Recently I have been watching "The History of Comedy" on TV1, and it has stirred me to write a little more about humour. Bear with me: I will find my theme as I go along.
I wrote a little about humour a year or two ago in the post "Concerning Jokes". In that post, I argued that a joke is a logical argument of the reductio ad absurdum variety. I can add to this today. When a stand-up comic makes a joke, he or she deliberately says something absurd; his or her audience laugh because they recognise, perhaps subconsciously, that the joke is something silly. This creates a bond between the comic and the comic's audience. Humour creates a sense of community; it also hopefully encourages tolerance. Moreover, jokes separate sensible ideas from ridiculous ones, the sensical from the absurd. To get a joke, one must recognise that it is absurd, that the comic himself (or herself) doesn't believe it. One needs some sense of 'reality'. The community the joke creates is one of 'right-thinking people'.
The problem with humour is that one cannot always know if the teller is making a joke deliberately or presenting something meant seriously. To know for sure, often one must know the perpetrator of the joke. An example. My friend Jess included in her book of poetry the following senryu:
left without a note
but on the lavatory soap
one last pubic hair.
I first read this poem on the Internet in early 2014 and it provoked mixed feelings – I wasn't sure how to take it. Later in 2014, I saw Jess perform at a poetry reading; she was cajoled into reciting this senryu and, after delivering it, burst into a peal of nervous laughter. The poem was intended as a joke – something I hadn't realised until then because my feelings had clouded my perception of her. She didn't mean it seriously.
In order to recognise the joke, one first needs to recognise the joker.
Another example can be given. In "The Night of Too Many Stars" comic relief gala event towards the end of last year, Sarah Silverman provided a "Stars That Care" clip (viewable on Youtube) which was 'evidently' originally a plea on behalf of the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria. Every mention of the hurricane's name had been deleted and replaced with the word "autism". The clip, to state perhaps the obvious, was meant as a satire on celebrities who phone in support for a cause, or jump on a bandwagon, but for a joke like this to work, the audience needs to feel reassured that the 'real' Sarah Silverman does genuinely understand what autism is and does genuinely care about the people who have this condition. The audience needs to recognise her satiric intent, that she is satirising herself. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't really enjoy this joke – I couldn't feel really confident that Sarah genuinely did understand and care.
A gap needs to exist between the joke and the joker.
Although this blog might not evince it, I did once have a sense of humour. I grew up reading Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. In 2001, my first year as an MA student, I had some small involvement with the Auckland University student magazine. I wrote an investigative piece exposing the operations of an evangelical on-campus Christian organisation called the Morningstar Church, and decided to begin the article with a joke. I said that I wasn't a Christian but had considered converting to Judaism because the book was half as long. The joke's absurdity, of course, is the idea that a person might pick his or her religion based on the length of the required reading. Later that year, I wrote a short article pointing out that despite continued medical breakthroughs, the overall mortality rate was still 100%. "Death is still the leading killer in the world today, striking with especial ferocity the elderly and infirm." Some years later The Onion published a piece based around the same joke, coincidentally, I'm sure. Obviously my sense of humour was reasonably sophisticated. I suspect that the reason I became 'ill' in 2007, as I discussed in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" was that I had told a joke, or series of jokes, while working at a radio station, which had been taken seriously by others. In 2012, when I wrote the screenplay "The Hounds of Heaven" I included a long scene in which a bunch of stoners promulgate conspiracy theories. The intent was partly to satirise these theories but also to present a world in which it was no longer possible to distinguish between the sensible and the absurd. My intention may have gone over the heads of the film's readers but I only had in mind an audience consisting of one person.
The previous post "Representations of Mental Illness in Shakespeare"was also a satire but in order to get the joke, one needs some passing knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and the criticism around them.
It seems that to get a joke, audiences need to know that the joker is joking. This vitally important fact can be imparted in two ways – through internal clues and through external clues, the situation in which the joke is told. If the joker says something patently false, this constitutes an internal clue that the discourse is comedic. In the previous post, for instance, I described Edgar an an "itinerate schizophrenic" when anyone who has read King Lear knows that Edgar is only pretending to be mad. If one watches a stand-up comedian in a club, one knows that he or she is going to deliver joke after joke because of the physical environment comic and audience find themselves in. We know that Stephen Colbert is going to make a series of witticisms at Donald Trump's expense during his opening monologue every night, because that is the point of his monologue. We know that Family Guy's caricature Mort is intended as a joke rather than an antisemitic slur because it is included in a silly cartoon (and because we feel confident that Seth MacFarlane and the other writers are not themselves antisemitic.) We need clues. I sometimes suspect audiences laugh because they are expected to, because they pick up on such clues,rather than because they get the point of a particular joke.
Over the last several decades, comedy has become riskier and more confrontational, more obscene, has proliferated through different channels, and has extended far beyond its traditional boundaries. John Stewart's The Daily Show, for instance, smudged the distinction between news and humour. This change in comedic activity occurred simultaneously with the rise of social media, and it has become increasingly difficult to know what is intended as a joke and what isn't. Ironically, or perhaps consequently, advocates of Political Correctness have become louder and more aggressive. I read in the newspaper this week that many Millennial commentators, having been exposed to the 'nineties sitcom Friends for the first time via Netflix, have denounced it as homophobic, transphobic, and racist. In the 'nineties, it seemed quite anodyne. Critics have castigated Friends also for depicting a romantic relationship between Monica and Tom Selleck's character, but these critics don't bother to explain why it is acceptable for two women to date but unacceptable for a youngish woman to date an older man. I am currently briefly a student again at Auckland University and see on campus signs all over the place saying, "This university does not tolerate homophobia, transphobia, sexism, or ageism." When I was first a student at Auckland University in 2000, these signs did not exist. They were unnecessary in any case because neither I nor any of my contemporaries were remotely prejudiced. These signs I see today in 2018 only have the effect of making me feel obscurely guilty, as though I am being accused of a crime I never committed. And why stop at the four items on the list? Why not also include 'racism' and 'religionism'?
I do not deny that these 'isms' exist. In 2008 I returned to university as a twenty-seven year old and took an undergraduate paper with a whole bunch of eighteen year olds. In this class I was the victim of 'ageism' – although this discrimination took the form more of attitude or body language among my classmates than overt words and actions. I suffered in silence because I knew that, if I was eighteen, I would have related in the same way to a mature student. I tolerated it. Why find cause to become upset at everything? To try to eradicate all prejudice entirely is a kind of barbarism or totalitarianism – it forces people to monitor and regulate not just what they say and do, but also what they think and feel, surely too heavy a burden to place on young people.
Political correctness conceals a great deal of hypocrisy. Sometimes the staunchest heterosexual supporters of gay rights are the most homophobic. (I could tell a story in support of this contention but it would be impolitic.) Political correctness often also hides a great deal of simple ignorance and fuzzy logic. I came of age in the 'eighties and 'nineties when the AIDS epidemic was at its height. Millennials today don't however seem to appreciate the obvious fact that gay men have sex with men. The posture is one of continued vociferous, sententious outrage on behalf of others; when Trump is not being attacked, the Left turns upon and cannibalises itself.
The culture is bifurcated. One the one hand, we have comedy shows that are increasingly dark, violent and obscene; on the other hand we have a culture, bred, as Bill Maher rightly points out, in the universities, of militant and hypocritical Political Correctness, in which any deviation from 'right-thinking' is pounced upon and denounced. Then we have shows like Last Week Tonight that attempts the near impossible task of appealing to right-thinking students schooled in this politically correct mindset, while still being funny. Comedy's task should be, as I said at the beginning of the post, to create tolerance and acceptance – but today it has been swept up in a culture in which the scope of 'the sensible' is very narrow indeed and 'the absurd' covers almost everything, in which everyone is potentially a villain and scapegoat. The absurdity in American culture reached its apotheosis, of course, in the election of Donald J. Trump. A guest I think on Stephen Colbert's show, I forget who, a little while ago said that Trump might be "the first president destroyed by parody" but I think Trump was created by parody. In a world in which everyone is joking all the time, how can we tell who's telling the truth?
It may be The History of Comedy is performing a public service by putting comedy neatly back into its traditional compartment, its box.
I'll finish this post by returning to my brief stint working at the Student Magazine Craccum in 2001, when I wasn't the dinosaur I am today, and describe another joke we told. 9/11 happened while I was helping out. I asked the editor how we could let such an world-changing historical event pass us by without comment, but he had already made up his mind that that week's issue should be a parody of Rolling Stone Magazine. So we compromised. We put Bruce Springsteen on the cover, holding his guitar, with the caption "BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN vows to take on Middle-East by himself". It was funnier then than now.
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