Danielle Jester interviewed budding comic Dustin Wood for siskiyoudaily.com (7/27/2017), he begins with a discussion of himself as a type of truth teller, at least, in what’s funny:
Q: Do you have favorite topics to write jokes about?
A: They always start with not just truth, but my truth. The best advice I received early on in my career was being told NOT to write what the audience finds funny but write what YOU find funny. After that it was like a dam crumbled in my head. I wrote about all the stuff in my life that was funny. The formula to comedy is often described as just being Tragedy + Time. Growing up with a rare disease has caused a lot of tough situations. But I can look at the absurdity that happens in a day to day basis of my life and convey that to a crowd.
Truth vs. Persona
This is an ongoing theme for me: the question of whether comics are ever “Real” or “Truthful” onstage or if they’re playing a role, embodying at least, in David Misch’s terms. a slippery persona? For critics like myself, it’s obvious, but as for a lot of comics – even when talking about other comics – they deny it. This is what’s going on in the above quote.
Yes, it’s personal to him, and we can also point out that yes, it’s selectively the stuff he can make funny. However, a new point emerges that’s often overlooked: it should be the stuff that he finds funny – his particular sense of humor. In my discussion of persona, I’ve pointed out that oftentimes we comics get enticed by the laughs into doing stuff we don’t like to be successful, and it’s good to see comics speaking out against that.
On comedy as self-defense
Q: Do you feel you use comedy as a form of communication? Are you trying to get a certain message out there or more just helping people to have fun?
A: Comedy was always used as a shield when I was a kid. I was an overweight, Catholic Irish kid covered in freckles and blue bumps from a rare disease. I was teased and bullied. I began to use comedy as a shield and a sword. I would make fun of myself before they could. It would soften the blow if it was coming from a comedic, self-deprecating place.
It’s a common story, we’re forced by society to display that we have a sense of humor, that we can take a joke, that we can laugh at ourselves [this segment is still coming], so we take the reins and tell the joke first, sanction their laughter and thereby (in theory) take control of their power to laugh at us. We allow them to laugh with us, at us. The question is, does it really work that way?
While we may steer the conversation in particular ways, into well-known jokes, thereby limiting the scope, and while those topics, being familiar, may be easier to cope with, is there a guarantee that the laughers’ deprecate us any less with their laugh?
On a personal note
I don’t usually tell jokes about my height (I’m 5’4”), but I tell a joke onstage, the setup for which is an insult I read on Facebook (admittedly not directed at me, but it could have been):
Someone recently tried to insult me. They said, “The reason you’re so short is because your dad tried to pull out. The other half of you was left on the bedsheets.”
It gets a bigger laugh than most of my jokes—including my attempt to turn it back on itself. Further, it’s an ugly laugh, a laughing at, that grows as the audience comes to believe that it’s ok to laugh. And it is ok, because I told it, and I know where I’m going with it. But when they laugh harder at this than at my punchline, it displays their lack of sympathy. Maybe I need a stronger punchline.
It points to an enforcement of social boundaries. In making fun of those at the margins, the joker is highlighting their marginal status, in choosing to laugh (even if it’s fake or a guffaw) we signal that we are in the group – but only barely, and it’s unlikely that by doing so that we will pass the test and be left alone in the future.
Moreover, we may be left uncertain if we even want to be a part of the group at all, though with work-groups, sport or activity groups and peer groups, we may not have a choice, it’s fit in or miss out.
Summary
As comics, we do have to negotiate our onstage personas with the audience; however, we don’t have to kowtow to their whims. Comics choose what we tell, the way that we tell it, and what we want to make funny about it. However, we also have to realize that the audience can take that up in a number of different and sometimes problematic ways.
I return to the point I made in my blurbs on Chris Crespo and Josh Blue:
[Once a comic has] acknowledged that he has to talk about his disability on-stage, [it] begs the question: Can you ever really be laughing with him, once you know that he’s only laughing to preempt the laughing at he expected from you? Does the fact that he’s allowing it- even writing the jokes – change the fact that it still might be, at base, ridicule?
