Audrey Carleton writes in an Opinion piece for McGill Tribune.com (9/4/2017) that audiences and comics should be more sensitive, not less. Carleton begins with a critique of stand-up comedy,
Comedy has a problem with sensitivity, and rather than admitting it, many comics shift the blame onto viewers for being too delicate or attempting to stifle free speech.
This approach is wrongheaded. By turning the audience into the enemy, comics gloss over the fact that there is a wide range of people who are, at best, underrepresented on the stage, and at worst, mocked in jokes by members of dominant groups.
Sense of humor (soh)
This resonates with some theory I haven’t gotten to yet [it’s coming]. Daniel Wickberg, in his book, The Sense of Humor, talks about the importance of having one – it is considered the height of virtue, and if one doesn’t have one, it suggests that one is “literally an incomplete person” (85). Further, the call to have a sense of humor becomes codified in the command to “Laugh at thyself.”
Moira Smith, in her essay on “Humor, Unlaughter and Boundary Maintenance,” argues that although Americans regularly test each other’s sense of humor by making our friends the butts of our pranks and jokes, people we dislike and marginalized people are more frequently tested, and often by jokes that aren’t even meant to be funny, but to provoke the targets to dare to “not laugh,” and thus confirm our feelings that they are bad people, who can be further ostracized. I have often felt myself to be the victim of such attempts, even by “friends,” and family. Such pranks and jokes should probably be labeled harassment or bullying, rather than humor, but to do so would be to wrongly constrain the latter term.
So perhaps I’m off on a tangent, but these calls to “check any and all political correctness at the door!” or not to be “over-sensitive” or “thin-skinned,” and to “learn to take a joke,” seem to be calls to have a sense of humor in the face of any and all potential affronts.
Shock comedy
Carleton states that it’s a question of whom stand-up comedy serves, “the audience or the comic”?
One clear reason that some stand-up comedians regularly use material that is offensive or off-colour is its shock value. While many comics pat themselves on the back for having the guts to blurt out what they perceive everyone to already be thinking, getting laughs at the expense of minority groups is a low stoop…. Ignoring political correctness or basic sensitivity when writing and telling jokes perpetuates a vicious cycle that keeps marginalized folks excluded from the world of stand-up—both as audience members and performers.
I’ve spoken out against so-called “shock comics,” who think they’re pushing the envelope, when they’re not “speaking truth to power” and saying what everybody is secretly thinking. They’re like horror movies that employ jump-scares – just because we made a noise, doesn’t mean you were funny.
Carleton notes that the problem is complex. It’s a question of free speech, and also of approach – some performers use their act to defuse the tensions of their own experiences.
In some circumstances—if one has experienced trauma or injustice, for example—joking about the experience can provide a sense of release.
So here we see relief theory raising it’s obsolete head again. But here it’s a matter where the victims of the joke (those who are harmed in the course of the action) are separate from the butts (those who are responsible and worthy of our ridicule [in a superiority theory frame]) – the butts are the oppressors or the oppressive system, not the marginalized. Then again, you never can tell what will trigger some people – and some just can’t tell the difference between a dick joke and a joke about sex.
Solutions
While comics have a lot of choice in the material they cover and the way they do it, Carleton’s solutions are in the hands of the audience:
Audiences have tremendous power to challenge this by choosing wisely which comics and material they support.
The best of her solutions is to boycott artists you know make alienating jokes.
Her other solutions involve mindfully and selectively laughing. The problem with that is that many of the theories I discuss on here wonder if that is even possible. All the theories that suggest a humorous or comic mode, which is invoked within a play space, have some sense that we’ve checked our rational mind at the door and allowed our emotions free rein in the pursuit of the pleasures of laughter. The gist is that even if we can, it would make comedy a whole lot less fun. True, I don’t believe it for an instant, but I’m in the minority, it seems.
Further, there are many reasons we laugh – sometimes it’s merely because we recognize the form of a joke, and that it calls for a response. If we’re not paying close attention, this can happen. Then there’s that pesky pressure to have a sense of humor, to be seen by our friends as a fun person, to laugh with them, at whatever they laugh at – it creates a sense of group membership, unity, togetherness, the illusion that we are all laughing at the same things for the same reasons. That is the most difficult to fight.
Summary
However, that’s what we have to do when our friends make racist and sexist comments. We have to stand up to them and say something, not just let it go. Essentially, Carleton is suggesting we do for comics what we do for our friends, call them out when it needs doing.
It’s also what we should do to “friends” who repeatedly tease, prank, insult, harass or bully us. We might need to let these “friends” go.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
