This one’s an oldie, but I came across it in some research recently, and it needs to be in this discussion. Megan Garber, in an article for The Atlantic (5/28/2015), saw in Amy Schumer’s “Court of Public Opinion” sketch the marks of a trend: “[J]okes that tend to treat humor not just as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for making a point.”
Why has this happened? For Garber, “There was an unmet need” left by our traditional news media, so comedy stepped up to fill it. However, Garber mentions a definition of comedy that could hamstring her entire thesis.
What comedy does
Garber asserts,
The point of comedy has always been, on some level, a kind of productive subversion…. [Comedy forms] are forms of creative destruction, at their height and in their depths…
This is a fairly common view of humor that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to address: that it is subversive and destructive, even if productively and creatively so. That anything that is created in comedy is so because something else was destroyed or demolished by it. That comedy (or perhaps meaningful comedy) only tears things down, it never builds things up.
I know, Garber’s own discussion seems to correct us on this point, but that’s the internal logic breaking down – it’s a performative contradiction of this definition. Garber sees comedy and humor as a form of cultural criticism and a force for social change.
Critical cultural comedy
Garber notes that TV comedy, “the stuff that is firmly rooted in traditions of sketch and standup,” is talking on meaningful subjects:
Its jokes double as arguments. “Comedy with a message” may be vaguely ironic; it is also, increasingly, redundant.
So when Schumer, in a set that aired on her show, comments with purposeful nonchalance that “we’ve all been a little bit raped,” she may be making viewers laugh. But she is, much more importantly, making us squirm. She’s daring us to consider the definition of “rape,” and also the definition of another word that can be awkward in comedy and democracy alike: “we.” She’s making a point about inclusion and exclusion, about the individuality of experience, about the often flawed way we think about ourselves as a collective. This is comedy at only the most superficial level; what it is, really, is cultural criticism.
She’s going out on a limb a bit with the “definition of ‘we’ stuff,” and she recites the “making viewers laugh” line that subtly de-powers audiences by making them objects, but I’ll tackle those points in a moment.
I can agree, Schumer is tackling the difficult issue of rape – she’s making a rape joke. And it’s one that “works” (if it does) because it plays about the edges of the issue; it plays with the definition, and that’s the province of cultural criticism.
Similar to the performative contradiction pointed out above, cultural criticism is, to some, only in the practice of tearing down some monolithic social and cultural structures. However, critics who use this definition overlook (or redefine as “something else”) critical acts that celebrate a text, that produce new ways of looking at a thing, issue or idea, that expand the discussion, rather than curtailing it. Comedy and play does the latter, as Garber seems to stress.
Garber includes a decent list of comics in this vein: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Keegan Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Louis C.K., Nick Kroll, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore. All of whom, she says, actively engage in some level of cultural critique, which is counter the traditional comic’s intention of just trying to get a laugh.
Intention
Garber points out that comedy has changed over time:
As comedy began to do a better job of reflecting the world, it began, as well, to take on the responsibilities associated with that reflection. It began to recognize the fact that the long debate about the things comedy owes to its audiences and itself—the old “hey, I’m just making a joke” line of logic—can be partially resolved in the idea that nothing, ultimately, is “just a joke.” Humor has moral purpose. Humor has intellectual heft. Humor can change the world.
We can pin on Schumer the intention of doing a cultural critique – that in addition to the traditional comic’s intent of trying to get a laugh, she also knew she was writing a joke about rape, she was perhaps trying to make us think about how widespread the issue is, how fuzzy the lines can be – she’s trying to change the world. Garber goes further in describing the comic’s intentions:
They’re exploring and wrestling with important ideas. They’re sharing their conclusions with the rest of us. They’re providing fodder for discussion, not just of the minutiae of everyday experience, but of the biggest questions of the day.… these are bits intended not just to help us escape from the realities of the world, but also, and more so, to help us understand them. Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.
As Mike Sacks, an editor at Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, told me: There’s a general feeling right now that “comedy can change people’s opinions.”
Both of these statements place emphasis on the comics: they explore, wrestle, share, provide, intend and fashion themselves, they speak truth (to power?) and through their comedy they try to “change people’s opinions.”
Garber sees in both happy and indignant news headlines alike evidence of the influence of comics, and I couldn’t agree more. My problem is that some, like Neil Postman, would argue that we’re just “amusing ourselves to death,” that discussions by and about comics – and worse, discussions about discussions by and about comics (like this blog) – are simply wastes of our collective time; that none of it matters in terms of real-world, political change. While we can point to anecdotal evidence that people changed their views based on a bit or joke, there’s little hard research to support it.
So perhaps Schumer is trying to tell the truth, to change opinions but if you asked Schumer, I’d bet all I have that playing with the definition of “we” never entered her head. The “we” stuff, that’s on Garber. Which reveals a point she makes very clear: we [the monumental audience] allow it; we do the work.
Audience power
Earlier, I pointed out Garber’s use of “making the audience laugh,” as marking a performative contradiction. This phrase, as I’ve discussed before, falls under the popular view of audiences as objects. In direct contradiction to this, consider this quote:
[Comedy forms have] long allowed us to talk about things that taboos, or at the very least taste, might otherwise preclude…. [Comedians are] people who [use] laughter as a lubricant for cultural conversations—to help us to talk about the things that [need] to be talked about.
As in a previous quote where comics “provide fodder,” here comics “allow,” and “help us to talk about the things that [need] to be talked about,” not simply that they allow the comics to talk about what they want (though the space of humor does that too); it’s “we” who do the talking. If we look back, in the previous quote, it was we who ask comics to give us more moral messages as fodder for our conversations. The audience isn’t a passive object; for Garber, we are active.
[Comics] most important function is to stimulate debates among the rest of us. They are adjuncts–… to the several institutions that have been self-consciously modeled as guardians of the national discourse. And we, for our part … [collectively] allow them to be.
I like this idea that comics are teachers, as I’m both and frequently see the overlap. I give my students and my audiences material, but it’s they who do the thinking, the work, the learning. And whereas my tenured position is granted by the University, my position as an adjunct comic is granted only by the audience.
Further, it’s we who do the watching, and that has fundamentally changed the way humor is delivered to us.
Changing the form
Garber notes that we watch so much comedy via the internet, that the form has evolved:
Comedy, like so much else in the culture, now exists largely of, by, and for the Internet.
Everything is packaged (or eventually repackaged) to hit the internet consumer – sketches, bits and rants are regularly created for or posted to YouTube. One more important quote from the middle, to serve as Garber’s conclusion:
[T]here are two broad things happening right now—comedy with moral messaging, and comedy with mass attention—and their combined effect is this: Comedians have taken on the role of public intellectuals.
Of course, that’s just one journalist’s opinion, though she does get taken up on this point by a policy mover and shaker, Caty Borum Chattoo, whose project is the reason why I’ve come back to this article. [Look for that write up in the days ahead!]
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
