Talking about Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix special, Homecoming King, Nathan Mills of The Joplin Globe has a lot going on, but I want to call attention to three points implicit in his arguments, two of which I agree with, one not: 1) stand-up audiences are (or can be) thinking audiences; 2) material that causes us to think is not part of the joke, but in-between jokes, and 3) that stand-up is what we allow it to be.
Stand-up audiences
Mills’ whole argument seems to start from the presumption that “audiences come to laugh, not to think” and develops from there. This seems to be a common conception, not just in everyday conversations about humor and stand-up (see for instance Borns), but in academic conversations as well (see for instance Gilbert; Limon; Stebbins).
Lloyd Bitzer talks about an active, engaged, thinking (“rhetorical”) audience, those “who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (8). Stand-up audiences are commonly excluded from this category because we expect humor, not political messages, we presume the speaker to be unreliable and because “getting” most jokes requires us to make a particular mental leap (what I’ll call a process of supplementation [more on this later]), and that it’s trivializing – once we’ve laughed, we have no intention of acting further on it – although perhaps the opposite of this is booing, heckling or walking out [more on these later]. In short, we’re not interested in the speaker’s views, save as fodder for humor.
Mills is right to point out that audiences do think, and that they are powerful, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere. We have the ability to react in any way we choose, and we don’t just give a pass to everyone.
The in-between and transitions
Mills trips up a bit, for me, when he says
Homecoming King is full of these lessons in between well-built and well-rehearsed jokes. Minhaj seamlessly transitions between the moments as if they’re two separate pieces of him.
It’s the notion that Minhaj’s personal stories are filler “in between” the jokes, and that he has to “transition” in and out of them that irks me. Or perhaps it’s the implication that the personal stories are the only part of the act in which we, the audience, think.
My retort is that we think more than most people give us credit for – look at the examples of fake laughs and guffaws (some of it may be “fast,” [more on that later] but it’s thought nonetheless). It’s most clear that audiences think when they boo, heckle or walk out, but that doesn’t mean they’re not doing it at other points too.
What is comedy
Mills is on track, however, when he answers his own question, “Didn’t we come here to laugh, not think?” with: “Minhaj’s audience loved it. I loved it.”
This implies that stand-up comedy is what the audience or market will bear. As long as the audience loves it, it’s fine. Some might try to say Minhaj is a storyteller who tells some jokes [I’m betting I’ll see one before the week is out – and I’ll post it here], or that Reggie Watts is a musician who tells some jokes [ditto], but the bottom line is comics are entertainers who tell jokes. As long as they are successful (sell tickets) and have a decent amount of jokes, who cares?
Political Possibilities
Some scholars think that stand-up comedy is about pandering, drawing people in and giving them what they want. If this is true, then the political value of stand-up is, as Lawrence A. Mintz suggests, that of a simple social barometer; tracking the important issues of the time, without any inherent value as social critique or potential for meaningful change.
At the other end of the spectrum, so the thinking goes, is the political speech, the sales pitch, or yes, the TED Talk, in which the audience is changed via the process. Mills seems to reinforce this split when he talks about the in-between material that Minhaj transitions into and out of.
However, audiences have the power to determine what we allow our stand-up comedians to do. We make the rules of stand-up comedy, and we don’t do it passively. We think, we engage, and if necessary, we act.
References:
Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Gilbert, Joanne. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.
Limon, John. Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Mintz, Lawrence E. “Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation.” American Quarterly 37.1 (1985): 71-80.
Stebbins, Robert A. The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
