The Critical Comic

In his article for Splitsider.com (7/6/2017), comic, critic, writer and teacher David Misch brings up five jokes to make a point about authenticity in comedy:

1. Louis C.K.: “I went to a bar the other night. Where isn’t important, because I’m lying.”

2. In Chewed Up (2008), Louis talks about a comedy club waitress who comes to his hotel; they make out, she stops him; he tries again, she stops him; she leaves. The next night she says, “What happened? Why’d you stop?” Louis is baffled: “’Cause you weren’t into it.” “No no, I just like to be forced.” Louis is astonished: “Are you out of your fucking mind?! You think I’m gonna rape you on the off-chance you’re into it?!”

3. Amy Schumer: “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

4. Sarah Silverman talked about an ex-boyfriend who was half-black, then chided herself for “being such a pessimist. He’s half-white.” Then, when the audience reacted, the capper: “I don’t care if you think I’m racist. I just want you to think I’m thin.”

    

5. At a club, Daniel Tosh talked about rape jokes, a woman called out “Rape jokes aren’t funny!” and he said “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by five guys right now?”

Let’s take Misch’s treatment of these jokes one at a time, and by the time I’ve summed up his critique of Tosh, you’ll see why I’ll need to come back around to the first three.

“I went to a bar the other night. Where isn’t important, because I’m lying.”

Misch calls the first joke “the best joke about standup comedy in history, the definitive statement on the question of authenticity.”  He says,

Of course he’s lying – we knew that. Where [the bar is] doesn’t matter because it’s a setup, a premise, a ‘gimme.’

The bar joke is brilliant, playing off the truth that all comedians, like all artists, lie. But its truth – the location of the bar – isn’t important.

“You think I’m gonna rape you on the off-chance you’re into it?!”

Misch differentiates the first joke from the second joke, which is also “hilarious,” but further “it makes a point.”  He asks, “doesn’t ‘authenticity’ – believing it really happened – play a role in that point?” An anonymous critic thinks it doesn’t, Misch thinks it does,

It’s different for waitress rape; what’s the truth being exposed there? “Some women are like that”? If that’s the “insight” we get and the story is a lie, then, I’d argue, Louis is taking advantage of the trust and good will he’s earned (…) to make an unearned point. We’re encouraged to think “Yeah, sure, there are women who expect men they barely know to give them sexual pleasure even if it means being arrested for rape.” Which may be Louis’s truth but is, arguably, one that’s a smidge shy of universal.

Basically, Misch is arguing that in the first joke, Louis C.K. performs the very behavior of comics that he is describing in the joke: He tells us he’s lying to display that comics lie.

However, when C.K. tells the second joke, he makes a point about a type of person – women who expect men to play out a rape fantasy – and we have only his word and singular example to go on.

However, in the conclusion of the article, he says,

So what meaneth the waitress joke? This: if it’s wrong to extrapolate a cultural insight from an anecdote (Spoiler Alert: it is), then it’s even worse to do that from something which never happened.

So here he admits that it’s wrong to make some larger point about a type of woman, but he doesn’t seem to get that perhaps C.K. isn’t doing that; that it’s more likely just an absurd example – true or not. Because Misch fails to grant a positive motive to C.K. he argues that C.K. is extrapolating, and that this behavior is made worse if the anecdote is not true.

“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

Misch says, of Schumer, that while she sometimes “challenges her audiences with sexual, cultural, and occasional political edginess” he implies that in this joke “her outrageousness masked problematic material, getting easy laughs from cultural stereotypes.”

Misch notes,

There, authenticity isn’t the point; if she’d actually been raped by a Hispanic guy, would the joke be less racist? And how is it different than Trump’s referring to “some” Mexicans as rapists? Not very… and among the people who agree is Schumer: “I used to do dumb jokes like that. Once I realized I had an influence I stopped.” Tossing the cloak aside, Schumer admits that her persona – raunchy, but feminist and inclusive – requires a higher degree of responsibility.

So here the truth must be that she’s been raped by a Hispanic guy, and Schumer is generalizing out to all Hispanics, or there is no truth to it at all, and she’s still generalizing out to all Hispanics, which is worse. This is by far, Misch’s most harsh treatment of a joke and comic, and I will argue, it’s completely unwarranted.

“He’s half-white.”

Misch says that Silverman’s joke “played off her (sometimes) persona as an oblivious, narcissistic white chick, commenting on racism from a faux-naïve perspective (that’s actually left-wing).”

This marks a major change in how Misch describes the jokes. Here, if he were being consistent, Misch would give us a “straight” reading and claim that Silverman is focusing on the “good,” white half, instead of on the “bad,” black half – that the (primary) “truth” she’s revealing is that white people are better than black people, or so she believes.

Instead, Misch grants her enough goodwill to read the joke in a positive way – that she’s being ironical to state a larger (second) truth about the absurdity of claiming racial superiority.

I could push it further: her last quip plays off the absurdity of characterizing people by physical characteristics even more: that she doesn’t care if people think she’s racist (that she characterizes people by their appearance in terms of skin color) as long as they think she’s thin (characterizing her by her appearance in terms of weight).  As I argue elsewhere, she pushes just a bit too hard in wrong direction, just a bit too often to be bona fide.

“Wouldn’t it be funny…”

When Misch gets to Tosh, he becomes still more magnanimous. Misch notes that although the internet was offended,

[M]ost standups defended him, if not the joke, because he was responding to a heckler with an ad-lib. Sure, it was a failed ad-lib but what’s the punishment for that?

Comedians have the right to be tasteless or offensive, accidentally or on purpose. Criticize Tosh (or Maher or Kathy Griffin), boycott, but to prevent experimentation is to prevent art. Standups need to fail to learn how to succeed. (Noted comedian T.S. Eliot said going too far is the only way to find out how far you can go.)

And, by the way, Tosh’s joke could be more complex than it appeared. What if his question wasn’t rhetorical? “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped?” No. Which could have been Tosh’s wry, subtle – far too subtle – way of pointing out the difference between rape jokes and rape.

Here, Misch is reading into the joke far, far more than is warranted, especially given – as he states – that Tosh was responding to a heckler with ad-lib; it’s hugely unimaginable that in that heated moment, he spontaneously came up with a universal (secondary) “truth” to express – a larger critique about the difference between jokes and reality – rather than just verbally attacking a woman who threatened his act by reminding her of the (primary) “truth” that at any moment she could be raped.

If we grant a similar level of leniency and goodwill to Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer, we can similarly revise Misch’s reading of their jokes.

Bar Revisited

What the first joke displays to me is that, as Misch reveals about Silverman and Tosh, there are at least two truths in the bar joke:

1. The truth about comedians, and
2. The truth about the bar.

[Note: Within the joke, there is probably also the truth about the relationship between the comedian and audience, and by laughing (or not) the audience reveals some truths about themselves.]

It’s not just that 2) the truth about the bar isn’t important, it’s that it is eclipsed in importance by 1) the truth about comedians, which simultaneously renders it irrelevant because if the first is true, the second is untrustworthy.

Waitress revisited

I would similarly argue that Misch’s initial take – that when C.K. tells the second joke, he makes a point about a type of person: women who expect men to play out a rape fantasy – is true only if we take the joke as containing one truth: about factuality of the scenario. Instead there are at least three truths here:

1. The truth of the scenario,
2. Whether that one example provides evidence that “some women are like that,” and
3. The truth that Louis C.K. doesn’t want to rape.

And the scenario could honor one, two, all or possibly none and still garner a laugh – depending on the motivations of the laugher. Four interpretations other than Misch’s come easily to mind:

1. If we don’t take C.K. at his word about the scenario, then he’s concocted an absurd situation that allows him to tell a rape joke and look like the hero for refusing to participate. He’s written a joke about not wanting to rape. And this may be Misch’s mystery critic’s point – we can laugh at the wit of the comic, or at the absurdity of the scenario, without believing a word of it.
2. If we take Misch’s final point, and believe that C.K. is giving an actual, but non-generalizable example, then we can still laugh at the absurdity of the example, without reading into it a critique of a large group of women, who we should come to laugh at. Plus we can still appreciate that Louis C.K. doesn’t want to rape.
3. Misch’s take on the joke is (perhaps) the third worst scenario, narrowly eclipsed by one in which we believe that the scenario is real, and Louis would have raped, had he had any indicators: that his denial of the desire to rape is false.
4. Of course, if we believe that the scenario is false, and that Louis C.K. is telling it to make us believe that there are women out there into rape, so we can go ahead and rape, it would be read as truly horrific and not remotely funny.

My point is that to laugh, we have to have some goodwill toward the comic.

Hispanics revisited

However, Schumer’s joke also has several potential “truths”:

1. Whether or not she used to prefer Hispanic guys (she says in one interview that it was just a “formulaic joke,” and she picked Hispanic basically at random),
2. Whether or not she was raped (in her book, public advocacy and act, she claims that all women have had experiences that were close),
3. Whether or not Hispanic men (generally) rape (probably not),
4. Whether or not Schumer prefers consensual sex (which, C.K.’s story notwithstanding, she probably does), and
5. Perhaps most importantly: Whether or not Hispanic and consensual are mutually exclusive.

Here’s the reading I prefer in my work for that joke: Schumer used to prefer a race type, then realized that racially typing men was stupid and so switched to a more meaningful “type”: whether the sex was consensual or not.

This reading doesn’t require us to believe that she was raped by a Hispanic guy – let alone that all Hispanics are rapists – or even that she was raped at all, just that she realized that “not being raped” was more important than racially profiling.  But here, again, we have to grant goodwill to the comic, which Misch seems disinclined to do for Schumer.

Summary

I’ll have more to say on Misch’s idea of authenticity and truth in the coming days, as I ponder it some more.  Here, I wanted to begin with his uneven treatment of the jokes, which seem premised on two ideas:

1. Comedy that matters doesn’t [or “Standups who make social commentary” don’t] just reveal truth, but relies[/rely] on it.
2. There is only one possible reading of a joke.

He gives lip service to the lack of accuracy and literal truth; that comedy must only be plausible, or “truth-adjacent.”

That’s how most standup works: think up a joke then pretend it’s part of your life. But “authenticity” is the key; stories are more effective when they feel like they could have happened. Yet a successful joke depends not on its “realness” but on the artfulness of its construction and delivery. Which is as it should be; standup is about being funny, not having a funny life.

He also notes that there are different “truths”:

Of course, everyone’s “truth” is different; standup truth is one the audience either shares or comes to share by dint of the comic’s comic persuasion.

And later,

Picasso defined art as “the lie that reveals the truth,” but we all have our own truths.

But these sentiments don’t play out in the critiques he levels above – at least, not until he gets to Tosh’s rape joke – it’s a performative contradiction.  Again, more on this coming.

As I hope I’ve shown, just granting the amount of wiggle room he grants to Tosh, and expanding our ideas of the potential “truths” in a joke similarly expand not only the audience’s capacity to find the joke funny – to hear it in such a way that it doesn’t offend them – but the ability for the joke to act as social commentary.