Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Conscious Laughter: Fake Laughs and Guffaws

Posted on by nwilson

As I’ve noted, John C. Meyer draws a useful distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.  I’ve further complicated this with Joanne Gilbert’s model of victims and butts – we laugh with the victim, at the butt of the joke. These functions, however, create a potential for people to laugh strategically, especially in response to unequal power in their relationships. Basically, they can laugh with their superiors, or fake laugh – even when they feel personally attacked – or they can laugh with those who critique them, or guffaw – perhaps especially when they’re being attacked.

Fake Laughs

Horowitz notes,

[E]veryone laughs longest and hardest at the boss’s jokes.  The ability to be a good sport and laugh at a joke, especially when it’s on you, is the mark of a good subordinate (5).

Other critics have found this to be true in race and gender relations (Apte, Gilbert).  In this vein, many theorists differentiate between real laughter and “fake” or “nervous laughter” (Barreca; Gilbert; Horowitz; Limon; Merrill).

The latter terms designate laughter that is “usually done to placate someone in power or show that you get a joke (when, in fact, you might not enjoy or even understand it)” (Horowitz, 11).  For Horowitz,

A fake laugh is like a fake orgasm—intended to smooth over a difficult social situation and not much fun for the laugher (11).

Power Problems

The problem is, when performed within a large group, not all of whom are faking it, fake laughter becomes virtually indistinguishable from real enjoyment, and thus is taken as such. While John Limon rules this form of laughter out of his absolute model – it is the mark of a “failed joke” – he notes that if we were laughing in the moment, we cannot claim fake laughter (or any alternative motive) after the fact – “individual recantations are invalid” (11). It’s Homer’s response to Marge’s laugh in The Simpsons Movie: “You smiled! I’m off the hook!”

The stipulation that one be a “good sport” isn’t limited to those without power.  Thus subordinates aren’t the only ones who feign laughter; those in power guffaw.

Guffaws

Horowitz explains how the rule of laughter and decorum at events like “roasts” (or I would add, White House Correspondents Dinners) dictates that the target of the jokes and the rest of the audience must not rebel, and they must not interrupt; they must show themselves to be good sports to the extent that they laugh or remain silent.  In short, they must “take it” (5).  However, to the extent that audiences exercise a considerable amount of power, they may have more options in their laughter than simple agreement with the comic; in laughing at him, they can refocus the humor.

It is very much like when a person makes an earnest declarative statement – for instance, they say, “I’m the best!” – and somebody laughs.  The laughter of the listener doesn’t allow the statement to mean what the speaker intends it to mean.  In fact, by taking it differently than its intended meaning, laughter creates the possibility that the statement is ironical; the statement is now revealed to mean multiple things (it always had that possibility, the laugh just made it visible).

This is ridicule – or laughing at – in its strictest sense, which serves a socializing function: it says in essence “I don’t believe you, therefore you must be kidding.”  It shifts the power over meaning from the speaker’s intention to the listener’s.

Similarly, Gilbert believes that groups who perceive themselves to be in-power, such as white, middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual males, are able to shift the meaning and laugh appreciatively at jokes at their expense, a condition she calls the “male guffaw.”  She posits:

Perhaps by laughing a man is saying, “I’m a straight, white male—I am hegemony—hear me roar.  No amount of joking, no matter how well done, is about to unseat me from my power position any time soon.”  Perhaps the laughter is precisely because he is not threatened (163, emphasis in original).

While she speaks specifically of male guffaws, we can broaden the use of the term to apply to any group with claims to domination (156).  Laughter thus becomes an act through which someone represents a superior position.

Power Potential

While many theorists feel that guffaws trivialize a challenge – that we expose our power over a situation precisely by laughing at it – this characterization is not quite accurate.  Instead, imagine that through laughter, you transform yourself from butt to victim; that suddenly we are laughing with ourselves as targets, and laughing at the comic or critic, or even at the situation at large. While this seems easier to pull off when people believe we have that power, it is nevertheless a potential that all targets of laughter have – we decide what the joke means.  Thus, guffawing is a particularly political form of uptake; it is a political act.

Political Possibilities?

Laughter as action

Laughter can thus be seen as an act of humor – not simply a response to humor – in that laughter performs the same function as the set up of a joke: it creates a space, a gap between the signifier (what was said) and the signified (what it means) [I’ll fill in this piece later].

Admittedly, this process is not easy – particularly in the case of people with little social power.  After all, just because you laugh doesn’t mean the joke changes meaning for most people; to paraphrase the movie Mean Girls, I can’t, individually, make ‘fetch’ happen. If you have no power in the situation, the attempt to challenge the person mocking you does little to take them down a peg – it certainly is not likely not trivialize their power in the way that a more powerful person could.  However, this it not to say that it can’t happen.

The ability that the laugher possesses to hijack the meaning of a joke – or any statement, for that matter – has important implications.  Once again, Meyer begins to point us in a productive direction.

In his final position (differentiation), Meyer notes that humor that unites one group may differentiate that group from another, and for him the first group’s laughter is matched by the second group’s outrage (he notes that group members “would be expected to object if an ‘outsider’ told the same deprecatory jokes about their group,” [323] and remember, objections violate the contract of humor).  Meyer implies that a significant part of the audience will not find the joke funny and the others will laugh at them – perhaps the first group is mad that the others are laughing at them.

But it would be a mistake to reduce Meyer’s statements to the enforcement of a humorous/serious divide, as such a blatant division of the audience along lines of humor/outrage is not the most desirable outcome for the political humorist.

Instead, what if those who were outraged fake laughed or even guffawed? The laugh would be read as a statement of agreement, which has political repercussions; yet at the same time, for the individual it is a statement of dissent that, contrary to Limon’s theory, cannot be ignored. It is not inaction, but rather may merely defer more direct action until a later time.

Summary

In fake laughs and guffaws we note the break down of a laughter/outrage binary.  One can be furious and still perform as if the joke is funny, aligning oneself with the speaker (fake it).  Conversely, we can laugh and yet differentiate ourselves from the speaker (ridicule or guffaw).

If humor has consequences and laughter guarantees neither that we found the joke funny nor that we agree with the meaning intended by the author (i.e. we didn’t “get it”), then perhaps we can see other possibilities for a redefinition of humor.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Barreca, Regina R.  “Introduction.”  Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy.  Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. 3-23.

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Horowitz, Susan.  Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women.  Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Merrill, L. “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

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.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-291. 

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Laughing With Victims At Butts

Posted on by nwilson

Apologies for reposting, but in trying to organize the site I think it will be more useful to break the theory out from the cases. This enables me to just link to the theory in future cases, without making people read the previous case. – N

The “with/at” question

There’s a problem with laughter that I call the “with/at” question. Are we laughing with someone? Or are we laughing at someone? Or both? And who/what is the object of each?  I’ve already written about how John C. Meyer characterizes the function of laughing with vs. laughing at: when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.

Victims & Butts

Joanne Gilbert offers a distinction between the victim of the humor, the person or group who receives negative treatment within the narrative of the joke, and the butt of the humor, the person or group who is at fault and therefore worthy of ridicule.

We should note that this distinction comes from a model of superiority.  In a frame of tension release, we could imagine a distinction among stressors and triggers; what is creating the tension and what triggers that release.  We would always laugh at stressors in light of the release, but even this relationship can be complicated when one delves deeper.

This would seem to solve the “with/at” problem: we always laugh with the victim, at the perceived butt (to the extent that these are different).  This distinction is crucial because, as Samuel Janus states, “The ability to make a person laugh with [a minority group], not at them, is a vital one” (as cited in Horowitz, 7).  However, this distinction makes things more complicated as we now have to navigate new potential sources of humor.

Because humor could be found in many different parts of the joke or performance, it is difficult to pin it all down.  Further, laughter, particularly when expressed by a group, does not necessarily reveal any of the particularities. For an example, see my discussion of the difference between Silverman and Maher.

Gilbert notes there is no guarantee that even members of preexisting groups – groups that would seem to share the same backgrounds, values, etc. – will laugh for the same reasons.  Despite the common interpretations of laughter, Laughter is not a uniform sign that the author’s intent was received.  Further, though laughing is a performance, this performance does not have to be unconscious and therefore trivializing; it can be feigned.  While there are many reasons for feigning laughter, I will discuss begin with two:  fake laughter and guffaws.

References:

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Horowitz, Susan.  Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women.  Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

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.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-291. 

 

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Comics/Theories About Laughter

John C. Meyer’s Four Functions of Humor

Posted on by nwilson

John C. Meyer was interested in how people use humor – what their purpose is. Meyer’s first conception is that people can use humor to unite us or to divide us. Meyer is thus one of several critics who note a crucial distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.

Humorous Modes

In looking at the traditional humorous modes, Meyer finds that each can be used in specific situations:

Relief humor for relaxing tensions during communication in disconcerting situations or relating to a controversial issue, incongruity humor for presenting new perspectives and viewpoints, and superiority humor for criticizing opposition or unifying a group (316)

However, each mode falls down when attempting to stretch to encompass all humorous instances.

Besides, he argues, wherever humor comes from, it depends on at least two other situational variables.  First, it is dependent on its acceptability, given the audience and the context. Second it must surprise the audience, neither being too familiar nor too foreign.

Four functions

From this (and Martineau’s sociological model), Meyer finds four functions of humor, differentiating the major types (unifying/dividing) based on how sympathetic the audience member is to the target of the joke (its acceptability), and how familiar she is with the topic (its ability to surprise).

Identification

“If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.”

On the side of unification, he finds that humor can enact identification.  When the audience strongly agrees with the target and is familiar with the issue, they can feel a sense of commonality and shared meaning. His example of this is when failed 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot, who was caricatured in political cartoons as having huge ears, quipped in a debate, “If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.”  Audience members familiar with the cartoons and Perot, Meyer argues, could laugh with him at those caricatures.  Notably, Perot denied knowing or noticing that what he said was funny (and Meyer mentions this).

Clarification

An audience who has slightly less agreement and familiarity will find that the humor clarifies the issue, social norm or the speaker’s position on it, “without a sense of correction or censure of anyone involved” (319). A number of examples are offered here:

Ronald Reagan, who was regularly criticized for his age in his second run for president, in a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale expressed that he had no desire to make age an issue in the campaign because of the “youth and inexperience” of his opponent.

Then there are “church bulletin bloopers”:

The Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7:00.  Please use the back door.

The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.

During the absence of our Pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J.F. Stubbs preached last Sunday.

The choir needs eight new robes “due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.” (320).

Meyer finds that in reacting to such messages – in laughing with the others in our group – we clarify social norms without correcting specific people, thus they help to unite groups.

Enforcement

An audience that disagrees slightly with the target or is less familiar with the issue will enact the enforcement of a social norm. Meyer refers to this as a delicate process that maintains some degree of identification.

Here he points to several examples of children’s questions, including:

A girl wrote she would like to ask god, “Are you invisible or is that just a trick?”

A boy wrote, “Why is Sunday school on Sunday? I thought it was supposed to be our day of rest.”

Another boy asked, “I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that okay?”

Another girl asked, “Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t You just keep the ones You have now?” (320-321)

Meyer finds that in laughing at such statements, we are laughing at the children, who will soon be corrected – and our laughter serves as a form of correction that brings them back into the group.

Differentiation

Finally, the audience with a large amount of disagreement with the target, who are very familiar with the issue will differentiate themselves from that target.  We laugh at them. When we unite in our laughing at, we identify with each other and stress the differences between us and those we oppose.  His example here is Bob Dole’s failed 1996 run for president, wherein he said:

For the government cannot direct the people, the people must direct the government. This is not the outlook of my opponent [Clinton], and he is my opponent, not my enemy. Though he has tried to be a good Republican, there are certain distinctions between the two great parties that will be debated, and must be debated in the next 82 days. (Dole, 1996, p. 679 as cited in Meyer, 322).

In pointing out that Clinton was trying to be a “good Republican,” Meyer sees Dole highlighting the differences between the true Republicans and Clinton, and our laughter (if any) reflects our agreement with that critique.

Problems

However, Meyer falls prey to several problematic assumptions: the intentions of the speaker matter more than the power of the audience, laughter is separate from critique, and laughter is unifying.

Speaker intention

In characterizing the relationships between audience and target, he assumes that speaker and audience are one, that the speaker’s goals are clear and in sync with that of the audience – that the audience can and will “get it.”  This is particularly clear in identification and differentiation, where Meyer relies on examples of bona fide political speakers, such as Ross Perot and Ronald Reagan, who wish to persuade us, not the unreliable and discordant narrators represented by stand-up comics.  This is again the assumption of intentionality, and it is easily dismissed.

How do we know that the audience who laughed was laughing with Perot at his caricatures?  Couldn’t they have just been laughing at him?  Wouldn’t some audiences have laughed harder thinking that he said it un-self-reflexively (and even more, upon finding they were correct)? [I have a more developed critique of this through Script Theory.]

In the case of Dole, can’t we laugh at Dole for thinking Clinton is a “good Republican,” for being fooled (enforcement)? Can we laugh with the community and Dole at himself, clarifying the way we did with Reagan? That Reagan example is just weird.

Audience power

Why is it necessary that we get the speaker’s point? Meyer’s treatment of clarification and enforcement starts to get at this – the audience decides to laugh with, or laugh at.

We don’t have to laugh with the congregation at the bloopers, we could laugh at the congregation, or at those with low self-esteem, or the Rev. Merriwether, our usual pastor or the older members of the choir.  Rather than censuring the children, we could laugh at the congregation that created rules that so baffle these children – for “From the mouths of babes…”

For stand-up comics, clarification becomes especially problematic; it takes a large amount of inference to believe that we know what the speaker “really means.” Comics are feel free to inject their own versions of social norms or reinterpret those in existence, thereby perhaps doing little to enforce such norms. Nevertheless, they leave the audience free to interpret in multiple ways.

Laughter is not critique

Further, Meyer’s functions of humor reinforce a laughing/critique dichotomy.  While he differentiates between laughing with and laughing at, he’s only talking about laughing, thus implying that when the audience rejects the speaker’s message (when they heckle or boo), they have not received humor (though it may be too much to say they haven’t been subject to persuasion or rhetoric).  Thus we still might note that for Meyer, expressions of critique rupture a humorous space.

Uniform laughter

Because laughter is assumed to be a sign that we’ve accepted the speaker’s message – that we “get it” – Meyer also does not break us away from the common notion that laughter is uniform.  The four parts of Meyer’s model designate that humor works and the text is funny because it possesses some agreed upon meaning that we all share with each other, that it clarifies an unknown incident or condition via relation to one that is known by way of an (often hyperbolic) analogy, that it informs and thereby enforces social norms or that it possesses an agreed upon message through which we reject the target. However, individual audience members may read a joke in different ways.

The good news

However, Meyer does complicate the common interpretations of laughter. What Meyer introduces is a notion that laughter is not unconscious but thoughtful, and therefore not trivial but consequential.  Further, while Meyer replicates several problems, he does provide us with a perspective that humor serves a purpose.

Meyer also breaks out of humorous modes argument, offering ways that his purposes can be explained via (or work within) multiple modes (317):

Humor theory Humor Function
Relief Identification
Incongruity Clarification
Differentiation
Superiority Identification
Enforcement
Differentiation

There are still many reasons to question these relationships, even when both the humor and purpose work, but we’ll move on.

He further implies that physical and temporal presence is not necessary, as identification and differentiation have no time limit.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

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.

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Common Interpretations of Laughter

Posted on by nwilson

I have previously discussed John Limon’s theory of absolute stand-up. This theory states that the audience “[makes the comic’s] jokes into jokes, or refuse[s] to, by a reaction that is more final, less appealable, than a judgment” (26-7) Thus, we might infer that laughter is the ultimate judgment, and it is the only judgment that should matter.

However, Limon calls it a “reaction.” And the way that he talks about it, displays that humor’s constitution is marked by an involuntary physical reaction; therefore laughter is an anti-judgment, a refusal to judge. This view relies on a few common underlying premises – mostly remnants of Freudian psychoanalysis – that have profound entailments for judgments of humor.

In Limon’s view, humor must be defined by a uniform and visceral display of pleasure, an eruption of the unconscious; thus this judgment is reactive, uncontrolled and therefore trivializing.  As such, one must be physically present for any such reaction to matter. Here, I’ll take a moment to examine each of these premises.  To begin, the notion of uniformity of laughter depends on the idea that all laughter is based on the same interpretation.

Uniform/Particular

One of the early proponents of a superiority theory of humor and one of the first to write a treatise on laughing, Henri Bergson believed there was a sort of complicity among laughers – that all people laugh for the same reason.  It is in this sense that many researchers note the power of humor to polarize people (see for instance, Boskin; Gilbert; Schutz).

Collective laughter is often interpreted as a sign that people have formed a cohesive group and agree with one another (Coser; Gilbert; Merrill; Mitchell; Nietz).  For instance, Borns notes that in the face of a joke we might not normally find funny, like a “dick joke,” “we find ourselves laughing in recognition, then we notice others laughing, and we feel a sense of group recognition” (16). This felt sense, while it might be mistaken, nevertheless constitutes a group whose sense of self can have very real consequences – they may then decide to act as one.

Limon takes up this view by default.  He reasons that because laughter is ephemeral, expiring in the moment, it cannot be examined after the fact.  Such appraisals are untrustworthy (therefore “Individual recantations are invalid”), whereas the uniformity of visible and audible reactions is undeniable, and the effects accrue regardless.  While hostile audiences pinpoint their critiques – boo’ing at the moment or stating the particularities of their problems (heckling) – laughter gives no clues as to why or how it was funny, simply that it was.  But this sense of uniformity at its base relies on a notion that laughter is visceral, physically affecting the emotions, and therefore unconscious.

Unconscious/Conscious

Limon’s theory of laughter returns us to Freud’s idea that humor attempts to subvert thought and therefore judgment.  This belief stems from Freud’s distinction between the conscious and unconscious.  For Freud, judgment occurs in the conscious.  Conscious thought enforces taboos.  It is only when we react without thought – when the unconscious is victorious over the conscious – that laughter is possible.  This view of laughter as an involuntary response or an eruption of the unconscious has become commonsensical, and is held by everyday people, academics and critics alike (see for instance Bergson; Boskin; Coser; Merrill; Mitchell; Nietz; Schutz). We can see it when comics talk about belly laughs, or “making the audience laugh.” In the hierarchy of humor, these laughs are thought to be the best.

Comics and critics who take this view further argue for a loss of bodily control; mere amusement is insufficient.  Laughter and gasping (e.g. in surprise) are therefore thought to be genuine, visceral responses enacted in the accepted register of humor – that is to say, the physical expression of unconscious emotions.  Any other response thus displays the imposition of thought, which then constitutes the content as “not humor.”

By this logic, any audience member who is moved to thought – to judgment – is no longer audience to a humorous act, but to something else.  So from this frame, anyone who boos, heckles, critiques or protests – especially after the fact – is cut out of humorous audiences – “To criticize a joke is to miss it” (Limon, 12).  In each case, by taking up the act, thoughtfully engaging it and responding in a manner other than laughter, such audiences constitute it as consequential, and therefore not humorous.

Trivial/Consequential

Laughs, as the expected response to humor, are treated by many people as universal signs that the joke has not achieved any political end (whether or not this is true).  Limon states, paraphrasing Freud, that “there is ‘no process that resembles “judging”’ in [laughter’s] vicinity” (12). Because the pleasure of humor is derived from an eruption of the unconscious, it is incapable of being subsumed within the realm of judgment, thought and therefore incapable of having any meaningful effect.

Limon believes that laughter displays an unwillingness to take the content seriously and/or to take action – at least, for the time being.  On the other hand, outrage would seem to display that the joke is not trivial, but consequential and such determination must come not from reaction (as an unconscious, physical act) but from judgment. Outrage comes from audience members’ thought, which distances the reaction from the unconscious and therefore the joke from the trivial, and this distance is what comics need to bridge in order to “make people laugh.”  However, comics must also overcome physical and temporal distance.

Presence/Distance

The requirement of an unconscious, visceral, physical reaction limits the correct use of term “audience” to those physically present.  Many theorists of stand-up implicitly reference the traditional live audience that witnesses and responds to the stand-up act (see for instance Borns; Gilbert; Limon; Stebbins).  As Borns states, stand-up comedy is not just “live, but living – an organic, growing, developing monologue that is as reactive as it is active,” and this could only occur in front of a live audience, or a series thereof (16).

Yet, by the above logic, when the act becomes mediated via radio, television, and especially when captured in writing or on records, tapes (audio or video) or digital technology (CDs, DVDs, or MPEGs), the act loses this living quality and presumably much of the audience’s power to shape it. Audiences making use of mass media are thus implicitly designated secondary (and therefore perhaps trivial) to (and therefore parasitic on) the immediately present audience.

A series of immediately present audiences have shaped the comic’s routine, the live-audience being televised confirms the humor and serves as mediator of our reaction, thus although we don’t get the experience in the same form, format or context as the live audience, we still are encouraged to laugh by that audience. This is the whole reason for the laugh track.

This requirement of presence further justifies the separation of critics as well as their audiences from humorous audiences.  If we accept that once we are outside the “living” moment of stand-up, once the text has been watched (whether via mass media or not), it is no longer adaptive, malleable, living; then in this static form the text can be examined in greater detail, as is the case with many critics and protesters.

In this form, audience members – including bona fide political critics (those who present themselves as advocates, not comics) – are free to reframe the comic’s material as consequential political discourse.  The comic’s entire routine may be rendered down to a specific bit or series of jokes, critical commentary can be added in order to clarify the issue – to determine the “true” meaning – and this new statement is then (re)presented to a new audience with different expectations.  My own projects are thus cast as highly suspect.

Political Problems

Yet such an easy delineation of who is and is not an audience for humor relegates stand-up to a trivial role.  To begin to distinguish between audiences puts us on a slippery slope.  Where do we stop drawing distinctions? In making such distinctions, we rob stand-up of any claim to political action, and also define political statements as necessarily non-humorous.

Implicit, then, in Limon’s laughter/outrage dichotomy is a set of criteria that systematically define whether a text is humorous or serious and he is not alone.  Other scholars also make this distinction, and I’ll get to them in due time.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Corrections? Additions?

References:

Bergson, Henri.  Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.  New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Coser, R.L.  “Laughter Among Colleagues: A Study of the Social Functions of Humor Among the Staff of a Mental Hospital.”  Psychiatry 23 (1960): 81-95.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963.

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.

Merrill, L. “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.

Mitchell, C.  “Hostility and Aggression Toward Males in Female Joke Telling.”  Frontiers 3 (1978): 18-27.

Nietz, M.  “Humor, Hierarchy, and the Changing Status of Women.”  Psychiatry 43 (1980): 211-23.

Schultz, Charles E. Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin.  Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1977.

Stebbins, Robert A.  The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.

Cases and Current Events/Comics Talking Shop/Stand Up Comedy

Jay Leno on Anti-Political Funny Stuff

Posted on by nwilson

Tim O’Shei interviewed Jay Leno for The Buffalo News (6/23/2017) about his philosophy on stand-up, and in Leno’s responses I see a few popular notions of stand-up that I (and others) write about.

Anti-political: Hitting both sides

O’Shei asks Leno, “You seem to balance the political material in your act and talking about Republicans and Democrats equally. Is that instinctive, or something you learned to do over time?”

To which, Leno answered,

I always found when I was on the road, I would do a (Donald) Trump joke and I would do a Hillary (Clinton) joke, and go back and forth, and everybody started laughing as they realized, “Oh, you’re just not picking on one side.

This statement could also have been said by Bill Burr about his 2017 Netflix special, Walk Your Way Out, or a number other comics.

When asked to clarify on Trump, Leno says,

I was lucky. I came up at a time when (George) Bush was dumb and (Bill) Clinton was horny. These were just sort of normal human failings you could have some fun with.

Russell Peterson has called this process of “having fun,” with “normal human failings,” “Leno-izing,” and notes that the process is distinctly “anti-political.” For Peterson, “it is not satire,” actual, meaningful political critique done in a humorous way, “but pseudo-satire.”  Such “nightly assaults on political leaders are characterized not by critical engagement with politics, but by a kind of lazy nihilism.”  As opposed to treating politicians like enemy targets, they treat politicians as “mere targets of opportunity.”  He says, “Their attitude is: we make fun of whoever shows up, we hit both sides evenly, and we don’t mean any of it.”

When Leno (or any other late-night host) makes jokes about Bush being dumb and follows with jokes about Clinton being horny, Peterson says the “conviction” such jokes “[turn] upon is not that politics and politicians don’t matter, but that they are irredeemably and indistinguishably insufferable.” It is a reductio ad absurdum, a reduction of their humanity to a caricature, a humor (in Northrop Frye’s sense of a ruling passion that hamstrings a character’s actions). Peterson traces this literary method back Aristophanes.

What this expresses – albeit passively – for Peterson is all politicians are bad, and that therefore “the political process itself – and, by implication, representative democracy, which depends on that process – is an irredeemable sham.”  Peterson further links this belief to low voter turnout.  In this sense, such comics are undermining our very democracy.

While Leno seems to believe that comics can make a difference when expressing a political view, he doesn’t seem to see it as their job.  Their job is not to be wise fools who “speak truth to power,” but to be funny.

True/untrue vs. funny/unfunny

In his last question, O’Shei asks, “I was talking to a rising stand-up comic who told me, ‘Comedians are the only people left who can tell the truth.’ Do you agree with that?”

Leno answered,

The answer lies somewhere in the middle. One thing you don’t want to do is get too self-important as a comedian, when you think you’re the only one telling the truth…. The truth is most comics just want a really good laugh. That’s what you’re going for, and if there happens to be some truth in it, well that’s really nice, too. But most comics will lie their teeth off if it gets them a good laugh.

Again, this seems to express that comics can speak truth, but they’re not trying to – or they shouldn’t be.

In answer to a previous question about being political, Leno similarly said,

As a performer, your goal is to be funny first, and people will figure out your politics….Just do your act and let them come to that discovery on their own. When you make an announcement like that, right away you lose half the crowd….  I think comics are truth-tellers to a certain extent, but you need to be a comedian first. The idea is to really be funny.

Leno notes of the Kathy Griffin incident (which I’ve addressed previously),

The Kathy Griffin incident, perfect example of that, when she held up the bloody Trump head. If it had been funny, people would have gone, “That was awful. But I’ve got to tell you, it was really funny.” If it’s not funny, you’re just standing there naked onstage.

This speaks to another thought I addressed recently: that comics become “truly” themselves onstage.  Leno seems to think comics will be whatever will make the audience laugh.  [For the record, I agree with this, but think the best of us temper this with some kind of goal – what can I say that the audience will agree with and laugh? Or at least, some boundaries – what am I not willing to say that would make this audience laugh?]

Leslie Jones expressed something similar in her interview with Sylvia Obell of BuzzFeed:

I’m so tired of comedians trying to teach people. Your job is not to teach people; it is to make them laugh. And if we can laugh about the pain, then we can get taught somewhere else. There’s no laughter in this world right now, at least not no pure laughter. And anytime any comedian steps up with the bullshit, they are making people hate us. Step up with some funny shit, don’t step up with that political controversial shit. … Bring some goddamn laughter or stop calling yourself a comic.

These last quotes confirm what Peterson has said about comics like Leno (and those trying to do the same), that they do not seek to “speak truth to power.”  But instead, they are, “almost by definition, consensus-seekers. They don’t succeed by saying things with which the audience disagrees…. Challenging people’s beliefs… makes them defensive, angry, and uncomfortable, and people don’t laugh when they’re uncomfortable.”

New models, new possibilities

However, this is just one, outdated model of stand-up.  Even Leno notes,

With Netflix and comedy specials, comedians find their audience and play to that. If you have a particular point of view – Republican or Democrat – you just go to that audience and play to that crowd. But that doesn’t help you grow as a performer.

The shift is toward niche marketing, finding your audience, and it can be lucrative.  This is the basis of Rory Scovel’s Lenny Bruce opening: to weed out those who aren’t likely to be his type of audience. So comics who want to speak to a particular political sensibility can do that.

This, however, begs the question: If they’re only writing for people who already believe, are they having a meaningful political impact? While reinforcing a responsible political belief might be good political work, it might not be as meaningful as convincing the unconvinced.  It would seem like comics in the age of Netflix are free to abandon that goal.

I should point out that neither Peterson nor Leno (nor Jones) seem to say that comics can’t speak the truth to – and change the mind of – a general audience, just that they probably shouldn’t and therefore usually don’t. Some can and undoubtedly do, though it’s really hard to point out when and where it actually happened. So many other things are going on – so many messages being exchanged simultaneously – can we ever really say it was “just one thing” that made the difference?

Leslie Jones has said, “Comedians’ job is to point out what’s going on in society and make it funny.”  Embedded here is the possibility of finding common ground with a general audience that doesn’t reduce politicians and issues to caricatures – though this is really difficult. But then, we all have to have goals.

In the words of Mark Twain,

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. And by forever, I mean thirty years.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Peterson, Russell.  Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Late-Night Television.  Doctorial Dissertation.  The University of Iowa, 2005.

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.

Humor Theories/Stand Up Comedy/Theories About Laughter

John Limon on Laughter: Is It Crucial?

Posted on by nwilson

I’ve talked a bit about how John Limon defines a genre of “absolute stand-up,” as marked, in part, by authorial intent.  Yet he also distinguishes his absolute form from serious, extrinsic forms by noting how the audience responds.

Limon’s rules for absolute stand-up are as follows:

  1. “If you think something is funny, it is.”
    1. “Individual reservations are irrelevant.” People who don’t agree with the general audience response are wrong.
    2. “Individual recantations are invalid.” Once you’ve laughed, you can’t take it back.
    3. “You cannot be retroactively disabused by a critic. To criticize a joke is to miss it.”
  2. “A joke is funny if and only if you laugh at it.” Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke.”
  3. “Your laughter is the single end of stand-up.” (pp. 11-13)

So only item three deals with the intentions of the comic.  The bulk of the theory places responsibility on the audience. Limon argues that unlike “serious art,” stand-up does not need to appeal to any outside judge for a decision that endures.

Serious Art

For Limon, serious art is what we might call “high culture” art, which requires professional critics.  In performance art, like ballet or opera, where the art is expressed in the moment, the decision falls to the professional critics who witnessed the event.   When the art form is more enduring, such as a novel, the decision is deferred: “posterity will judge,” thus these high forms have claims to seriousness (13).  Of course, many have critiqued such a high/low distinction as elitist in nature, thus this distinction is fairly quickly dispensed with. Further, now that we have video, more and more critics can weigh in on performance art, after the fact.

Stand-up

On the other hand, he argues that laughter by individual audiences is the sole indicator of humor – any given act of laughing in the moment retroactively defines humor as such for that moment.  The requirement of laughter thus indicates that it is incorrect to define a joke or bit as funny or not, but instead we must place it in a time and a place; we must state “it was/was not funny when…”  Funny changes from a stable traitor quality of a routine, bit or joke to a state the audience is in after hearing or reading it, and it is the achievement of this state that is the comic’s goal.

Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke” (12). As Limon puts it, “the audience cannot err, it cannot feign, it cannot be misled” (13).  Laughter is a very limiting criteria, but Limon argues it is involuntary and less ambiguous than smiles or other indicators. When I talk about the difference between Silverman and Bill Maher’s racist incidents, this is a primary indicator: people laughed – and continued to laugh – with and at Silverman, few, if any laughed with or at Maher.

Audiences individually may be idiots, but together they’re a genius

Limon also arrives theoretically at what Betsy Borns arrived at inductively: that a large number of comics downplay the individuality of members of the audience in favor of the reaction of the group.  As just one example, Lenny Bruce reportedly once said, “Audiences individually may be idiots, but together they’re a genius”; taken together, they’ll tell you what is or is not funny (Borns, 27). Comics don’t have to please everyone all the time; they simply have to please enough of the people (and not completely alienate anyone) to elicit tacit approval from those who are not actually laughing – these people shouldn’t be incensed enough to disrupt the show, but they don’t have to love it.

Boos and hecklers

However, more hostile reactions from a few members of the audience can negate this tacit approval. Borns notes in the case of the individual audience member who is not at all happy, “one can always yell, ‘Hey, what the hell are you talking about?’ and, most likely, you’ll get an answer” (25). And, as I’ve noted in Dying Laughing, where they tell sixteen stories about hecklers and boos, audience dissent is certainly recognized as a possibility.  But when such interruptions occur, the audience as a group also may go farther; Borns notes the audience may mutiny and take back control, as Royale Watkins describes in the movie.

Thus, Limon notes that a stand-up act can be measured as separate from the absolute form (and therefore consequential) by registering “the irruptions of alien impulses.”  This can perhaps be easily seen when the audience’s tacit approval fails – the most extreme case being audience outrage (13-14).  Negative audiences (protesters, critics, hecklers, boo’ers and walk-outs) do more than indicate that the text was not humorous; they mark the rupture of the humorous event.  Thus, like the criterion of expectation inherent in incongruity theory, Limon’s laughter criterion creates a false dichotomy between humor and serious persuasive discourse.

This presents another danger of the heckler or booer.  To a certain extent, criticisms after the fact and from people who weren’t there are informed by the criticism of those who were – if people in the immediate audience responded negatively, the critic has more to go on.  On the other hand, by Limon’s logic, if the immediate audience finds it amusing, the comic has no need to defend it once it’s filmed or digitized.  Therefore, when the act is interrupted before it can be laughed at, the comedian has truly failed.  Once the act is disrupted, the uptake of the original humor is no longer possible – any response by the comic is not guaranteed reception as humorous, and thus the comedian needs to be wary.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

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.

Cases and Current Events/Comics Talking Shop/Humor Theories/Stand Up Comedy/Theories About Comics

Persona

Posted on by nwilson

I’ve already written a bit on the documentary, Dying Laughing, but there’s a lot more to say there [plus, I transcribed quite a bit of stuff, so I’m inclined to use it!]. So let’s talk about who the comic is on stage.  There are a couple of views, broadly cast as “Being yourself” or “Creating a persona.”

Becoming Yourself

In the movie, comic Tom Dreeson asserts,

Every stand-up comedian starts out emulating another comedian because they know that works. But then another night, you let a bit of you out and it gets a laugh and you let a little bit more of you out and then pretty soon, you’re you on stage.

Rick Overton and Paul Provenza agree that it takes (in Provenza’s words) “a period of many, many years of growing as a human being and being on stage and developing your own material where you can really get a sense of your own voice and your own identity,” where your act “gels” and becomes “comfortable to you.” Overton adds,

And you have the greatest comfort and latitude with stuff you don’t have to feel like a thief about.  When you can use your own stuff, that’s the forever fountain.

It seems that, though the film lumps them together, Overton is here discussing the material, what topics you talk about and anecdotes you share, while Provenza is discussing the comic’s persona.  Provenza seems to agree with Dreeson that you become more and more yourself on-stage.

Then we get a testimonial from Cocoa Brown, who says she used to “do material,” but after one rough moment recovering from insulting an audience member,

I realized comedy is real, I’m telling her something that really happened to me… and that’s when I realized what my funny is, my funny is real, my funny is truth.

This idea previously appeared in the opening of the film, when Overton is discussing what comedy is: It’s “full approval or full disapproval on your essence, on what you actually believe and how you really see life.” And this is followed shortly after with Jerry Lewis’ emphatic assertion, “When you risk and it scores, it’s hallelujah.”

The idea also appears in the discussion of hecklers and booing.  Suli McCullough notes that audiences begin judging you the moment you walk on stage. Paul Provenza discusses why their disapproval hurts so bad:

It’s like there’s no oxygen and you can’t stop.  If you stop, you lose.  Because we’re all trying to just be who we are.  You know when you’re a musician and you go up there, you’ve got songs that you or somebody else has written.  If you’re a painter, you’ve got what you did with paint.  It’s all there and it’s separate from who you are.  With a comedian, it’s you, there is nothing..it’s you.  They don’t not like you’re material, they don’t not like the clothes that you wear, they don’t like you.  It’s about as personal as it gets.

Update: Chris D’Elia, in an interview with The Interrobang’s Dan Murphy (7/2/2017) about his 2017 special, Man on Fire, says something similar:

I’ve always shied away from being too personal,” he said. “I’m an actor, too, and as an actor, you don’t really want people to know the real you because that helps you as an actor. But as a comedian, you want people to know the real you because it makes you funnier and more relatable. I was always trying to ride that balance. But for this, I just thought ‘fuck it,’ I’m going to go out and tell people who I am and how I feel about things…. People really like when people get vulnerable and open up. It’s been great.

Further, in an interview with oregonlive.com’s Mike Acker (7/3/2017), Solomon Georgio discusses getting personal:

Like most comedians, part of what Georgio discovered was that stories about his life and personal experiences made for great material.

“Personal experience was definitely the way in. Trying to find a way to relay my own life so it doesn’t seem crazy. That’s kind of been the thing that I’ve had the most practice in, having to explain where I’m from, what I am,” Georgio said. “Anyone who’s a minority in this country is sort of put in the position to have to explain their existence. I kind of had to do that my whole life.”

This brings up the notion, told to every person trying to find love: “Just be yourself.” To which we respond, like the minor character in Free Enterprise : “I AM myself!  I’ve been myself for 20 [or 30, or 40!] years!  It’s clearly not working!” [I know, my friends and I were the only ones who saw that movie]

Sometimes, this gets confused. Christian Becker of Pastemagazine.com (7/5/2017) talking about Deon Cole’s Netflix episode of The Standups, says,

In his episode Cole walks on stage with a piece of paper in hand, as if he’s a beginner trying to work out material for a later act. But he’s anything but a beginner, and that persona he puts out there is all intentional.

But then, at the end of the same paragraph, he ends with,

While comedians will often times play a character or show off a larger than life personality on stage, Cole is taking off that mask and just being himself.

And then again, later in the article, he again refers to the comic as “self-aware,”

How self-aware does he get? He opens by literally explaining to the crowd that he’s there to try out some jokes, “and if they don’t work out then you’ll never see me again.” His closer is him just leaving the stage, purposefully skipping the “big finale” that other comics like to end on.

This strikes me as wishy-washy, it’s an intentional persona, but he’s “just being himself.” He’s self-aware, and that’s part of the act, but it’s also him being “real” and “toning down the theatrics.”  But if it’s part of the act, then isn’t it “theatrical” by nature?

Luckily, this is not the way everyone views it. Some recognize that it is not “truly” you on stage; that everyone has a persona.

Roles and code switching

Some critics, such as Joanne Gilbert, believe that every comic creates a persona, a narrator; a humorous version of yourself that helps create a space where we can laugh. Theorist Erving Goffman says that we do this all the time, taking on different roles in different situations.  Other theorists talk about “code switching,” changing not just your language and the words you choose, but also how you talk and act in the conversation – even the topics that you’ll bring up and what you’ll talk more about. Conversations with grandma are way different than conversations with friends. Why should conversations on stage with an audience be any different?

In a piece on Elle’s 2017 Women in Comedy (6/16/2017) written by Seth Plattner, Kezia Wier and Amanda Fitzsimons, Natasha Leggero says the following,

When I was showcasing for Mitzi Shore, I’d show up every Sunday at The Comedy Store, and there was this little sign: ‘You don’t have to be funny for three minutes. You just have to be yourself.’ That’s always taken a lot of pressure off me. It’s like the old quote: ‘Stand-up is your evil twin.’ You just have to find that place where you’re able to be yourself—if a little bit, well, heightened.

In these statements, Leggero seems to note that it’s not really being yourself as the sign she’s quoting would have it, but a version of yourself – that it’s a character the comic is playing. John Sheehan expresses much the same thing in an interview with Heather Barrett of CBCnews.com (7/23/2017):

When it’s stand-up [when he’s performing stand-up], it’s me, it’s my thoughts, it’s my character, it’s me with the volume turned up.

Although he says “it’s me, it’s my thoughts,” the idea of “my character” starts to twist things – does he mean character as in the mental and moral qualities distinctive to him, or the fictional person he’s created?  In any case, the next bit – “it’s me with the volume turned up” – suggests that he’s moved at least in part to the latter.

It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that what happens on stage is a negotiation.  Are comics truly finding their voice, or are they finding a voice (one of theirs?) that the audience finds funny?  Is it your identity, or the identity that works best for everyone (you and the audience)? You try things out and the audience gives you feedback by laughing; you’re all participants in the exchange.

We should note that acceptable persona are historical constructs.  Historically, much attention is given to [and I’ve already written about] the figure of the wise fool. But there would seem to be distinct types that we view as funny.

Marginal?

Where Gilbert loses me is the notion that a comic’s persona is based on their marginal status – that they have to “play up” being a woman, or a person of color, or their appearance (overly short/tall, fat/thin, even hair color). They may also change/heighten the audience expectations by dressing and/or acting in certain ways and thus can “play up” being bisexual/gay/trans/queer, or their social class, or being mentally unstable, even their political affiliations or views. Larry the Cable Guy is a prime example of creating class expectations through dressing up and speaking in an accent. We can all think of many more examples of each of the categories – or I can list some in the comments.

Problems

First off, as with just normal persona, not all marginalities are accepted as funny at all times and in all forms, so playing up marginality is not sufficient.  Yes, there are a lot of black comics doing racial humor, Jewish comics and fat comics doing Jewish and fat jokes. Josh Blue is my primary example of the differently-abled, playing that up for a laugh, and you could also point to Emo Phillips or Sam Kinison and the other unhinged comics making fun of the mentally different. On the other hand, female comics have traditionally struggled, especially if they don’t want to play the “funny” role of the ditz or the slut.

Further, not everyone successful seems to need it. There are a lot of white, middle class, straight, cis-gendered, comics of average height and weight who are quite successful – see 90% of comics working today!

Also, not everyone who can do it, does it. Because I’m a short guy, I look to those comics. There are a few short jokes, here and there, but Jimmy Pardo and Jim Norton are night and day (although maybe Norton qualifies as sexually queer), and neither has much to say about their height.  There are women and people of color (men and women) who do topical humor. Sometimes they are working within the base of the persona they created earlier, when they used to tell jokes about themselves, but perhaps not.

The final series of problems I have with the idea of marginalized persona, stem from its dark side.

The Dark side

The first problem is one I have with marginalized persona are that in trying to please the audience, you can lose yourself.  This one is personal to me, as I’ve done it. I sometimes have a sick sense of humor – I enjoy Jim Norton and Dave Attell and comics in that vein, and I wrote some jokes that got some laughs. I discovered that if I dressed down, didn’t shave, and played up the creepy factor, I got more laughs.  The problem was, I became committed to that line, that character. I had to write more jokes in the vein, and I reached a point where I was no longer comfortable with my own material.  I should say, I enjoy Jim Norton, but I didn’t really want to be Jim Norton!

Amy Schumer [I can’t find where, but I will] says something along the lines of “you have to figure out who the audience will let you be.” But that’s the problem, in chasing the audience laughter, you can surrender your part in the conversation and move to a place where you don’t want to be – and it feels alright because you’re getting the laughs, but you start to die inside. I finally had to pull back and rethink what I was doing.

Hamstringing yourself

Further, some say that if you cast yourself as a marginal person – a wise fool – then you hamstring your credibility.  We don’t have to listen to fools, because they are, well, fools! Look at screaming comics, like Lewis Black.

Through his form and application, Black’s outrage and indignation become a “humor” in Northrop Frye’s sense of a “ruling passion” characteristic of certain comedic characters, particularly buffoons.  And comics and audience alike are trained to think of him as such. Like Lewis Black’s propensity toward angry, snarling indignation, “Bobcat” Goldthwait’s (or Sam Kinison’s) screaming fits, Emo Philips’ slow, deliberative style and off-kilter intonation or Steven Wright’s (or Mitch Hedberg’s) reticent and monotone delivery each indicate a certain off-ness of mental state, signaling that the views they express in the routine are not those that the average, sane person would make.  Each provides us something else to laugh at.  We can laugh at the off-kilter presentation and/or over-the-top persona and, via laughter, trivialize/ridicule both the presentation and the persona – we laugh because their behavior is abnormal. These over-the-top persona come across as unreliable and discordant narrators, and therefore, we don’t have to listen to them.  Though Black’s position is clear, we need not accept the positions of raving madmen or the ponderings of the unbalanced – unless, of course, they are running our government.

Further still, some authors, like Gring-Pemble and Watson take humor to be polyvalent – we can evaluate them from various ways.  Through hyperbolic yelling, Black gives us other things to laugh at than his critique. So when listening to a political rant from Black, we can find his material deeply political and disturbing, but laugh in the moment due to its hyperbolic delivery.  In other words, we may not find the material funny, but we set that aside to enjoy the spectacle of its delivery, the performance of irritation, frustration or incredulity.  Thus our laughter may display that we’ve (for the moment) ignored the politics, because if we were upset by it, we wouldn’t laugh.

Unforeseen Consequences

Nevertheless, it does not guarantee that the messages of marginalized people have no effect – and therein lies perhaps the worst dilemma, because some, like Josh Blue, claim they are giving us the opportunity to laugh with them, at themselves. They tap into the tension that their presence evokes, and they relieve the tension by making self-deprecating jokes, which makes the audience like them.  They would claim that they do no harm because, if Black’s political rants have no effect, how can their self-critiques?

However, there’s also the possibility that we feel superior to them, and their self-deprecation only furthers that sense of superiority, thus eliciting the laugh.  This would be a worst-case scenario, where the comics are hamstringing, not just themselves, but entire classes of people. This is why so many women don’t want to play ditzes and sluts; this is (in part) the basis for Iliza Shlesinger’s recent critique of female comics. It’s the reason I don’t tell short jokes.

Summary

Although popular, it’s unlikely that you have “one true, essential self” that you learn about through stage-time.  It’s much more likely that you evolve a persona that meets audience expectations, and if you’re smart about it, it’s someone you see in yourself – a best, funniest part of you.

If you don’t want to play up your sex, class, gender, sexuality, physical attributes or disabilities, you shouldn’t have to. Doing so may be easier, but beware where that takes you.

It’s impossible to tell if jokes alone have any impact on society, though there are a lot of theories. My point is, why risk it? Just for personal financial gain?

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

What do you think? Do you think comics making jokes at their expense helps or hurts?

References:

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1957/1990.

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique.Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. New York: Random House, 1956.

Gring-Pemble, Lisa and Martha Solomon Watson.  “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.”  Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.2 (2003): 132-53.

Cases and Current Events/Comics in the News/Stand Up Comedy

Rory Scovel’s Lenny Bruce Opening

Posted on by nwilson

If the title doesn’t already tell you: *Warning: Explicit Language*

Rory Scovel’s new special, Rory Scovel Tries Stand-up for the First Time on Netflix, begins rather oddly.

No, I’m not talking about the Goodfellas-esque, Scorsese, steadycam, follow-through-the-bowels-of-the-theater opening.  Nor the twenty-seven seconds he spends repetitively thanking the audience, though that is somewhat humorous and definitely sets up the next part – I’ll get there.

No, I’m talking about his opening joke. Both Vinnie Mancuso of A.V. Club and Graham Techler of Paste comment on it.  Techler says:

The special begins with tactless question posed to the audience; have they ever had anal sex?

Lenny Bruce’s piss joke

The joke immediately reminded me of one I had only read about in the work of John Limon: Lenny Bruce’s piss joke. That joke is as follows:

If you’ve er, [pause]

Ever seen this bit before, I want you to tell me.

Stop me if you’ve seen it. [long pause]

I’m going to piss on you. (16).

Limon says,

Bruce waits after his announcement, and for a half-second a fraction of the audience rumbles, followed – so closely that the first stage is easy to miss – by seventeen seconds of unanimous laughter, accompanied by the sound of one or two people clapping though not applauding: adding to the percussion of their laughter, as if it were not possible to laugh sharply enough (16).

Seventeen seconds of laughter is significant – it’s far longer than most jokes get – and apparently there was no milking or pantomiming. The audience’s laughter also doesn’t wax and wane but remains continuous. Limon notes that usually such a thing only happens when we reprocess the joke. Here, he argues, perhaps they laughed, and then laughed that they laughed, without a pause in between.

Joke work

In trying to parse out why it might be funny, Limon notes what Freud called the “joke work,” which others have referred to by various names [I’ll insert some here later], but basically it’s set up, delay, punchline. The format is familiar to most people in Western civilization, and we know where and when we are supposed to laugh, and often do so.

Bruce sets it up by telling us to “Stop me if you’ve heard this one…”, pauses, then hits the punchline.

Similarly, Scovel doesn’t just “begin with a tactless question.”  Instead, he says:

Let’s get right into it:

Anal.

Who’s done it?

Although the pace is quicker, the joke work is there: set up “Let’s get right into it,” pause, punchline. As with Bruce’s audience, there is a brief pause in Scovel’s audience after he says anal, and they don’t start to laugh until a half second after the question is posed.

Tendentious jokes

Working from Freud, Limon talks about Bruce’s joke as tendentious, as having, “underneath the joke work, a repressed content, unhumorous but willing to be humored, which is either aggressive or sexual” and “‘sexual’ means ‘excremental/sexual'” (14). This is, again, Relief theory. The theory is that society represses us from talking about sex, pissing or pooping, and the joke creates tension that begs for the relief of a laugh. So Bruce’s joke easily ducks under that bar.

So does Scovel’s – perhaps precisely hitting the “slash” in “excremental/sexual.”  Scovel himself said he was “seeing if the crowd would laugh at the shock of it.” Anal sex shocks us in that it crosses all kinds of lines, the shock creates tension, which then begs for the relief of laughter. In this sense, it’s just a dick joke.

Again, for Limon, the continued laughter suggests that some people were laughing at themselves laughing – that they thought it funny that people would laugh about the possibility of being pissed on, rather than being disgusted.  Scovel’s joke doesn’t have that dimension; it’s just a dick joke. However, Scovel then builds on that.

Repetition and riffing

Whereas Bruce has to try two times to continue through that seventeen seconds of laughter, Scovel powers right over the top of it with repetition:

Who’s done anal? Who here’s done anal? Who’s done anal? Who here has done anal?

Techler notes,

But it isn’t rhetorical, and Scovel continues to ask the question so many times he can eventually suggest that this may be the only joke in his arsenal.

“That joke started by repetition,” says Scovel. “Saying something over and over again, seeing if the crowd would laugh at the shock of it, then lose them and then see if they’d come back around.”

However, Scovel isn’t simply repeating; instead, he riffs on it, changing the wording, which changes the rhythm, and he also alters intonation to milk the joke.  These are pags, follow up punch-lines, slightly different than the original, and meant to get as big a laugh. This riffing goes on for a full eleven seconds, then a five second meta-critique (see below), then another eight seconds of pags:

Anal.  Who’s done anal? But like, anal. Anal, though.  Anal. Who has done anal?

Then comes a twenty three second meta-critique, then another few seconds of pags before he starts mixing it up, getting dirtier/more obscene and doing characters:

Anal. We’re still – this is still – anal. Anal! [in a nasally voice] Anal! Does that sell it, if I added – if that’s my posture: Anal! [shouting] Who’s done anal? [still in character, but softer] I’m the brattiest comic on the circuit. [shouting] Who’s done anal, though? [laughing].

[In a country accent] Buttfuck, who – [normal voice] does that help? Does that help? Does that help, though? Buttfuck.  Somebody’ll be, [country accent] “Oh, buttfuck. Ok yeah. Ok. Yeah. Dude said ‘anal,’ I was like, ‘Who’s the doctor-lawyer on stage?’ Anal, what? Buttfuck, that’s more my speed; that’s more my style. Truth be told, that’s more my style. I buttfuck. Wanna know something about me – I butt-”

[normal] You have to say ‘buttfuck’ with an accent. If you say it without an accent you sound like a goddamned serial killer.  [In a creepy voice] “You guys ever buttfuck?”

Once the audience is laughing, the repetitive pags can hold the laugh – if he varies it a bit.  He also benefits from the word taboo that comes with all variations of fuck. Now it becomes – more truly – a dick joke.

However, if the audience didn’t start out laughing, this would go the way of Lenny Bruce’s infamous Australia show, which Limon notes created such a hullabaloo over the piss joke.  If Scovel tells that initial joke and no one laughs, would they pick him up at some point? Maybe. because of the way he set it up.

Repetition and riffing as joke work

As I mentioned, when he walks on stage, he doesn’t “Get right into it,” he instead thanks the audience – more importantly, he thanks the audience at least ten times.  And he similarly riffs; he never says it the same way twice. He plays with the name of the city to add variation: Atlanta, ‘Lanta, etc.

This is more joke work; Scovel has set a pattern in the mind of the audience, so when he repeats the line, over and over, the parallel structure satisfies what we’ve come to expect of him. He can’t milk it forever, however; eventually he has to transition to another joke, and this brings up one more part of Bruce’s joke: it fits the form of ritual humor.

Ritual humor

Limon talks about Apte’s theory of ritual humor, which “is characterized by purposeful verbal and nonverbal behavior by individuals and groups in which … sexual activities are simulated in an exaggerated manner, and simulated defecation and urination are carried out with scatological overtones.”  The argument is that perhaps in Western civilization we are conditioned to respond to these types of jokes; that they fulfill an anthropological function. Once again, this definition nails Bruce’s joke, but Limon is questionable on whether or not that’s relevant.

Scovel gets there too, some two minutes and forty-five seconds later when he finally talks about having tried it with his wife. He paints an exaggerated picture:

My wife and I tried anal sex once and I didn’t like it, and for some reason I feel like that makes me a gentleman. “Oh, that’s pretty cool, babe, we don’t have to go down that road again. Lord knows, you hated it. All the tears.”

He’s finally made it more of a sexual joke, but at this point, we’re really on to another joke.  Well before this point, the audience had to make some decisions.

Decisions

Techler notes,

For him [Scovel], it’s a page out of the Book of Glass (Todd), who would make sure the first joke of his set let the audience decide right away whether this was going to be for them. That way, says Scovel, “you’re not really begging anyone to watch your thing.”

We know good comics will “work the room;” they will mention a category or premise, pause for a response, and on the basis of the audience’s response decide if a joke on that topic is going to succeed (McIlvenny et al.; Scarpeta & Spagnolli). That’s not what Scovel and Glass claim to be doing.

Here Scovel’s suggesting he was going to do this joke regardless, to allow his audience to opt out. He wants to tailor the audience to his material and not the other way around.  That’s a fairly ballsy move for someone who’s not a household name.

Further, ten seconds into the repetitious pags that begin the joke, he spends five seconds calling attention to it.

This is the show. Who has – everybody here’s like, “Wait, so is this the show?” This is the show. This is the show.

Then he’s back to the pags for eight seconds, then he returns to his meta-critique of the act for twenty-three more:

I have one joke and I’m half-way through it.  This is – This is it. I do sort of a reverse Louis CK, I write one new joke a year.  And this is actually a three year-old joke, so it should be a pretty good special. You guys made a pretty good choice watching, thanks for being here. Oh.

I’ve talked about how a lot of comics in the documentary, Dying Laughing talk about trying to create a rhythm and a group mindset.  These statements do the opposite; they make the audience take notice, breaking the rhythm of his joke and any collective effect that he may be working toward. He offers another subtle one later on, speaking as an audience member talking to his wife.  So we get three chances to opt out of watching, where he says, “this might not be for you.”  Again, ballsy for someone who has less than superstar status.

Summary

I don’t want to misrepresent Limon; I’ve already written about his theory of absolute stand-up, and I’ll write more on his other theories later. Limon’s purpose was not to say, “This is why Lenny Bruce’s joke worked,” because it didn’t work in Australia. Humor theories are great for looking at possibilities, but none yet can nail it 100% of the time.  That’s what makes stand-up comedy (and any form of public address) exciting!

Nevertheless, I like to point out when people have done similar material, with similar theoretical backing, to highlight what’s going on.

Like Bruce’s piss joke, Scovel’s anal joke makes use of subtle joke work, to capitalize on what he thinks is shock value within a relief theory – it’s a dick joke (although Bruce’s joke may have, admittedly, more to it).

Unlike Bruce, Scovel uses repetitive pags that riff on the original to keep it going for nearly three minutes, and he does this to test his audience, before he continues onto another joke. This is a novel approach. My thoughts:

References:

Apte, Mahadev L. “Humor research, methodology, and theory in anthropology.” In McGhee and Goldstein (eds.) Handbook of Humor Research, : 183-212.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

McIlvenny, P., Mettovaara, S. & Tapio, R. “‘I really wanna make you laugh’: Stand-up comedy and audience response.” In M.K. Suojanen & A. Kulkki-Nieminen (Eds.) Folia, Fennistica and Linguistica: Proceedings of the Annual Finnish Linguistics Symposium, 16. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Finnish and General Linguistics Department Publications, 1993: 225-245.

Scarpeta, Fabiola & Ann Spagnolli. “The interactional context of humor in stand-up comedy.” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42(3), 2009: 210-230.

Transcript:

Let’s get right into it: anal. Who’s done it?  Who’s done anal? Who here’s done anal? Who’s done anal? Who here has done anal?

This is the show. Who has – everybody here’s like, “Wait, so is this the show?” This is the show. This is the show.

Anal.  Who’s done anal? But like, anal. Anal, though.  Anal. Who has done anal?

I have one joke and I’m half-way through it.  This is – This is it. I do sort of a reverse Louis CK, I write one new joke a year.  And this is actually a three year-old joke, so it should be a pretty good special. You guys made a pretty good choice watching, thanks for being here. Oh.

Anal. We’re still – this is still – anal. Anal! [in a nasally voice] Anal! Does that sell it, if I added – if that’s my posture: Anal! [shouting] Who’s done anal? [still in character, but softer] I’m the brattiest comic on the circuit. [shouting] Who’s done anal, though? [laughing].

[In a country accent] Buttfuck, who – [normal voice] does that help? Does that help? Does that help, though? Buttfuck.  Somebody’ll be, [country accent] “Oh, buttfuck. Ok yeah. Ok. Yeah. Dude said ‘anal,’ I was like, ‘Who’s the doctor-lawyer on stage?’ Anal, what? Buttfuck, that’s more my speed; that’s more my style. Truth be told, that’s more my style. I buttfuck. Wanna know something about me – I butt-”

[normal] You have to say ‘buttfuck’ with an accent. If you say it without an accent you sound like a goddamned serial killer.  [In a creepy voice] “You guys ever buttfuck?”

[In a feminine voice] Oh my god!

[As an audience member] Karen put your fucking hand down!  It’s obviously a trap.  It’s a death trap.

[Feminine voice] Well I don’t know, I’ve never been to one of these things.

[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck?

[Normal] Isn’t that – it’s kinda – immediately you’re like “Oh that’s not so bad.”

[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck?

[Normal] Hey, it’s the guy from the gas station. Answer his inquiries.

[Country accent] I just wanna know if y’all ever buttfuck before? Y’all come on now, oh [breaking character; back] Unleaded, fill it up, you got it! You every buttfuck?

[Normal] Hi, I’d like to fill it up, I’m over on pump 10.  I gotta tell ya, that one employee, he is a lively sort, I – What’s that? That’s not an employee? I’ll be right back. I’ll be right back. No. It’s on me, there were a lot of red flags and I – I don’t – I should’ve – I should’ve tuned in. I should’ve tuned in.

[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck? Buttfuck!

[Normal] My wife and I tried anal sex once and – [at a sound from the audience in the wings] Shut the fuck up! Shut up! I already asked you if you did it, nobody said shit! And now I have to talk the entire show. This job sucks.

I feel like, right now, some people are like, oh, maybe he does only have the one joke. Where we thought he was being facetious. The twist in tonight’s show, was honesty. Hmmm.

My wife and I tried anal sex once and I didn’t like it, and for some reason I feel like that makes me a gentleman. “Oh, that’s pretty cool, babe, we don’t have to go down that road again. Lord knows, you hated it. All the tears.”

If your wife cries during sex, she is telling you something. Check in, you know what I mean? Do it. Check in. [High pitched voice] “You Ok?” Just one of those, “Hey everything cool? What’s going on? You got a little misty here. I don’t. Huhh.” [Normal] Also, talk like that. That’s a big turn-on for women. That’s a huge turn on for women. [High pitched] “Hey, just a quick question, what’s going on with the tears?” [Normal] Be that ecstatic. Be like [Yelling high-pitched] Hey! What’s the deal with the tears? Let’s get back into it [pantomimes thrusting].”

Where did I lose some people? The visualization of my wife crying during anal sex? Is that where some people were like, “You know what, no. No. Next exit. We’ll take the next exit. I’m not here for this.”

Cases and Current Events/Comics in the News/Stand Up Comedy

The Difference Between Silverman and Maher

Posted on by nwilson

I’ve already written about Bill Maher’s recent N-word problem; however it’s not the first time he’s been a part of a discussion about racist language.  I thought I’d revisit that event, and point out some key differences between Silverman and Maher.

Silverman

On July 11, 2001, comic Sarah Silverman made an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, where she told the following joke:

I was telling a friend that I had to serve jury duty and I wanted to get out of it. So my friend said “Why don’t you write something inappropriate on the form, like ‘I hate chinks’?” But I don’t want people to think I was racist, so I just filled out the form and I wrote “I love chinks.” And who doesn’t?

NBC aired the joke uncensored.  Asian American rights activist Guy Aoki saw the joke on television and began a media campaign claiming that Silverman was in fact a racist.  After Silverman made a guest appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (7/22/2001), Aoki was invited to debate Silverman on that same program (air date: 9/22/2001).  Maher asked that the language of the show not be censored, and in his summary statements noted that this issue was dangerously close to impeding our free speech.  Silverman retold the joke on both programs, stated that censoring words, especially those used by comics, does nothing to end racism, and then included several other jabs (such as calling Aoki a douche bag), most of which now appear in her act and her 2005 concert film, Jesus is Magic.  Aoki made most of his points well, stating that racist language use, even in an ironic (or presumably, commentary) form, allows their use – and therefore their ability to harm – to continue.

The “with/at” question

There’s a problem in here that I call the “with/at” question. Are we laughing with someone? Or are we laughing at someone? Or both? And who is the object of each?

Victims & Butts

Joanne Gilbert offers a distinction between the victim of the humor, the person or group who receives negative treatment within the narrative of the joke, and the butt of the humor, the person or group who is at fault and therefore worthy of ridicule.

We should note that this distinction comes from a model of superiority.  In a frame of tension release, we could imagine a distinction among stressors and triggers; what is creating the tension and what triggers that release.  We would always laugh at stressors in light of the release, but even this relationship can be complicated when one delves deeper.

This would seem to solve the “with/at” problem: we always laugh with the victim, at the perceived butt (to the extent that these are different).  This distinction is crucial because, as Samuel Janus states, “The ability to make a person laugh with [a minority group], not at them, is a vital one” (as cited in Horowitz, 7).  However, this distinction makes things more complicated as we now have to navigate new potential sources of humor.

Application

For instance, in Silverman’s “chink” joke, she is the focal point of the joke.  However, we can read her as the butt of the joke, as the one who believes that hate is the most hateful term in the declaration and we can laugh at her.  Or we can read her as the victim of a racist system in which chink is ok to say, but hate is not, and we can laugh at the problems of such a system.

Note that both of these interpretations rely on the notion that she’s a reliable and harmonious narrator – that this really happened she actually means what she is saying – and most of us don’t believe that for a second.

Thus we may infer that she has ulterior motives. If we believe that Silverman has a good reason for telling this joke, we may then perceive our laughter as laughing with her, at the racist system.  If we believe she’s just trying to get away with saying a bad word, we can either laugh with her as she subverts the system that prohibits her from saying chink, or we can be outraged (as was Guy Aoki), thus supporting that system.

Similarly, while Maher tries to cast himself as the butt of the joke – he is the “house n-word” – his critics thought he was just trying to get away with saying the word, and were outraged.  True, we can laugh at him for having the audacity to say the word, or we can laugh with him for getting away with saying the word – but then, he didn’t really, did he?

Further, because it was an off-the-cuff remark and not a prepared joke, Maher can’t claim he was trying to comment on a racist system. It’s just a simple dick joke. And not a particularly good one.

References:

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Horowitz, Susan.  Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women.  Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.

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.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-291. 

Cases and Current Events/Comics in the News/Comics Talking Shop/Stand Up Comedy

Iliza Shlesinger and Jokes About Vaginas

Posted on by nwilson

Controversy

I’m a fan of Iliza Shlesinger; seen her live, watched all her specials. So when, on Monday (6/12/2017), Deadline’s Matt Grobar posted an interview with Iliza Shlesinger, promoting her third Netflix special, Confirmed Kills, her TV show, Truth & Iliza, her new short-film series for ABC, Forever 31, and her upcoming book, Girl Logic–she’s been busy–I heard about it.

In the interview, Shlesinger expresses that

I think the landscape of what’s available out there for women is not as extensive as it could be. That’s something that drives me; … I wanted to speak in an open and honest way that wasn’t always sexual, that didn’t always limit us to women that are desperate for marriage or babies.

Then she was asked, “How do you really feel about the way women are represented, or represent themselves, in this arena [comedy]?” and she said [I quote her here for clarity and reference – I’ll pull it apart below]:

As tracked by Megh Wright on Splitsider, the Twitter response was huge, and “pretty brutal.”

replied, “Iliza, you’ve joked about sex & vaginas. Why police what other women are saying? We can talk about whatever we want. Why focus on this?”

Eliza Skinner (@elizaskinner) Tweeted, “Suggesting that female comics should limit what subjects, words, or attitudes they use is just a way of trying to limit female comics.” And, “I don’t care if you think we’re too dirty, self-deprecating, sexual, or ukulele-dependent. Men get to use all their words, so do we.”

Many called Shlesinger a “bad feminist.” Shlesinger followed up with a series of Tweets, long since deleted, but archived by Wright, in which she further defends her position.

However, perhaps we’ve got enough here to work with. More than just a discussion about female comics, this is a discussion about the rules of stand-up comedy (or, at least, “good stand-up”).

Systemic rules

The first insight lost in the discussion is that Shlesinger points out the systemic problem, that “[W]e [women] have to work hard to get that attention,” from (primarily male) audiences, talent scouts, agents, promoters, club owners, producers – right up the line.  Shlesinger’s ending line is: “[Q]uite frankly, I’m appalled by what is expected of women, and what women offer in response in that.”  She clearly feels that women are offering a response to a felt or implicit expectation, and this is a systemic problem. However, it’s just as true, for her, that the reaction is too easy.

Specific reactions

Shlesinger’s problem is that women try to act like men within the system:

I do think many women think, ‘Oh if I just act like a guy, if I go for that low hanging fruit…’ Everything’s about sex, or how weird I am. It all just kind of runs together….

From a theoretical stand-point, it’s a knee-jerk reaction that perpetuates the system, instead of a thought out response that transcends the system – that tries to do something new and get us to laugh and think in a new way (Lyotard; Phillips).

What Shlesinger is calling out is originality.  Reactions breed stale, pat, unoriginal responses. This is what she sees:

I could walk into The Improv, close my eyes, and I can’t tell one girl’s act apart from another…. every woman makes the same point about her vagina, over and over.

For my part, I’ve seen this just in our local scene – and I agree with Shlesinger,

That’s not saying that 30-something white guys don’t all sound the same sometimes,

They do.  Oh my glob, do they.  If I hear another joke about masturbation, even female masturbation….

Dick jokes

The decision to talk about a dick or a vagina isn’t really the issue for Shlesinger. She says,

I think shock value works well for women, but beyond that, there’s no substance. I want to see what else there is with such complex, smart creatures.

A good joke has more to it than a general topic or the use of a word.  It’s gotta have substance, insight.

The problem with the true dick joke is it’s blue for blue’s sake. Contrast that with the sexual joke, which actually has something to say about sex, or feminine hygiene, or the plethora of other topics that occur in that area and can be mined for meaningful insights. Shlesinger’s problem is that a lot of comics–not just women, but she’s talking here about women–aren’t pushing for meaningful insight.

The problem is, shock and dick jokes often get a laugh, especially from a younger crowd.  It’s believed–and therefore used calculatingly–to play on relief theory, as sex is a titillating topic. It’s taboo to talk about your dick, or your vagina, or your sex life, and perhaps women have more tension there because “good girls don’t do that.” Acting like a man is forbidden.

Relief as intervention

This, however, is where it becomes a feminist point: A woman speaking about her vagina and sex life is more of a social intervention than a man doing it because she’s not supposed to. However, when everyone is doing it, is it necessarily an intervention any more?  Has the goal line moved?

Her critics say, “We [women] should get to use all our words and not be limited,” but if the words you choose to use, and the subjects you choose to discuss, and the way you choose to represent yourself is done in order to “fit-in” and excel (make money) by working within the rules of a sexist system, then are you not, already, “limited?”

Shlesinger’s follow-up tweets are pretty good here:

As comics, it’s our job not just to find something new and interesting to say, but also to transcend the rules and transform both ourselves, our audiences and stand-up itself.  Keep pushing my friends.

References:

Lyotard, Jean François.  The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.  Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi.  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1984/2002.

—.  The Différend.  Trans. George Van Den Abeele.  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1988.

—.  “Lessons in Paganism.”  The Lyotard Reader.  Ed. Andrew Benjamin.  Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989/1993. 122-154.

Phillips, Kendall R.  “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere.”  Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 231-48.

—.  “Space of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002): 328-344.

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.