https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dulGdlC6hs
Don't worry, this isn't gonna be one of those essays in Reason or the Wall Street Journal where a dude laments cancel culture or trigger warnings or people who can't take a joke.
But I will ask you to click on this video just to see how much the world changed in ten years - stop it whenever you need to.
Patrice O'Neal died shortly after this special and clearly knew it. Had he been alive just a few more years, he'd have been as famous a comedian as George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Bill Hicks, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle... Even with the amount of time he got in the spotlight at his low profile, Patrice O'Neal is one of the greatest standups who ever lived, and when I think of standups who've consistently made me laugh as hard as I've ever laughed in my life, it's Louis CK, Norm Macdonald, Robin Williams, and Patrice O'Neal. O'Neal might have supplanted Louis CK as the comedian of the 2010s, but even if his behavior was spotless by our era's standards (doubtful), just his act would have cancelled him forever.
O'Neal is a perfect example of how humor is cruel. It always hurts. Period. There is no such thing as something funny that doesn't hurt someone. Any joke without a victim is pseudo-laughter. A victimless joke can be fun, but it's never funny. The joke is only funny if laughter's the point of the joke, and laughter is only the point of the joke when you don't care about the joke's consequences. Puns, klang association, irony, drollery, even wit and epigrams, they're not funny; they're usually told in high spirits, but the laughter they elicit's a secondary reaction. Laughter at victimless cleverness is about the camaraderie it provides. This kind of low-key pseudo-humor is incapable of making you forget everything that is not the joke.
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A bunch of DC friends from 12ish years ago probably remember my phase of driving around Bethesda. Bethesda is the richest town in the richest county in America - with the highest ratio of restaurants per capita in the whole world. One day in conversation, we decided that anybody hanging around Bethesda was a douchebag (except us...), and we should disrupt Bethesdans in my car by honking at every Bethesda pedestrian we saw, all of whom would either have a deer in the headlights reaction, or jump six feet in the air as they screamed, or would yell and give us the middle finger. I nearly lost control of the car because I was laughing so hard, and nobody in the car cared because they were laughing even harder. I did this every time I was in Bethesda for six months. A generation earlier, I'd have been arrested for disturbing the peace, and a generation from now I might have been arrested again; but one friend of mine at the end of a drive through Bethesda put it perfectly: "It's fun to be a bully."
Better put than you even realized James..., humor is the language of bullies and all of us have a bully lurking inside. The very act of laughing contorts you into the body language of dominance and superiority, emitting a subconscious primal grunt with your head held far in the air, your neck exposed because you know you're invulnerable to attack.
Think back on your life for a minute. How many of us tried as best we could to provoke laughter at other people's expense? And how many of us learned how because we have been the victim of others' laughter? Why is there a commonly held archetype of a comedian as someone who laughs on the outside because they're crying on the inside? Laughter is innate, but humor is learned behavior, and it's learned not through joy but through pain.
Mel Brooks once explained the difference between tragedy and comedy this way: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die." It's fun to be a bully. It's fun to cause or watch other people's misfortune and know that it holds no consequences for you, and it's particularly fun when you've been on the receiving end and laughter's followed by relief because someone other than you is getting humiliated.
A sense of humor is like drawing a straight line or carrying a tune. Some people just don't have the gene for it, many of whom are otherwise fun people and great company. Sitcom after sitcom's made for people like that who realize that our world finds it unacceptable to have no sense of humor, so the fake sitcoms are accompanied by laugh tracks which tell them when laughing's socially appropriate. Everything has its light side and its dark side, so humorless is far from the worst thing in the world to be. Very few things have a more obvious dark side than humor, and after fifty years when having a sense of humor was considered the most important trait to have in socializing, we're beginning to rediscover how dangerous humor is.
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A good friend and I once noted that of all America's contributions to world culture, comedy is the only one in which our position as the 'world's most important nation' is absolutely unquestionable. Look at any other field for which we're best known: the British beat us in radio and compete with us in Popular Music, the Japanese and French compete with us in movies, and in social media China and South Korea are well ahead of us. Comedy is the only aesthetic field where America's primacy is as unquestionable as Italy in opera and Bavaria in beer.
There is no pretending that good comedy is as good as it was just ten years ago. It's not, and I don't think it's because humor tends to date quickly. We've placed all sorts of restraints on humor which weren't there in 2011, which makes being funny much harder; but that's not necessarily a bad thing. When some notice that others so quick to insult are enraged when they're insulted back, it's not their imagination. Nobody has thinner skin than bullies and trolls who already mean ill. The whole point of bullying is to make yourself invulnerable, and when bullies learn that they're vulnerable, their first ten urges are not to learn their lesson. They just bully harder.
Insofar as humor is an art, I think history is going to look back on the fifty years between 1967 and 2017 as a golden age for humor like the high Renaissance for painting or the mid-19th century for the novel. We had The Simpsons and South Park, Seinfeld and Cheers, Louis CK and Richard Pryor, The Producers and Life of Brian, Chappelle's Show and Kids in the Hall, Letterman and Craig Ferguson, Joan Rivers and Gilda Radner, Dana Carvey and Dan Aykroyd, Colin Mochrie and Steve Carell, Ted Danson and Julia Louis Dreyfus. It's a magnificent history, but the greatest achievements are mostly male, white, and straight, and that's because humiliation of the less powerful is built into comedy's DNA.
Mass media censored nudity and violence, but it never censored insults, and social media makes insults the most basic fact of our lives online and so omnipresent it changed the curvature of history. Insulting behavior elected chief executives to four major world powers in five years (US, UK, India, Brazil) and may soon elect a fifth (France). All over the world, humor propelled the party of bullies into power because we've learned the false lesson that a sense of humor is a virtue. It's not a virtue, it's a gift like being good at games or physical activity, and like them a gift that can be used for bad purposes.
We spent the better part of the twentieth century lifting humor's lid, and now we're putting the lid back on in the same way that in the late 60s we put the lid on racism and prejudice; but just like with racism and prejudice, it's a pretty makeshift lid, it's barely even cosmetic. All it does is make the most obviously malicious humor more socially unacceptable. And now, fifty years later, just when we seem to have made some small minimum of forward motion, racism and prejudice explode back out of Pandora's Box, and we can only watch.
Some traits are endemic in the human psyche, they're not going away no matter how distant we wish them. Unlike prejudice, nobody thinks they wish humor away, but then we remember the how people used humor against us. If you feel any sympathy for others at all, how can you blame people for wanting limitations on what we can joke about?
But at the same time, if you really go after humor, if you want to eliminate people's ability to joke at each other's expense the way that many people would like to eliminate prejudice, you can't be surprised when people who base their lives around either humor or the prejudice hit back with everything they have. The goal of the world is not liberty or equality or justice or dominance; as my brother would say, the goal of the world is homeostasis - the condition of guaranteeing as best we can that everyone is able to muddle through tomorrow. Isn't that hard enough?
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...So these personal essays of mine have an enormous problem, they're incredibly pompous, which I find a particularly funny because I, personally, am really fucking funny.
Even if I've just become the guy who entitles an essay 'Comedy and Humor', I know for a fact that if you meet me and don't find me funny, the problem is you, not me. I doubt I was born this way, I was a bookish kid made funny by extreme bullying, Jewish culture, mental illness, and a family of nothing but funny people. We probably learned to make goyim laugh in the Old Country, after all, there's nothing funnier than the Holocaust. (and by the way, today is Yom HaShoah...)
Everybody says they want to be close friends with the funny guy, but nobody really wants it. He's perfect for dinner or drinks, but everybody knows that the funny guy is the bundle of volatile buttons easily pushed, who gets mad when people do to him what he does to them. He's funny because he found a socially acceptable place to deposit his rage. He's perfect for three hours, then you go home with your better looking but dull partner and he goes back to whatever bridge he lives under.
Even if they don't know it, what many funny people want most is to stop being funny. Being funny is so exhausting. It's like a drug that feels amazing for a couple seconds and leaves you feeling nothing but fear, because the only way you feel comfortable relating to people is when they're laughing. Every moment spent in the company of others when not in that state is a moment when all your doubts flood into your head. All you want is to stop performing but you don't know how, all you want is to stop feeling the itch to leave an impression, stop talking to two people as though they're fifty, get off the stage so you can have a core self no feedback can take away.
Funny people are usually the smart people who learned early on that if you're too smart, you're going to stand out no matter what, so you'd better stand out for making powerful people feel good. We would be much happier if we were able to go home, be our naturally pompous selves, stop thinking about others' opinions, and go through life with personal experiences that audiences neither take away nor validate.
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So what, ultimately, should comedy be?
It's easy to say that comedy should be done responsibly, but the whole point of comedy is to forget our responsibilities. There might be such a thing as comedy which doesn't punch down (I'm obviously skeptical...), but there is no such thing as socially responsible, didactic comedy. If comedy which seems didactic is funny, like the Colbert Report or Parks and Recreation, we're not laughing at the educational aspect. We're laughing because the situations they describe are funny on their own. It's possible to do great comedy when comedy becomes tied to civic education, but it's much, much harder, and if comedians have an obligation to be that responsible, most will find doing that kind of comedy impossible, and many will rebel by finding ways to do material which is even more insulting.
Comedy is like any other societal trait that's value neutral. It exists neither to benefit nor hurt us, it just is, it isn't going away, and is therefore a reflects society much more than it creates society. So if you want less hurtful comedy, gentler comedy, more humane comedy, create a gentler, more humane society first.
Comedy didn't even used to mean things which make us laugh. The word is Greek, and in antiquity, comedy just meant a drama with a happy ending. 1800 years after Aristophanies (god this is getting pompous...), Dante would refer to his famous epic poem as 'The Divine Comedy.' Dante tried to be funny, but there isn't much in the world less humorous than Dante. Nearly any story with a happy ending makes us feel better, but one of the easiest ways to make people feel better is to make them laugh, so it's only natural that humor attaches itself to comedy.
The point of ancient comedy was not to make us laugh, but to make us feel life's continuity. To show that through all the setbacks, life goes on, the river still flows, the world blooms again, and the grain of wheat which dies brings forth new fruit (oh my fucking god Evan you brought St. John into this?....).
I don't think comedy has any social use that won't backfire - there may even be a direct line between the Daily Show and the Trump Presidency; but all through history, the best comedy does remind us that life keeps going, shit passes along with triumphs, and as long as we're still here, those two states are locked in an inseparably bound cycle.
That is the lesson of comedy merciful enough to uplift us after knocking us down: The Simpsons of course, The Muppets, Cheers, Roseanne, The Office and Parks and Rec, Freaks & Geeks and My So-Called Life, Taxi and M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family, Thirtysomething and The Golden Girls, Pixar, Louis CK it's true, and Richard Pryor, and Frank Zappa and Randy Newman (though it's kind of astounding how little humor there is in rock music...), and Stephen Sondheim, Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, Disney for better or worse..., Jean Renoir and Yasijiro Ozu, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Alan Ayckbourn and Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett, Cole Porter and Noel Coward, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Scholem Aleichem and Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Jaroslav Hasek, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anton Chekhov, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain and GK Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse, George Elliott and Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Nikolai Gogol, Wiliam Hogarth and Rene Magritte, not to mention Mozart operas, and Henry Fielding, and Don Quixote, and Shakespeare comedies, and Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales...
...and if this list seems incredibly weighted toward the serious, that's the point. It's when you don't take things seriously that people get hurt; and if it seems weighted toward white males, find other demographic equivalents.
Whether or not life becomes less humorous, life is still there, and a new era will create its own great reasons to get up in the morning. For the moment, I do believe that the Golden Age of Humor is ending, I do believe that cancel culture and political correctness exist, but they are all somewhere between problem #275-5000 of our lives. The passing of comedy's golden age is a small symptom of our era's seismic dangers, but they're not the dangers themselves.
The real danger is to be too enamored of any one conception of the world, and for the moment, the real danger comes more from the people who believe they should be able to make whatever jokes they like. I happen to agree with that sentiment, but I don't like the company I have on this side of the argument. There are so much more important fights these days, and you'd have to be an idiot not to see how far into the slime unregulated humor took hundreds of millions. For the rest of our lives, humor and comedy won't be as dominant a force in our lives, and to me that's mostly a shame, but it will still be there, even if it's something to be shunted to the side like schoolwork, while people look with suspicion passionate comedy fans.
There's plenty more to write about this, but I'm tired, I'm tired of being funny, I'm tired of writing essays that let me and everybody else forget I was ever funny, and now that there's a chance to be free from humor's bony grip, I sort of look forward to seeing how it goes.
And in the meantime, if I need to watch something truly wrong, there's always Patrice O'Neal.
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