is comedy inherently conservative?

aw cmon if bringing up baby and seinfeld get an apolitical pass let's not consign wodehouse to conservatism just because his entirely constructed fantasy universe has butlers in it (although he's admittedly super mean to bingo's communist girlfriend, CHARLOTTE CORDAY ROWBOTHAM). i even think that in stuff like "bertie changes his mind" he's deliberately clear about jeeves' fascist tendencies. or maybe it's not deliberate. maybe he doesn't realize.

Yeah, I mean, lol Gallagher, but dude has been pretty outspokenly right wing for a long time.

yeah i was going to say, bringing up baby is reactionary imo. nb i hate that movie.

but so is philadelphia story and that one i love

teaching mark s a *LESSON* response four: LOUIS PRIMA

^op might have some relevance to discussion at hand

i mean there are probably literally a thousand pages of bourgeois-idyll-at-blandings to be dumped on me but i dunno. galahad threepwood is a disruptive force! excuse me while i comically try and reconcile my wodehouse stanning with my politics even tho they don't need to be reconciled

wait his name isn't threepwood is it. that's the name of the guy from monkey island.

'comedy' is impossible to pin down exactly, any definition has to contain all these opposites.

i never liked the line that satire is the weak making fun of the strong, but the opposite is bullying. bullshit, plenty of funny in jokes about the weak. comedy really doesn't care, the joke just has to work -- i guess that's 'conservative'. comedy is mercenary.

comedy doesn't last very long; referents change, styles change, the culture moves on. jokes wear out and you have to drum up new ones, even if certain underlying human themes about pain and sex and body embarrassment or w/e don't alter much. so there's a 'planned obsolescence' capital depreciation aspect to comedy. sort of 'market conservative' vs. the cultural conservatism of tragedy? idk, 'pity, fear and awe' might have a very long shelf life but jokes generally don't.

omg that's a much better rumination than i ever came up with

aristotle was what i was missing

i was thinking along the lines of orwell's remark that wodehouse's worst sin was making the british upper classes seem like much nicer ppl than they actually were. don't get me wrong i LOVE ol' pelham as much as the next guy (i actually only listed ppl i dig, except for bob hope).

'philadelphia story' has all that sexist dialogue about how 'selfish' kate hepburn's character is which annoys me, but i can't find any political message (or any kind of message) in 'bringing up baby' at all.

i just think philadelphia story and bringing up baby are both romantic comedies that are about shaming the woman until she's been knocked down enough to finally earn her man (you're right, philadelphia story is a lot more explicit about its ideology) and bringing up baby makes katharine hepburn look so pathetic it's unacceptable! that might be less about conservatism and more about my hepburn stannery

bringing up baby makes katharine hepburn look downright schizophrenic honestly (i have never finished bringing up baby, i should try it on acid or something)

One quick generalization I'd probably be willing to defend: anyone who can't stomach conservativism in comedy probably just doesn't like comedy, full stop. Except maybe, like, something like an anarchist tweak on "The Deficit Rag" with all actual humor sucked out of it. It might be that the existence of conservativism in comedy, however problematic and occasionally objectionable, is part of what creates the tension that makes it tick.

i only saw bringing up baby the one time. it was torture, apart from how pretty hepburn and grant were.

the classics prof i had in college had a pretty sly point about Lysistrata -- we read it now through the lens of feminism, but it's original intent wasn't satirical or anti-war at all. women refusing sex to stop a war! that's a good one, haha. it was meant to be as hilarious and unbelievable as a guy building a city in the clouds and becoming a god of the birds.

i forget what point i was trying to get to there

i guess that point of his wasn't especially 'sly' either

a friend's professor insisted on a similar thing about merchant of venice -- that it's supposed to be self-evidently hilarious that a jew would bleed when pricked etc -- but i'm really skeptical of that.

yeah me too!

morbz, i don't really feel like u and i have much to discuss re comedy

Fine, Mordy, bcz I wasn't remotely trying to do that.

left-wing humor is some of the MOST reactionary!

OK, strongo, I have no idea WTF you're talking about and neither do you.

If you're using "reactionary" in the political sense, comedy generally doesn't follow a party agenda, bcz "humans are ridiculous" is the thesis statement.

re the old-school MAD guys -- yeah, same as the old SNL guys, the Yippies, the Black Panthers -- sexist pigs all. Welcome to American manhood in the first 4/5 of the 20th century. (and beyond)

this thread arose out of conversation about the show 30 rock in the 'is this racist?' thread. i brought up the idea that comedy might be inherently conservative there, in response to this article. this is basically what i was getting at:

"perhaps this kind of conservatism, the kind that patrols the boundary between "normalcy" and "weirdness" (and which should not be confused with political conservatism, though the two can definitely overlap), is an essential component of all comedy.

in retrospect, i'd modify that to "an essential component of certain comic approaches." not all comedy is conservative in the sense that i meant. comedy doesn't always depend on drawing a line between ordinary behavior and weirdness, and it certainly doesn't always stand on the side of the ordinary, gawking at lurid buffoonery of weird grotesques. i would say that this is what 30 rock does though, at least to some degree, and in that, it's not out of step with much contemporary american comedy.

I feel like esp nowadays that a lot of progressive liberal lines of thought requires a willingness to be open-minded, to recognize and embrace difference, whereas comedy & laughter are essentially defensive, a retreat, rigidly demarcating the boundaries between self and other

― cinco de extra mayo (loves laboured breathing), Monday, May 14, 2012 8:51 PM (48 minutes ago)

yeah, that's exactly what i was getting at. a lot of comedy constructs a position of "rightness" and "us-ness" from which other aspects of the world are mocked. it's inclusive in that it asks you to join the group, to become one of the right-thinking usses who laughs at these things and sees the world in this way. but it's also exclusionary, in that there's usually a butt to the joke. i suppose the best comedy of this sort is that which attacks inward as often as it does outward, mocking itself at least as cruelly as the deficiencies of others. both seinfeld and 30 rock at least try to do this, which tempers the conservatism of their basic approach.

it occurs to me (and perhaps just because i got zinged good) that even if comedy isn't always reactionary at it's core, strongo's comedy certainly is.

i don't find humans ridiculous, i find them untenable.

We find them incomplete

i guess i could see an argument for '30 rock' as conservative similar to the one orwell made for wodehouse: it makes wealthy celebrities and right-wing TV executives look like lovable, essentially decent ppl.

Ha, do progressives think that wealthy celebrities and right-wing TV executives are child-eating monsters?

no, speaking for all liberals, we just feel that they should be stripped of their holdings and put in labor camps

I feel like Morbs posting here appropriately reminds me of the Marx Bros. who by sheer wit and likeability manage to calibrate the us/them polarity of comedy along class lines.* They're hardly the first to do this, but (here's where I start flubbing my main points) with the whole rags-to-riches/American Dream rhetoric p much in place by then, it does seem like its usually easier to represent 'the rich' in America as more complete versions of ourselves as opposed to un-fun, fat cat oppressors

*idk enough about Chaplin to be able to group him in with the Marxes. Seems to me that however that both could be considered as spectacularly successful instances of progressive comedy. But those were different times, etc.

Answer is no. As many, many folks have said(check the vid of Colbert being interviewed & doing a q&a in front of Harvard students a few years back), comedy is about power reversal. You punch upward to mock those in power for doing stupid shit, for example.

Attempts at comedy punching downward, like Limbaugh or Nelson Muntz, against the powerless ain't comedy; it's bullying.

if people laugh, it's funny

racist jokes, dumb woman jokes, jokes about the disabled, those are still jokes, they're still 'comedy'. what else is it?

How much of laughter at bullying humor is "I'm glad I'm not the target" relief?

depends on how funny the bully is

On Mother's Day a friend of my cousin's, chuckling to himself the whole time, passed around an image on his cellphone: a little girl holding a piece of fried chicken while a black man chased after her. "That's pretty fucking stupid," I said and walked away. I'd like to say other people walked away but all he got were polite rictus grins.

Attempts at comedy punching downward, like Limbaugh or Nelson Muntz, against the powerless ain't comedy; it's bullying is really featherweight, shooting fish in a barrel comedy.

Fixed. But, yes, it's also bullying.

if we're trying to theorize the comic in toto then we can't section off the stuff that assholes like

Yeah, sadly enough, bully comedy makes up a huge swath of the most popular comedy. Which is, I'm sure, partially informs and answers the question asked by this thread.

this is an interesting thread!

i think i'm like horseshoe about this. comedy gives me a certain kind of anxiety -- there's something that feels scarily uncontrollable about it. i guess this is about laughter being a kind of instinctive or gut response? i don't know that i can quite articulate what this has to do with comedy's possible conservatism but it feels like its related.

"rigidly demarcating the boundaries between self and other"

This is never found among "progressive liberal" humans? Hilarious.

I rewatched Cosby standup a couple months ago: hysterical shit. I'd say his humor relies on stereotypes the audience holds about mothers in law, dentists, children, etc.

I think we've largely agreed that we're using 'conservative' in a generally apolitical sense here, Morbs.

Cosby is a master of being hilarious while avoiding cruelty. So many comedians seem to idolize him while not really taking his example to heart.

i think i'm like horseshoe about this. comedy gives me a certain kind of anxiety -- there's something that feels scarily uncontrollable about it. i guess this is about laughter being a kind of instinctive or gut response? i don't know that i can quite articulate what this has to do with comedy's possible conservatism but it feels like its related.

― max, Tuesday, May 15, 2012 10:37 AM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes! last night when i kept trying to figure out how to say this sensibly it occurred to me that maybe i was just uncomfortable with the impulse to laugh itself and what that's about, anyway. i keep circling around this thing; i don't know. what goole has said itt about how comedy is insufficiently theorized helps me feel better about that, though.

a lot of the "right-on" comics of the past and near past also had targets where it degenerated into bullying but they were still telling jokes, getting laffs from an audience also laughing at the jokes aimed at more deserving targets.

i also dont think it's exactly counter to horseshoe's thesis that most of them were white men and all of them were men, period.

When is a wealth-worshipping, reactionary old crone named Joan Rivers going to enter this discussion, I wonder.

I only saw Cosby do his standup at Radio City Music Hall circa '84/85, and by then he was quite cruel, esp about children ("brain-damaged idiots"). It was brilliant.

(he was also very acidic whenever he guest hosted the Tonight Show in that era)

add to the moment i was watching english patient to the moment i saw gone with the wind in a lavish showing at the providence performing arts center (in the year 2000), and the mostly white audience cracked up like crazy every time hattie mcdaniel appeared onscreen. maybe that was more laughing from discomfort, but it's enough to make you suspicious of the whole enterprise of making people laugh.

i guess this is about laughter being a kind of instinctive or gut response?

yeah, there's a connection between the immediate and the empirical here. a good laugh is something that (as an audience) you don't will on your own, but is brought out of you. and so comedy doesn't really have an "is it good or bad" question to answer, but "does it work". not that audiences don't enjoy (being made to emit) cheap and easy laughs...

think of pratfall humor, or "i couldn't help but laugh", or the exchange: "that's not funny" "then why am i laughing?" things can be funny even if we don't want them to be, which suggests that something is happening that is idk, pre-moral

i had some kind of half-formed thought last night about how comedy is compassionless, and compassion is the foundational value of liberalism, or something. i dont know if i buy that either.

you guys are the best; the next time i bother people irl with my worries about this i'm going to have so many better things to say.