is comedy inherently conservative?

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.

I have those half-formed thoughts all the time, max. Trying to figure out how comedy can be humanistic and still, y'know, actually funny. It's a lot of why this thread is so up my alley.

And Morbs, I absolutely agree that Cosby could be acidic. It's just that he also knew how not to be, and he did it brilliantly.

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.

I could argue that compassion requires curiosity: the act of noticing behavior. The oafish comedy I cited in the black-guy-and-chicken-wing example doesn't rely on observation at all, just outdated stereotypes.

And Morbs, I absolutely agree that Cosby could be acidic. It's just that he also knew how not to be, and he did it brilliantly.

"The United States of America is a wonderful place but there's nowhere you can get rid of your children."

i think alfred is otm here and is clarifying something i was trying to say in mybhalf-in-the-bag stupor last night: comedy is often funniest to me when it's picking on nuances of a particular personality (esp. the cimedian's) that can also point toward universals. which is a lot harder to do, well or otherwise, than women be shoppin.

I could argue that compassion requires curiosity: the act of noticing behavior.

Uncritical compassion isn't very progressive imo

Compassion is also a directed act, and liberalism only requires it to be directed in one direction. And rightly so, I would say, if there was only one direction.

Uncritical compassion isn't very progressive imo

Reagan agreed!

i'm no bill hicks stan (or even much of a fan at this point) but i think the reason he keeps popping into my mind is because he always kinda tried to a.) poke holes in the established power structures and b.) poke fun at his own weaknesses as he stood up there ranting but often c.) belly-flopped into total bullying when the targets of all that extreme invective seemed so out of proportion. (gun to a knife fight, etc etc.) like the rush limbaugh rants were sometimes funny and generally right-on as an idea. but the stuff where he laments that his video store bill is nothing but porn and sonic the hedgehog games is a lot funnier because there's a specificity (lampooning his own sad lonely living in motel rooms lifestyle) that has an uncomfortable resonance for anyone else who also thinks their lives haven't exactly panned out as planned. and it's a damn sight funnier than misogynistic ranting at scream-level for minutes on end about how 14 year old girls are idiots because they prefer debbie gibson to hendrix. the joke still gets a laugh from the audience, even if only because of how o.t.t. the performance is, which points toward goole's pre-moral thing up there as being maybe otm for me, but there's a kind of hollowness that follows, which i kinda feel after all reactionary/conservative/bullying/mean-with-no-sense-of-proportion comedy, especially from smart people who should know better (comedy is rife with the smartest dude at the frat house misanthropy of people who think eviscerating themselves means they then get a free pass eviscerating everyone else), which is pretty much akin to the feeling i get when any privileged person, in any context, lords it over someone with no ability to answer back.

(no contendo)

goole otm imo.

a joke is either well written, or badly written- that is all, (to paraphrase). have never understood the preference for art, music, comedy (or any creative endeavour, really) agree with their political/moral worldview before deciding whether or not they like it. seems to be a strange and unnecessary filter through which to view something that stands first as an executed work of skill/ability/deftness (or not).

A comedian doesn't need to convince me they're right to make me laugh.

yeah, that seems otm, and also what goole said about comedy being pre-moral. i've been re-watching a lot of louis ck stand-up specials and it's funny how they oscillate between being specific about lampooning his own lifestyle in the way you describe, strongo, which are my favorite moments because they feel sort of generous and he's inviting everyone in to relate to his food shame or whatever, and moments that seem kind of reactionary to me, where he's complaining about how dumb fat, white americans are.

xp

jokes are conservative by nature fairly often, comedy is built to appeal to shared knowledge, not forge new ground.

doesn't mean it's always the case but eg stand-up comedy is a conservative medium, half of it is built around making a room full of people feel compelled to laugh, it's never going to be anything else.

i think comedy can be compassionate, i think the comedy that best gets at things that are true definitely is. as Alfred said, "I could argue that compassion requires curiosity: the act of noticing behavior" -- there's a line that runs through observation, curiosity, understanding, to compassion. how could you have any feel for the "human geography" around you, if you didn't care about it, at least a little.

but on the other hand, comedy has no problem being parasitic, and it thrives on pre-existing conflicts. basically if anybody cares about something, then someone else is gonna make fun of it.

and it's interesting because i think for louis the impulse behind those reactionary moments is to sort of illustrate to white Americans how well-off they are in the grand scheme of things, but in a weird way it's also reifying, like the lives of non-white Americans and non-Americans seem fixed in a kind of eternal misery by comparison. (he has a joke in Hilarious about the Pakistani woman at the customer service call center not caring about his problems because she can't get clean water and two of her kids died that morning and louis, by contrast, is fat. the delivery is funny but something about that joke annoys me, like how many Pakistani women do you know, anyway?)

basically if anybody cares about something, then someone else is gonna make fun of it.

human condition

xpost

Yeah, most of the Pakistanis (and Iranians, come to think of it) I've known came from money I can barely even wrap my head around.

right, but i was trying to get at the line of anti-compassion that humor can run on. kinda like a 'memento mori' except it's more like 'haha god are you kidding'

i think we might be specifically looking at the types & forms of comedy that might be considered the most conservative in order to describe their conservatism as something that bothers us? i think this narrow discussion is useful, but i think we can contrast humor that relies & resolves into the status quo from other types of humor -- stuff that's maybe more adventurous, silly, zany, absurdist, imaginative, subversive, or transgressive. different mechanics, different types of laughter? (this has probably been touched on before but i haven't absorbed the whole thread yet.)

i don't think 'shaggy dog' jokes are conservative, but they are jokes nonetheless.

pls tell me that the head/wrap things wasn't....

well that's because some of the pakistanis that can afford to emigrate are crazy wealthy because it's a kleptocracy with, like, 5 really rich people who have stolen from the rest of the desperately poor. so yes, a woman in Pakistan is likely to be less well-off than Louis. it's just that comedy can be so flattening or something.

LocalGarda, I kinda disagree with a lot of your post inasmuch as it is an accurate description of most stand-up/comedy, but I also don't think insecure grasping for laughs or the avoidance of groundbreaking material is at all inherent in the form. They're just super common.

pls tell me that the head/wrap things wasn't....

It really, really wasn't.

That's a pretty instructive response wrt this discussion, though. Some people have their racism/xenophobia radar cranked so high that the mere mention of a different race or culture can make an innocuous comment seem loaded.

I'd like to point out that 'conservative' isn't necessarily always a bad thing and that comedy may be conservative but when it punctures pompousness, skewers piousness and points out the emperor's new clothes, it's not a bad thing at all.

compassion is The Only Value as far as i'm concerned and like alfred/others said is evident in comedy all the time; even when you're "lampooning" someone you have to have at least some kind of idea of what's going on with them or it's not that funny. to me. (it is not a necessary value for something to be defined as "comedy" but it's def necessary for quality imo.) strongo otm about bill hicks whom i can't really stand because though he is sometimes (often!) really funny/poignant/whatever it's just not worth having to sit there for like ten fucking minutes being yelled at about how new kids on the block suck. maybe it's a lenny bruce thing and audiences in 1991 were shocked into hysterics by the taboo suggestion that new kids on the block sucked. maybe not.

It's an antidote to 'enthusiasm' that keeps us from straying too far