is comedy inherently conservative?

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

i don't like bill hicks either

Michael, I think there's been at least some general agreement itt that 'conservative' is kinda value-neutral in this context (i.e. not inherently despicable).

I don't particularly care for Hicks or that style of confrontational, "tellin' the truth, maaaan" style of comedy more generally. It has its place, I guess, but it just really isn't my thing.

horseshoe, louis ck is someone i often think about irt to these issues as well

re "conservative" yeah it is presumably not being used here in its modern american sense where it is code for "revolutionary psychopathy".

I think there's definitely a strain of contemporary comedy, maybe the dominant strain of comedy, that's extremely coarse, and in that sense is not really very "compassionate." This sort of relates to some of what was said in that Tyranny of Humor thread -- a kind of vaguely oppressive non-seriousness and mockery of everything that's a bit numbing and doesn't really lend itself to compassion because you can't be compassionate to an object of mockery.

I don't know if that makes it "conservative" except inasmuch as it indirectly promotes the status quo and complacency

the dominant strain of American life is extremely coarse

it's hard for me to think of any popular comedy that's terribly compassionate in its humor. the jokes may occur within a broader narrative that displays compassion, but the jokes themselves, the funny bits, are never the product of compassion. agree that comedy, the funny in comedy, is fundamentally heartless, even when it's simple pratfalls. we laugh because we do not empathize. we may understand the pain or shame that's driving the joke, but we're only able to laugh because we're not actually feeling it.

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.

yeah, this is the conservatism i was thinking of when i brought this up. yelling to a crowded room that some hated thing is actually worth hating, developing conformist collective identity through ostracism of the different. this remains conservative in a certain sense even when it's "punching up", in that it's all about oppositions and exclusions, defining and defending a single correct way to think and be.

maybe "conservative" is the wrong word here, though. maybe centrist is a better way to think about it. comedy establishes a center point of correctness and/or normalcy from which it punches out at extremity, however that's defined. even when the comedian is his own punchline, that's what's going on. inspector clouseau's pratfalls and idiocy are funny because peter sellars has created such a perfect portrait of comically unacceptable behavior.

i don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with this, but it does make me stop and think about how the center point of right and normal thinking is defined in comedy.

Does it make you more fond of wacky comedy?

it's hard for me to think of any popular comedy that's terribly compassionate in its humor.

parks and rec?

dunno if you'd call it popular.

The humor in a Sturges comedy isn't cruel. Shakespeare either.

Shakespeare can be very cruel!

only on those who deserve to be the butt of a joke (e.g. Malvolio)

I think there's definitely a strain of contemporary comedy, maybe the dominant strain of comedy, that's extremely coarse, and in that sense is not really very "compassionate." This sort of relates to some of what was said in that Tyranny of Humor thread -- a kind of vaguely oppressive non-seriousness and mockery of everything that's a bit numbing and doesn't really lend itself to compassion because you can't be compassionate to an object of mockery.

― this guy's a gangsta? his real name's mittens. (Hurting 2), Tuesday, May 15, 2012 12:27 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh wait sorry, that's ILX, not comedy.

that's a good question. i love absurd, unpredictable comedy, the sort that changes directions and levels of reference constantly, borderline nonsense. like zucker-abrahams-zucker stuff, the better adult swim shows, repo man, etc. maybe i like it because that sort of comedy because the chaotic absurdity makes it hard to say where it's coming from, exactly, or what the boundaries are. and maybe i just did too many drugs when i was young, i dunno.

i also like pratfalls (the pink panther), wordplay (rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead), "conservative" comedy of misbehavior (seinfeld), observational humor (70s & 80s woody allen), recent/contemporary stuff like arrested development and 30 rock. not sure to what extent my ideas about comedy affect my taste in humor, if at all.

it's hard for me to think of any popular comedy that's terribly compassionate in its humor.

parks and rec?

again, the show has compassion towards its characters, overall but the comedy - the jokes themselves - aren't compassionate. they're barbs puncturing the characters image of themselves, jabs at one another.

i think we're just laughing at different jokes.

The humor in a Sturges comedy isn't cruel. Shakespeare either.

that's a very good point. light silliness and wordplay are forms of comedy that can exist absent cruelty. now that you mention it, i'm sure there are others. shakespeare does also traffic in the comedy of buffoonishness, error and cruelty though.

I think you're only seeing part of the picture, contenderizer. That strain is definitely prevalent, and I agree that it exists to a degree even in stuff like P&R, but humor that's about tearing others down is just one facet in the Jewel of Guffaws.

xposts, obvs

Is there any identity w/o exclusion and if not, is it not at some level cruel or the beigining of cruelty?

Mitch Hedberg is not cruel.

But tbf that's largely because he's dead.

there is this tiny horse and some people think it is the best thing ever and one person doesn't understand why everyone else loves this tiny horse.

i don't think this is a barb puncturing a character, but then what do i know.