is comedy inherently conservative?

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.

Is russell simmons def comedy jam inherently conservative

yeah it's from wikipedia, but seems to make some sense...

Benign Violation Theory

The benign violation theory (BVT) is developed by researchers A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren.[35] The BVT integrates seemingly disparate theories of humor to predict that humor occurs when three conditions are satisfied: 1) something threatens one’s sense of how the world “ought to be,” 2) the threatening situation seems benign, and 3) a person sees both interpretations at the same time.

From an evolutionary perspective, humorous violations likely originated as apparent physical threats, like those present in play fighting and tickling. As humans evolved, the situations that elicit humor likely expanded from physical threats to other violations, including violations of personal dignity (e.g., slapstick, teasing), linguistic norms (e.g., puns, malapropisms), social norms (e.g., strange behaviors, risqué jokes), and even moral norms (e.g., disrespectful behaviors). The BVT suggests that anything that threatens one’s sense of how the world “ought to be” will be humorous, so long as the threatening situation also seems benign.

There is also more than one way a violation can seem benign. McGraw and Warren tested three contexts in the domain of moral violations. A violation can seem benign if one norm suggests something is wrong but another salient norm suggests it is acceptable. A violation can also seem benign when one is psychologically distant from the violation or is only weakly committed to the violated norm.

For example, McGraw and Warren find that most consumers were disgusted when they read about a church raffling off a Hummer SUV to recruit new members. However, many consumers were simultaneously amused. Consistent with the BVT, people who attended church were less likely to be amused than people who did not. Churchgoers are more committed to the belief that churches are sacred and, consequently, were less likely to consider the church’s behavior benign.

also I want to quip after reading the conservapedia thread that conservatism is inherently comedic ...

Steven Wright is not cruel.

Conservatism is ideal fuel for a type of comedy I really appreciate (i.e. laughing at the fucked up things in the world in order to stave off abject despair).

want to clarify something here. i still think humor is rarely compassionate (by "humor" i mean jokes, not the larger narratives in which they might occur). this dearth of compassion needn't be cruel though. while wordplay and absurd silliness can be funny without being cruel, they're not typically compassionate.

i'm not saying that truly compassionate jokes categorically can't exist, just that they're rather rare. to the extent that they seem to exist, it usually isn't really the compassion itself that's funny, but rather some behavior or turn of phrase that's used in the communication.

i suppose that there is a strain of compassionate humor that results from the combination of cuteness and oddity. it's rarely laugh out loud funny, imo, in that it depends too much on real sympathy to permit laughter. the response is more an appreciative "awwww".

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

You could probably make a case for the Rosanne show and Strangers With Candy.

Adventure Time!

i think there is something at the psychological root of a lot of comedy that might lend itself to reinforcing the status quo

Dilbert to thread.

This thread is doing a lot to firm up my already semi-solid belief that I need to work on humorous projects aimed at kids. A lot of what I think about wrt comedy relates to its often needless cruelty or the extent that it establishes unnecessary oppositions. And I don't think there's a lot of room for transformative, humanistic comedy for jaded adults.

think there is some confusion here between compassion and being nice

think there is some confusion here between compassion and being nice

I'm interested to hear more about this confusion you speak of.

well, the presence of compassion in the overall tone isn't at all what i'm talking about. i'm talking more about the direct expression of compassion as a joke. directly expressions of cruelty can be jokes, with little else added. a pratfall, a pie in the face, an embarrassing blunder, an unfortunately nude person, etc. this isn't really true of direct expressions of compassion, which are hard to distinguish from "being nice": a hug, a pat on the head, medical aid, etc.

is it the act of cruelty that's funny or the contect in which it happens?

well i think it's possible to feel compassion for someone -- to recognize their humanity and project yourself into them and feel their fears -- and then make harsh jokes about them. the same way you can make harsh jokes about yourself. in fact it's necessary if the jokes are gonna be more than like "lol you talk funny". i haven't watched parks and rec specifically but:

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.

how could you make jokes about the characters' image of themselves if you didn't understand those images and their frailty at a level only attainable via compassion? and how could you separate the jokes themselves from the compassion that enables those jokes to exist? making fun of people in this way is not the same as cruelty, which requires the reduction of another creature to an object to be toyed with, with no interest in or sympathy for how that person feels. people often describe comedies that rely on bad shit continually happening to someone, or on someone's foibles being revealed and exploited, as "cruel", but the feeling of laughing at these is not the same as the feeling of laughing at, like, the way a dog with a broken leg walks. i think this is why nabokov was always annoyed at people calling his stuff cruel.

a pie in the face is i guess cruelty but i mean most of why people laugh at pies in the face (if they indeed do) is surprise.

yeah, i think you're using a much more extreme definition of comic "cruelty" than i am. a pie in the face is funny because it's unexpected, sure, but it wouldn't be anywhere near so comical if it was an unexpected hug, or an unxepected gift of flowers. it's the violence that makes the surprise funny. we're shocked, but we immediately realize that there's no real threat or harm, so we laugh to relieve tension.

and i agree that a lot of character based comedy depends on our compassion towards the characters involved, but on a certain level, that framing compassion is merely the device that allows us to accept and understand the small cruelties that provide the laughs. i don't think that cruelty requires complete othering and objectification. even if we're only fondly cruel to our loved ones, there's still a little barb in there.

I'm interested to hear more about this confusion you speak of.

tbh i thought this thread was much more interesting before half the participants sounded like this guy:

http://theinfosphere.org/images/d/dc/Billionare_bot.jpg

that is: making fun of people is is always cruel, but it's not always so cruel as to be hurtful or otherwise objectionable. calibrating the degree of cruelty one can get away with while still earning audience sympathy is the key to a lot of comedy.

guess i shd read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor

surprise seems like a key element, or the unexpected or unplanned.

a joke in a pure form is about setting an expectation or creating a structure (setup) and then not meeting that expectation or wrecking it in some way (the punchline)

tbh i thought this thread was much more interesting before half the participants sounded like this guy:

^ the comedy of cruelty

don't puss out, which half?

xps well sure, i can be less categorical about "cruelty", and you're right about the pies. but main point is still that without compassion you just can't be that funny about people because you can't get inside them, and the compassion you use to get inside them is not a totally separate thing from the jokes or just there to leaven the cruelty. i mean it can't "just" be a device that allows us to understand the jokes because if we didn't understand the jokes there wouldn't be any jokes.

ALTHOUGH THE QUESTION IS what does it mean when an intelligent psychopath to whom people's motives and fears are unusually transparent but who is incapable of actually empathizing with them makes jokes about them? how deep can the jokes go? are they doomed to a kind of glibness? frustratingly none of the psychopaths i undoubtedly know will own up to me about it so i can't investigate this personally.

i'm talking more about the direct expression of compassion as a joke. directly expressions of cruelty can be jokes, with little else added. a pratfall, a pie in the face, an embarrassing blunder, an unfortunately nude person, etc. this isn't really true of direct expressions of compassion, which are hard to distinguish from "being nice": a hug, a pat on the head, medical aid, etc.

(x-post)
Is that even possible without some sort of implied guilt, condescension, or distancing though? I'm thinking of Laura and Sarah's relationship on the Sarah Silverman Program - there's compassion (albeit one-sided), but it originates out of this horrible co-dependency.

I should clarify that I have differing and occasionally clashing concerns wrt this stuff. On the one hand, I enjoy a broad range of comedy, including some stuff that's pretty wantonly cruel. But that's within, like, the privacy of my own home, where I know what my values are and am secure that transgressive-to-offensive comedy isn't going to turn me into a slavering psychopath. On the other hand, I think a lot about the effect that comedy has on other people (as hashed out to an extent in that "Tyranny of humor" thread) and I have some concern about the extent to which humor coarsens or desensitizes people or encourages cruelty but not quite "won't somebody please think of the children?!"-level concern. Where that concern becomes most acute is when I think about any work that have done or will do in the public sphere and the extent to which I don't personally wish to contribute to a tendency towards humor-induced coarsening. When I think about issues like this, and consider questions like "is comedy inherently conservative?", it leads me to realize that the issue is less that comedy is inherently any one thing than it is that comedy is a huge ocean liner traveling full steam ahead in a particular direction and that it's going to be difficult to get most people on board with going in any other direction. Which, personally, is not a fight that I'm sure I'd wanna put much energy into with people whose senses of humor are probably already primed for a certain approach to comedy.

Is that even possible without some sort of implied guilt, condescension, or distancing though? I'm thinking of Laura and Sarah's relationship on the Sarah Silverman Program - there's compassion (albeit one-sided), but it originates out of this horrible co-dependency.

well exactly. comedy depends on shared point-of-view for one thing. we have to be "with" the comic voice, on its side. if we hate the comic voice, we won't think they stuff it says is funny. the jokes will just make us hate the implied joke-teller all the more.

this is even true of characters who we're supposed to hate, because the actual comic voice in play isn't precisely theirs. the comic voice is the sensibility that has constructed the hateable character as someone for us to laugh at. andrew dice clay is a great example of this. he was initially funny, in an odd way, because he seemed like a perfect cartoon of loathsomeness and stupidity. that novelty wore off quickly, however, and much of the humor drained away when it started to seem that there wasn't any difference between the comic sensibilities of "the diceman" and his creator, andrew clay silverstein. at that point, audience sympathy evaporated.

compassion is important in comedy because of the need to maintain audience sympathy even while the comic voice is engaged in potentially cruel mockery.

http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/i-can-has-cheezburger.jpg

arguably the most widespread form of humor on the internet.

i guess it's cruel because the cat can't really have the cheezburger? haha, stupid cat. cheezburgers are for people.