is comedy inherently conservative?

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.

or maybe it's compassionate because we really wish the cat could have the cheezburger.

comedy man, it makes you think.

it's ok tho, because that cat probably became an asshole over people making fun of him for looking retarded, so fuck him anyway

lolcats work in two ways:

1) they're cute. people like cute things.
2) they're dumb. it's funny to laugh at the dumb things people (uh, cats) say.

seems like one of the best end-runs around the cruelty of humor that anyone's come up with. shift the laughable stupidity onto animals that we don't expect to be smart, whose dumbness we find endearing. that way we can just enjoy the risible foolishness without putting anybody down.

parks and rec works on basically the same principal, but instead of cats it's hoosiers

THAT'S HOW CATS TALK

― nabisco, Monday, December 10, 2007 5:08 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ilx: explaining lolcats since 1999.

cats who lol. cats who make YOU lol. lolcats.

Is Bill Hicks the transitional figure between L Bruce's transgressive/progressive vanguard and the stereotype-ridden, anti-PC shock humor employed by Howard Stern, Seth Macfarlane, and Ric Delgado?

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)

yeah if comedy works by subverting our expectations, and those expectations come from assumptions we have about the target of the joke, then those assumptions would tend to be stereotypes in most cases, right? and any joke that targets a broad category of person (or targets a specific person who can be shoehorned into a category) would almost by necessity be playing with stereotypes. so is it possible to skewer a stereotype without in some way also reinforcing it?

the chicken and guys walking into bars lobbies have so much work to do

you know what's conservative, that recent run of Mark Twain Prize winners. God Almighty.

Is Bill Hicks the transitional figure between L Bruce's transgressive/progressive vanguard and the stereotype-ridden, anti-PC shock humor employed by Howard Stern, Seth Macfarlane, and Ric Delgado?

Married With Children imo

the cheezburger represents God, Who does not exist. No one can have cheezburger, there isn't one. The cat is not yet smart enough to realize this. Lol @ you you dumb cat there's no God, pwn3d

incidentally have you heard the new Eyehazgod album

haaaa

Is Bill Hicks the transitional figure between L Bruce's transgressive/progressive vanguard and the stereotype-ridden, anti-PC shock humor employed by Howard Stern, Seth Macfarlane, and Ric Delgado?

i don't think hicks has been all that influential on mainstream humor in the u.s. -- he was barely ever on TV and was virtually unknown here till he died. he got a posthumous cult following but i see him as more a one-off guy than any kind of transitional figure. his style of humor is also completely different from those guys imo -- i can't see any hicks influence in macfarlane, for sure.

arguably hicks was one of the major touchstones for "alternative comedy" (lol remember when that was a thing) which after a brief detour thru the truth about cats and dogs gave us endless ben stiller flicks gave us "meet the parents" gave us i dunno. but rewind and "alternative comedy" also birthed a whole generation of sketch shows birthed a school of rapid-fire shockimprov and dead end reference and repetition for the sake of it arguably playing a role in the humor of family guy. i mean from the right angle, you really can see it as the slow stepbrother of wonder showzen or whatever.

I remember when that was a thing, it was the 80s in the UK - I suspect that from a US perspective alternative comedy probably seemed like hearing a musical genre but not listening to the bands the artists were listening to.

i have been attempting to keep up w/this v interesting thread since horseshoe started it but i keep being busy and not having time and falling behind. soz if these points have been done already, i skimmed a couple of times

- i broadly agree w/horseshoe's argument. one of the most negative things about comedy (nb: i think everything about comedy is negative and abhorrent) is the way it tries to bully you towards consensus, to assume consensus into existence, and a lot of the time it's not even via what the joke is "about" but the language and the details used in telling it, and that shit is insidious

- the laughing upwards vs laughing downwards binary is dumb. very often comedy thinks it's laughing upwards but actually is so tone-deaf and unaware of its own privilege/power that it can't see how it's also bullying. misogynist jokes at the expense of women like louise mensch or paris hilton or, for that matter, every woman in the public eye ever, are an obvious example

- "laughing at oneself" comedy trades on self-loathing but still requires that assumption of consensus; fundamentally it seeks to drag its audience down to the base level of its creator, and often the implication is that anyone who refuses to degrade themselves in that way is pompous or up themselves or humourless. it really is the very worst human activity imo.

- <3 banaka

don't you think that pretty much all art is trying to 'force' you to feel something, in very much the same way? do you never feel as if music, film, literature is trying to manipulate you emotionally as part of the experience? why judge all of comedy so negatively based on phenomena that are hardly unique to it?

oh good, we finally got some genuinely humorless people itt to talk about comedy

'finally'

haha oh lex! i don't know if my initial post rises to the level of an argument. i love that you hate comedy, though.

I find it weird when ppl see heirs of Lenny Bruce in people who never address politics, or if they do they're reactionary or bigots (Sam Kinison, Stern in the '80s).