is comedy inherently conservative?

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).

Morbs just made one of the points I was about to mention!

I think at a certain level the news-parody shows like The Daily Show and Colbert are less subversive than confirmations of where the mainstream actually is. It's pretty uncommon that the deconstruction of the news actually pulls something out far enough to make the opposing political point; it's only illuminating how ridiculous exaggerations of viewpoints that differ from the norms really sound.

My UK humor knowledge is kind of shallow but some of the past Chris Morris or Charlie Brooker projects are ones that I would say were more acerbic but also aimed at bringing things back to a healthy norm.

Colbert comes much closer to Bruce than Stewart ever does, at least on TV, since playing his Fox-y character is not unrelated to LB "relaxing his colored friend" at a party by saying, "Let's face it, you wouldn't want some Jew doin' it to your sister" in 1958...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oWk4ZiuSHE

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

I'm less bothered by the "conservatism" of the picks as much as the fact that the last three have been relatively young. Mort Sahl's not going to be around forever.

They want to make their picks "relevant," ie translate into a TV special. And Sahl would rant against Obama, we can't have that.

can't believe I missed the part where contenderizer explains lolcats

the best thing about the internet is that i'm still doing it and will be forever, you only have to scroll back a little...

http://www.suck.com/daily/97/11/07/index.html

friend who is starting a feminist comedy troupe yelled at me for this kind of thinking btw so i retract it

huh, what was her line?

the psychological/physical rupture of a joke or gag, the very impulse to laugh, can be seen a model of the incompleteness or rupture of any system. not utopian but a spasm of happiness in a hard world etc maybe?

(not speaking for this person, just thinking about this again)

ergh i'm trying to think of a word that's on the tip of my tongue... social/lit theory about 'irruption' or a holiday, but it can't last. dammit my brain is fried right now. jubilee? that's not it

she was basically like, that is just the argument *entrenched comedy interests* make to excuse their sexist/racist/conservative jokes, and there's a way to be funny that could be loosely characterized as progressive. and then she used a joke a female comedian told in her presence about relief that a random street harasser called her fat and didn't rape her as evidence. (obvs not funny the way i've related it, but presumably funny in the actual delivery.) i don't know; i didn't argue further about whether that kind of joke still has a reactionary/conservative/whatever the fuck i think i'm talking about vibe, because i felt like a jerk doing it when she was so excited about the feminist potential of comedy. also i feel like i can't possibly be right; it's just too sweeping of a thing to think.

xxp actually i bet she would agree with that!

carnivalesque?

jouissance?

like in barthes?

CARNIVALESQUE!

yeah. shit.

bakhtin is all right as fucking assholes i had to read in graduate school go

oh i know all this stuff second- or thirdhand at best

it is a rule of thumb of mine not to trust people or institutions that don't get a joke (that doesn't make the opposite rule true tho)

we need to draw a line between "doesn't get a joke" and, "'can't take a joke?'"