is comedy inherently conservative?

also dying at dr. morbius taking offense at the idea of reactionary comedy

Oh no no no, horseshoe, my post about Girls wasn't meant to be at all accusatory. This discussion reminds me of those criticisms but it doesn't reflect those criticisms, if you get me. I was just pointing out an example that indicates what a tricky minefield it is to even go, like, post-racial in comedy (which I don't think is the intention behind the Girls casting, ftr).

lol sorry for being defensive; it's hard to come to terms with having started a thread

hahaha

I like this thread.

wow you really do almost never start threads (xpost)

also dying at dr. morbius taking offense at the idea of reactionary comedy

― jesus christ (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Monday, May 14, 2012 11:07 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that was delightful! (love you forever, dr. morbs!)

xp i like to piggyback on the insights of others

it probably IS counter to the revolution but fuck it because the alternative is stalinist sellf-crit sessions

― jesus christ (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Tuesday, May 15, 2012 4:06 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the alternative is necessary.

There's obviously been "radical" humor in one sense or another for like forever. Most notably, various elements of absurdism, surrealism (though clearly not all surrealism), dada, etc. Street theatre too. Satire has historically been part of the arsenal of all sorts of social movements, both left and right. The idea that every instance of this has been secretly "conservative" is pretty far-fetched. I can think of some very funny radical poetry as well (and some very funny conservative poetry, for that matter...)

lol horseshoe i've started even less threads than you have i bet. and unlike mine this one is actually interesting

horseshoe you make me laff but strike me as essentially right-on. perhaps you are your own one-woman corrective.

I really like this thread, too, but I think I'm likely to mostly hang back and watch people hash this out. It's in the realm of stuff I think about a lot, but my thoughts are probably more conducive to a long essay than message board posts.

while conservative humor (ideological + political) can be funny, i'd like to see a funny thing written/said/created by the 'American right wing' in the last 4 years

this is kinda the perfect place to discuss something like 'is comedy inherently conservative?' imho. an essay would just get dreary and tedious

I mean "inherently conservative": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo ?

You probably have seen right-wing comedy, Mordy, that your brain was unable to process as comedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Firesign_Theatre ?

I'm picking really obvious examples, but that's sort of the point...

i guess 30 rock

left-wing humor is some of the MOST reactionary!

In re: writing an essay, I just mean in terms of getting my thoughts in order, not in terms of generating anything publishable or that other people would actually want to read.

strongo i have no idea what you mean by reactionary.

positioning itself in reaction to something else

i'm not going for some inscrutable high-minded definition here

i mean i don't want to say that harpo marx running around disrupting a cruise ship is in any way left-wing or "radical" but i have a hard time branding it as meaningfully "conservative" (which i do know what that means) or "reactionary" (which apparently is being used in a way i fail to understand entirely except maybe "at the expense of somebody" which doesn't mean comedy is conservative, but does mean that comedy is often *mean*)

i mean everything is "in reaction to something else"

unless what you mean is that comedy is somehow not as creative a force as other sorts of artistic or cultural production, or is more directly or obviously parasitic, which i also think isn't true.

http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/steve%20martin%20comedy%20not%20pretty%20better.jpg

just saying that (most performative) (and most written) comedy generally is not concerned with nuance, self-skepticism beyond the most surface sort, empathy with the other (whether that other is heathen liberals or consumerist god-squadders or non-white people or whatever)

note that i dont generally see this as a failing on the form's part

also i just double checked to make sure i wasn't nuts and "in reaction to something else" is pretty much not the definition of "reactionary" anywhere.

but does mean that comedy is often *mean*

It very often exists at one end or the other of the "mean/toothless" continuum, with lots of grey (like, at least 40 of them) generally ignored.

yeah, you're probably right. obvs my question is facile, but i feel like some of the ways people have taken it up itt are interesting.

xxxp to sterling

I think comedians would be the first to admit (or brag) that comedy is a pretty lacerating form of expression. It almost by necessity plays on the scapegoat dynamic, even if the scapegoat is the comedian him/herself.

i feel like there are probably several actually specific enough to be useful questions being asked itt; one of them has to do with the potential gulf between the comic's intentions and how her comedy is received (the chapelle dilemma)

My joke got sonned in a Droid phone beef.

one of them is Abbott's angle, where there's been kind of a preservation of the status quo in humor, especially because jokes are told about a group of people who are not telling the jokes themselves.

xpost

strongo: i sort of agree with you that almost by definition the best comedy lacks a certain nuance (even if it has other sorts of nuance). but i don't agree that comedy isn't concerned with self-skepticism because that's an entire genre, among which woody allen films form a sub-genre all their own, or a sub-sub genre even. and if you don't have empathy with the other explicitly, there's certainly a great deal of fun to be had with lack thereof (sienfeld, larry david, etc) and more importantly i don't think that any of these traits are particularly conservative or anti-conservative or whatever.

but doesn't a lot of humor come from ppl telling jokes about themselves? xp

fine but that doesn't negate abbott's point, which was abuot the reification of what women are arising out of "women be shopping" type jokes.

most comedians aren't self-lacerating enough ime

nb: i've had about half a bottle of whiskey tonight so i'm cogitating behind a handicap here

strongo: as far as self-lacerating comedy goes you set a pretty high bar, so i get that..

i mean obvs i'm totally imprecise about what i mean by conservative itt. my most specific referent is the knots i see female comics and comics of color sometimes tie themselves in trying to make comedy out of the experience of being marginalized without 1)being dogmatic 2)falling prey to the long history of stereotype

i feel like there are probably several actually specific enough to be useful questions being asked itt; one of them has to do with the potential gulf between the comic's intentions and how her comedy is received (the chapelle dilemma)

― horseshoe, Monday, May 14, 2012 8:29 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of them is Abbott's angle, where there's been kind of a preservation of the status quo in humor, especially because jokes are told about a group of people who are not telling the jokes themselves.

― horseshoe, Monday, May 14, 2012 8:32 PM (1 minute ago)

I think the combination of these two things was what lead to the Chapelle dilemma. A large & ugly portion of the audience (eg the UC student who had a "ghetto party" where the invite referenced his "grape drink" bit) maybe didn't know how to consider his humor, which is powerful with him as a teller of jokes from within an outside group, as not upholding the status quo (their reactionary views on black culture). This is worded stupidly but maybe you see what I'm getting at.

i see this in a much more blunt way with twittersnark which ta-nehisi complained about the other day. like you make a satirical tweet in the voice of somebody totally nuts (usually following a link to their totally nuts statement that sort of makes it absolutely clear you disagree) and then that joke tweet gets retweeted and then two days later you get people asking how you could possibly support doing something terrible to palestinians or whatever.

the potential gulf between the comic's intentions and how her comedy is received

This is a central dilemma with art in general, that whole thing where you have no more control over your baby once you've sent it out into the world. The key difference wrt comedy is that the artist is (usually) aiming for a very specific type of reaction from the audience: the laff. Anything outside of that particular intention is usually viewed as peripheral by the audience/critical establishment unless you really telegraph the intelligence and wit of your own comedy. I don't think he public at large seeks out layered comedy or assume the presence layers in the comedy they consume. Chapelle is actually a really good example of the pitfalls a smart comedian faces in getting huge. As little control as you have over that baby in the wild under the best of circumstances, it can take on a life of its own wholly outside of your initial intentions once it becomes a cultural phenomenon.

xpost

which these days i guess is known as poe's law.

oh man i think about this all the time

a bunch of college freshmen in my entering class cracked up at the sight of the sikh character in the english patient, as far as i could tell, because the sight of an indian man onscreen was inherently funny to them.

this is sick!

and not in the snowboard way

i am so mad at those idiots, over a decade later

Ugh, I have to stop posting on a phone.

so i guess if you actually care how you're understood and what impact you have, then your hands are tied a bit. and hence some of the best comedy comes from people who don't care how they're received or what "message" they present.

like gallagher.