is comedy inherently conservative?

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.

i think about the 'name of the rose' thing where we don't have the part of aristotle on comedy. to my knowledge nobody has tried to come up with an all-encompassing theory of it, until pretty recently? idk correct if wrong here

i think there's plenty about comedy that is 'conservative' or things that comedy can act on that align with contemporary right-wing sentiment, but i like the post up there that comedy isn't 'essentially' anything, that's part of why a thing is comic.

this question is tough to answer given the slipperiness of the word 'conservative,' but assuming we just take it to mean 'more or less in favor of preserving the status quo' you could split up the ranks this way:

against status quo: jonathan swift, mark twain, chaplin, w.c. fields, marx bros, lenny bruce, harvey kurtzman (tho it could be argued that for working for a basically pro-establishment, sexist institution like playboy kurtzman became effectively pro-status quo after his e.c. days), r. crumb, 'the honeymooners,' 'dr strangelove'

for status quo: evelyn waugh, p.g. wodehouse, h.l. mencken (arguably -- his political views basically translated into 'leave everything the fuck alone'), bob hope, post-1980 SNL, 'the simpsons,' 'south park'

neither for nor against: 'bringing up baby,' thurber, charles schulz, 'seinfeld'

I feel like esp nowadays that a lot of progressive liberal lines of thought requires a willingness to be open-minded, to recognize and embrace difference, whereas comedy & laughter are essentially defensive, a retreat, rigidly demarcating the boundaries between self and other

I kind of rushed to the end so sorry if I'm being redundant

actually, w/r/t gallagher, http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/gallagher-is-a-paranoid-right-wing-watermelon-smashing-maniac/Content?oid=4357855

lol strongo

aw cmon if bringing up baby and seinfeld get an apolitical pass let's not consign wodehouse to conservatism just because his entirely constructed fantasy universe has butlers in it (although he's admittedly super mean to bingo's communist girlfriend, CHARLOTTE CORDAY ROWBOTHAM). i even think that in stuff like "bertie changes his mind" he's deliberately clear about jeeves' fascist tendencies. or maybe it's not deliberate. maybe he doesn't realize.

Yeah, I mean, lol Gallagher, but dude has been pretty outspokenly right wing for a long time.

yeah i was going to say, bringing up baby is reactionary imo. nb i hate that movie.

but so is philadelphia story and that one i love

teaching mark s a *LESSON* response four: LOUIS PRIMA

^op might have some relevance to discussion at hand

i mean there are probably literally a thousand pages of bourgeois-idyll-at-blandings to be dumped on me but i dunno. galahad threepwood is a disruptive force! excuse me while i comically try and reconcile my wodehouse stanning with my politics even tho they don't need to be reconciled

wait his name isn't threepwood is it. that's the name of the guy from monkey island.

'comedy' is impossible to pin down exactly, any definition has to contain all these opposites.

i never liked the line that satire is the weak making fun of the strong, but the opposite is bullying. bullshit, plenty of funny in jokes about the weak. comedy really doesn't care, the joke just has to work -- i guess that's 'conservative'. comedy is mercenary.

comedy doesn't last very long; referents change, styles change, the culture moves on. jokes wear out and you have to drum up new ones, even if certain underlying human themes about pain and sex and body embarrassment or w/e don't alter much. so there's a 'planned obsolescence' capital depreciation aspect to comedy. sort of 'market conservative' vs. the cultural conservatism of tragedy? idk, 'pity, fear and awe' might have a very long shelf life but jokes generally don't.

omg that's a much better rumination than i ever came up with

aristotle was what i was missing

i was thinking along the lines of orwell's remark that wodehouse's worst sin was making the british upper classes seem like much nicer ppl than they actually were. don't get me wrong i LOVE ol' pelham as much as the next guy (i actually only listed ppl i dig, except for bob hope).

'philadelphia story' has all that sexist dialogue about how 'selfish' kate hepburn's character is which annoys me, but i can't find any political message (or any kind of message) in 'bringing up baby' at all.

i just think philadelphia story and bringing up baby are both romantic comedies that are about shaming the woman until she's been knocked down enough to finally earn her man (you're right, philadelphia story is a lot more explicit about its ideology) and bringing up baby makes katharine hepburn look so pathetic it's unacceptable! that might be less about conservatism and more about my hepburn stannery

bringing up baby makes katharine hepburn look downright schizophrenic honestly (i have never finished bringing up baby, i should try it on acid or something)

One quick generalization I'd probably be willing to defend: anyone who can't stomach conservativism in comedy probably just doesn't like comedy, full stop. Except maybe, like, something like an anarchist tweak on "The Deficit Rag" with all actual humor sucked out of it. It might be that the existence of conservativism in comedy, however problematic and occasionally objectionable, is part of what creates the tension that makes it tick.

i only saw bringing up baby the one time. it was torture, apart from how pretty hepburn and grant were.

the classics prof i had in college had a pretty sly point about Lysistrata -- we read it now through the lens of feminism, but it's original intent wasn't satirical or anti-war at all. women refusing sex to stop a war! that's a good one, haha. it was meant to be as hilarious and unbelievable as a guy building a city in the clouds and becoming a god of the birds.

i forget what point i was trying to get to there

i guess that point of his wasn't especially 'sly' either

a friend's professor insisted on a similar thing about merchant of venice -- that it's supposed to be self-evidently hilarious that a jew would bleed when pricked etc -- but i'm really skeptical of that.

yeah me too!

morbz, i don't really feel like u and i have much to discuss re comedy

Fine, Mordy, bcz I wasn't remotely trying to do that.

left-wing humor is some of the MOST reactionary!

OK, strongo, I have no idea WTF you're talking about and neither do you.

If you're using "reactionary" in the political sense, comedy generally doesn't follow a party agenda, bcz "humans are ridiculous" is the thesis statement.

re the old-school MAD guys -- yeah, same as the old SNL guys, the Yippies, the Black Panthers -- sexist pigs all. Welcome to American manhood in the first 4/5 of the 20th century. (and beyond)

this thread arose out of conversation about the show 30 rock in the 'is this racist?' thread. i brought up the idea that comedy might be inherently conservative there, in response to this article. this is basically what i was getting at:

"perhaps this kind of conservatism, the kind that patrols the boundary between "normalcy" and "weirdness" (and which should not be confused with political conservatism, though the two can definitely overlap), is an essential component of all comedy.

in retrospect, i'd modify that to "an essential component of certain comic approaches." not all comedy is conservative in the sense that i meant. comedy doesn't always depend on drawing a line between ordinary behavior and weirdness, and it certainly doesn't always stand on the side of the ordinary, gawking at lurid buffoonery of weird grotesques. i would say that this is what 30 rock does though, at least to some degree, and in that, it's not out of step with much contemporary american comedy.

I feel like esp nowadays that a lot of progressive liberal lines of thought requires a willingness to be open-minded, to recognize and embrace difference, whereas comedy & laughter are essentially defensive, a retreat, rigidly demarcating the boundaries between self and other

― cinco de extra mayo (loves laboured breathing), Monday, May 14, 2012 8:51 PM (48 minutes ago)

yeah, that's exactly what i was getting at. a lot of comedy constructs a position of "rightness" and "us-ness" from which other aspects of the world are mocked. it's inclusive in that it asks you to join the group, to become one of the right-thinking usses who laughs at these things and sees the world in this way. but it's also exclusionary, in that there's usually a butt to the joke. i suppose the best comedy of this sort is that which attacks inward as often as it does outward, mocking itself at least as cruelly as the deficiencies of others. both seinfeld and 30 rock at least try to do this, which tempers the conservatism of their basic approach.

it occurs to me (and perhaps just because i got zinged good) that even if comedy isn't always reactionary at it's core, strongo's comedy certainly is.

i don't find humans ridiculous, i find them untenable.