is comedy inherently conservative?

i was thinking about this thread during the whole tosh rape-joke thing

yeah my friend basically started her troupe because of the tosh "joke"

i thought a lot of the response that was kind of stupid. i dunno, all the liberal writers trying to like set up rules about "here's how to make a funny rape joke" and analyzing why tosh's joke was "bad" and this other rape joke is "good"... it was so

ime ostensibly "progressive" or lefty comedy is maybe even more repulsively conservative than the dad jokes and stereotype-reinforcing unhumour that's the obvious subject of this thread

the defenses of tosh were even stupider, obviously

i had to drop out of the internet temporarily when the tosh joke happened...i can't really talk about it rationally tbh

no, progressive comedy was the subject of this thread! or comedy that's created with an anti-racist/anti-sexist intention but somehow seems to reify racist/sexist stereotypes unintentionally. or whatever.

"ostensibly 'progressive' or lefty comedy" isn't really what i'm talking about

what i really wanted to read was a kind of *historical* account of comedy & its relationship to transgression, like a "genealogy of comedy." a lot of the discussion was weirdly ahistorical, like this sense that stand-up is the purest form of comedy and not form that has its own culture and rules and history (culture and rules and history that lean really heavily on the bill hicks-doug stanhope-sam kinison damaged-man resentful misogynist archetype)

haha i mean i guess what i wanted was someone to write the "Standup Comedy Sucks" article but no one did. i shouldve

u should write a genealogy of comedy nietzsche style

xp

bob hope invented standup. it's not that old.

i was thinking about how most of the latest wave of successful women comedians have come out of the improv world. & the structural differences between improv and standup that might lead to cultural/political differences

write it max!!!!

bob hope invented standup. it's not that old.

― goole, Friday, August 17, 2012 1:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, yeah, this is what i mean? the whole tosh discussion seemed to be identifying "standup" as this pure form of Comedy, like the Form of Comedy whose rules had been handed down by the ancients. instead of as a 50 yr old "art form" that has its own insular and generally p shitty culture

A lot of conventional humor is based upon staid, conservative social stereotypes, such as the cartoons about women posted near the top of the thread by Abbott, but it is important to note that such 'establishment' humor rarely, if ever, provokes open laughter. Such jokes are similar to the plastic models of food that are sometimes displayed in the front windows of restaurants to give prospective patrons a more visceral idea of what is on the menu. They provoke recognition, as in "I can see this is a joke, because it is formed like one", but nothing more.

Real laugh-until-you're-crying-and-weak humor is never conservative.

― Aimless, Friday, August 17, 2012 9:55 AM (18 minutes ago)

wish this were true, but it just isn't. lots of people laugh their asses off at the most conservative comedy imaginable.

http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/08/22/

"The Road to Vietnam" ranks with Bob's funniest work, if only for its sheer Brechtian blast of unreality in the midst of nightmare. You can almost hear Brando's Col. Kurtz whispering under the laughs, "The humor ... the humor ..."

lollll

i can't stop laughing at that

i keep thinking about writing about Why Comedy Sucks but then i think about the amount of comedy i'd have to endure as "research" and i die inside

why trouble yourself with shitty comedy

i still don't get why the whole human category of "things that are funny" reduces to, idk, simon amstell or some shit, for you

lex, you yourself are very funny so i find your railing against comedy hard to take seriously, though it is also very in character and funny so i welcome it.

i apologize if calling you funny is like accusing you of murder or something :/

i'm not funny at all!

my most ill-tempered communications with editors have been when they have asked me to make a piece funnier. i literally cannot do funny writing.

megalol at lex joek upthread

i'm not funny at all!

^^^this is precisely why you are funny bro

every time i try to make a joke in writing i can feel the semi-colons just...bubbling under the surface of the sentence

bubbling colons? now that's funny!

>:(

ftr i didn't laugh at that either

what i really wanted to read was a kind of *historical* account of comedy & its relationship to transgression, like a "genealogy of comedy."

yeah but max people spend their entire careers trying to say something definitive about this and failing. it's one of the biggest subjects and one where you're never going to get resolution. you can take an ancient comic tradition course and get a little more clarity (it's these classes that tend to lead toward the "comedy is inherently* conservative" idea) but for the most part you disappear into prehistory before you're satisfied. plus "western" vs. other models which are even less rigorously documented.

*"inherently" is a poor word here - what it means is "originally," I think, and that some of those origins are present in all comedy

the semi-colons...the semi-colons

aero otm

lex yer great btw, your opinions on comedy are ridiculous but I p much agree in my heart of hearts I think

saying comedy is inherently anything seems like a really bizarre, unfounded contention imho

it's one of the biggest subjects and one where you're never going to get resolution.

both "not admitting of resolution" and "trying and failing" are comic qualities, so, i say go for it.

there probably are ways to document certain aspects of things, though. like i'd be interested in hear from, like, guys from the Don Rickles generation about whether they think standup has actually gotten meaner or dirtier over the last few decades, or whether they can get away with blue material in bigger rooms or on TV whereas that stuff might've been limited to small clubs back in the day. (xpost to aero)

maybe "originally" is what i meant, but i don't even know anything about the origins of comedy tbrr. this was a thread started in ignorance, for sure.

im not looking for a "theory of comedy" or a "definition of comedy"! i think the search for universal answers to those things ends up sidetrack the more interesting question of "what role does [this kind of] comedy play in this specific time/place"

some dude otm. interested in both micro and macro histories of comedy

i don't think i 'get' don rickles

i always assumed that irl he was totally gross and vicious but if it was just like his 'you hockey puck!' business you see on TV then i'm really mystified.

rickles talked about some of this in the joan rivers doc I think I don't really remember tho, but I think so

i mean it's interesting to me that up until a certain point in time, it seemed like the only comics really known for pushing the envelope for language/content on large stages were the really respected and clever guys like carlin, bruce, pryor -- then at some point after andrew dice clay (or maybe eddie murphy's needlessly nasty stuff) it became the province of the hack, that you could go on hbo and say awful shit and not have to justify it with major creativity or wit.

have you seen that mr. warmth documentary from a few years back, goole? helped me get the rickles.

swear to god i read something a while ago that dealt pretty deftly with the whole compassion thing in humor. something like comedy must, at some break point or w/e, when the clown slips on the banana peel, be dispassionate.

also where's the weird dissertation about humor that Tracer (?) posted lo those many years ago, about humor being the moss growing on rust or some old bullshit

rickles is awesome fuiud

The audience for those guys were the middle class, no? I've only heard a couple Rickles routines. Is the class itself a target?

there probably are ways to document certain aspects of things, though. like i'd be interested in hear from, like, guys from the Don Rickles generation about whether they think standup has actually gotten meaner or dirtier over the last few decades, or whether they can get away with blue material in bigger rooms or on TV whereas that stuff might've been limited to small clubs back in the day.

oh, no doubt. but if somebody's shooting for a unified theory of how comedy works (the premise of the thread) then you're going to get to about Aristophanes and then hit a brick wall. Early Roman comedy is also pure supposition, there's just fragments. As far as we know it was basically a guy standing in front of an audience and falling down over and over, really broad physical comedy. Whether a form's original tropes inform it forever is a question you could really chew on for a long time, though it'd be hard to argue that an original formal impulse didn't remain present without a documentable "here's where the shift occurred" moment.

it is interesting stuff, because it necessarily turns on the question "why is (x) funny," and that's a question that ends up facing a brick wall very quickly. "The ball...his groin...it works on so many levels" is kind of what you end up saying in less funny terms.

yeah that was a cool flick -- saw the joan doc too, although it's been a while so i'm not really sure if either got into what i was talking about. (xpost)

no, progressive comedy was the subject of this thread! or comedy that's created with an anti-racist/anti-sexist intention but somehow seems to reify racist/sexist stereotypes unintentionally. or whatever.

― horseshoe, Friday, August 17, 2012 6:12 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like, comedy that fails on it's own terms, or comedy that succeeds, but is embedded in and reinforces other oppressions?

My first thought on reading the thread title was Monty Python, which is explicitly leftie political comedy without getting preachy, but also five white straight public-school boys (with occasional appearances by a lady with very large breasts).