is comedy inherently conservative?

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).

i'll have to check those docs out.

w/o much familiarity i have a certain respect for old showbiz hoofers/lifers omg is that conservative

but I will say, from what we know about early western comedy, it seems to have been mainly about laughing at the misfortune of others? and sometimes about upending the privileged, but there are plenty of laughs had at the expense of eg slaves, too - and I think "finding amusement in the misfortune of others" is maybe inherently conservative?

i think American comedy would be a good-sized topic to tackle, since it still exists kind of a distinct flavor from other English-speaking countries and you'd only have to go back a couple hundred years, although it's probably most oral tradition that's hard to document, no idea how much non-literary comedy/humor made it to print before a certain point. (xpost)

i think more the latter, comedy that is embedded in and reinforces other oppressions. that's better-put than my original post, for sure. i think i was talking about a really specific and historically contingent thing and pretending it was general, for one thing. so yeah, i am interested in max's history of comedy, too.

xxp to Andrew

i think there is something at the psychological root of a lot of comedy that might lend itself to reinforcing the status quo -- like a lot of time a joke has to function by playing off of some widely understood truth or idea or social norm. if an idea or norm is inherently racist or misogynist etc., then yeah, a lot of the jokes constructed around will probably essential saying "check out this ridiculous situation in which our accepted ideas of this minority are defied." which by the way would be a horrible way to tell that kind of joke, usually it's done much more smoothly, but i'm not a comedy professional.

― kitty shayme (some dude), Monday, May 14, 2012 11:04 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

i was about to try to write a post but i think i was just going to kind of reword this old post

Is the class itself a target?

I'd say in Rickles comedy everyone is the target. it's very meanspirited but in an oddly magnanimous "hey EVERYBODY is a joke" way. not defending all of his material cuz he definitely worked racist/sexist, but I do think there was something genuinely appealing in his "I am an equal opportunity offender" schtick.

xp

american standup comedy was invented by airplanes btw

airplanes and spendthrift women iirc