Comedy is Not Harder, It's Just as Hard as It Ever Was
The best comedians joke about the realities we refuse to see and make us laugh. That's no different than any other time.
In the early nineties I was in a professional comedy ensemble. I had taken the requisite classes, learning to improvise and write sketch comedy, and ComedySportz was one of the few groups that actually paid the performers. My buddy, Kevin Colby, was in it and convinced me to audition.
I was cast and only then decided to go see the group perform.
I was mortified. It was games improv, like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and I wasn't amused. Puns, racial stereotypes, wigs. WIGS. While I didn't laugh once (except in agony at my predicament) the audience was howling. They loved it.
I shrugged. What the fuck do I know? These idiots are roaring over this.
I was with the ensemble for five years. A few years in, I began teaching classes for them as well as making money on the side writing scripts for corporate events and acting in comedy PSAs. The money wasn't massive but it was money in exchange for performing comedy bits in front of paying audiences.
My difficulty with ComedySportz (and theirs with me) is that my sense of humor veers toward the dark. The shocking. The unconventional.
The safe comedy of goofy mugging, white guys pretending to be Jamaican or Asian, gibberish games, and one-liners, while something I could pull off well enough to stick around for five years, was not my proverbial cup o' tea. I loved the folks I worked with, though, and that made up for my disdain for the comedy.
I learned from them that comedy about nothing is easy. It's actually incredibly easy to get people to laugh. All I had to do was gel up my hair, get introduced as Don "The Taz" Hall, run out, lift my shirt, smack my belly, and the audience would crack up and applaud.
I preferred (and continue to gravitate toward) Lenny Bruce. Bruce started off in his career as a Borscht Belt goof but the 60's and heroine gave him an angrier, hipper edge.
Give me some pissed off George Carlin, some 'fuck you' of Richard Pryor, some Bill Hicks dissection of humanity any day.
This is the comedy that is hard. Making people laugh while giving them something to think about. A bit edgier than the observational comedy of a Seinfeld or Richard Lewis, this form of comedy relies on challenging whichever cultural orthodoxy exists and our culpability within it.
George Carlin
“Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
“Most people with low self-esteem have earned it.”
“We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet? . . . And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great. It's been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn't goin' anywhere, folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away. And we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.”
Richard Pryor
“All humor is rooted in pain.”
“The black groups that boycott certain films would do better to get the money together to make the films they want to see, or stay in church and leave us to our work.”
"...the less people knew, the louder they got."
"Comedy rules! Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and there are no rules in stand-up comedy, which I really like. You can do anything you want and you can say anything that comes to mind, just so long as it's funny."
Bill Hicks
"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."
"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people."
The fun for most of us is that comedy, like any other form of art, is completely and wholly subjective. It is that subjectivity that makes it vibrant and relevant. Subjectively, I find Hannah Gadsby, David Sedaris, Tig Notaro, and McSweeney's to be fucking bores. Subjectively, I find Nicki Glaser, Bill Burr, and Jimmy Carr to be hysterical.
When someone decides that a comedian has 'crossed the line' into offensive territory, they aren't specifically attacking the comedian but the audience who found it funny. The comedian simply becomes the avatar of a section of society that their jokes spoke to in some way.
"If you find yourself laughing at stand-up comedy, it probably isn’t sufficiently progressive."
- Titiana McGrath
One of the great hallmarks of my lifetime is how humorless those on the more conservative side of the political divide tend to be. That is not to say that these folks have no sense of humor but that they have such a long list of things they find offensive to mention in a comic way that it can seem like an absence of humor.
It is that knee jerk offense response—to jokes about religion, sex, race, language, and the totality of the human experience—that makes them so much fun to rankle. In fact, the more outraged they are, the more subversively fun it is to laugh at them and the issues they find so sacrosanct.
Jimmy Carr
“My girlfriend said she wanted me to tease her, so I said, ‘Alright, fatty.'”
“I live near a remedial school. There’s a sign that says, ‘slow – children’. That can’t be good for their self esteem. But look of course on the positive side… they can’t read it.”
“The reason old men use Viagra is not that they are impotent. It’s that old women are so very ugly.”
“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but if you took all the money that we in the West spend on food in one week, you could feed the Third World for a year. I’m not sure about you, but I think we’re being overcharged on groceries.”
Is it more difficult for comedians to push those boundaries, to mock the self-seriousness of the modern scolds? I don't believe so. The only true metric is 'Is It Funny?' There are plenty of comics out there experimenting with that very question. If there is a new difficulty it is that the easy targets of established orthodoxy have expanded as the more conservative aspects of culture are being matched by the scolds of the more progressive view of what is and is not offensive.
Could a movie like Blazing Saddles ever be made again? Of course. Would it be widely distributed? Probably not. That doesn't make it harder to create just harder to market. If it's funny to enough people, it will make cash. If not, it won't. As much as the Capitalist market sucks, that's pretty much meritocracy at work. No longer limited to movie theaters and the companies that distribute to them, the avenues to eyeballs is wide open.
2020's Host was shot by three students on handheld video cameras over a long weekend and cost $35,000 (less than Marvel spent on Chris Evans's ass pads). It went on to gross a hefty $248.6m at the box office, smashing the record for an indie film at the time. It was not distributed into movie theaters. Granted, it isn't a comedy but the relationship between horror and comedy, as it relates to filmmaking, is that of incestuous cousins.
The best thing about this state of democratization of art is that, if you are offended by the subject matter or taboos mocked, you have plenty of other options to watch.
That's why I don't watch much Bo Burnham, Hasan Minhaj, or Wanda Sykes. I have my subscription to Louis C.K., the many specials by Ricky Gervais, and can check out anything featuring Jim Norton.
Smart, edgy, aggressive comedy that causes the audience to guffaw and then talk about it after has always been hard. It's supposed to be. If it wasn't, every dipshit with a YouTube channel could do it.
