Responding to a thread of people I respect talking about humor and politics, very wrongly. (@baroquespiral, @balioc, @kontextmaschine)
I’ll have to start at the basics, but this will get to the issues they were talking about like Dave Chappelle.
One of the key forms of humor is a punchline that takes advantage of something the audience knows but is unsaid within the joke, and so the punchline only makes sense if you know that unstated fact. For instance a joke that relies on “Oh, Italians are stupid” or “rich men are entitled.”
Two men are sitting drinking at a bar at the top of the Empire State Building, when the first man turns to the other and says “You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, the winds around the building are so intense that by the time you fall to the 10th floor, they carry you around the building and back into a window”. The bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.
The second guy says, “What, are you nuts? There’s no way that could happen. “No, its true,” the first man says. “Let me prove it to you.” He gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and plummets toward the street below. As he nears the 10th floor, the high winds whip him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
He meets the second man, who looks quite astonished. “You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke.” “No, I’ll prove it again,” says the first man as he jumps again. Just as he is hurtling toward the street, the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
“Well, why not.” the second guy says, “It works. I’ll try it.” He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward passes the 11th, 10th 9th, 8th, floors… . . and hits the sidewalk with a SPLAT.
Back upstairs the bartender turns to the other drinker and says, “You know Superman, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk”.
This joke only makes you laugh if you know the various powers of Superman.
There are two important ways this can be used politically:
–To tell a joke that relies on ideological truths as the unstated assumption.
You ask a white guy who’s he votin’ for, like, “Hey, Bob, who you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy. So I was fuckin’ my wife in her ass, right? And let me tell you, it was something else.” “Yeah, yeah, but who are you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave, come on with the voting! I’m trying to tell you about fucking my wife in the ass, and you’re asking me all these personal questions.”
–To tell a joke that uses the ideological truth as the facade, with the ways that ideology fails being the unstated assumption. The is known as an encounter with the Real.
Have you ever watched, like, a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? I was sittin’ there with my nephew. I turned it on Sesame Street. And I was, like, “Oh, good. Sesame Street. Now he’ll learn how to count and spell.” But now I’m watching it as an adult and I realize that Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people. That’s right. They got this one character named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right to his face. “Oscar, you are so mean. Isn’t he, kids?” “Yeah. Oscar, you’re a grouch!” He’s, like, “Bitch, I live in a fucking trash can! I’m the poorest motherfucker on Sesame Street. Nobody’s helping me.” Now you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people, like, “Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch.”
The two examples I gave were from Dave Chappelle, the person people are arguing over as a particular unspoiled strain of humor. He’s not. (Though at his best, like the gameshow “Who Knows Black People?” he emphasized the latter style of joke.)
The point is not to reliably identify which of these categories a joke falls into, and to “only do the good kind of joke” – but to understand why ideology will always find humor a threat and a useful weapon.
There is no such thing as a humorless ideologue. The humorless feminist, the humorless christian conservative, these are all fantasies. The more someone shows umbridge at a joke that’s “not funny” because of inappropriate content, the more they love jokes that play by the rules of their particular ideological system.
(This isn’t about target, so much as about “agrees with my rules about how the world operates.” Someone who says “jokes about rape are never funny,” likely will laugh at a joke whose punchline is “frat boys try to dope drinks to get laid.”)
***
So what’s bad about all this discussion of “punching up” is acting like this concept is a remotely new thing. Every powerful ideology has felt the need to clamp down on humor, AND to use humor as a sharp weapon that enforces social order in a way most people can’t defend themselves against (ie, it’s just a joke you big baby.)
And the mourned libertine consensus of “everyone can take a joke” was just as doctrinaire about how humor was used as well. Most of what libertarian cultural advocates are complaining about is, after all, people making mean jokes at their expense.
***
To be more clear, what made Chappelle special and particularly good was not that he “offended all targets.” I believe the original analysis upthread was fatally flawed because of that. Obviously you can find endless comics who took that attitude, the Jeremy Pivens of the world and PCU. “Oh wow, he made fun of black people AND white people” is nothing to write home about.
Instead, so much of Chappelle’s comedy was about deconstructing societal assumptions rather than reifying them. His funniest pieces were both positive and surprising, such as a white dowdy-looking cop being eloquent in urban African-American slang, which held the promise that there really could be communication across communities.
(Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece on an SNL skit with a similar theme that gets at the point I’m making, except Chappelle did it a decade earlier, and with an entire show not just one skit.)
The joke is that we are all human. This is the second half of the distinction I made.
Or other skits, like “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” were less about the clubgoing boi who is the butt of the joke, and more about the traumatic encounter with the Real, where norms about masculine aggression are crushed beneath the weight of a nihilistic universe that does not give a fuck about your personal identity.
I find nothing to be impressed with the PCU / Bill Maher humor of the nineties, and I do not mourn its (vastly overstated) passing. Yes, yes, it is a particular cruel double punch to be told you are the butt of the joke and that’s because you’re evil, which is what “punching up” entails -- but ideological humor was always morally charged that way. You don’t think Nazi jokes about Jews were both mean, and leveraged the belief that Jews were immoral so that made the meanness okay, even positive?
I am genuinely sad there is less Chappelle show in the world, and I find current controversies about his standup extremely interesting. He’s making jokes exploring his hero worship of Bill Cosby and OJ Simpson, while believing they are a rapist and a murderer, with all the awkward ambivalence that entails. That is hella edgy, in a way that making fun of purple haired college chicks is not.
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