Wonderful Cruelty: It’s Not Funny Until Someone Gets Hurt
Vít Luštinec, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
For a long time I was of the opinion that comedy is all about timing. Now I think that timing is a requirement, but it’s cruelty that matters. It’s always been about cruelty.
I should note that that’s wonderful.
My wife and I have tossed this around. She’s the smartest person I know and I know a guy that changed the course of a gubernatorial race and another who argued in front of the Supreme Court. The latter, were he still alive would have pointed out that the tense is all wrong since he’s passed on and I should have said that I knew rather than know and the former would pat me on the back for keeping latter and former straight. “F” comes before “L” but I still need to mentally reassess every time I read the former/latter construct.
The long and the short is I know smart people and have managed to insert my ignorance among them.
A point of contention between my wife and me is that I think all humor requires a foil. She disagrees, so the caveat here is that the smartest person I know thinks that everything beyond word 203 of this (I’m going to call it a treatise because I’m feeling snooty and that’ll show her) treatise is nonsense.
Being funny is focused meanness. I’ve written here about George Carlin’s “look at the rubes” and the fallacies that make that actually funny contrary to his intent. Humor is pointing out what is overlooked.
My wife brings up Wodehouse as kindly comedy but he requires mocking an assumption of British people in the inheriting business. The upper classes and titled may be altruistic and wonderful and so worried about the environment that they fly private planes all over the world to tell you how worried they are about the environment, but Wodehouse’s books don’t work unless you view the upper classes as buffoons. It casts another. It’s cruelty.
Even the most basic jokes rely on mental missteps. Why did the chicken cross the road? The answer is to point out that people skip past the obvious. Joke is on…
I am funny in person, at least I think so. I’m a pretty good tickler too, but in particular I’m a fan. I’m a goof, a Tiger Beat subscribing type, to people that have made a living being funny in print. As an aspirant I have my list of heroes. I have a plastic wrapped copy of the Doug Kenney led spoof of Time Magazine that launched National Lampoon. I know about Matty Simmons for non-credit reasons. I strangely have two copies of Bored of the Rings.
To me the funniest human being not named me is Christopher Guest. He killed it with “Highway Toes” and that was not nice. He skewed James Taylor – and I should note that James Taylor did not beat up the mermaid because that was a different guy but they get confused and it’s not just me that conflates them – for drug use. The song was as close as you get to perfect parody and the payoff? Huge.
The lesson of Christopher Guest is that if you are cruel and funny and point out the foibles of others you get to get convivial with the hot chick that escaped Jason or Myers or whatever. I don’t know. It wasn’t Freddie. That was a Depp project. All that aside, Guest was watching Spartacus at age 12 and had no idea that he would be married to Tony Curtis’s daughter. Serendipity.
Record Scratch. My outline for this post is suddenly out the window.
I just Googled Guest who I’ve been a fan of for the entirety of my non-adolescent life and apparently he’s a member of the British House of Lords? What the ever living hell, Archie? Christopher Guest is the 5th Baron of something.
I’m kinda thrilled.
I love the idea of actually funny people in power even if it seems to be merely titular.
Humor, properly executed, is a fart joke, but refined, it’s a scalpel. You mock what is false because it’s false. It points out incongruities because they are not congruous. Humor separates fact from pretention and no one has ever told a better joke than Vaclav Havel.
“Workers of the World Unite!”
Havel got it.
In his Soviet dominated-world a greengrocer, and that’s at least his or his translator’s word for a guy that owns a grocery store, was required to have a sign hanging in “his” business that said the above. “Workers of the World Unite.” But that wasn’t what the sign said.
The sign said, “I submit.” Havel got it.
It was the biggest pull in history and this man who was a poet (bless him) and playwright (we all have our sins) threw a Velvet Underground album at the powers that were and dustbins opened.
Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” may be up there with “Areopagitica” as one of the most important essays ever written, but be clear. It was a joke. A very serious joke.
He pulled the rug out from under powers because he honed in on the truth and disallowed their attempts to cast the world in a shade favorable to them. He took things from them. He was relentless. He was cruel. He was funny.
Because that’s what funny is. It is pointing and showing.
It’s an instinct as far as I can tell. People from various sides of the aisle are asking why we can’t be funny, and by that I mean why we can’t ask about what we are supposed to accept.
Rogan, Wiess, Chapelle, Brand, Travis, Greenwald. These are people asking questions. The answers may not be what you agree with, but they ask. They note that there is a statement and then contrast the statement with the what they see. They get it wrong on occasion. That’s okay.
The scary thing about funny people is not that they note the disconnects on issues or whatnot. You can argue disconnects out over a shrimp salad at lunch. The problem with funny people opposite the table from you is that post salad lunch, they know. Deep down you know that they saw your flaws. That’s what funny people do.
I’m willing to be wrong here – I’m willing to be wrong everywhere – but I think a sense of humor is a divisive trait. People with a sharp one instinctually identify bullshit and they opt to be kind and keep the observation to themselves or they don’t. It’s cruelty.
Those willing to be funny are putting themselves out in front of crowds and are daring to contest ideas. P.J. O’Rourke wrote hilariously about a Parliament of Whores. I’d guess he’d be with me in the idea that maybe a few comedians should run for office and look at the issues encroaching the world. A few uninvited Guests might be just the answer.
Comedy is about surprise. Laughter is an involuntary reaction to something unexpected. That’s why timing is essential.
I think the Brits value “clever” over “funny”. Perhaps being clever always requires a foil, but “funny” does not.Report
The interesting thing is that something can be surprising even if you see it coming. You may have rewatched a John Cleese clip to the point you’ve got it memorized, but it’s still surprising, because your brain is comparing it to a thousand pompous bureaucrats.Report
I’ve never seen John Cleese coming, but I bet it’s hilarious.Report
In pro wrestling, one of the best tropes is that the heel can establish his bona fides by telling the truth.
Is there a plothole that everybody but the fans is ignoring? Have the heel be the one to point it out.
Is there a storyline from last year that everybody but the fans has forgotten? Have the heel ask “Have you guys forgotten September already?”
If there is a truth about society that everybody is too polite to notice, put it in the mouth of a comedian.Report
If you laugh, you’re an accessory to the crime.Report
There is the element of cruelty, but these days, you have to make sure the cruelty is only aimed up. No punching down, even if it’s a legit bit of BS to call out.Report
Wodehouse is not as kindly as you might think. The Efficient Baxters gets humiliates (and repeatedly BB’d in the butt) as he so richly deserves. Bingo Little always loses the girl in humiliating fashion until he meets and marries noted authoress Rosie M. Banks, at which point Freddie Widgeon takes over that role. Bertie is constantly made to look like an even sillier ass than he is, as the price of continuing his single, superficial, sophomoric way life. Though he does get to tell off Spode in wholly satisfying fashion:
You hear them shouting: ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?Report
I think this goes too far, or plays fast and loose with the more click-worthy word “cruel.” Often, for example, the best humor is self-deprecating humor, but if self-deprecation reaches the point of cruelty, we would rightly think that perhaps something is wrong. “Cruel” humor is rarely funny to anyone but the cruel. Granted, pointed, critical, mocking, satirical, etc. humor is often funny, but I think is funniest when not at all cruel, that is, when it tears down boundaries and sacred cows but does not dehumanize.
There is, and has always been (see, e.g., ancient Greek comedies) a social function to humor, sometimes iconoclastic and irreverent, as when it brings the high and mighty down to our level, but also sometimes in such a way that it reaffirms and strengthens social hierarchies (think of all the misogynistic humor of the last century, e.g.). Cruelty rarely accomplishes the former, at least not in any lasting way, but frequently accomplishes the latter.
I don’t want to equate this with punching up or punching down, mind you. I generally prefer punching up, or punching level, but punching down can be very funny, and even effective, when done well. One of my favorite funny books is An Béal Bocht by Brian O’Nolan (as Myles na gCopaleen) which is both a parody of the self-pitying Irish autobiographies popular a century ago, punching down at his own people (the poor Irish) in a way that is both very funny and implores the Irish to be better (while also highlighting the role of the English in the plight of the Irish). It’s not meant to be cruel, it’s meant to inspire while making you laugh (at yourself, if you’re an Irish person in the early-to-mid 20th century).
Also, puns are rarely cruel and often quite funny. Unless you think they’re cruel to language, in which case, good, ’cause fish language.Report
I agree with the basic point that every joke has a butt, but I think that Chris is right about stretching the word “cruel” past the point where it remains meaningful. It is very difficult, though not impossible, to be be simultaneously cruel and funny. This is not because cruelty can’t be funny. It can be. But cruelty is usually about prolonged states of mental and physical anguish, while laughter is a form of breaking tension. You can hold both together for a limited amount of time, but eventually you have to choose to resolve one in favor of the other. You can make fun of someone to the point where it becomes cruel, but at that point we are no longer talking about a performance. We are talking about bullying, which is an interpersonal matter.
It is hard not to read this piece in the context of contemporary internet discussions about acceptable and unacceptable comedy. This is fine. But if we are being honest, the ethics of the internet don’t really have much to do with cruelty as commonly understood. The ethics of the internet are: when you make fun of me, people like me, or people with whom I sympathize, you are being mean and likely unethical; when you make fun of the people not like me or the people that I don’t like, then you are being righteous and speaking truth to power (or some other such bromide). All the talk of “cruelty” and “punching up v punching down” is mostly after-the-fact rationalization.
Joe Rogan is a pretty good example of this. His standup routines are about as edgy as Paula Poundstone’s were. He literally tells observational jokes about his cat. Here is a clip of Rogan talking about Hannah Gadsby (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGRbVItPBfA). The Gadsby stuff starts around 3:40. Be careful, though; it’s real edge lord stuff (it’s not). But Rogan is associated with UFC and has a huge podcast that isn’t very discriminating in its guests, so the internet codes him as ‘friend’ or ‘foe’ depending on who the intended audience is and then proceeds to describe him as either “cruel” or “a brave truth teller.” But in truth, these distinctions have almost nothing to do with his style of comedy.Report