When Does Dark Humor Stop Being Funny?
nautil.us
nautil.us
It's an interesting phenomenon you don't see in other artistic performances. Comedy is the one realm where an audience will show up, uninformed by reviews or any research into who they're seeing perform (as opposed to say, watching a movie trailer, for example), and be so offended (and entitled) that they feel they must take public action against the performer directly.
A comedian's jokes may very well be unfunny to a group of people, but does that inherently give anyone the right to try to silence it from being said? And should a joke someone finds offensive cost a comedian opportunities in their career?
Let's see how some examples go down:
"People say it's easy to make fun of retarded people, but it's not. You really have to explain it to them."
"My great grandmother threw herself in front of a bus. The police tried to say she had committed suicide but the family knew she was just trying to stop civil rights."
"I’ve spent the past two years looking for my ex-girlfriend’s killer... but no one will do it."
http://scomedy.com/quotes/Anthony-Jeselnik
The last special he made, he bombed so hard I just stopped following him. It's just hard to find things funny when absolutely no one else is smirking...
I thought it was his best yet, but you touched on a good point: If his (or anyone else's) comedy isn't your style anymore, that's fine -- you just stop following/listening to them. If you're at a club, you get up quietly and leave. Maybe ask a manager for your money back if you feel you deserve it.
Nothing wrong with incorporating offensive subjects in comedy, but there needs to be more meat to it.
Is it? This keeps being repeated, but I'm not seeing it in the general population. Sure, there are some loud people here and there, but overall it seems exaggerated to me. Of course, that's anecdotal, but still, I'm not buying it just yet.
I am aligned with the positions explored for the most part, but it seems like self-righteous offense inevitably emerges as a defense mechanism for these types of views.
Some people value being 'right' more than they value being happy. Some have an agenda or hidden motivation to talk down to others.
As long as there's an advantage to be gained from it there will always be individuals who bully others. Old school bullying has been replaced with 'moral' grandstanding and public shaming.
We used to teach kids, "sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me." At some point, that tradition was abandoned and some individuals shifted to assume the stance of 'perpetually offended' so they have a justifiable platform to attack others.
If other people find those jokes offensive, and want to raise a stink about it, would you "silence" them?
Especially since this is all happening entirely in the marketplace of ideas--people aren't passing laws banning jokes, comics aren't being arrested or shot--if the general tide of public opinion has turned and a comic can't make a living telling jokes of a certain type of offensiveness, isn't that just the way a society evolves?
Galleries and museums are often the site of protests about their own content. I've been in the theater during a really terrible movie where the audience starts loudly heckling the movie itself as if the people who made it could hear them.
When you make the case for acceptable behavior on the part of the audience as an attack on someone else's idea of acceptable behavior on the part of the comic... that seems like shaky ground to me.
I always hear about it through social media, like someone on twitter calling out someone for making jokes they didn't like--and that's the speech I can't imagine silencing (even if some people can't get gigs anymore).
Take for instance the account of comedian Kurt Metzger beginning one of his bits with "Are you guys for gay marriage? Well I'm not," (I believe it was this joke told in a club [0]) at which point a woman sitting in the front row grabbed a drink, not even her own, and threw it at him because he said he was "against gay marriage". In what world is that okay to do?
And of course my analysis of it being a growing trend is purely anecdotal from the shows and festivals I've been to and the podcasts I listen to.
[0] http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h6f2uv/stand-up-kurt-metzger--...
Obviously, in a specific venue, only the proprieter has the right to remove the comedian (also, for those of you that go to standup shows: no one wants to hear what you have to say, be quiet). I fully support the comedian's right to say whatever they want to say and bear the full brunt of what that means for their career.
If what you are looking for is jokes about mentally handicapped people and lesbians, you can always turn on the morning show of your choice in most major American cities. To me, that's not dark humor, it's dumb humor.
I don't think he's gotten rid of it at all, unless this was very recent. I just saw his opening monologue from last year's episode of SNL, which exactly epitomized that style of joke.
> you've seen his jokes evolve to where he's "punching down" less and less, and now almost not at all. But his humor is no less dark for it, it's MORE dark for it.
Why is punching up (i.e., insulting high-status people rather than low-status people) more dark?
I encourage everyone to watch the bit and see where you think the humor comes from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjrWF-RRlg
It's funny, but it's not deep or intellectual.
Well, someone wasn't an English major! Didn't know their was anything dastardly about trying to parse the context of any particular text.
Like I said, we disagree about what he is doing in that bit.
Overall I really liked it (except for the ending). I was only vaguely aware of CK as a standup comedian from a few youtube videos I'd seen, so his depth of writing, character creation, and also his acting chops really impressed me.
That kind of comedy works for a movie or maybe one season but for me it gets old.
Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by
using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power
and myths.
Slavoj Zizek like to talk about dirty jokes as a sort of a way to forge an in-group, or a way to let the guards down.
He mentions it here for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri0qiAita4s
Jokes are a way to probe and see if the other party is sincere. One example he brings up is how there used to be racial jokes between ex-Yugoslavian countries. They would meet and tell jokes about themselves basically. However as soon as tensions started jokes stopped. So another way to think about, dirty jokes are a bit like a canary in a mine. If jokes are allowed, other party is laughs at jokes, everything is still ok, it means they don't harbor hidden hatred or resentment. As soon as jokes stop, beware. You could be back-stabbed.
Not advocating telling dirty jokes everywhere obviously, just present that particular take on that.
Exactly. He talks about the second type of jokes in the story about the doctor in the army. How humor and jokes was used for oppression.
tldr: “do not make a rape victim the butt of the joke, QED”
I think that applies quite well to this topic; dark humor ceases to be funny when it becomes an actual attack against another person.
But what if someone told a joke that made fun of rape victims that also caught people by surprise and made people laugh? Trying to create some arbitrary lines about what kind of comedy is permissible and what kind is forbidden just makes the forbidden stuff into more of a sacred cow. And humor is all about slaughtering sacred cows.
Rape is about power. Power conceded by the victims and forcefully taken by the attackers.
A rape joke could make fun of how, useless, sad, an worthless a person would have to be to force themself on others.
How the act itself is nothing but a pathetic act of desperation.
Use perspective, artful storytelling, crafty dialog/writing to take the power from the attackers. Face the fear behind their actions and reduce it to reality; that rape is a sad, terrible, pathetic thing to do to somebody.
Take away the power from fear and gove it back to the victims in the form of empathy and support.
The 'sacred cows' as you say aren't just topics with shock value. They're topics that people are afraid of. Whether because they're taboo, morrally wrong, or legitimately terrifying.
Some may say that the victims suffer more due to living dealing with the shame and lying to loved ones to keep their past a secret.
In the right hands a truly talented comedian could make a great rape joke that is actually empowering to rape victims. One that makes the topic less taboo and helps victims feel less shame in a past that they had no power to shape.
Tasteless humor is noyhing but an ad-hominem dressed up with a fancy delivery. Good comedians don't attack people, they shine light on the ridiculousness of life and in doing so bring people together.
If that were true, South Park would not be successful.
Reduced to childhood terms, they're the kids on a playground playing doctor. Yet, as adults we treat people who play doctor with equal or higher regard than those who actually are doctors.
It's pretty idiotic but we all tend to attribute image as a viable replacement for substance.
South Park just points out the ridiculousness of it all by poking fun at those who take their image too seriously or make a mockery out of their status as a public figure.
Before you make an offensive joke, check who's around you.
in-group out-group also matters. second cousins shouldn't be cracking jokes at a funeral but immediate relatives are often under so much stress that they can laugh at almost anything.
Laughter is also a common social signal, it signals safety and increases happiness for all who join in. Dark jokes specifically, increase our threshold to face terrible things and help distract from the anxiety of -- otherwise -- trivial matters in out day-to-day lives. It increases empathy and connectedness among people, even strangers who have little or nothing in common.
Just look how Austin Powers uses puns to lighten the situation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wafhDIMU6w. It's cheesy and over-the-top to match the character but the effect is the same. We joke about the things that make us uncomfortable because it makes us feel better.
The only people up-in-arms about dark humor are individuals seeking to use their own false sense of moral superiority to subjugate others.
In a way, I'd be more scared of somebody who can't find it in themselves to laugh at all. To laugh at an awful joke requires self awareness and a clear understanding of the separation of truth from reality. People who lack those characteristics lie to themselves as much as others and live to project an 'ideal' image of themselves rather than face the humility of accepting their own weaknesses. Whet her the reason is big or small, they project a facade because they have something to hide. Is the person secretly a 'political activist' with an agenda or a murderous psychopath a hair-trigger response away from going off the deep end?
Of the dark comedians, Doug Stanhope is one of the darkest. Just watch the following skit https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hY3W9Z4bdS8. It's a clear middle finger to the 'Breast Cancer Awareness' movement for distracting from one of the few things in life that he truly enjoys. Not only is it extremely shocking but it artfully shines light on the ridiculous hypocracy of a movement that is more marketing than substance.
As shocking as his comedy usually is it's surprisingly endearing and disarming. Look past thr 'bitter old guy' image and it's hard not to see an intelligent young idealist who gave up one day and said, "fuck it, I'm going to ride out this existence until the wheels fall off."
BTW, the dead baby joke the author didn't have the courage to share was, "how do you get a dead baby out of a blender... with a spoon."
In short, don't feel bad about laughing at terrible jokes but be on guard when it comes to those who can't find it in themselves to join you.