Just because you can get someone to laugh doesn’t mean it’s
not offensive. It’s a convenient excuse
that people try – Oh come on, it was just a joke – implying that the
fault must be yours.
It’s tricky, because sometimes it’s true. Some people, perhaps even some entire groups,
are oversenstive and their offense should not be an obstacle. With humor, sometimes the entire point is to
show how little it takes to offend them.
I have mentioned before that the ability to laugh at oneself is good
shorthand for emotional balance.
Comedians may drive culture somewhat, yet I think they
mostly reflect it. They are out at the
edge, breaking down barriers, but it isn’t arbitrary. They are usually sensing
which barriers are soft, what boundaries can be expanded. We as audience are in a sense
invitational: Break this fence. We want you to. We haven’t quite got the
courage to do this ourselves.
Yet the offense given is sometimes the entirety of the
humor. When you take it apart, there
isn’t actually anything funny in there, just meanness, and the audience is only
expressing joy that the meanness is being expressed publicly. In those
situations, what is happening culturally is worth observing. Historically, it
has been used in the arts to suggest evil and stupidity – groups of boys
attempting to humiliate girls with hurtful comments they dare not respond to;
rednecks making fun of blacks. The Nazis
in the 30’s were not a stern people – they loved to go out and drink with their
friends and make fun of gypsies or laugh at stories of terrible things done to
Jews. The play “Cabaret” didn’t come out
of nowhere. That people laugh is not
sufficient. A good deal of “clever” writing now is mere creative insult. It is remarkable how little of even the NYT
columnists remains once one studiously removes the snark. I have a distant impression that television
comedy and standup are the same, but I can’t be trusted to have a
representative sample from what I encounter indirectly. And I know less still
about movie comedy.
I can like that sort of humor as well. Dave Barry and especially PJ O’Rourke have
that as part (though not all) of their repertoire. Jonah Goldberg same. I liked small doses of Jay Severin in the old
days for his sheer outrageousness. But
for me, it only works as a seasoning, not as food itself. It gets tiring. I can also enjoy sheer outrageousness, of the
“Borat” type.
When people don’t laugh, it usually means it just wasn’t
that funny. But there is a type of
not-laughing that tells us something else.
There is an uncomfortable silence, an intake of breath, a how-dare-you
quality that is a refusal to be amused.
It is hard to describe, because once the moment of humor has passed, the
memory of being offended can pass as well, so that the non-laugher can tell
himself “No, it just wasn’t very funny.
I didn’t mind him making fun of X in principle.” Yet if you can read the audience right, you
can tell they aren’t going to laugh. Don’t go there. They aren’t going to like it. You are treading on sacred ground. Watch what happens to a professional
comedian, who thinks the old rules of chuckle-funny still apply. A few laugh uncertainly, but it dies quickly.
Well, perhaps it wasn’t chuckle-funny, even in a different
era with a different audience; perhaps nothing along those lines would be. We’ll never know. Rickles cleverly attributes the problem to it being a basketball joke. Ah. The audience knows Rickles from roasts and insults, which may give it an added significance.
Not very shockingly CS Lewis had something to say on this.
The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction,
and it is specially promising among the English who take their 'sense of
humour' so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only
deficiency at which they feel shame. Humor is for them the all-consoling and
(mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means
of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is
"mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows
with having been scored off, he is no longer "mean" but a comical
fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous
exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is
shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand
bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much
as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only
without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can
get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden
from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that
there might be too much of it can be represented to him as
"Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humor." (The Screwtape Letters, 1942.)
"It is remarkable how little of even the NYT columnists remains once one studiously removes the snark."
ReplyDeleteMe thinks the current occupier of the WH got his start in stand up at Second City.
Edgy humor changes the bounds of the acceptable, so there's feedback. It reflects what people want to hear, but also shapes and reinforces it. The next generation of "edgy" has to push farther. That program means an eventual end to sensitivity and decorum. Of course people can mandate new sensitivities and new words you're not supposed to say, but I wonder how sturdy those rules will prove to be. (I gather from a certain {scripted?} furor that the latest Tarantino movie tries to push the limits in using "unspeakable words.")
ReplyDeleteI think we develop new sensitivities. They are hard to see, almost by definition - things that cannot be said.
ReplyDeletePerhaps taboos are more numerous and/or less visible in smaller cultures and are destroyed by intercultural contact. I wrote about bad words a few years ago.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2006/01/overheard-in-avebury.html
I did not listen to it, but I believe most of us remember accounts of comedians saying that nothing about Obama is funny. Can't be parodied; can't be the subject of jokes. Obama jokes were Verboten!
ReplyDeleteI think the loss of some of the old sensitivities is a serious problem. Or better: a serious symptom. We can be acclimated to pretty much anything if we get there in baby steps via our beloved entertainments.
ReplyDelete