I’m really funny. No, I promise. I know you follow me on Twitter or maybe even are Facebook friends with me, and you’re thinking “I mean I guess a little, but you’re not like, downright hilarious or anything.” But I swear to fucking g-d I’m really really funny.
Okay, so maybe I’m not as funny as I think I am. But I really wanted to be. Although writing about music was my first love and has been the one that I’ve stuck with the longest, from approximately 2010 to 2015 I was thoroughly convinced that I was going to go on to a well-respected and artistically-celebrated career as a stand-up comedian of significant note. The reason that I thought this is because, as a teenager, I felt very similar to how I always heard comedians describe themselves growing up— funny as a self-defense mechanism. My mouth got me into and out of trouble with frightening frequency and I craved (crave) outside validation in the form of dopamine-delivering laughter and I truly, genuinely felt like it was the only way I could see myself spending the rest of my life.
Of course, life itself always finds a way to challenge your goals and aspirations. After a high school career spent doing improv and sketch comedy (shudder), I made my stand-up debut at the age of 16 and I totally killed the first time I ever tried it. This is, I’ve learned since, possibly the worst thing to happen to any aspiring comedian, because I also totally killed the second time I ever tried stand-up, which made me think that I was some kind of wunderkind and did not prepare me for the next thirty or seventy times I tried stand-up and proceeded to bomb harder than Ted Kaczynski. Between my senior year of high school and the end of my freshman year of college in Chicago (which, if you’re unaware, is essentially Aspiring Comedians: The City), there were approximately three sets that weren’t stacked with completely discouraging shit-eating and uncomfortable silences.
It wasn’t all horrible failure, though. I took a class on satire in which I wrote several sketches which were all very well-received by my teacher and classmates. I was also in a creative writing class that I essentially used as an excuse to write and perform short monologues and try on the hat of a David Sedaris-esque “humorist,” and that went fairly well every week too (although I look back at the material I penned during this period with a mixture of disdain and embarrassment). I thought I might find a niche in purely written comedy, and actively pursued an internship at The Onion. If I hadn’t moved back to Las Vegas at the end of the year due to a combination of suicidal depression, lack of faith in my abilities, and a doomed long-distance relationship, I might have made it a few more years in that world before I inevitably spiraled out of it because I simply am just a cut below the necessary levels of both talent and commitment to really survive in that sphere.
Even after I completely gave up on comedy as a career, I still kept up with the industry out of a sense of obligation, but over the last three or so years I’ve almost totally missed out on some of the biggest developments in the medium, which kind of bums me out sometimes because it truly was one of the most important parts of my life for such a long time. I very much remember the exact moment I completely tuned out: it was when Louis CK admitted to sexual misconduct. There have been many comedians both before and after this event that were completely disgraced due to similar transgressions, but CK was the one that hit me the hardest.
I don’t know that he was ever necessarily my absolute favorite comedian, but from 2008 to 2013— essentially his run from Chewed Up to Oh My God— it was hard to argue with the idea that he was the greatest living stand-up comic, and Louie was one of my most beloved shows due to its unique fusion of absurdism (in the existentialist and comedic senses), surrealism, tragedy, poignant explorations of shame and failure, and fearlessness in exploring the darkest recesses of human folly. It shouldn’t have been much of a shock that someone so adroit at dissecting the worst impulses and fucked-up, involuntary thought processes that people are capable of was speaking from experience as a shitty, fucked-up person (and CK himself essentially foreshadowed this development several times over the course of his career, most notably the Louie episode where he nearly assaults Pamela Adlon), but it still felt like getting the wind knocked out of me. My knees honestly almost buckled when I read his “apology.” Hilarious was one of my go-to comedy sets; whether I was knee-deep in the muck of misery or just wanting to laugh for a while, I knew Hilarious would deliver every single time. I’ve tried to go back to it a few times and although the artistic talent is undeniable, there is a nasty, intangible undercurrent resulting from what we now know about him as a person that makes it just a bit too much of a challenge to unreservedly enjoy, and I can’t finish it.
In retrospect, however, I feel like this was a good time for me to exit the conversational sphere surrounding comedy, because although the debate had been raging for years, this was around the time that I recall the warring factions of “political correctness in comedy” reaching fever pitch. You remember— Joe Rogan released the special that was actually fucking titled Triggered, and in retrospect I think of the themes and conversations surrounding Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette a few years later as a sort of response to it. I don’t unreservedly love Nanette in the way many people do, although I do think as a cohesive work of art it is seamless, well-constructed, and delivered with aplomb (and far stronger and more affecting than Gadsby’s follow-up), but I have beef with both sides of the proverbial Triggered vs. Nanette divide (both of which have little-to-nothing to do with the subjects explored within either comedy special in and of themselves), which I’d like to explore in brief here before diving into some other stuff on the subject of comedy in a more personal sense.
I find a distinct lack of ideological and philosophical coherence on either side of this issue, and more than that, I find a disrespect for the capital-A Art of Comedy in and of itself. But to put it in the simplest possible terms: the Triggered side lacks empathy; the Nanette side lacks courage (Gadsby herself does not lack courage, for the record; the things she reveals about herself in that special are, for lack of a better phrase, fearless); and both sides lack nuance.
The thing I find more offensive than any “offensive” joke is that certain topics are “off-limits.” I fully believe that anything can be funny, and “political correctness” is often an easy excuse to get out of exploring the ramifications and effects of language (something that all comedians should be acutely aware of, although in my experience, they rarely are). It is far from a fresh observation to say that jokes about trauma, genocide, suicide, and the like can often be the funniest jokes ever told, for a multitude of reasons: they take away the power of these subjects; laughing about horrible things brings people closer together; comedy can be historically observed as a pressure-release valve as well as a vessel through which to speak truth to power. These are all statements so obvious as to be trite (almost as trite as the toothless run-around of “punching up” vs. “punching down” in comedy), but they are timeless statements for a reason. I also don’t think comedy even necessarily needs to be Funny in the traditional sense (see: The Onion’s “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” headline, which is always the most reliable and cutting piece to emerge in the aftermath of a horrific event of American gun violence, or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is my favorite theatrical work of all time), but that’s an argument for a different newsletter.
But in order to accomplish any of these things, comedy requires empathy, courage, and nuance. Some of the best comedians of all time (including my personal favorite comedian, Mitch Hedberg) never even attempted to broach political or social satire in their work, but brandished all three of these qualities like well-honed weapons and are celebrated because of it. To be a comedian at all requires a certain degree of intelligence, work ethic, and social acuity, but to be truly great requires you to be both vector and conductor of audience expectations, to both manipulate your audience and be completely, genuinely vulnerable all at once. Even if one’s persona is that of an arrogant truth-teller or a sociopathic monster, and ironic distance is required to sell the bit, the very act of stepping onstage and asking the audience to come along with you on the journey you want to take them through— and giving them the confidence and trust to do so— is an act of vulnerability that lesser comedians do not have, even if they do reach a level of success. Comedy at its worst— both the pugilistic, “are you shocked and offended yet?” variety and the treading-so-lightly-that-no-one-could-possibly-take-umbrage-with-the-things-you-are-saying variety— spit in the face of what comedy can be at its best: the truest and most naked artistic reflection of the comedian.
There are many connotations that spring to mind when one thinks of comedy. Some people think of funny movies, some people think of sitcoms, some people think of sketch comedy shows, and some people think of stand-up. All of things and more are indeed comedy in the sense of both genre and mode, but I think of comedy as a sort of platonic ideal, consisting of three levels. (If you read my Patreon-exclusive essay about horror, it’s a sort of equivalent of the idea of the levels of terror, horror, and disgust in that genre). Comedy, in its purest sense, consists of three levels. The first two are simple: Anticipation, in which expectations are set, excitement is built, and/or a premise is established (in joke construction, this level is referred to as “the set-up”); and Delivery, in which the anticipation is given a pay-off in some form—expectations are subverted, juxtapositions are made clear, and there is an involuntary laughter response (“the punchline”). While there are zero (0) comedians who have achieved any level of success without some degree of mastery of these two levels (and laughter is, of course, one of the most subjective of all human responses), only the greatest of comedians master the third level, Humor. I don’t mean humor in the “haha funny” sense, I mean in the “mood and temperament” sense. The best comedians use the first two elements to establish the tone and atmosphere of whatever work they are constructing, and proceed to maintain (or, in the case of the truly talented) manipulate the mood throughout the entirety of their work and, knowingly or not, explore a facet or facets of the human condition with them. Whether the goal is to make people laugh or think (ugh, I can’t believe I just fucking said that), to sustain Humor throughout the course of any comedic endeavor is the most difficult thing to do. In the same way as the element of disgust makes the difference between a horror movie that has great jump scares but doesn’t leave you wanting to keep a nightlight on when you go to bed, Humor is the difference between something that makes you giggle once and something that makes you laugh so hard your head hurts and leaves you thinking of it later on— and it is the space in comedy where empathy, courage, and nuance all collide to create something truly special. Without it, you end up with lazy comedy that reinforces unhealthy societal dynamics without exploring them with any real depth, or worse, you have comedy that is actively regressive and life-denying.
I realize this is all a bit heady, so let’s examine some actual examples. For the first, let’s use this MAD Magazine cover that parodies the poster for Jaws. Whether you find this funny or not (and I don’t, really), it has the first two elements: Anticipation (the premise of Bruce the shark eating Alfred E. Neuman) and Delivery (the juxtaposition of a man-eating shark finding Alfred E. Neuman to be gross). MAD Magazine has a plethora of great and funny covers, but this is a weak one because it leaves you with nothing. You laugh or you don’t, but you’re not gonna be thinking about it ever again. In contrast, take one of my favorite satirical pieces of all time, this National Lampoon cover. You have Anticipation (why is someone holding a gun to this dog’s head? what can possibly be said that can make this awful situation funny?), you have Delivery (“If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”, which both subverts the expectation that this situation should be taken seriously and juxtaposes the use of a cute animal on the cover of a magazine to sell units with the ghastly threat of murdering a defenseless animal), and you have Humor (I don’t know about you, but this cover has always felt, to me, like a condemnation of crass and exploitative marketing as well as the way that capitalism holds basic human rights hostage in pursuit of profit and the almighty dollar. It’s a blunt and even a bit cruel piece, but behind it is empathy for the dog and the audience, the courage to confront readers with such bleak, controversial imagery, and nuance in that it can take a moment to move past the initial shock and extract a sophisticated message). This piece establishes the kind of meld of lowbrow and highbrow humor and commentary— ranging from the puerile to the insightful, often within the course of a single piece— that ultimately defined the best years of the Lampoon, even taking into account the wildly diverging and often diametrically-opposed views of the magazine’s best contributors (Anne Beatts and P.J. O’Rourke could not have more dissonant personal politics, but both were huge parts of many of the Lampoon’s best pieces).
But all published or presented comedy— whether it is a movie, a sitcom, a stand-up special, an episode of a sketch show, an improv performance, or even a really funny tweet— is distanced from the platonic ideal of comedy, by virtue of the always-insurmountable distance between humans that keeps any quality from reaching its true platonic ideal (which is universally unattainable, by its very nature). I think that at their best, sitcoms like Arrested Development, Community, and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are capable of getting close to bridging that gap, much like the films of Albert Brooks or even Judd Apatow (and I might get in trouble for this, but Woody Allen too). Sketch shows like Chappelle’s Show, In Living Color, Key & Peele, The State, Upright Citizens Brigade, and my beloved Mr. Show with Bob & David can get just a little bit closer. But the closest comedy can ever get to its purest form, to its platonic ideal, is in stand-up comedy.
Much like the question of whether or not video games are art (and they are), there should be zero question that stand-up comedy is a rich art form unto itself, filled with exploration, formalistic experimentation, and careful construction, and worthy of close critique. Even during the comedy boom of the early-mid 2010s, there was a sense that comedians were the only people capable of recognizing this and critiquing stand-up with the level of detail and insight that it deserves, and little has changed in the years since even as comedy has become more widely seen as worthy of artistic analysis (like I discussed a few weeks ago, there are multiple parallels between the concept of “elevated horror” and the “sad comedy” that have taken up so much space in Comedy Discourse). People are finally recognizing comedy’s ability to straddle multiple genres at once while still functioning within the comedic mode, despite the fact that this is not at all a new development— BoJack Horseman is representative of this in the field of animated sitcoms, although The Simpsons in its golden age was just as capable of emotional whiplash between laughter and heartbreak, while some of my favorite comedy specials of the last couple years, like Chris Gethard’s Career Suicide or Whitmer Thomas’s The Golden One, have achieved acclaim for essentially being polished representations of the tragicomic/seriocomic tone that both comedians have been working within for a decade now.
But what I want is for someone to finally say that comedy is an art form that is just as vital to the human experience as music or literature. I want people to no longer be able to deny that Chappelle’s Show is a contribution to the conversation of American race relations every bit as essential as Native Son or the work of James Baldwin. I want everyone to realize that the melancholy, gut-wrenchingly honest beauty of Neil Young’s “The Needle & the Damage Done”— “every junkie is like a setting sun”— can be found reflected in the work of Mitch Hedberg, as much as these things seem like they are irreconcilably dissimilar. The rage and effluvia and the sound and the fury and the fear and loathing of Hunter S. Thompson’s screeds from the campaign trail are not worlds apart from the spittle-flecked, coarse screams from the bowels of post-9/11 American complacence and willful ignorance found strewn throughout David Cross’s Shut Up, You Fucking Baby. Empathy, courage, and nuance— comedy isn’t just important, isn’t just necessary, it is vital and beautiful and inseparable from the human experience. Comedy isn’t tragedy plus time. Comedy is tragedy, it is joy, it is hopelessness, it is loneliness, it is faith and fear and camaraderie and it is ego and it is depression and it is self-awareness and self-consciousness and it is embarrassing and it is morbid and it is silly and it is avant-garde and it is lowbrow and it is offensive and it is undeniably, deeply, inextricably human.
Last March, the world lost Matt Pollock, who was an immensely gifted musician and imbued every musical project that they were part of— whether it was Morning Effort, Darkle, Spaceshow, or Parker Luck— with a uniquely vulnerable outlook that was so achingly personal and specific that one couldn’t help but see a part of themselves within it. They were also one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I find it to be one of the greatest tragedies in history that they were never the most famous stand-up comedian in the world. While it is no secret that funny people are often immensely troubled— it might be the single thing that comedians have all made a concerted effort to communicate to the general public over the last decade or so— Matt’s knack for turning their pains and insecurities and fears into some of the longest, funniest phone conversations I’ve ever had was nothing short of revelatory. I miss them every single day, but if there was one negative to our friendship, it was that I envied their supremely effortless sense of humor because it was doing something that I’ve only ever wished I was capable of. (This isn’t really a negative, for the record. I love you so much, Matt).
But if there’s anything that Matt always encouraged, it was being able to laugh at the worst of what life threw at you. Like many other funny people, Matt was tied down by the existential demons of an overactive mind, and I’m glad that in a way they have found peace. And if there’s one thing that I’m grateful for, it’s that thinking about them so much allowed me to unlock the part of my brain that gives me permission to find the funny in any and all shitty situations that I have ever and will ever find myself embroiled in. I don’t know if I’m going to pursue comedy as a career ever again, but I can still comfortably say that it will always be a part of me.
I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to approach this piece, so I’ve kind of been trapped in a stream-of-consciousness mode that I hope hasn’t made this too difficult to stick with. I’m not sure how well that tack will serve me going forward, but I can’t think of a way to compress all my Thoughts And Feelings about my personal history with comedy in any other way, let alone a more easily digestible way. So here’s some haphazard, unformed discussion on a collection of funny things and people that have changed my life.
GEORGE CARLIN AND RICHARD PRYOR
I know I’m cheating by putting two comics in one spot, but in my mind, these two men and their impact on me are impossible to separate from each other. I fell in love with these two in middle school through a combination of unfiltered Internet access and my parents’ affection for them; the material that both comedians put out in the 70s and 80s became an inseparable element of my worldview as a kid. Anyone who thinks that Rick & Morty or BoJack Horseman invented the concept of comedy-as-therapy has never heard Richard Pryor’s Live On the Sunset Strip, where he turns what was probably the worst night of his life— an incident where he set himself on fire after spending several days freebasing coke— into arguably the greatest stand-up of all time. Anyone who thinks that “political correctness has ruined comedy” just doesn’t want to admit that they’re incapable of exploring English language with anything even vaguely resembling the dexterity of Carlin, who challenged and interrogated the way that we communicate with such deftness and depth that linguists should feel embarrassed. Both men top “best stand-ups of all time” lists with such regularity that talking about them at all is a cliche in and of itself, but they’ve left me with so many invaluable insights that it would be disingenuous not to mention them here.
THE ONION
America’s Finest News Source has been home to some of the darkest and most fearless sociopolitical satire in the history of American comedy. Their peak, to me, is inarguably “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighter All These Years,” which is so ruthless in its efficiency that it should be in a museum somewhere. When I was in high school I analyzed their articles for a current-events project in English class and was eventually told that I would no longer be allowed to do so. Their website was my browser default for years. I haven’t regularly read them in a long time, but they irrevocably changed the way I consumed the news and current events, and The Onion trained me to question the narrative presented to me by news, culture, and entertainment with unrelenting scrutiny. Cynical? Maybe. Wrong? Rarely. It’s one of the few works of written comedy that I think rivals the best stand-ups in platonic comedy purity.
BILL HICKS
Look, I was fifteen just like everyone else, okay? Not all of Hicks’s material feels necessary in the years after his passing, as his interrogations of commercial artifice and conventional morality was an express product of Reagan and H.W. America, but as neoliberal rot and unrestrained capitalism have continued to wreak havoc on the world at large, that side of Hicks’s outlook has aged like fine wine. “If you work in advertising, kill yourself” is even more of a vital refrain as advertising has infiltrated every aspect of American life, and even as society has slowly become more accepting of recreational drug use, his repudiation of the War on Drugs still resonates now that awareness of the destruction it has had on marginalized communities is greater than it’s ever been.
MR. SHOW WITH BOB & DAVID
No other sketch comedy show of the 90s can lay claim to influencing the modern comedy landscape as much as Mr. Show, from the sheer intelligence of its tightly-structured episodes (collections of sketches that more often than not revolved around a central thematic idea and flowed into and out of each other with the smoothness of a Möbius strip) to the fact that Bob Odenkirk’s championing of Tim & Eric has resulted in the biggest changes to the rulebook that comedy has seen in the past 30 years. But even without the legacy it’s had— from David Cross’s first two stand-up albums, which stand as some of the most incisive commentary of the George W. Bush era, to Comedy Bang Bang or Abso Lutely— Mr. Show would still hold an irreplaceable spot in my heart because of sketches like “Audition,” “The Story of Everest,” “The New KKK,” “Joke: The Musical,” and dozens, if not hundreds, of others, all of which completely upended traditional sketch comedy mores and actively deconstructed their own jokes while still being screamingly funny in their own right. Again, while stand-up is still the closest I think we can get to Platonic Comedy, Mr. Show stands as one of the boldest and most effective missives from the world of sketch.
BO BURNHAM
I wouldn’t blame someone one bit for being turned off from Burnham if all they’d seen of him was his early work (which often featured extremely over-labored puns and disconnected one-liners within and around choppy songs that relied a bit too much on his youthfulness to excuse lazy shock-humor), or his fanbase, which consists of some of the most annoying smol bean losers in the world. But things changed a bit with 2011’s Words Words Words— the weaknesses were still apparent, but songs like “What’s Funny” and “Art Is Dead” were watershed moments. They established a uniquely self-aware tone that juggled ironic detachment with deep emotional resonance, and a half-arrogant, half-cripplingly-self-deprecating delivery that foreshadowed genuine, genre-defying greatness to come. He fulfilled that promise with 2013’s what. and 2016’s Make Happy, which are two of my favorite stand-up specials of all time. No one puts together a show as thematically dense and conceptually airtight as Burnham, and throughout all his bloody, vicious attacks on others, he always makes sure that he himself bears the brunt of the scorn. The fact that he’s only 30 just made me even more jealous of him growing up.
CHRIS GETHARD AND MARIA BAMFORD
I’m cheating again, and I don’t even have the excuse of a subconscious connection between these two from childhood, but Maria Bamford and Chris Gethard have both done so much to challenge and improve my approach to my own mental health issues that it’s difficult for me to examine them separately. They are completely distinct comic voices— Gethard is one of the most adept, disarmingly honest, considerate, and engrossing storytellers on the circuit, while Bamford combines surreal, absurdist premises with extreme (to the point of discomfort) formalistic experimentation (best exemplified on The Special Special Special!) and rapid-fire impressions to create a bizarre hybrid of Bob Newhart’s conversation-comedy and one-woman show in which she explores mental health and familial dysfunction with unprecedented veracity and candor. Both of them have produced utterly arresting and aggressively unorthodox television work (The Chris Gethard Show and Lady Dynamite, respectively) but it’s in their stand-up that I think they shine best. Gethard’s Career Suicide is one of the most inspiring, hopeful, and beautiful stage productions I’ve ever seen in my life, made even more impressive by his winsome and unflinching comic voice. Meanwhile, all of Bamford’s material is great, but I think she reached her peak with Ask Me About My New God!, which is one of the most idiosyncratic and unmistakably personal comedy sets ever pressed to record.
MITCH HEDBERG
And to finish off this edition of the newsletter, I can’t imagine a better conclusion than an ode to Mitch Hedberg, who I hold in rare regard as the single greatest stand-up comedian of all time. There is no social critique here, no heartbreakingly honest soul-bearing, nor even any extended bits. Hedberg was a pure one-liner comic in the tradition of Steven Wright, but what he did with that format— that no one else could— was communicate his utterly singular worldview with every single joke. His persona was charming precisely because of its utter lack of premeditation or performative distance. He had to wear sunglasses when he was onstage because he would get so nervous that he had to close his eyes, but his voice, silly and staccato and infectious, completely owned the room as he delivered one beautifully absurdist and fat-free punchline after another. “Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.” “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.” “My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.” All of these jokes are so simple, so completely lacking in pretension or labor, it comes as no surprise that so many of Hedberg’s friends and colleagues have said that he was never “off.” He wrote so many jokes that it seemed like this was the only way his brain could work. There was no Mitch Hedberg and Mitch Hedberg, Comedian. There was just Mitch. And that’s what made him so pure, and so tragic. There’s no “Mitch was.” Mitch is comedy. Comedy is Mitch.
You know, I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just gonna ask them where they’re going and hook up with ‘em later.
-xoxo, Ellie
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