At Donald Trump’s hate rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024, the conservative standup comedian Tony Hinchcliffe amused the MAGA faithful with his witticisms about, among other topics dear to the far right, Latinos. “These Latinos,” he said, “they love making babies, just know that. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” He also called Puerto Rico, much to the delight of the Trumpers, “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” Guess you had to be there.
Predictably, Democrats and even a handful of Republicans were outraged, but I what all the furor was about. A moronic comedian reliably delivered the bigotry and tribalism demanded by Trump’s “base”. What were Democrats expecting – a rousing defense of Burkean conservatism couched in sparkling comedic aphorisms? The Trump campaign operatives knew what they were doing. They hired a comedic goon to pander to the worst instincts of the target audience. For that purpose, no vehicle could have served better than standup comedy.
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Right, left, or center: whether political, apolitical or merely scatological, standup comedy exists, at least in part, to pander. That’s the part that interests me. The other part – intelligent, observational standup comedy for grownups – isn’t where the money is. Until he was cancelled a few years ago, Louis C.K., whom many devotees of the art considered one of their best and brightest, not least for his fearless willingness to take on forbidden topics, was one of the chief panderers. Even his (partial) cancellation for private behavior was consistent with his professional shtick: He just couldn’t stop talking about masturbation. What follows is a representative monologue from a filmed performance in 2015. The subject is “rats fucking” on a New York City subway platform:
It was a pretty standard rat fuck. Just . . he’s on top kinda squishing her into the pavement … And I’m watching ‘em, cuz I wanted to know what is it going to be like when he cums. That’s what I wanted to know. What is it like when a rat cums?
Girl rats don’t cum. There’s no way the girl gets to cum when rats fuck. First of all, he’s not going to hold out for her; he’s not that kinda dude. You can tell. He doesn’t give a shit, he’s gonna fuck her and leave her, he doesn’t even know her name. He’s not sitting there waiting for her, trying to think of things to not cum … Cuz I know what girl rats need. I know how to make a girl rat cum. I do. You just pick ‘em up and hold ‘em upside down and just [gestures]. Just to be clear, what I was doing there, I just want to be sure you know, I spit in her mouth while I played with her little asshole.
Hilarious, no? The audience at this performance, Louis C.K.: Live at the Comedy Store, thought so. What they were laughing at remains a mystery to me, but at a guess, I’d say the humor derives from in-group psychology and the breaking of taboos. Wow, Louis C.K. is talking about rats fucking! Isn’t that outrageous? Isn’t that bold, ballsy, and defiant? Don’t we have the satisfaction of knowing that stiffs like the writer of this essay can only tsk tsk pathetically?
Those fans are on to something. It’s essentially a matter of being in on the joke. The outrageousness of the topic goes a long way toward compensating for the absence of wit. Of course, it could be argued that the above transcript misrepresents the mastery of Louis C.K.’s delivery – his timing, body language, responsiveness to his audience – all those intangibles that, we’re told again and again, make standup comedy the most challenging and demanding of popular art forms. That may be. And yet, I find watching a Louis C.K. monologue even more depressing than reading a transcript of one. Then again, I’m a stiff.
What’s so terrible about appreciating bad taste in standup comedy or belonging to the very large community that shares that taste? Aside from the risk of slight intellectual debasement and moral degradation, nothing very much, and the argument I’m making is not directed at standup comedy fans. I’m not about to dissuade anyone from laughing at the jokes of Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, Dave Chapelle, or anyone else, nor would I want to.
Still, there must be a few other people out there (I’ve met one or two) who find this stuff as repugnant as I do. You’re not alone. If you remain stone-faced through, let’s say, Louis C.K.’s chatter about the projectile quality of male ejaculation (or “cum”, as he prefers to call it), maybe the problem isn’t you. To borrow a favored tag line of stand-up comics, I’m just sayin’.
In much standup comedy, there is an us-versus-them quality that accounts for its pervasive self-congratulation: we, the honest, unpretentious, unshockable common folk; they, the uptight, humorless straights. This sort of conspiratorial winking was (aside from the racism) virtually the whole of Tony Hinchcliffe’s shtick at the Trump hate rally, except that the humorless straights were explicitly and exclusively identified as liberals.
Crass Camaraderie
How do you get the audience on your side? You flatter them, even when you’re pretending to challenge them. I’m sure many stand-up comics really do consider themselves incorruptible truth-tellers, but that doesn’t stop them from sucking up to the customers. Ricky Gervais, a far more humane and, I believe, amusing performer than Louis C.K., is hardly above such pandering. His 2018 performance film Ricky Gervais: Humanity closes with a joke about “cunts”, or rather, his appalled reaction to a fan who objected to his use of that word.
The joke is that on his Twitter account he had registered a protest about a viral video showing two “cunts”, as he called them, flaying a dog alive in China, whereupon a female fan tweeted back, “Is that language necessary?” Well, yes, in the context of animal torture, that objection does seem a bit sniffy, but then, that woman wasn’t in an auditorium of 3,000 rabid Ricky Gervais fans paying for the privilege (or the illusion) of being taken into the confidence of a comedic superstar. Would she have laughed had she been among them? Possibly. I laugh at some stupid shit too.
Outside of that congregation of true believers, what serves as a comic punch line might seem a fair and even necessary question. After all, Ricky Gervais might have made the same laudable point on his Twitter account about animal cruelty without using the “C” word – even allowing for its much greater frequency in British English – that women have reason to find objectionable. So I ask the same question as that supposedly clueless woman on Twitter who obstinately refused to get the more significant point: Is that language necessary?
Fortunately, American comedians have a euphemism for that word: “pussy”. A governing assumption of standup comedy, as practiced in this country, seems to be that the word “pussy”, repeated as often as possible (by female comics no less than males), may be counted on to bring down the house. At any given moment, a comedian may be floundering, may be dying up there, but a few good pussy jokes can suffice to salvage an act otherwise going down in flames. Chris Rock, who never flounders, nonetheless gets a lot of mileage out of that word, as in this riff about “commitment or new pussy”:
Commitment or new pussy – that is the question. Commitment or new pussy. You know, commitment will give you a headache every now and then. New pussy always clears the mind … But you got to think about the long term. In the long term, if I’m sick, is new pussy gonna take care of me? No. If I’m hungry, is new pussy gonna feed me? New pussy can’t cook! If I got a baby, is new pussy gonna teach him to read? New pussy’s illiterate! So I got to come back to commitment and turn this old pussy into new pussy. That’s right, I got to recycle the pussy.
“Soooo true”, “amazingly wise”, “iconic”: thus, some of the comments left by admirers of the YouTube clip where this monologue can be found. Like I said (another favored standup locution!), you’re in on the joke, or you’re not. Where others hear eternal wisdom expressed by one of America’s reigning wits, I hear a litany of stupid pussy jokes.
Standup comedy is not the place for nuance. I get it. To use still another cliché much favored by practitioners of the art. A judicious balancing of antitheses, a due consideration of countervailing opinions, won’t leave them rolling in the aisles. The form itself is all provocation and no complexity, which isn’t a drawback if the provocation is genuinely insightful, as it is (sometimes) in the routines of Dave Chapelle, for example. There’s an overlap, however, a seepage of standup aggression into public and even private life, which is why standup comedy casts a long shadow.
It’s no secret that the cruelty and mockery of Donald Trump’s debased “oratory” has much in common with the style of certain gonzo comedians and especially with the comedic extravagance of professional wrestling. He’s a vile and ignorant man; also, he’s kinda funny. Furthermore, we live in an era dominated by pop culture. If there ever was an opposition between high and low culture, it has long since been resolved: low culture won in a rout. Intellectuals like to talk about “discourse”. Well, pop culture is the discourse, or at least the discourse that gets heard, and standup comedy largely sets the tone. You can’t shut it out even if want to.
Take George Carlin. Please, take George Carlin! A much-revered father figure to the current generation of standup comics, he saw ugliness and stupidity everywhere in American life and did his best to add to them. Here’s a riff from his 2005 television performance film Life Is Worth Losing:
Say what you want about America, land of the free, home of the brave, we got some dumb-ass motherfuckers floatin’ around this country, dumb-ass motherfuckers, yeah. Now obviously that doesn’t include this audience, I understand that. You seem intelligent and perceptive, but the rest of them, holy jumpin’ fuckin’ shitballs – dumber than a second coat of paint! …
Have you seen some of the people in this country, have you taken a good look at some of these big fat motherfuckers walkin’ around, big fat motherfuckers? Oh my God, huge piles of redundant protoplasm lumbering through the malls like a fleet of interstate busses. The people in this country are immense – massive bellies, monstrous thighs, and big fat fuckin’ asses. And if you stand there for a minute and you look at one of them, you look at one of them, you begin to wonder, How does this woman take a shit?
For an ostensibly populist performer working in a populist medium, George Carlin was remarkably de haute en bas. Why didn’t he implicate himself (or his audience) in this condemnation of ordinary Americans going about their daily lives? The first principle of social criticism is recognizing one’s involvement in the social system that one is criticizing. At times, Carlin sounded like the Ayatollah raving about the Great Satan or the worst kind of Euro-snob recoiling in distaste from the deplorable tackiness of the American populace. Present audience excepted, of course. No, he unctuously told them, “You seem intelligent and perceptive.” How would he have known? Because they were at a George Carlin performance.
Standup Comedy Ain’t Jazz
If it wasn’t enough to mock overweight, working-class women for being overweight, working-class women, George Carlin also gave us this zinger: “Holy jumpin’ fuckin’ shitballs!” That magical incantation typifies yet another depressing aspect of standup comedy: its linguistic poverty. True, the delivery is vitally important, but the fundamental resource of any standup comedian is language. Why do almost all standup comedians treat the English language like an annoying ex they can’t quite get rid of, one whose overfamiliarity requires no special consideration or forethought?
The analogy is often made to jazz. That is; a good standup comic is like a jazz musician, improvising ingeniously on a firm structural foundation. Yes, but jazz instrumentalists are actually good at music, whereas most standup comedians have no ear whatsoever for language. For some standup comedians, any hint of eloquence would mar the spurious authenticity they seek to convey by making stage language sound as boring and banal as off-stage language. For most, however, it’s probably less a conscious policy than an instinct: they really are no good at language and have little or no appreciation of words and idioms in and of themselves.
George Carlin, as it happened, was something of an exception to this rule. Now and then, he came up with a jazz-like fugue on a theme, as when he complained that “Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today: a shopping mall, a big fucking shopping mall,” and followed that complaint with an inventory of strip-mall America: “You got the car lots, the gas stations, muffler shops, laundromats, cheap hotels, fast-food joints, strip clubs and dirty bookstores – America the Beautiful, one big transcontinental cesspool.”
Aside from awakening my nostalgia for vernacular American architecture (not quite Carlin’s intention), this screed reminds me of what is almost entirely missing in standup comedy: the music of words and the magic of how they fit together. Is that asking too much? Well, standup comedians do little but talk. It might help if they talked better than the average garrulous barroom bore.
So no, standup comedy is not the place for nuance, nor is it the place for any but the most trite and tiresome variety of spoken English. It is, however, the place for endless jokes about shitting and farting. Why shouldn’t it be? At least since Aristophanes, comedy has made a special effort to disabuse us of any excessively lofty notions about human dignity we might entertain. However noble our aspirations are, we’re still sacks of decaying flesh carrying putrefaction in our guts. It’s useful to be reminded of that now and then. I just wish the reminders weren’t so utterly devoid of wit.
Wit-Less
Then again, for some comedians, wit isn’t the point. The point is to find humor in the opposite of wit – in deliberate tastelessness and an infantile fascination with bodily function, as in this Amy Schumer monologue (from her 2017 performance film Amy Schumer: The Leather Special) about an attack of food poisoning that she and her boyfriend suffered in a small Paris hotel room:
So it hits him first. And he’s in there [makes vomiting noises]. And then, the way it manifests itself in me is – how do I say this and not be gross? – I was in the bathroom just like [makes shitting noises] machine gun shitting out of my ass. Violent diarrhea … He’s fucking puking, he’s putting his head right where I was [shitting noises]. And then I thought I was just going to be the one, the shit one, he was the puke one, but I’m in there and I’m [shitting noises] and then he hears me go, “Fuck!” and I grab the trash can and I start [vomiting noises], all my holes, like shit’s coming out, all my holes, and then I realize there’s holes in the bottom of the trash can I’m puking in.
The key line here is, “How do I say this and not be gross?” Being gross is the substance of the whole shtick, almost the substance of Amy Schumer’s whole career. Still, it’s worth remembering that Jonathan Swift was sometimes gross, François Rabelais was gross, and William S. Burroughs was gross. Indeed, there’s a long literary tradition of grossness as a sort of perverse poetry, as negative transcendence, or at the very least as a corrective to human vanity. Amy Schumer doesn’t belong to that tradition. She belongs to the tradition of grossing people out because she truly can’t think of anything else.
To give Amy Schumer the benefit of the doubt, talking like a potty-mouthed 12-year-old might conceivably serve a larger social purpose. I don’t really believe this, but here goes: If standup comedy is all provocation and no complexity, it is also, in psychoanalytic terms, all id and no superego. Laughing at endless streams of scatological free association liberates us, temporarily, from the burden of adulthood, from the strain of repression that adult life requires of us.
Like medieval carnival, standup comedy turns the world upside down: the fools and jesters are in charge. Carnival ends, the comedian puts down her microphone, and after a brief and therapeutic spree of anarchy, order is restored. Possibly. Or possibly that Amy Schumer’s routine is exactly what it seems: inane toilet jokes for people who will laugh at anything.
Standup Comedy That’s Really Not Funny
After being slimed by Amy Schumer or Louis C.K., I feel almost cleansed listening to the righteously progressive standup comedy of someone like Hannah Gadsby. Admittedly, she’s not very funny; being so relentlessly on the side of the angels tends to dampen the humor. To her credit, however, she repeatedly questions the nature and purpose of standup comedy, and at various points in her 2018 performance film, Nanette, speaks openly about giving up her act completely. As she acknowledges, she tells jokes for a living. That’s just the problem:
Standup comedy has suspended me in a perpetual adolescence. The way I’ve been telling that story [that is, the story of her coming out as a lesbian in rural Tasmania] is through jokes. And stories, unlike jokes, need three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Jokes have two parts: a beginning and a middle. And what I’ve done with that comedy show about coming out, was I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma part. And I sealed it off into jokes.
Exactly. However obscenely reified it may be imagined, however socially fraught it may be rendered, the human condition does not reduce to a punchline. I know perfectly well that there are standup comedians out there who tell intelligent jokes, attempt to subvert the status quo, and use comedy to illuminate the absurdities of everyday life and the injustices of the world. I just don’t think those comedians are particularly funny or interesting. When you come down to it, they’re still just telling jokes. The bad stuff these standup comedians talk about – which is most of it – is so bad that it simply stupefies me that anyone could laugh at it.
Whether it’s assault comedy of the lowest common denominator or something you could take your mother to see, there seems to be something fatally flawed about the whole form. Standup comedy is at its best when it’s embedded in the fabric of ordinary life – stories, not jokes, to borrow Hannah Gadsby’s formulation. Even Louis C.K. at times achieved something striking and truthful with his television series Louie, which has believable characters confronted with the sort of semi-comic excruciations that tend to arise in real life.
What do you do when you take your two small children to visit a fondly remembered aunt who turns out to be a racist? How do you handle social conceptions of manliness when an obnoxious punk humiliates you in front of your date? I don’t know, nor does Louis C.K., but in addressing these issues, he engages my interest beyond any amount of supposed comic yammering about male masturbation. He even manages to be, in these mini-tragicomedies of social and psychological character formation, what he is emphatically not on stage: funny.
In principle, I ought to be drawn to performers who engage less puerile subjects with a satirical or absurdist slant. The problem here is that such performers tend to be, well, not very funny. Again, the problem is with the form. The standup comedian has to keep ‘em laughing at any cost, even when the laughs diminish what might be an insightful take on a substantive topic. In Aziz Ansari: Live at Madison Square Garden (2015), the comedian tells a long and touching story about his immigrant mother’s first day in America:
She’s in this small apartment, it’s empty, she didn’t know what to do, and she felt so scared. I was like, ‘What did you do that first day?’ She’s like, ‘I didn’t know what to do, I was all alone, your dad was at work the whole day, and I just sat on the couch and I cried.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so sad, how did you get through that’” And she’s like, ‘It was just one of those moments when I knew I had to be brave and figure it out. You ever had moments like that, Aziz, when you were so scared but you knew you had to be brave and figure it out?’
Nothing more need be said. Even in the slack and lazy idiom of standup language (never say “I said” or “she said” when you can say “I’m like” or “she’s like”), Ansari makes this oft-told story of immigrant striving and struggle memorable and moving. No, it’s not funny and doesn’t need to be. Yet, Ansari is a standup comedian, and so he pushes ahead to the comic payoff: a feeble laugh wholly incommensurate with the poignant simplicity of everything he has just been telling us:
And I was like, [pause], ‘No! My life is super easy, cuz you did all the struggling, so my shit’s really easy.’ I’m not gonna have any struggles to tell my kids about. What’s my story gonna be like? ‘Oh, son, once when I was flying from New York to L.A., my iPad died.’
Well, I appreciate the effort. Imagine what Amy Schumer might have said about her mother. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. She said it quite directly in a comic riff that might be said to touch a nadir of casually monstrous cruelty:
My mom’s a cunt … She’s always bragging about the dumbest stuff. The other day she was telling me, she’s like, “You know, I can still fit in my wedding dress.” I was like, “Oh my God, who cares, right?”
In “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” a notorious takedown of detective and mystery fiction published in the New Yorker in 1945, the great literary critic Edmund Wilson summoned his readers to a definitive repudiation of what he considered a worthless genre. “With so many fine books to be read, so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish,” Wilson concluded.
About standup comedy, I make no such declaration. I merely assert that it’s perfectly reasonable not to like it, that you don’t have to be a hopeless prig to find it, in the words of Shakespeare’s guileless pedant Holofernes, responding to the coarse jesting of the arrogant nobles at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost, “not generous, not gentle, not humble.”