Comedy, or stand-up misanthropy?
Life can be pretty tough at times, and humour can help to release the tension that builds up from the resulting stress. But do we have to denigrate and marginalise others to feed our humour?
There are many circumstances that we can find humourous, but often that humour is a spontaneous reaction to circumstances resulting from just going about our lives, and is triggered by something that seems anomalous or odd about a particular scenario.
A lot of scenarios involve us laughing at ourselves as we stumble at handling our lives. The laughter helps us to lift ourselves out of the possibly depressing realisation that we cannot always be on top of what is happening in our lives, and that we are not perfect in all the choices that we make. In recounting some of those scenarios, others are entertained, and for those that can do that well, that can be the start to them having a special reserved place as a stress-reliever to the rest of us.
Of course, there are not always enough circumstances just spontaneously happening in our lives that we find enough humour to carry us through. While we can always keep harking back to previous humourous times, some can make up circumstances that we can find amusing, and we call them comedians. They have entertained us by performing/acting out scenes repeatedly, changing to be more topically relevant so that they don't become stale.
However, manufacturing humour can have a sinister side. There are not always a preponderance of humourous circumstances, and while we can laugh at ourselves, it does expose our weaknesses. But we can laugh at others, especially those we don't identify with, as that doesn't expose us to being laughed at. Comedy then becomes a way to reinforce group identity, but at the expense of others outside the group. For those that want to have a career in comedy, there is a lucrative plethora of others to denigrate without alienating their own patrons.
With mass media, and a mass of people trying to get our attention, comedians have a lot of competition, especially from the plethora of amateurs on YouTube and social media. One way they seek to differentiate themselves is to be more aggressive about who they direct their humour at, becoming known for the people and topics they focus on. This is how they brand themselves, and so become a defined and marketable commodity, hopefully giving themselves a perpetual career.
But with scaling up to mass media sizes, we have created an industry that feeds off denigrating masses of people, setting them up as easy targets for many others to use to their own advantage. What has been a means to ease our pressures has been weaponised against people. Many comedians seem to have no real empathy for their targets, and so aggressively berate them, and we, in laughing along, become complicit in alienating our fellow human beings, and lose our own empathy.
We are now seeing many push back against such misanthropy, leading many comedians to cry that a cancel culture
is out to get them. This is irony, because these same comedians have been using the cancel culture
shtick as their modus operandi of their whole career.
A recent trend among comedians is to put down those who have called them out by labelling them too politically correct or social justice warriors
, as if standing up for the maginalised and disadvantaged is somehow an attack on their freedom. They still get to peddle their misanthropy, but maybe not so many people are buying it anymore.
So, what sort of humour does not create such misanthropy? Well, it seems that those who do not use others as the foils of their humour, but use themselves, tend to be less aggressive, but also allow us to see ourselves in them, in those suituations where we have not been masters of our universe, but just human beings fumbling our way through life, trying to make the best of it.
At this point, I would like to give an example of one comedian who, to me, really exemplifies the pathos of daily life, and generally without using others' misfortune. That is Jimeoin, an Irish-Australian who uses the minutae of life to highlight the everyday circumstances that bedevil our existance, but that do not get us down enough that we cannot laugh at ourselves.
We are trained from early on to think about what we say before we open our mouths. Becoming an adult does not mean that we forego those lessons. There is something known as right speech that seeks to create truth and healing, rather than the hurt that a lot of so-called comedy seeks to inflict. As an adult, we can and should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Political comedyβ³
Many try to use comedy to make political statements, but are they really effective?
This section was prompted by a discussion between Chris Hedges and Lee Camp regarding the compromises that comedians have to make in order to ply their trade. While they were serious about there being a place for comedy in bringing about political change, I suspect that that is a delusion.
Writers, comedy or otherwise, have sort of believed that the pen is supposedly mightier than the sword, or at least hope there is some truth in that. However, the truth is that words just encapsulate an idea, and the idea has no real power until millions take it to heart and believe in it enough to live it in their lives and fight for it. The bigger the idea, the longer it takes to gain the critical amount of believers to make it a reality. On the contrary, the pen is not mightier than the sword, but needs lots of swords to make the difference that the words promise.
The real issue with comedy as a political weapon it that it is hijacking the real need for people to relax and enjoy themselves amongst all their stresses to point them at something bigger to get stressed over. Regardless of how important that bigger thing may be, it is betraying the promise of comedy. Not only that, it undermines tackling that thing because it gives the illusion that the comedy is effective in doing that, essentially because it supposedly raised the issues, but offers no plan of action that would actually bring about change. Laughter is not an action plan!
The conflation of comedy with political awareness weakens both. People have more to stress over, but no wiser about how to change it, which would mean that comedians would have to find other topics to rant about. There's a sort of opening for endless comedic milking of situations that really need to be addressed, but never do because people have been distracted by laughing about them. Awareness supposedly opens the door to action, but only if people are shown clear paths they can take to effect change. Thus, political comedians are effectively fooling themselves and their audiences.
Use comedy to allow ourselves to be less stressful, but then later use that space of lesser stress to actually think about and take actions that really change the situations and circumstances that create those stresses in the first place. Otherwise such so-called comedy is just training us to accept the status quo, just because we are relieved enough to cope, but not enough to change. Comedy is a coping mechanism, not a change mechanism, and in pretending that it is the latter, it is failing us.
Comedy has become a commodity that we outsource, but we have to learn to find it within ourselves if we are to really learn to conquer our anxieties so that we can make the changes that actually improve our lives. We cannot outsource everything just because our economic systems rely upon that to create addictive cycles of dependency that rob us of our agency so that we can be exploited. Humour is stress release, but nothing more. It has its place, and we can respect that by not expecting it to fight our battles for us.
However, given all that, a comedian who seems to find a balance is Tadhg Hickey, who uses comedy to present the stark simplicity behind some modern seemingly intractable conflicts, but dispenses with it when presenting the details of their arguments. They seem to understand the dividing line between comedy and action. Their comedy is short and stark, but their serious expositions are straight down the line without such distractions so that the message is heard clearly.