Stop Killing Comedy or You’ll Kill Us All
Time travel to my past to understand why laughing now will save our future
Time travel to my past to understand why laughing now will save our future
Last week, Facebook censored a satirical post a friend of mine wrote and it pissed him — and me — off.
I’m saving it for the very end because I don’t want the content — and your reaction to it — to shade your understanding of this essay. In these hyper-partisan times, I feel this is unfortunately necessary.
Like a lot of you, I’m really disheartened by the state of the world right now. And that means when I’m not crying about it, the best thing I can do is laugh.
Watching America from my home in Japan, especially over the past decade, has increased my concern that our world is losing its sense of humor.
What happens when we make it harder to laugh? Well, speaking for myself as a 47-year-old dude, when I’ve been in situations I found disturbing and absurd but I wasn’t allowed to laugh, I’ve felt one of two emotional reactions rise up: anger or depression.
Not to worry, if humor isn’t an option I vow that my anger would at least be creative. Perhaps I’d raise an Avatar-esque platoon of poorly trained, masked monkeys to rage against all machines (including machines disguised as humans).
And I vow that my depression would never lead me to choose suicide, especially the way the locals often do it, which is to jump in front of a train.
(Maybe I’d just ask someone else to push me.)
Was that comment funny? You decide.
Is this all hyperbole? Maybe so, maybe not.
Humor Is Essential To Remain Human … And Free
Laugh a little, would ya? No, I’m not going to go Jeb Bush on you and beg for laughter at my silly jokes. And while I know times are super challenging right now and it’s hard to feel light, that makes it all the more essential. How do we defeat the darkness if we are always in a dark mood?
“It’s the duty of a comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” — George Carlin
The 2015 documentary, “Can We Take a Joke?” digs deep into this topic with some of America’s top comedians, revealing this was an issue before the Trump years made us all too serious for our own health.
It’s “not in [students’] political views but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. … You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” — comedian Chris Rock in early 2015
While this post was born out of censorship of satire on a tech platform, Rock’s comment was specifically about college campuses.
College campuses? No comedians? Or only safe comedians? Does that mean we “make America great again” by taking comedy back to when Bob Hope got a platform but Lenny Bruce did not? Really?
And the thing is, this time the crackdown is mostly being called for by those who call themselves progressives. Is this really progress?
I’m training my monkeys and finding a train track just thinking about a world of Hope but no Bruce.
You see, I’m a Gen Xer and back in my millennium, well, things were different. I walked to my Los Angeles college uphill both ways in the snow in my deerskin moccasins and comedians were allowed on college campuses and sometimes treated us students like dirt.
I didn’t necessarily like that, but I accepted it because free speech was, and is, sacrosanct. A core American — no — core human value.
And besides, if a person being paid (or not) to crack jokes to college kids isn’t allowed to speak freely, what hope for free speech anywhere?
Will America become like Hong Kong?
Over the past several years, citizens of that global city have been protesting the increasingly totalitarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And the world has been cheering them on. Even so, those citizens are in the process of losing those rights. In fact, people who have criticized China — from anywhere — now have their freedom threatened if they transfer through the busy hub of Hong Kong international airport.
And of course, criticism in the form of satire and humor is also included in the things the CCP will not allow.
Again, will America become like Hong Kong?
Hyperbole? Maybe so, maybe not.
Hop In My DeLorean With Me, Would Ya?
The purple door opens and the yellow flames fire into the heavens, announcing your (and my) arrival: August 31, 1991, the University of Southern California.
Students are filtering in a shuffle toward the center of campus, near the Tommy Trojan statue.
You follow.
You arrive and — WTF?!? — Chris Rock is about to go on stage! But — huh? — nobody seems to pay him much attention.
“So, Rock’s not big yet,” you whisper to me.
“Nope,” I respond. “And it’s also before rock n roll went on life support.”
You don’t know what I’m on about, but hey, I’m Gen X and at least I have a sweet time machine. Besides, Rock’s ready to roll and this is before he’s Rock!
You watch the set and count: 543 fucks, 291 shits, 76 assholes and 8 pansy asses later and — phew! — the set is finally over.
Funny thing is lots of people had laughed. Not everyone, but enough. And those that didn’t had just casually chatted or looked a bit bored; nobody seemed ready to make a stink to the event organizers.
Different standards, you think, perhaps a bit disgusted but whatever. Time travel’s educational even without working smartphones.
Suddenly your host, 47-year-old me, pulls you out of the crowd where you’d been hoping to see some sort of early 1990s relic like Vanilla Ice but it’s time to go.
Back into the DeLorean, I tell you to set the controls for April 17, 1993.
You aim the DeLorean north (avoiding the goggling eyes of the shuffling students), honk the horn to scatter the others like sickly seagulls and — blast off! — you reach 88 mph and those 1.21 jigowatts of power send you to the future, where the car fishtails across a fortunately uncrowded Jefferson Boulevard and screeches to a stop in front of some off-campus pizzeria.
Your host is in Doc Brown mode— “hurry! hurry!” — and you rush into the place, where the host grabs two chairs on the side of a stage and proclaims, with a clap of his hands, “Perfect!”
He materializes a ratty $20 bill, slaps it in your hand and says, “Please go get us a pitcher and order a pizza, would ya?”
Soon the beers are flowing and, when the pizza comes, it’s okay, but you catch enough of a buzz in time for comedy amateur hour.
Oh joy, you think, if Chris Rock couldn’t make me laugh …
Perhaps it’s the beer, but the comedians aren’t that bad.
An hour or so in, you’re starting to wonder if your host is still in a hurry when a young black guy with a high-pitched voice jumps on stage. 10 minutes into his profanity-laced routine, your host leans over and says, “This! Pay attention to this!!”
You do.
And it’s much worse than Rock.
Some skinny, scraggly blonde-haired, blue-eyed white guy had been hollering at the comedian — a bit obnoxious, but not mean-spirited.
The comedian, though, doesn’t care. He’s found his target and lets the guy have it: “What, just because you are some honky ass white dude with a BMW and a silver spoon in his ass, you think you can take me? Do ya? You ain’t shit, honky. Nah, just some loud-mouthed, weak-ass white guy with money to protect him. Fuckin’ honky ... nothin’ to ya.”
The white dude starts to fire back but it’s not getting any better. Besides, he doesn’t have the mic so he just sits there and takes the comedian’s abuse. It gets a whole lot worse. It gets to the point where you think the white dude may have some tears in his eyes but he’s trying to keep his composure because he’s with a girl …
“We’ve seen enough,” your host slurs, and you both stumble into the night and fortunately, with enough plutonium remaining, the DeLorean brings you home.
In case you hadn’t guessed, that honky was me.
The Moral of this Tale
Now that you are back in front of your computer screen in the future, well, I’ll level with ya: I made up the comedian’s dialogue. Hopefully, you’ll cut me some slack: I was drunk and it was 27 years ago!
But the details aren’t important. What matters is I remember two things: The words hurt and, after the show, I didn’t do anything about it. Mostly just forgot about it and moved on.
Was that the right move? You tell me.
I think it was.
The Grief of The Rat Race Is Real
Now, in recent weeks, I’ve been processing some heavy grief from those 1990s “LA years,” which got a whole lot worse than being smacked down by an amateur comedian. Much of that grief went beyond words, yet I don’t want to minimize the fact that words can hurt and sometimes that hurt can take time to heal.
I believe our fast-paced culture makes it hard to process grief. We’ve got to stay in the rat race to survive, so when we get hurt we find ways to ignore that pain and often stuff it deep inside. Deep within us, it festers and turns into shit a lot worse than nasty comedians.
That’s what I see happening in our culture today. The rat race has made us feel nasty inside and so when someone tries to be funny, we find offense in their words and we go on the offensive. We aren’t light enough to laugh it off anymore. Perhaps if we were able to slow this rat race down, we wouldn’t create so much grief for each other in the first place.
Looking back on that spring night in 1993, though the experience was not a happy one, I am happy that I lived in a country where it could happen. And I’m worried we may be headed to a situation where not only America but perhaps the world may not have such “safe spaces” for that kind of comedy.
This time it probably is hyperbole, but if there’s one thing 2020 should be teaching us, it is: We’ll see.
And, if you don’t recognize the threat that limits on free speech means, I’d recommend you look into what’s going on in Hong Kong more closely.
Here, I’ll help you: these are my favorite YouTubers covering China with extreme gusto and honesty (their podcast and channel is better for recent news, but their YouTube channel is incredible, too).
These guys spent a decade promoting China via YouTube yet when the Chinese economy started going south a few years ago, the CCP decided to scapegoat all foreigners. Why? Because any time shit goes wrong in one’s country it’s so much easier for the leadership to point the finger at anyone but themselves.
In other words, the scapegoats are not only irrelevant to the issue at hand, but they are also innocent of what they are being blamed for. I do not want to see our world lose more freedoms like Hong Kong, but I fear we already are.
Back to the Future, er, Essay
This brings me to today and that post from my South African friend I promised to share.
Before we finish, I want to re-iterate, especially to my American friends, I get it: your country is in a super challenging place. Still, having a laugh about how messed up things are is one of the most healing things we can do for ourselves and each other. And this means laughing at ourselves as much as it means laughing at others.
Now, about my South African friend. Like you, he is human and born to make mistakes. He is also very sweet and very funny (like you?).
So when I saw that Facebook didn’t allow him to share this post, a post which helped lift my spirits after one of my cries, well, I was moved enough to spend several days working my butt off on this essay.
You be the judge: Is his post funny? Maybe so, maybe not.
But I’d like to think that you can see that it is satire. And for you to understand that when we can’t have satire, especially in times of intense political and social turmoil, we may as well call ourselves the 1930s USSR (or 2020 Hong Kong) and you may as well start building a gulag for chaps like me.
And even more importantly, expect it to get a lot darker in our world. That’s precisely why near the start of this essay, I wrote that with a clampdown on laughter, people will become more violent, either to the world around them (rage) or to themselves (depression and/or suicide). Do we really want to go there? Are we already there?
Thanks for reading.
Here’s the screenshot of his post:
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