It's a really, really big "if."
My favorite show on YouTube, Tabletop, is currently on hiatus. So I’m catching up on Kid Snippets/Kid History on the BoredShortsTV channel, which reminded me to suggest them to you.
…buying stand-up comedian Tig Notaro’s set off fellow comedian Louis CK’s web site.
But before you listen to it, I would really recommend listening to listening to the Professor Blastoff podcast. In general, but especially since episode 63. Here’s the iTunes link.
Hat tip to Kara, who pointed me in the right direction after I discovered Notaro in this.
There is no way, I think, to more thoroughly annoy a proponent of free speech than to claim that criticism violates it.
It’s hard enough defending free speech sometimes. People don’t see anything wrong with stopping the Westboro Baptists from protesting. Denying the Holocaust? Yeah, go ahead and outlaw that. Hate speech– what, that’s not already illegal? By all means, ban that too. And nobody really needs violent video games or faux-violent porn, do they? Banish those, along with the burqas!
No, I’m not going to address any of those topics right now. I’m just going to say that when you’re talking about violations of free speech, more speech which happens to be critical of that speech isn’t one such violation.
I am talking, of course, about the Daniel Tosh thing. If you’ve been under a rock lately and aren’t familiar, he made some jokes about rape to an audience and then heckled a female heckler who didn’t like them by joking about her being raped. Yeah, I know. I know. And now we have to have this big discussion about the claim made by the woman which was that jokes about rape are never funny, and alliances have to be created and lines drawn between people who agree and people who disagree, and actually some really good and useful and even funny discussion can arise from it. For instance, you should go read Lindy West’s piece How to Make a Rape Joke at Jezebel. I really enjoyed her last two examples of funny jokes about rape, because a) I hadn’t heard of either of those comics before, and b) as with all four examples she gives, the joke isn’t making fun of rape victims. It’s about mocking the rapist, and the mentalities that feed into that, and the circumstances of people who go about their lives worrying about either being raped or being thought a rapist, or both.
Two of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt and Louis CK, have weighed in with support for Tosh. Oswalt’s has been conflicted and convoluted, and Louis CK is one of the people commonly accepted as being able to do a joke about rape correctly– he’s one of West’s four examples, for that matter. To call this disappointing would be an understatement. Both of these comedians are so much smarter and so much funnier than Tosh that it’s like seeing Batman sympathize with a police officer who was accused of roughing up a suspect. And there is actually a similar sort of closing ranks going on– they’re sympathizing as fellow comedians, people who also get up in front of a crowd and say things that might make the crowd erupt in laughter or erupt in rage. And they’ve also dealt with hecklers, and know what a trial that is. Hecklers don’t just pop up in the audiences of small time comics, but that’s where they’re most common. Generally speaking, the “job” of a comedian who is faced with a heckler is to shout him or her down. To make fun of and embarrass him or her. Some comics have developed this ability into a high art, while others prefer to simply say “Shut up, or you’re out of here.” And that, of course, requires having access to some sort of security personnel who can make good on that threat for you, since the comedian him or herself is not going to interrupt the show, step down off the stage, and personally deal with the person who has been disrupting things.
So yes, dealing with hecklers is rough. And the woman in question was technically a heckler, though in the interests of fairness it’s important to point out that she didn’t mean to go see a Daniel Tosh show. She meant to see Dane Cook (also offensive, but mainly because unfunny), and Tosh came on afterward. She apparently had no idea who he was, was disturbed to see rape discussed as a possible topic of jokes to follow, and declared that rape jokes are not funny to this person with whom she was quite unfamiliar. And what followed was really unpleasant, regardless of whether you go by the described linked above or the account of the owner of the Laugh Factory, who ended by saying “If you don’t want to get insulted don’t go to comedy clubs.” After being quite happy to condemn Michael Richards for his racist insults, of course, because those “came from hatred.”
Patton Oswalt and Louis CK offend audiences sometimes too, and they have an interest in not wanting comedians who offend to be punished too severely. But by and large they have no reason to fear this punishment, because they don’t make bigoted jokes. Making bigoted jokes is easy, which is why why lazier and less creative comics do it all the time. It’s hard to fail by appealing to the prejudices of your audience, provided your audience actually has those prejudices. And since audiences have warmly embraced or at least chuckled at sexist jokes for a very long time, it’s not at all surprising that a lazy, uncreative comic would resort to them. Because they work, and most likely because that comic shares those prejudices himself. It takes work to make a joke about a sensitive subject that doesn’t involve mocking the very people who are so sensitive to it, and it also takes caring about those people in the first place. Comedians have an interest in appealing to a broad audience, obviously, and it’s doubly, triply challenging to make it and be successful without mocking minorities or even being a minority yourself– if you don’t believe me, give Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story a watch sometime.
Louis CK is a straight white man, and he makes fun of himself as a straight white man– constantly. He is the definition of self-awareness, sometimes even painfully self-aware, and that’s why his jokes on these topics work. Clearly he’s thought about them, a great deal. My favorite Louis CK rape joke isn’t mentioned in the Lindy West article, but it’s this (NSFW language, definitely):
Here we have Louis CK talking about trying to do the right thing, and not being appreciated for it. And it’s funny, because he is earnest. He’s thought about it. When Louis CK makes a joke that portrays him as an asshole, you know he’s not really an asshole. Possibly people who are assholes laugh at those jokes because they think he’s identifying with them, but he isn’t. Trusting the comedian is an important element, but you don’t really have to trust Louis CK because he makes it abundantly clear what he’s being literal about and what he isn’t. This is not a description that applies for Daniel Tosh.
Somebody in the comments for the Pharyngula post about this whole debacle linked to this essay articulating why and when rape jokes are or aren’t funny, and it’s definitely worth a read. It’s clear, it’s actually very light-hearted and casual considering the subject matter, and it’s very thoughtful. Give it a read when you’ve got some time to think and consider.
You know what it’s not, however? A freedom of speech issue. A freedom of speech issue is when you’re being censored by the government. Massive crowds of people looking on what you’ve said or done disapprovingly is not a freedom of speech issue. It is simply the assertion and exercise of their equivalent freedom of speech.
I understand….I understand.
…from Jon Stewart:
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| Judy Gold: one funny lesbian |
Psychologist Jesse Bering’s latest “Bering in Mind” column at Scientific American addresses lesbians in comedy– why are there so many? Or rather, why are there so many in comparison with straight female and gay male comics? Obviously the vast majority of comics who do stand-up, whom Bering refers to as “heavy-hitters in the world of comedy,” are straight males. Is there something that Louis CK, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Doug Stanhope have in common with Sandra Bernhard, Judy Gold, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho that draws both groups to the clubs?
Bering challenges us to name a single gay male stand-up comic without consulting Google. I came up with Andy Dick, but stopped there. I know there are more, but on the spot couldn’t seem to muster any other names. Eddie Izzard definitely bends gender expectations with his transvestitism, but gay he is not. Bering suggests a reason for the disparity:
Still, one of the hottest findings to emerge from contemporary humor research is the fact that while both men and women say that they value a “good sense of humor” in potential partners, the two sexes mean vastly different things by this. Men prefer women who find them funny (“humor receptivity”), not funny women per se (“humor production”). Women display the opposite trend in their dating preferences. These were the basic findings reported in a 2006 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior by psychologist Eric Bressler and his colleagues. The authors interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor.
I’d heard of this theory before, and find it entirely plausible but also a bit depressing. Anecdotal evidence from my personal life shows that plenty of straight men are willing to at least claim that they are attracted to funny women– not just women “with a good sense of humor”– but it’s entirely possible that they did so just thinking that that’s what I wanted to hear. I definitely find myself attracted to men who are funny, and like to think that they feel the same sort of attraction. But maybe not. Or at least, maybe not to the same degree. Straight women certainly aren’t immune to feeling a rush of pleasure when someone appreciates their displays of intelligence and creativity in the form of humor; we just don’t seem to be nearly as keen to step up onto a stage in front of strangers to experience it. Julia Sweeney is a notable exception– when talking about her research into how the mind works in Letting Go of God, she says to the audience “I found that all of our brains are on drugs all of the time. We give ourselves hits: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and vasopressin. The next time all of you laugh, I’ll get a hit of adrenaline through my veins, and if you don’t when I expect you to, I’ll get cortisol instead and I’ll feel anxious. I always thought I was a person in my family who escaped addictions, but now I realize that I am up here on this stage right now partly because I am an addict.”
Why does Sweeney seem to be often in the company of lesbians in that regard? Bering suggests that it has to do with hormones:
Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize. So, for heaven’s sake, don’t mistake this as me saying that lesbian comics go on stage just to score chicks. Gene replication is simply a mechanistic means to an end; if it works, it works. Many evolutionary psychologists, including Miller, believe that our minds are often just epiphenomenal interpreters.
The confusion Bering is addressing here has to do with proximate versus ultimate concerns, and it’s a common one for both the incredulous people who hear EP theories and don’t find them to line up with their own introspective reasons for doing what they do, and often evolutionary psychologists themselves. A proximate reason is what’s going on in your head– “I do comedy because I enjoy it. I love making people laugh.” An ultimate reason is what your genes want you to do– “I do comedy because it’ll get me laid, enabling me to further my lineage.” These reasons are not mutually exclusive, though that doesn’t mean that the explanation of ultimate concern is necessarily true. Our genes and hormones might not give a damn about whether we get up on stage to make people laugh or not, regardless of who we are. But it’s possible that they do, and that idea doesn’t need to be threatening. The conflict comes in when people differ as to what extent our minds are epiphenomenal interpreters– the means by which we manufacture after-the-fact motivations for our actions– as opposed to being directly causal.
For (a possible) example, an early comment on Bering’s article:
This seems so obviously cultural to me. It’s not considered ‘feminine’ or ‘lady-like’ to talk bluntly and sometimes vulgarly the way comedians must to elicit laughs. Lesbians have already been questioning and contradicting social norms of femininity, making it FAR easier for them to fit into the comedy domain.
I don’t want to claim that this person thinks that by appealing to social constructivism, he/she can reclaim a degree of agency stolen by evolutionary (read: genetic/hormonal) explanations. That might not be the case. But if he/she is, he/she is barking up the wrong tree– cultural forces don’t rescue free will any more than biological ones do. “My culture made me do it” is as much an abdication of responsibility as “My genes made me do it.” Aside from that, though, it seems like this explanation is begging the question– why is it not considered “feminine” or “lady-like” to speak in the vulgar ways often used by comics? Where does that come from? The goal posts have just been moved back a few yards. Eventually, we still have to answer the question of where these apparently very influential gender norms originated.
The psychology of comedy is endlessly fascinating to me. I know the common understanding is that analysis ruins a joke, but I’m prepared to murder a few jokes mercilessly in order to reach a better understanding of what makes people laugh, why it does, and– most interestingly to me– why the things that make people laugh so often become a moral issue. More on that later, hopefully. In the meantime, have a good weekend, and listen to whatever makes you laugh.