The best comedy is scary. I don’t mean this in a horror movie sense — I don’t even mean good comedy should necessarily provoke fear. The funniest things are often just the most freewheeling and the most insane — attributes which tend to come with the side-effect of disturbing people.
This raises a question about comedy today. It seems we all know that sometime in the past, people were more easily disturbed. A vague, cliche picture of the Victorians comes to mind, with their highly-mannered dinners and desperate shutting out of all things that disrupted order and sanity. Or maybe we are reminded of Voltaire’s satirical “Candide” and its worldwide, multi-century ban, or James Joyce’s derided “Dubliners,” or Zora Neale Hurston’s banned “Their Eyes Were Watching God” — the list goes on.
In learning about these authors and the reputation of their works, we have derived a certain theme, if our teachers haven’t just told us outright — something to the tune of “art challenges” or “art draws daring criticisms of society.” We are taught something similar about the artistic use of satire and comedy. Satire is a form of this artistic daring, we are told, meant to directly or indirectly lampoon or parody society, reflecting what is wrong and what needs to change.
The fixation on this brand of satire has warped many people’s views of comedy. This is partly a result of the problem that some art students and professors feel the need to face: how do you make art “serious?” This question of how to justify the study of art — and how to justify art itself — creates a need for art to relate to current events in a very immediate and “important” way.
This is not to downplay the importance of current events, but to recommend healthy suspicion when encountering the specific kind of satire that “Saturday Night Live” and The New Yorker can’t seem to produce enough of. A modern manifestation of those notions of Victorian stuffiness becomes evident in our inability to notice the fraudulence of things like SNL, The New Yorker and “Last Week Tonight.” While consistently giving the illusion of “going there” in terms of social criticism, all these things really do is pander safely within the ideological bounds of their audiences.
Even more troubling, though, is that their jokes aren’t even funny. This is a bigger problem, one with satire in general, or what satire can become. By the definition established above, satire cannot exactly be “comedy.” If we agree that the goal of comedy should be to actually be funny, then satire is just the use of comedy for the goal of criticizing or making a statement on something.
It’s easy to imagine how this can become didactic. The satirical wit of SNL or of The New Yorker’s Donald Trump caricatures strangely get funnier (or more poignant) in proportion to your alignment to their specific set of ideas. I am not denying the effectiveness of satire altogether, or the importance of sharp social criticism — but a problem arises when the standard of this “smart” social criticism is simply what we already know, and what everyone else is already saying.
If comedy should align itself with any ideology, it should be anarchy. This is the real secret of what offended those stiff Victorians so much — and here in the Northeast, we are more like them than we like to think. Many people, myself included, still live with varying degrees of close-mindedness, open to many ideas, but with various strict, almost unconscious limitations.
In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. It’s our condition as limited beings, and the process of wrestling with our assumptions and limitations to find genuine knowledge is a consistent, difficult challenge. What is a bad thing, though, is when the thinking stops — when a kind of mass-blindness and dogmatic thoughtlessness permeates our collective thought and behavior.
We have already seen the embarrassing university-wide gang-up here at Boston University on Nick Fuentes. And now we see the recurring (and often dangerously vague) buzz-label “alt-right” cropping up to discredit various artists and comedians.
As far as TV goes, Adult Swim produces some of the most genuinely insane, freewheeling and funny content available. But now even they have to answer to these new cultural pressures. Last December, after a Buzzfeed article accused “Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace” creator Sam Hyde of having suspicious links to the alt-right, the pressure on the network quickly became too much, and the show was cancelled. But there’s more: Pitchfork then felt the need to contact the musicians featured on the show to “speak on their involvement.”
This is not a question of whether “alt-right,” however that is defined, is bad. It’s the question of whether we should be wary that anything and everything associated with some loosely defined term loses credibility, or that the mention of the word can hush a room. It means something that the things that end up genuinely challenging me often come first in the form of what scares or repulses me.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article used the phrase “We all know that in the past…” instead of the current version,”It seems we all know that sometime in the past.” It also used the phrase “satire is just the use of comedy” instead of “satire should be the use of comedy.” These alternate wordings did not fully express the authors meaning. The article has been updated to reflect these changes.
