If We Doh Laugh...
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Across a handful of years working in theatre, I’ve worked on a couple of stage plays which featured portrayals of sexual assault. There are lots of differing perspectives about whether that’s appropriate or safe for audiences that I unfortunately didn’t have in my mind then, but that’s for a different blog post. In this one, I wanna talk about a strange occurrence that I’ve observed with each and every play, with each and every assault that made its painful way on stage, the same thing would happen;
The auditorium, every time, would go silent, for just one second longer than people felt comfortable. And then, there would be laughter.
And I don’t mean one person would laugh, or two. I mean a few, sometimes a couple handfuls of them. Still not a meaningful measurement of an entire crowd, but enough for me to wonder why. It didn’t matter whether it was a mostly young crowd or older folks. It didn’t matter where the play was done, as far as I could tell (and I’ve observed this as well with plays I didn’t have any part in, too). All that mattered was that there was an uncomfortable depiction of assault. One time I angrily asked a directing mentor of mine why he thought this happened, and he said something profound to me - We don’t know what to do when we’re uncomfortable. We aren’t good at discomfort. To break the silence, or ease our internal tension…we laugh.
One might think of that as an interesting look into the psyche of humankind, or an opportunity to lean into particular aspects of psychology or sociology, but I want to talk about the laugh itself. Or, rather, the people who try to make us laugh.
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There’s been an ongoing conversation about ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’ ‘killing comedy’. The fact that all of those phrases kind of had to exist in quotes is telling, to me, but I want to examine it just a bit further. The comment by comedians and those who enjoy comedy worldwide is that they should have the unaffected right to do what they are called to do - make people laugh. And that argument is compelling in its simplicity. But it’s also simple enough that it includes things in its definition that perhaps it should not.
After all, it’s actually quite simple to make people laugh, in my experience. Just show them a sexual assault.
See how terrifying that sentence is?
The truth is that comedy’s purpose may, in fact, not be to make people laugh. It’s the desired purpose of a comedian, but not their purpose, not the true art behind their work. Their art, more likely, is the deliberate and skillful manipulation of language to draw laughter out of the mundane, to draw both attention and laughter to the unobserved. Similar, too, is the calling of any artist. A Spoken Word poet’s purpose is the same as a comedian, except we may want an emotion other than laughter.
When I think about good sketches, my mind runs to a bit from Chris Rock’s 1999 special ‘Bigger and Blacker’. Some of it doesn’t age well (and, at least in my opinion, a lot of stuff doesn’t), but he makes some incredibly poignant bits that also get us rolling - highlighting school shootings while also highlighting violence within the black community, addressing media’s fascination with blaming pop culture without holding people (and perhaps their parents) accountable for their actions, and critiquing people’s reactionary tactics around gun control while posing a potential - albeit ridiculous - solution.
To me, all of it’s gold. And he can afford those laughs without having to punch down at anyone (except, perhaps, the mentally ill and those with substandard education, depending on how you look at the skit). And, at least in my opinion, he could still do this skit tomorrow without getting ‘cancelled’, if that’s a thing.
The problem, I guess, is that there are many people who making other people laugh, but not necessarily practicing comedy. Instead, they’re courting audiences’ discomfort for the laughs. Which, I suppose, is okay if that’s what you’re into. Except that it has real consequences for the people you’re talking to and talking about.
In Trinidad & Tobago, we have a saying; “if yuh doh laugh, yuh go cry”. I don’t feel like it needs a lot of explanation, but I’ll do so anyway. Take the same sexual assault scenes I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Many people are laughing not because it’s funny, but because it’s the only response that gives them the opportunity to vent their discomfort without breaking down in other ways. That, however, is not the same as comedy.
If yuh doh laugh, yuh go cry…
So when people like Todd Phillips or Bill Burr says crazy stuff like people can’t make comedy anymore because people are ‘cancelling’ them for saying uncomfortable things, what they’re saying (to me, at least) is that they feel like they should have the right to court people’s discomfort for laughs, regardless of the impact. And not only is that not right, it’s also not comedy.
To be fair, a lot of audiences, myself included, might not be sure what comedy is either. We sometimes don’t even know why we’re laughing at something. But comedy, like all art I think, should be about calling us to something more interesting as well. If we’re just laughing at a joke because it has a silly word or someone plays into a stereotype that we’ve been taught to think is funny, then…is it really worth the laughs? Comedy isn’t lazy, it’s a craft just like anything else.
And there are lots of people - Bo Burnham, Wanda Sykes, Hannah Gadsby, Hasan Minhaj, Tig Notaro - who are doing some serious crafting. You might not like all of their work. But chances are you don’t like it because it’s too lazy, but rather because it’s doing too much. Art is subjective. But if that’s your critique, it might be helpful for us to be consistent and acknowledge that some of the people we’re defending are not doing enough. And no, I don’t mean they’re not doing enough to be politically correct or socially conscious. Just that they’re not doing enough to earn laughs. Instead, they’re okay with us laughing awkwardly at things we shouldn’t expect to see or hear, and take that as a win. It’s not. Not for anyone.
I’m gonna close with a short bit from a Trinbagonian brother who I think might have figured some of this stuff out, in a clip that I think really exemplifies the idea of punching up, digging into language, and pulling something out of the mundane. Take a look. You mightn’t laugh, maybe. But you certainly won’t cry.
