We're Laughing. But We're Not Joking.
You like the idea of no limits to comedy? Or anything else? Well, wait for it...
The game was simple, the premise even more so. For want of a better name we decided to call it, “What Would It Take?” And the rules of engagement were simple. We’d take behavior that was completely standard, normal and passed between friends, associates and strangers as part of normal discourse, and push it as far as it would go to see how far people would go.
“Could I have some syrup please?”
IHOP was happening, and sitting behind a plate of pancakes, this was a perfectly reasonable request. And remained as such. Until…
“Can I have some syrup please?” The waiter, nonplussed, either points to the untouched syrup or brings you more syrup. Or perhaps a different kind of syrup.
Now, strange as things might be, your manner doesn’t nod toward this being strange at all. You continue your conversation with your dining companion and wait. Until…
“Anything else I can do for you all?” The waiter is trying not to notice the untouched pancakes and the ignored syrup.
Comedy, in this and almost every instance, was understood as being respite from the horrors of every day living. Not more horrors of every day living.
“Yeah…” He knows it’s coming, against all reason, but knowing it’s coming and believing it’s here when it finally is, are two different things. “Can I have some syrup please?”
This will break most waitstaff. Failing to do so is not losing the game. Getting thrown out of IHOP is not winning it. This is a game where the only winner is the absurd and the absurd favors no one as this “game” can be applied to how many times you ask a person “excuse me?” when they’ve said something you’ve heard. Or inching your car toward a pedestrian in a crosswalk when they’ve got the light.
It’s a confrontationalism that smacks of Fight Club, but is best recalled by The Adolescents in their song “Kids of the Blackhole”: “trashed beyond belief to show the kids don’t want to learn.” While the song sang about drug use, in this instance and every pop culture one we eat, breathe, or bathe in these days, it’s much less about drug use and much more about the endless and endlessly meretricious shit that distorts our every waking moment.
Complaints are fine tuned and amplified through a social media that feeds us our own farts and rewards the smelling of aforementioned farts with likes and shares, so that you feel you’re being listened to and, at the very least, appreciated by “friends”, mostly people you’ve never met. Conversation and dialogue are simulacra, so why not undercut it all by the absurd? If for no other reason than to at least slow the flow. Just. A little.
Those that complain the best — let’s call them comedians — well, we fill stadiums for them. And their field of play is everything and it’s everywhere and, yeah, we get that. We embrace it, and mimic it, via the social media that weaves us together in the world’s worst dinner party.
So if everything is funny, or can be, “What would it take?”
“In my defense the last woman I set you up with was only mildly retarded.” The audience was uncomfortable. The What Would It Take guy and I were doing a stand up comedy show. Like Abbott and Costello. Or Laurel and Hardy.
“She was wearing a helmet and could not speak. That’s not mild, that is severe.”
We were playing a video with our respective characters being played by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The lines they were speaking were drawn from our texts. That’s how we wrote our “comedy”. If memory serves, there were later references to an actual President Harry S. Truman quote about how he’d trust any man that wasn’t a nigger, chink or, and there’s some dispute about this last one, “a kike.”
There was still laughter. But at some point, in full What Would It Take fashion the idea that there would be no punchline forthcoming because the audience was the punchline had started to hit home. And we could see that maybe it hurt a little. Which we were hoping it would. The ridiculous mediocrity of the form begged for “disruption”. We weren’t really there to make people laugh. In fact, the exact opposite.
Why? It was a corollary for life as we saw it. And was valid because of it.
Would it surprise you to know that we were never invited back?
Comedy, in this and almost every instance, was understood as being respite from the horrors of every day living. Not more horrors of every day living.
…[T]ry as we might, we can’t find the shooting of Hitler in any scenario, to be capable of carrying any comedy. Which is kind of weird when you think of how often Mel Brooks has mined the Third Reich for yucks.
But for whatever reason, call it meme-ology maybe, there are no more lines between the two so that when outspoken and unremittingly lefty actor Alec Baldwin accidentally shoots two people on a film set with a gun that was inadvertently live the world skipped a beat. For just a minute. Until…
“Hey! Did you see the new Alec Baldwin meme?”
Seventeen hours had passed and despite efforts to avoid the memes some had claimed were unavoidable, they started to come in. Most noticeably by the former President Trump’s son, because: of course.
“Alec Baldwin meme?” I asked. “Is this the one about him SHOOTING THE PEOPLE IN THE FACE AND BLOWING THEIR BRAINS OUT ON THE FILM SET?!?!? OH MAN….THAT’S AMAZINGLY FUNNY! HEY, LET’S SAY WE GET OUR GUNS AND RUN OUT INTO THE PARKING LOT AND GENERATE A LITTLE MORE HUMOR!!!”
The divide now is, and has been established, that the world is divided into masochists and sadists, the sadists being the joke tellers and the masochists, those who have decided to embrace the idea that they, the joke tellers, are “only joking.”
As has been said laughter is involuntary and so anything that generates it is party to a certain purity. Despite ourselves and what we know and think, laughter will out, honest and unbridled. But it’s always seemed easier for cats to laugh at mice than that mice laugh at cats. And this is the nature of comedy at its root, the dark play between who the joke is on and who you’re led to identify with: the cats or the mice.
Then there is also the crushing inconsistencies.
“I bet you’re one of them flag-burning San Francisco freaks…” He was a Kentucky born and bred former paratrooper and presently, a powerlifter.
“Me? No.” I said. I had always liked Tim since it was clear to me that he was grappling with the Kentucky in him. I’d help him with that. “I treasure the flag. Especially when I have…” and here I squat into a horse stance and mimic snaking the American flag between my legs like a towel. “…A shortage of toilet paper and need to wipe!”
It was a pantomime of foolishness, me miming the pulling of the flag between my legs. It was almost funny until you got a peep at Tim. He was now red-faced and necked, real fury burning in his eyes.
“Booooyyy…” and he was choosing his words as carefully as his circumstance and Kentucky allowed. “…You’re lucky we’re in California…and I like you.”
I, sunny smile and all, say “I like you too Tim!”
And like nothing ever happened we acted like nothing ever happened. No “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” or “don’t dish it if you can’t take it”. None of that.
Years later I heard that Tim despite jokes about every racist in his family being everyone in his family married a nice Asian girl. No idea if his ideas about flags as towels have changed, but this heartened me.
Because it meant there was room for nuance in his life. And if there’s room for nuance there’s room for understanding that while you should be able to make a joke about anything within the purview of life’s horrors, that doesn’t mean you should have to laugh at it.
And just like jokes cross those lines before we can comfortably acknowledge that we’re ready to cross those lines, the idea that makes some of that line crossing ring wrong, might also go down hard. But consider this, try as we might, we can’t find the shooting of Hitler in any scenario, to be capable of carrying any comedy.
Which is kind of weird when you think of how often Mel Brooks has mined the Third Reich for yucks. Brooks or Hogan’s Heroes. Or Quentin Tarantino.
I also understand the challenge. It seems that if I could actually write the first Shooting Hitler joke I could be…would be…a legend. A joke that despite all of its weighted underpinnings and our innate desire to not find the murder of 12 million people funny, just made you laugh.
I even understand the attempts in a What Would It Take? kind of way.
But you know what I understand even more? No one, absolutely no one, finding any of those attempts funny, worthwhile or valid. That I understand.
Now why don’t the other cats?
You can joke about everything but not with everyone.
Freakin' adorable kid... but, yeah. Probably too soon.