No Laughing Matter
The Heresy of Humour in an Age of Certainty
Following Donald Trump’s win, I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in friends and acquaintances saying what they claim to have always thought.
On Instagram and on Facebook, I notice the likes beneath verboten posts from those who, only a little while ago, blacked out their profile photos in homage to Black Lives Matter and pretended, with Pentothalian honesty, to not only watch but to enjoy women’s football.
Now they’re breezily sharing naughty memes mocking ‘cultural appropriation,’ claiming that men cannot get pregnant, and gleefully slaughtering the sacred cows of the progressive left. Better yet, these newly aspirated freedom fighters enjoy their new cultural ascendancy. They mock. They scoff. They revel in their subversion.
This ‘vibe shift’, as Gen Z calls it, reminds me of my then three-year-old nephew’s weekly blasphemy tour of the local supermarket. Back then, corralled into carting the little critter around town, I’d fasten little Jack into a pushchair and head off. He’d say little to nothing between the front door and the edges of the high street.
As we crept closer, mischief would smear across his lips. He’d bide his time. “Now, Jack,” I’d plead. “Remember what your mother said…”
We’d land in the supermarket. Jack would survey the crowds. At the top of his lungs, he’d bellow: “Boobies! Boo-BEES! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Fat—FAT boobies!” With a visceral joy on his face, he’d fold over and repeat the lung-puncturing cycle, laughing himself into a pram-splayed stupor.
For the first time, Jack indulged the timeless power inherent in saying a few forbidden words and basking in the illicit result. Freud, for all of his faults, called this joy ‘evading the censor.’ Of course, Jack hadn’t read much Freud by then. All he knew was that saying what he was forbidden to say was, in fact, uproariously funny.
No doubt, modern scolds would pen a 5,000-word buzzword soup condemning Jack’s internalised misogyny, his unconscious patriarchal programming or some such modern voodoo. They’d miss the point: saying what one is forbidden to say is—and always will be—funny.
Universal Truths
Not so long ago, this universal truth resurfaced in two comedy specials—works that, I’ve no doubt, will be remembered less for their comedic intent than as the white smoke of a cultural shift.
Last year, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle released two rather unfunny rather popular comedy specials. According to critics, neither funnyman said anything funny. That is true. But this is the point: What they said was not meant to be funny as it was meant to be subversive. Lamenting the new age of ‘anti-woke’ comedy, The Guardian branded both men on the tongue.
According to that newspaper and to many left-sided critics, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle—two of the world’s most popular and successful comedians—heralded a new age of offensive comedy.
The show-trial verdict now reads like a Dostoevsky novel. Their crimes? Both made jokes at the expense of ‘marginalised communities.’ Both ‘punch down.’
Critics claimed these heretics represent the dying embers of a vanquished, unjust culture. As usual, those who subscribe to totalising views of the world, those who deplore spontaneity, ambiguity, irony, and contrast—those utterly human features—receive comedy like one’s front teeth receive a kerb.
In The Guardian, Dave Chappelle’s The Dreamer endured ritual vivisection. Chappelle’s “belaboured, low-effort hackwork” pours from a man who has never been more “self-involved” or “less funny.” For 58 minutes, Chappelle drowses through a trans joke. A “flimsy dismissal of his past transgressions that doubles down on the laziest of them at the same time,” says The Guardian. Alongside Ricky Gervais’ Armageddon, the two resembled the Siamese twins of an “unsavoury new niche in comedy,” that is, the anti-woke genre.
According to critics, whom one can feel audibly melting as one reads their work, this new genre commits such heinous crimes as making fun of people, suggesting life itself is riddled with contradiction, contrast, hypocrisy, and ambiguity. Such humour even pokes fun for the sheer transgressive pleasure of poking fun.
But the crimes with which both men are charged are political rather than aesthetic. In the manner of a New England tithingman, The Guardian review chalks up a litany of felonies, misdemeanours, and high crimes.
“Though the two both rank as A-list celebrities on merit of their illustrious careers, their latest work has seen a quiet, unceremonious, and frostily received release. These bits offer no insight, and in many of their longer-winded passages, scarcely contain anything that could be classified as a joke. These once-esteemed talents formerly dedicated to puncturing racial tensions or hollow pieties now argue only for the unfairness of their own persecution, and their bravery in resisting it. This is Crank Comedy.”
And this is crank criticism. The critic cries, and he mewls, and he scoffs and he scorns. Tellingly, he bemoans both men made their name puncturing fashionable falsehoods and hollow pieties. Now he opposes them for puncturing his fashionable falsehoods and his hollow pieties.
Besides that, the charge of a frosty reception could make English mustard weep. Both specials were the ‘most watched’ during their week of release on a platform with a mere 260 million paid subscribers. Unfunny? Perhaps. Unpopular? Not.
The writer continues with a catalogue of spurious crimes.
“Watched in close succession, these specials confer the impression of men racing to find new lines they can easily, emptily cross. Chappelle makes the baffling assertion that only gay men appear in photos with their mouths open; Gervais tells actors with dwarfism who might object to present-day stage productions of Snow White to just be grateful that they’re not being used as ‘props’. He cracks himself up with one line before he can even tell it, feigns holding it back because it’s just ‘too offensive,’ then sallies forth upon receiving sufficient encouragement from his adoring public: a Chinese paedophile tries to bait a child with the promise of a puppy, except the boy says he’s not hungry. This is not only entry-level racism, it’s weak writing, recycling the oldest stereotype in the book as cutting-edge envelope-pushing.”
I’ve read countless acres of cogent, thoughtful criticism in my time. This, reader, is not that. The problem, of course, is neither man is trying to push envelopes. They’re doing what little Jack did: saying the unsayable because it’s verboten. What they’re saying isn’t particularly funny. But it is subversive.
As Freud put it, they’re evading the censor. Freud thought wit and humour helped to remove our inhibitions. Through humour, we “combat such forces as reason, critical judgment, and suppression.” For Freud, for Jack, for Chappelle and Gervais, the pleasure of subversive humour lies in their evasion of the censor.
The audience agreed. They laughed along. Perhaps at the provocation rather than the content. In our censorious, stifling times, such humour need not be funny. The mere act of saying that which cannot be said appeals on a visceral level.
Logical Fallacies
The critics have their points. Though a veteran Chappelle fan, I laughed twice in one hour. Chappelle hasn’t been particularly funny since 2016. His languid specials drown in tiresome name-dropping and masturbatory self-regard. Gervais hits the target more often than not. But neither special writes itself into comedy folklore.
But the critics aren’t interested in comedy. For a start, the Guardian’s critic accuses Gervais of logical fallacy.
In one breathless segment of Armageddon, Gervais lasers woke indulgence. “They’re pulling down statues!” Referring to the biographies of those whose image the mobs ripped down, he says: “They built canals, schools, and hospitals. You’re not tearing those down!” Admittedly, this bit suffers from Twitter Brain—a modern affliction in which the brain acts as if an algorithm, prizing novelty over value. It’s sapless whataboutery. But the critic misses the point: “Any rational person understands this is a false equivalency, much like when Gervais checkmates the wokesters by positing that black people calling each other the N-word counts as cultural appropriation from white slaveowners.”
Indeed. The first joke is a false equivalency. Any rational person understands that it doesn’t apply here. This is comedy, not elementary logic. In the irony of ironies, this too is a false equivalency. The critic laments a prized salmon’s inability to climb a tree. The scolds inhabit a Lysenkoist world in which salmon fail to climb trees not through lack of limbs but for a lack of imagination. In this lame, consumptive world, jokes must conform to the laws of logic. To cage jokes within the iron bars of logic leaves us with few, if any, jokes.
I cannot speak for the writer, but I’ve mortgaged swathes of my ebbing youth trying in vain to save the great British pub from the designs of spivs and their ‘luxury’ apartments. Not once have I witnessed a priest, a rabbi, and a vicar walk into the bar. Nor have I ever heard a barman ask a horse, ‘Why the long face?’ Perhaps I frequent the wrong boozers.
The writer reveals a disposition woefully unsuited for reality and life as it is lived. Responding to Chappelle’s lazy jibe about trans people, he says: “Never mind that both of these statements are incorrect—trans men don’t dream of being men, they are men.”
This is what Jonathan Swift called ‘mechanistic thinking.’ For Swift, such thinking—the opposite of common sense—was the unspeakable flaw in our species. Essentially, mechanistic thinkers are amateur surgeons. They first diagnose the disease and then root around one’s major organs for the correct symptoms. The critic is right because he says so. The problem? Biology fans would politely disagree.
The plague of mechanistic thinking pollutes modern culture. At the review’s end, arrives an irony so great it would blush the cheeks of H. L. Mencken.
“When a comedian wraps himself in a cocoon of his own ideas and surrounds it with those who find them agreeable, he loses the ability to see the outside world.”
In just thirty words, the writer strips his skeleton from his skin. Ironically, this is funny. Why?
Humorists forage on the fertile ground between reality and pretence. The difference between words and actions.
He’s glued his censorious ilk’s charge sheet onto the collective forehead of everyone else, committing the very crimes of which he accuses everyone else.
Civilised Murder
Our anxious age desperately maligns Freud. But, still, he mocks us from the grave. His timeless maxim, that ‘the essence of neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity’, says almost too much about our cultural neurosis. The humourist thrives on ambiguity and spontaneity. The neurotic demands order and control.
The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler thought laughter was the great equaliser, revealing the gap between our ideal and imperfect selves. Laughter, then, expresses our pleasure entwined in the revelation that others, too, are flawed and imperfectible. After all, what is funnier, what is more enjoyable, than the pretentious and the scornful falling from their self-appointed perch? Mercifully for them, ridicule is civilised murder.
The spontaneity of laughter offends the scolds on a visceral level. A laugh isn’t premeditated. We don’t, upon hearing a joke, consult the deepest reaches of our minds or the counsel of sensitivity readers. We just laugh. Often, we think, ‘I shouldn’t laugh at that.’ What happens then? We laugh louder.
The Gervais and Chappelle specials are particularly unfunny. Much of that billed ‘anti-woke’ is often as equally tiresome as its opposite. But that’s the point. The true crime is to refuse the speech codes of those who will always find something to lament.
But the scolds fight a losing game. Humour accepts our flawed reality. Not only that, but humour embraces it, indulges it, laughs at it, and crucially—revels in the hopelessness of those with designs upon altering it. The ancient satirists, from Aristophanes to Petronius, mocked the same flaws our modern-day satirists mock. One thousand years from now, the same flaws will still be ripe for ridicule.
Jack’s shout of ‘boobies!’ may not constitute high art, but it reminds us of something vital: the beauty of rebellion, the joy of evasion, and the deeply human act of laughing when one is forbidden to laugh. Laughter is one of the purest demonstrations of our humanity.
Perhaps anti-woke overcompensation can prize our culture away from an ever-increasing list of things we cannot say and topics we cannot broach. Boorish comedians peddling lazy points for purely offensive merit might be crude, but it works.
As the late Christopher Hitchens put it, humour’s appeal lies in the indelible fact we are born into a losing game. We are the only animal blessed with the knowledge of our looming death. We’ve no idea why we are here, nor what awaits us after we die Reader, if that doesn’t raise a wry smile—or a hearty laugh—nothing will.
Bless the poor tormented souls at the Guardian....are they still on strike? Does anyone care? I am unfamiliar with Chapelle and can stomach only modest doses of Gervais - his popularity is bemusing to me. He went missing during convid and has not once addressed the lunacy in any of his "specials"....I forget who said it, but it's been commented that this omission was like Arthur Askey playing the Palladium during WW2 and not talking about the war.
I think humour, mocking, sarcastic, piss taking, is what's required to pull people back into the real world. From the bizarre dystopia they've fallen into where men are women because they say they are, etc. Once you point out the absurdities of life, people open their eyes, it's like a switch is flicked in their brain. Unless they work for the Guardian, obvs.
I didn't see the Gervaise special, but you're spot on about the Chapelle specials. I was reminded of the legendary Lenny Bruce while watching, and later in seeing reactions. It was that kind of moment where the "tolerant ones" showed their true selves.
As we used to say when I was a kid, "Geesh, man...can't you take a joke?"