by Ken Jennings
“I don’t think you can go that much faster than people are going now,” was Tim Long’s opinion.
Matt Selman agreed. “There have been shows on Adult Swim that are so dense with comedic chaos that for anyone over the age of thirty, it’s almost hard to watch.” I imagined a comedy moving so fast that it couldn’t maintain its own structural integrity anymore—a fighter jet losing its wings and tail to air resistance, a space capsule shedding heat tiles as it attempts reentry.
Metamorphosis into Metacomedy
The faster and more sophisticated the jokes got, the more complex their structures and esoteric their references, the more removed they felt from the universal roots of humor buried deep in our midbrains. It was harder to suspend disbelief that any of these capital-J Jokes bore much resemblance to the everyday things that made us laugh in life. Funny people were more conscious of this than anyone and couldn’t resist embracing it with a postmodern twist. Metahumor was born.
Just as metafiction is fiction about fiction, metahumor encompasses jokes about jokes. The idea of breaking the “fourth wall” in comedy performance isn’t new. Roman playwrights like Plautus loved that sort of thing. In his comedy Persa, one slave asks another, “Where am I going to get a disguise?” “Ask the stage manager,” the other replies. But in the twentieth century, the device was always reserved for the broadest and silliest kind of comedy: Groucho waggling his eyebrows at the camera; Bugs Bunny tormenting Elmer Fudd and confiding to the audience, “I do this kind of stuff to him all through the picture”; Bob Hope warning us that Bing Crosby was about to sing, “Now’s the time to go out and get the popcorn.”
This is funny when it’s surprising, but over the following decades, it grew from a rule-breaking device to the reigning sensibility in a lot of comedy. You can trace this in the works of Mel Brooks: no metajokes in The Producers, a handful in Blazing Saddles, and by Spaceballs the movie is wall-to-wall with them.XIV The characters in Spaceballs even spend a couple minutes watching themselves watch themselves on-screen, the first infinitely regressing metajoke in cinema history.
A metajoke doesn’t have to show you the sprockets of the film stock; there are softer ways to wink at the audience. For example, it has become commonplace for characters to recognize and comment on the silliness of the comedy in which they find themselves. Ron Burgundy’s “That escalated quickly!” in Anchorman might be the canonical example, but you also saw it when The Simpsons’s Superintendent Chalmers said, “What an odd remark!” to Principal Skinner, or Michael Bluth on Arrested Development responded to one of Tobias’s increasingly improbable homoerotic double entendres by saying, “There’s got to be a better way to say that.” These jokes are tempting in the writers’ room: not only do they liberate the comedy to speak to the audience directly, but they can double the pace—a second free follow-up joke for the price of one. But they come at a cost: less emotional investment in a scenario that viewers realize the show might step back from at any second.
You might think that metahumor only works in comic fictions like plays and TV and movies. How can stand-up comedy, for example, break the fourth wall? By definition, a stand-up’s whole routine is delivered to the audience. Exhibit A would be veteran comic Andy Kindler, probably best known for his acting roles on Bob’s Burgers and Everybody Loves Raymond, but who also put on a clinic in self-aware stand-up in his frequent appearances on David Letterman’s show. It was always easy to see why nobody ever wrote about Kindler without calling him a “comic’s comic.” His sets, even to Letterman’s huge national audience, were full of insider-y jokes about the career of comedy (“I’m currently on my Half-a-House Tour! I refuse to sell more than half the available tickets in any venue!”) or joke construction (“When I started comedy, you had to walk twenty miles just to get to the premise!”) or comic patter (“If Huey Lewis was a comedian, the name of his band would be Huey Lewis and . . . What Else Is in the News?”). But he could usually get a bigger laugh by stepping outside the jokes to comment on them. “Look, I don’t write any of this,” he would tell a crowd. Or “I was so hoping that Huey Lewis would have a career resurgence by tonight, so that joke would work better.” The act was an elaborate dance with comedy, right down to comically exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, with Kindler keeping up a running commentary on everything: the jokes, the audience, sometimes even his own commentary. “Yes!” he would say to greet applause. “I agree with your reaction!”
Engineered for the Savvier Audience
“Twenty years ago, I made a breakthrough,” Kindler told me. “I’ve noticed that whenever I say what I’m thinking in the moment, the more I would really be able to tell the truth.” He used to plan every aside; then he realized he could just make his inner monologue the act. Sometimes he stripped away the skin of a joke so you could see the anatomy, like Penn and Teller doing a magic trick with transparent props. “And then a third example!” he might finish a bit, nodding to the “rule of three” without actually thinking up a funny third example. Or “. . . and a funnier joke, and then a funnier joke, and then the kicker!” If you didn’t understand comedy norms and history, it was probably mystifying.
But, more and more, the audience was in on the joke.
In 1991, Kindler wrote an article for the National Lampoon called “The Hack’s Handbook” in which he outlined, with devastating accuracy, how easy it was to become an untalented club comic at the tail end of the 1980s comedy boom. The starter kit provided sample hack jokes about recommended topics including Dan Quayle, Madonna, TV commercials, Yugos, and gays. (“An effeminate voice is always a crowd pleaser.”) The organizers of Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival invited Kindler to present a live version of the article onstage, and the popular show eventually grew into an annual “State of the Industry” speech in which Kindler gave a scathing rundown of the comedy year in review. By its twentieth year, the show was one of the festival’s undisputed highlights, always selling out its six-hundred-seat room. Kindler gleefully roasted everyone who mattered, returning time and again to expected targets (Ricky Gervais is insufferable, Jimmy Fallon isn’t funny, Adam Sandler just doesn’t care) but also declining to spare comedians whose work he admired (pre-scandal Louis C.K. was pretentious, Jerry Seinfeld is out of touch).
The most interesting thing about the “State of the Industry” is that it’s become a mainstream phenomenon, eagerly downloaded by fans and dissected in a thousand-word New York Times piece. This is the state of comedy now: it’s increasingly performed not for casual Saturday-night drinkers or TV-channel-flippers looking for a laugh, but for an audience of aficionados. The end of the mass-market comedy boom in the 1990s created a more experimental “alternative comedy” scene on both coasts, with smaller but much more devoted fan bases. The mainstays of that scene—Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Marc Maron, Louis C.K.—eventually shed the “alternative” label and became the biggest names in comedy, full stop. But they brought their cannier, comedy-mechanics-obsessed audience with them into the mainstream.
In the past, comedy superfan anecdotes were mostly origin stories told by comedians—no one else they knew growing up even cared. Billy Crystal would bring home every comedy record from his dad’s 42nd Street music store. Marc Maron used to scour Parade magazine for its “My Favorite Jokes” column, the only place he could read about stand-up as a kid. Judd Apatow was so obsessed that he would arrange to interview big-name comedians for his ten-watt high school radio station, hoping publicists wouldn’t catch on that the “reporter” was going to be a sixteen-year-old with a giant green tape recorder. Most of his interviews never even aired.
But today, comedy fandom is mass culture. Mourners leave doughnuts with receipts on the grave of the late Mitch Hedberg, in honor of a single stand-up joke he used to do.XV The Aristocrats, about a filthy joke that comedians have been telling each other since vaudeville, became one of the most successful documentaries of all time. No detail, it seemed, was too inside-
baseball for this new comedy audience. My Name Is Earl frequently used the TV comedy shibboleth “Who Jackie?” in dialogue as an inside joke among the writers. (“Who Jackie?” is funny for reasons that are too complicated to go into in this parenthetical but probably fit in a footnote.XVI) But when Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt named an Asian character “Hu Zha Qi” in 2015 in honor of the trope, it could do so fully aware that some nonzero percentage of the audience would understand.
Too Smart to Laugh
The sophistication of modern comedy and the savviness of the audience have grown up symbiotically, a game of evolutionary leapfrog. Do you think Woody Allen’s nightclub crowd, the ones having trouble with a punch line about birth control, could have followed the speed of 30 Rock, the chronology of My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, the cadence of Andy Kindler?
The extraordinary result is that today, most very good comedy is popular, and vice versa. This, to put it mildly, has not always been the case. During the last comedy boom, in the 1980s, mass-market popularity killed experimentation, because every comic was angling for the exact same brass ring: the late-night spot, the sitcom deal. And because comedy has often been a comparatively narrow cultural niche, its history is filled with genuinely great art that no one seemed to like very much. Buster Keaton’s masterpiece The General was an expensive flop that ended Keaton’s career as an independent moviemaker and plunged him into fifteen years of alcoholic despair. The Monty Python movies only got made when the Pythons wheedled their rock musician friends into kicking in money; George Harrison mortgaged his house to fund Life of Brian. The original The Office received some of the lowest focus group scores the BBC had ever seen, just ahead of women’s lawn bowling. Viewers voted Andy Kaufman off of Saturday Night Live. Freaks and Geeks got canceled.
But in just thirty years, we went from a near-total lack of smart mass-culture comedy to an incredible glut of it. Producer James L. Brooks was an Oscar-laden Hollywood powerhouse in 1989 when he was developing The Simpsons with Matt Groening and Sam Simon, while Fox was barely even a network. That gave him the clout to negotiate a very unusual contract giving network executives almost no input into the show’s creative side. As a result, as Mitch Hurwitz has observed, “The most successful TV show in the history of the medium has never received a single note from any executive.” When everyone realized that a single creative vision, unspoiled by committee, could be a massive hit, the landscape started to transform. A more knowledgeable audience and a dizzying variety of new media options (independent film, basic cable, premium cable, streaming video) changed the math as well—suddenly making comedy that would stand out in a crowded culture was more important than making sure it fit in.
But now that we’re getting so much good comedy, are we enjoying it as much? Many professionally funny people have noticed that, paradoxically, the audience that knows the most about comedy might not be the best audience. Stand-up comedian and writer Jen Kirkman told me about a comedy show at which she used to perform regularly in Los Angeles. The show moved from its original home, a bar and lounge, to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and suddenly the audience was different: less diverse, less relaxed, more serious young men in their twenties with a definite whiff of improv classes about them. “I remember having a harder time suddenly getting them to laugh at things that had done well on the road,” she said. “At the time the debate backstage was, ‘Are they too comedy-savvy? Is the problem that they are so well trained in watching comedy that they know when a punch line is coming, and they don’t laugh?’ ”
Funny people get into comedy because it’s everything to them, but once it’s your job, that relationship can change. “I still love stand-up—I just love it in a different way,” comedian Moshe Kasher told me. “I’m still a fan of the art form. I just know a little too well where the numbers are that the paint got splattered on.” His friend Chelsea Peretti (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) has described it as being like one of the characters in The Matrix who gets unplugged but can still keep an eye on the matrix world via the stream of text on their computer monitors. They understand what’s going on, but they’re not immersed in the same way as someone who’s never been woken up from the simulation. “I would say that I laugh at comedy probably ninety-nine percent less than a regular person at a comedy show,” Kasher said. “Mostly because, yeah, I know the mechanics of what they’re doing.”
When an entire society buries itself in comedy, we can start to experience the same problem. We haven’t just become a culture of comedy geeks. We essentially became a culture of comedy writers. Our brains, which have evolved to ferret out all the twists and incongruities that make humor possible, keep racing ahead of the performer or the script, eager to make that next connection, “get” the next joke. No modern audience will ever be as heartbroken as I was when Nick from Freaks and Geeks watched his rock dreams slip away from him. Subverting sitcom formula was surprising then, but today it’s what every show does. We’ve been trained for whiplash story twists; we even expect them. In writers’ rooms across Hollywood, so many late nights and recreational drugs must get poured into staking out zigzaggy third-option endings that are neither easy tropes nor simple reversals.
And when we see all the tricks, we can get jaded. In Tim Long’s view knowledgeable comedy audiences don’t actually seem to be enjoying their favorite thing all that much. “In the era of vaudeville, everyone was wrapping their belly and slapping their knee. Now I see a lot of people going”—he switches to a completely deadpan voice—“ ‘That’s funny.’ This is the golden age of people in a very straight-faced way saying, ‘That’s funny.’ ” In other words, an MRI of the modern comedy geek might show the cerebral cortex sparking away brilliantly over jokes that are ever more complicated and abstruse—but at the expense of the dark pleasure centers beneath. When we connoisseurs applaud a joke, we’re applauding the degree of difficulty, like Olympic judges watching a platform dive or gymnastics routine. We don’t say that funny things “tickle” us anymore. That sounds too involuntary. Today, we decide to laugh.
There’s a danger, I think, that becoming coolly jaded comedy customers starts to make us jaded to everything else as well. The emotional underpinning of comedy isn’t just amusement. Becoming fixated on the mechanics, like we imagine the professionally funny to be, means that we’re less invested emotionally. Tina Fey famously described that difference this way: “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”
I’ve thought about that quote many times while watching modern comedy, where the pace is so fast and the jokes so elaborate and finessed that empathy for the characters is almost an afterthought—you want them to have funny shenanigans (involving, where possible, a flight of stairs) more than you actually want them to get what they want. Fey’s Liz Lemon is Exhibit A that real, rounded, beloved characters can still survive a milieu of dense, frenzied comedy writing, but she’s the exception, not the rule. Nobody cares about Michael Bluth quite the way they did about Mary Richards. Nobody feels Ron Burgundy’s pain the way they did Bud Baxter’s in The Apartment.
Sometimes I even miss the laugh track. Whether you were laughing along with a live studio audience or canned guffaws from a sound man’s Laff Box,XVII it was a communal experience. You were laughing on behalf of society, together with the other people watching Cheers or whatever all at the same time, not because you were smart or special but because everyone else was too. Now I laugh less often, in the quick breaths allowed me before the show races on, before I hurry on to the next episode in my binge. It feels a little superior, like a judgment: This joke, unlike that last one, has pleased me. Now we laugh alone.
* * *
I. Yes, this is a Woody Allen joke about sexual consent, and you are correct to note the irony. It’s harder to separate the art from the artist when the artist never tried particularly hard to keep them separate either.
&n
bsp; II. Jay Leno monologues. Kidding! Just kidding.
III. Hurley et al. use these two words interchangeably for “the good feeling of finding something funny,” which just goes to show that English doesn’t really have a good word for that. “Amusement” is so detached and clinical; “mirth” sounds downright Dickensian. How can you feel “mirth” if you’re not a large British man drinking spiced wine at a Victorian Christmas party? As a result, other humor researchers use “comedy” to mean “humor” (the stimulus) and “humor” to mean “amusement” (the response), which is even more confusing.
IV. Berle’s peers nicknamed him the “Thief of Bad Gags,” which was a funny and topical pun in the 1940s.
V. Sample fill-in-the-blank question from the school’s Comedy Talent Test: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Sam and Janet.” “Sam and Janet who?” “Sam and Janet _____.” A. evening B. (comma) the Bloomfields C. (comma) you know, Jimmy’s friends.
VI. For decades, I couldn’t get over this. Even the exploding drummer? But then I read an interview with Noel Gallagher of Oasis in which he admitted that his brother Liam—an actual rock star!—thought for years that Spinal Tap was a real band.
VII. The Arrested Development writers sometimes even wrote call-forwards to jokes that would never get made. The series drops repeated hints that David Cross’s character, Tobias, is not Caucasian at all, but rather a black man with a skin condition—but no actual joke or plot twist ever results. Was this an extremely deft hidden-ball play, or just a plotline abandoned due to the vagaries of serialization?
VIII. On that October 2014 show, guest star Bill Hader “broke” no fewer than three times over the reference to 1990s MTV stud Dan Cortese. Writer John Mulaney would often add new jokes to Stefon bits between SNL’s dress rehearsal and the live broadcast, in hopes of cracking up Hader on-air when he saw the altered cue cards for the first time.
