by Ken Jennings
She and Twain shared the same publisher, the same illustrator, and largely the same readership, but today, more than a century after his death, Twain is still a household name, while none of Marietta Holley’s books remain in print. As the aggressively self-promoting Twain traveled the world winking and harrumphing on the lecture circuit, Holley stayed at home in the quiet Victorian country house she had built in upstate New York. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton urged her to attend women’s suffrage events—incognito, if necessary!—but Holley demurred. And no one in the literary establishment pushed for Holley’s addition to the canon, though she mixed sharp regional humor with progressive issues like race and social reform just as Twain did.
Holley’s contemporary Sara Willis was the highest-paid newspaper columnist in America, but she had to use the pseudonym “Fanny Fern,” because her family had been so appalled to see their little girl go into the humor business. When she was just starting out, she sent writing samples to her brother Nathaniel, a successful magazine editor. He replied with a cold rejection letter, telling her that he’d be ashamed if his sister’s “vulgarity” and “indecency” ever came to light.VI It suited and flattered men to keep comedy a male clubhouse, and then to use that status quo as evidence for the inherent unfunniness of the female mind. Author Kate Sanborn noted in 1885, “There is a reason for our apparent lack of humor, which it may seem ungracious to mention. Women do not find it politic to cultivate or express their wit. No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady’s lips. What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws back the merry dart, or indulges in a little sharp-shooting? No, no, it’s dangerous—if not fatal. ‘Though you’re bright, and though you’re pretty, / They’ll not love you if you’re witty.’ ”
It would be nice to think that those ideas were entirely uprooted by a century of feminism, but change has been slow in coming. Even as women like Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers, and Phyllis Diller began to challenge the male stranglehold on comedy, that generation of “comediennes,” no matter how glamorous offstage, had to deal in frazzled or frumpy comedy personas and tell self-deprecating jokes about how they were too gross to get a man. The laughs had to be at their own expense. Decades of humor-studies research seemed to prop up the idea that men were funnier than women, during a time when men were designing most of the studies. For example, it was long held that women didn’t laugh at sexual humor the way men did; more nuanced research has since found that women are mostly turned off by sexual humor when women are the butt of the jokes. Studies on humor production—getting men and women to write funny captions for cartoon panels, for example—long favored men, but a 2011 study found that the biggest difference was confidence. The men who took those tests were writing more unfunny captions as well. They were getting more laughs for the same reason that NBA star Allen Iverson always made a lot of baskets: because they were taking more shots. Studies of conversational humor have found that men are more prone to witty teasing, the kind of thing that’s easily quantifiable as a joke, but that women tell more funny anecdotes and jokes that build solidarity between people.
Circling the Wagons for Rape Jokes
The success of above-the-title funny women like Amy Schumer and Tina Fey may give the impression that comedy’s gender gap is gone completely, but working comics know that’s not true. Many gatekeepers in comedy still hold to the rule of thumb used by legendary Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue: “It does help when writing humor to have a big hunk of meat between the legs. . . . Mr. Ding Dong, I think, has a lot of comedy genes in there.” Writing for Vice in 2015, LA stand-up Megan Beth Koester described the world of regional club comedy as one of “outright hostility to women,” a time-machine world where outrageously misogynistic material goes unchallenged and clubs and festivals routinely offer slates that are all male, or nearly so, without a second thought.
“When I started writing at Jezebel, it was totally accepted that women are less funny than men,” Lindy West told me, and I immediately pictured diagrams comparing men and women’s skulls, something out of the self-published phrenology or eugenics book of a turn-of-the-century crackpot. West started out covering local comedy and writing funny movie reviews in the Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly. In 2012, she was hired to blog for Jezebel, and almost immediately saw her career take an unexpected turn. That summer, Daniel Tosh, the edgy—just ask him!—host of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, lost his cool during a set at the Laugh Factory, when a woman in the audience heckled a rape joke in his act. “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?” he asked the crowd. “Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” The woman’s account of the exchange went viral on social media, and it took the conversation about misogyny in comedy into the mainstream media. Many prominent (male) comics lined up to defend Tosh on Voltairean grounds—isn’t it great that comedians can say anything, even offensive things? It wasn’t so clear to West that comedians musing aloud about uppity women getting gang-raped was an ultimate social good, and she wrote a piece for Jezebel proposing that, at a bare minimum, jokes about rape should target rapists, not their victims. Suddenly, she was the face of comedy censorship and PC thuggery, invited on cable news to explain Rape Culture for Dummies and then harassed endlessly—and I mean for years—by the Internet’s angry anonymous every time she wrote about issues of feminism or social justice. One particularly vicious troll pelted her with insults using the identity of her late father, an experience that West described in a memorable episode of This American Life.
“Being in a fight with all of comedy really sucks,” West said. Her 2016 memoir Shrill might as well be called The Passion of the Lindy: her battles with comedy professionals and fans turn her life into a demoralizing gauntlet of abuse. She had grown up as an obsessive comedy geek, feeling at home among the outsiders there. Then, without warning, she found herself Public Enemy Number One in that world just for taking the art form seriously, for saying that comedians should be responsible for their jokes. Even comics skeptical that comedy had a misogyny problem, like Patton Oswalt, eventually changed their tune after reading through online responses to West, which she patiently screencapped for the benefit of skeptical readers.
no need for you to worry about rape uggo
What a f—king c—t. Kill yourself, dumb bitch.
Jesus Christ this woman is about as fun as dry rape. Lighten up Lindy!
“Did that take a big psychic toll?” I asked her.
“I don’t go to see stand-up anymore. I don’t watch stand-up specials. I don’t want to go to comedy clubs. I feel like I was rejected by that community, and they were shitty to me, so fine. Good luck.”
Can You Have Your Racism Cake and Eat It Too?
It’s a stretch to call Daniel Tosh’s hypothetical rape threat a joke in any real sense, but that’s how he explained it away in his Twitter apology a few days later. “The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them,” he said. Dissection of comedy is now a regular sidelight in our culture. Was this joke in last night’s monologue on the right side of the issue? Was the comedian in that cell phone video out of line? In defense of comedians, this is in part a side effect of technology. Phone recordings and social media posts can skewer joke-tellers for tasteless one-off remarks never meant for mass consumption. In the past, Tosh might have seen a weeknight Laugh Factory set as a chance to workshop new material, testing the limits on sensitive subjects before tackling them in the public eye.
But the real reason for all the Monday-morning quarterbacking of comedy is that we changed. We know now how powerful jokes can be: they can raise or lower a politician’s poll numbers, transform public opinion on an issue, boost product sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. With stakes like that, the traditional “But I was just joking!” that Tosh trotted out no longer works as a blanket hall pass. Of course you were jok
ing. But that just begins the conversation about what you were trying to say, or what its effects were. It doesn’t end it.
Comedy is often lauded for taking risks with subject matter and viewpoint, but let’s not mince words: it’s possible to tell potentially offensive jokes for noble reasons—to make an audience listen to hard truths, for example—but it’s easier to do it for hacky reasons. Carlin’s adage about “suppressed laughter” being the easiest kind to get is important here. Funny people figure out pretty early that even jokes that aren’t particularly insightful or well constructed can get big laughs, if the audience thinks the subject matter is sufficiently edgy. Shock value covers a multitude of sins.
Punch lines that are overtly racist or misogynistic or homophobic just won’t cut it anymore—there’s also such a thing as being too transgressive. Today, Eddie Murphy couldn’t open two straight million-selling comedy records by telling the crowd at length about his fear of “faggots.” Woody Allen used to do a queasy joke about running into his ex-wife on the street and not even recognizing her “with her wrists closed.” And people forget that Andrew Dice Clay, the biggest fad comedian of the early 1990s, wasn’t just a ludicrously over-the-top chauvinist onstage, but also filled his act with so many anti-immigrant jokes that the New York Times compared one of his shows to a “Nazi rally.” Times have changed, but comedians are still eager for the sweet seductive thrill of shock. So one thing you see a lot is self-consciously offensive material foregrounded, but couched in irony. In his comedy film Hilarious, Louis C.K. repeatedly tells jokes that want to have it both ways. He claims that he’d have sex with a dead child—but then tells the audience he only did the joke to enjoy their offended response. He does a singsongy throwback “Ching chong ching!” impression of an Asian lady—but insists that the butt of the joke is his own dumb self. He shocks the crowd with a joke where he calls a woman with a “big nose” and “frizzy hair” a Jew, but then softens it into an observational bit about using the word “Jew” as a slur. I’m not convinced that the ironic distance excuses these jokes at all. They worked! He got the laugh twice—once for telling us racism was funny and once when he told us that, just kidding, it wasn’t.
Lots of funny people do this, and the winking subtext is always the same: “It’s okay when I do this, because my heart is pure. I’m one of the good ones.” The problem is that this defense is meaningless; literally every human on earth believes they’re one of the good ones. It is the one awful thing in life, as Jean Renoir once said: “Everyone has his reasons.” I become newly skeptical of this comedic device every time I resee an old tweet of mine where I tried the faux-naïve thing of sounding dumb or regressive on some issue of the day—but ironically! Without the benefit of being back in my own head, experiencing all my good intentions firsthand, the tweet doesn’t read as faux-dumb. It just seems dumb. I sound bad and dumb.
Why is it so much easier to tell a sarcastic joke that pretends to espouse the opposite of what we believe, as opposed to a sincere, constructive one that accurately reflects our viewpoint? There’s something nuclear about humor, in that it can be so easily used to blow things up and scorch the earth. You could harness that same power to produce heat and light, but it requires so many safeguards and careful calculations. The risk of meltdown is always going to be there. Is it really worth all the effort? When you could use the same material to make a dirty bomb in five minutes?
In Praise of the Killjoys
More and more, we hear about comedians who care enough about their act to idiot-proof it. Eschewing ironic offensiveness isn’t enough: you shouldn’t dabble in jokes that could even be accidentally taken literally. Chris Rock became the biggest comedian in America with his 1996 “N—–s vs. Black People” routine, but he never did it again after that tour, because he thought it was giving white audiences too much license with the n-word.VII In 2005, Dave Chappelle walked away from his hit sketch show and a $50 million contract offer at least in part because of one incident when a white crew member laughed a little too hard at a blackface sketch. “I want to make sure I’m dancing and not shuffling,” he told Time. Sarah Silverman calls those unintended responses “mouth-full-of-blood laughs.” “They’re the laughs you don’t want.”
Hearing Dave Chappelle tell Oprah that story was hugely validating for Hari Kondabolu. “There’s a lot of us that were like, ‘That’s what we’ve been saying!’ They’re not just jokes. They’re ideas. They can influence and have impact with people.”
Kondabolu and his friend and podcast cohost W. Kamau Bell are often the panel that white comedians run racially iffy jokes by. “Is this okay to say?” What they want is permission, a Get Out of Jail Free card from a certified person of color. Instead of offering a verdict, Kondabolu tries to start a dialogue: What is the comic trying to accomplish with the joke? What compromises or unintended side effects would he be okay with? “It’s weird being a killjoy in comedy,” he said. “It’s not something I thought comedy was going to be for me.”
But the research backs up the killjoys. It’s now well established in humor studies that disparagement humor comes with actual costs. Hearing one racist or sexist or homophobic joke might not “convert” every listener, but it can be persuasive to members of the audience already predisposed against the target. The experiments are often structured like this: Groups of participants are exposed to different materials. One group reads or watches disparaging jokes; the others might get neutral jokes or disparaging material that’s not comedic. Then the groups are asked to plan some task relating to the jokes’ target, like making a donation to a women’s organization or divvying up a college budget between different student groups. Demeaning jokes do more to change participants’ decisions than neutral jokes or, interestingly, demeaning nonjokes. The effect may be akin to the “confused” Stephen Colbert viewers in the previous chapter. The layer of irony in a Louis C.K. bit that traffics in race might be enough to sneak past our careful social conscience in a way that more overt material cannot.
Sadly, the effects of disparagement humor aren’t limited to the lab. The controversy over President Truman’s integration of the United States military in 1948 largely surrounded the notion, embedded in the chains of command, that African Americans were unfit for duty due to cowardice. This stereotype dates back to the Civil War and explains why black Union soldiers were largely kept out of active combat, and were paid less and equipped poorly compared to their white counterparts. The irony is that the antebellum image of the quivering black scaredy-cat, as employed by Mark Twain and others, was a self-serving one created to protect white interests! A population of four million passive and superstitious black people, whites imagined, could be subjugated into slavery. Four million fighters, bloodied but unbowed, would be another matter entirely. Once embedded in the culture and spread through minstrel humor, those stereotypes kept on influencing military policy, and reinforcing racism in the armed services, for decades.
For a more recent example, ask any Asian American who grew up in the John Hughes era about “Long Duk Dong” and look for the shiver of response. When I watched Sixteen Candles as a kid, the character of the clueless foreign exchange student, played by Gedde Watanabe, seemed goofy but harmless. I laughed when the “Donger” tried to use a fork and spoon like chopsticks or tried ineptly to put the moves on yet another pretty white girl. But in many American schoolyards, Long Duk Dong was the only Asian face in popular culture, and his inept brand of comic relief became implicit permission to tease the Asian kid in the class. “Jeer pressure” is a real and scary phenomenon: watching someone else be teased makes bystanders more likely to pile on. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the sake of a few cheap laughs,VIII John Hughes made the childhood of hundreds of thousands of people a little harder, a little more cruel. I know he didn’t mean to. But jokes have real-life consequences.
If this can happen even in the case of a writer like John Hughes, whose reputation rests largely on his sympathetic, sensitive ear to kids and
teens, just think what disparagement humor can do in the hands of every other idiot in the world. In 1993, the Tucson Citizen reported on the case of a fifth-grade teacher in rural Arizona who got fed up with John Henderson, a big kid in the class who often fell behind due to numerous learning disabilities and delayed motor skills. At the year-end class awards ceremony, Henderson was publicly presented with three “funny” distinctions: the Procrastinator’s Award, the Pigsty Award, and the World’s Worst Athlete Award. The boy was devastated and tried to hide the certificates from his parents. When they finally found out, they were furious. Their son had an “emotional breakdown,” they told the newspaper, and it took years of therapy and a change of schools to get him back on track.IX All because of one teacher who didn’t understand how humor works.
What’s most interesting to me, when it comes to mean or insensitive jokes, is that it’s not always the most outrageous offenses that are the most dangerous. In 1993, Ted Danson emceed at a comedy roast for his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, and appeared in blackface. He launched into a long, raunchy routine about his interracial sexual relationship with Goldberg, ate watermelon onstage, and used the n-word no less than twelve times. Ted Danson! If you didn’t live through this, you probably think I’m making it up, but it happened, and it was a huge deal. A thousand thousand thinkpieces agreed, quite correctly, that a line had been not merely crossed, but plowed three feet into the dirt.X But here’s the thing: l’affaire Danson didn’t lead to a racist epidemic of celebrity or civilian blackface speeches. It was so clearly over the top that everyone just shook their heads in bemusement and moved on. It’s the small offenses, closer to defensibility, that can actually affect the way we treat other people. The “c’mon, surely that’s harmless” ones. The white comic who affects a caricatured “black” voice in his act but then jokes about it afterward. The SNL sketch that uses two guys kissing as an outrageous topper. The Long Duk Dongs.
