by Ken Jennings
The Price
The opposing view is often framed this way: sure, prejudice is bad in all its forms, but what do we lose if we become so hypersensitive to boundary cases that we steer away from jokes about tricky subjects altogether? Often, professional funny people are the ones sounding this alarm. They see themselves as sentinels on the walls watching the barbarians amass, the canaries in the coal mine while the growing climate of “political correctness,” as they will say, becomes suffocating. First, they came for the hacky club comics, and I did not speak out, because I was not a hacky club comic.
I get it. No one likes to be told how to do their job. In particular, it must be galling to be a professionally funny person and still face perpetual criticism from less funny people with a long list of complaints. I’m not a comedian, but I waste a lot of time on Twitter, and Twitter is the single best invention in human history for telling jokes to thousands of people who don’t like or understand jokes. If you have a sufficiently large following, you will get helpfully corrected just about every time you say anything. It’s the kind of place where a joke about bees will be met within minutes by a reply from a beekeeper saying that kind of levity isn’t helpful to his field.XI I once tweeted a lousy pun my son had made and asked readers if I should have him put up for adoption or killed. “Good joke, but next time skip the implication that adoption is a punishment,” one reader instructed. (The murder threat was apparently okay.) That very night I was in a taco place that had photos of Mexican actors Cantinflas and Katy Jurado on the respective restroom doors, and I posted a photo with the note that, luckily, I identify sexually as a Cantinflas. One reply told me I was hurting the cause of trans people by making light of gendered restrooms.
Responses like that make a common enough mistake: confusing a joke about a subject with one targeting the subject. A joke that mentions adoption does not necessarily stigmatize adoption, just as a photo of funny themed labels on restaurant restrooms isn’t there to disparage trans people. A joke about rape can target rape culture instead of rape victims. But I understand that these aren’t my go-to issues, and others for whom they loom larger will experience them differently. Their reluctance to laugh about a subject that hits close to home isn’t something I need to correct or rebut. Let’s be honest, their priorities (be inclusive toward adopted people and trans people) are nobler than mine (make dumb jokes on social media out of a bottomless need to feel validated by strangers).
That’s just part of the social contract of joking. If I think something is funny, I can try out a joke about it, and if someone doesn’t think it’s funny, they’re free to leave, or explain why. (Twitter isn’t a nightclub, where joke critiques ruin the “show” for others.) My right to free speech isn’t being constrained in any way. “The ‘thought police’ aren’t a real police,” Hari Kondabolu pointed out. “There’s no jurisdiction that has the thought police. So you can say what you want to say, but you have to face the consequences of what you say. That’s not a novel idea!”
If, as a comedy fan, you feel you must side with a comedian who publicly complains about something he (or she, but come on, usually he) “can’t joke about anymore,” ask yourself a few questions. First, do these objections ever age well? Is there ever a kind of insensitive joke that came back into style once everyone realized we were overreacting? Generally, that doesn’t happen. Mean jokes go out of style because civilization moves on. There’s a transcript of a White House press briefing from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in which Reagan’s spokesperson and the press corps share a hearty laugh at the idea of a “gay plague” and kid each other that—uh-oh!—what if one of them had it?!? It’s funny, because that would mean they were homosexuals! I’m sure all of these people would have scoffed at the idea that their little joke, and the attitudes behind it, did any harm. But looking back, it’s clear who was on the right side of history during that era, and it wasn’t all the people doing easy AIDS jokes.
Second, what real harm has been done by the pushback to jokes? Is our culture suffering from not enough quippy people being able to speak their minds? Is that really what’s causing most of our problems right now—everyone’s too kind and sensitive, and so marginalized people have it too easy? A 2016 analysis of survey data from the American National Election Study found a gaping divide on the question of “political correctness”: respondents who said they’ve never been the victims of discrimination overwhelmingly agreed that “people are too easily offended” these days. Having experienced discrimination made people more than twice as likely to support more inclusive language. In other words, the complaints about “thought police” are coming almost entirely from people who have the luxury of not having to worry much about the issue either way. Firsthand experience might change their mind.
Many comedy people now take the more enlightened line that if a controversial joke “offends,” it just means it wasn’t funny enough. The audience has spoken; write a better joke. That’s true as far as it goes, but to me it misses the point. In a world of omnipresent comedy, getting a laugh isn’t all that rare, or difficult. It’s certainly not an absolute defense. Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes got laughs with his “gay plague” joke at that briefing, but that doesn’t make him right. And it’s not like “tell sharper AIDS jokes” would have been the best advice for him; as it turns out, what we really should have done in 1982 is take the epidemic more seriously early on.
It’s been said that “political correctness is just good manners,” and of course that’s not an absolute defense either. There are thousands of things more important than manners. But it’s an illuminating comparison, because I think most people would like to live in a society where good manners are the rule, and where they’re only dispensed with when there’s a higher good at stake, an urgent need. “I just thought of a little joke” doesn’t always qualify. Historically, we’ve tended to except comedy from the requirements of manners, because these people are special: they’re our truth-tellers, our impudent court jesters. But in a time where everyone’s a comedian, when there are literally millions of truth-telling court jesters, that carve-out seems less necessary than ever. Today comedy is mainstream discourse, not just a quick break from it.
“Are comedians right that there’s a price to monitoring their jokes more carefully?” I asked Lindy West. “What would happen?”
“All of these institutions would unfurl and make themselves available to all the people who have felt unwelcome and unwanted in that community.” She thought we were already starting to see it. “The comedy landscape feels different to me today, the way women are given much more default respect. All of those women who are starting out right now, who are geniuses, might never have started if the climate hadn’t opened up a little bit. That’s the ‘price’! It’s that you actually get to know and hear the stories of all these other people who had previously been excluded or discouraged.”
Sure, the change may have involved external pressure, West concedes. But just as it didn’t really matter how many alt-right provocateurs were dabbling in Nazism ironically, someday it won’t matter how many shock comedians just toned it down so feminists would stop yelling at them. “Even if that’s the reason, that’s fine! Because the generation behind them won’t know that was the reason.”
Changing the World with Ping-Pong Balls
Comedy can make backward social views seem more palatable and even harmless. But for the same reasons, jokes have also become a uniquely powerful way to argue for positive change.
For starters, they can be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. “People let their guards down when they hear comedy,” Hari Kondabolu told me. Even a skeptical audience member, he said, might think, “I’m willing to listen because I paid for the ticket, I still think this is funny, and he’s going to reward me at the end with a laugh.” Recently, journalists have noted the “John Oliver effect,” in which the long-form desk pieces delivered by Oliver on Last Week Tonight have changed the status
quo where years of op-eds and direct-mail appeals have not. Oliver’s little lectures are dotted with plenty of snarky asides and cringily millennial-friendly pop culture similes (the United States uncovering FIFA soccer corruption was “like finding out that Ke$ha arrested a group of bankers involved in commodities fraud!”), but they get results. When Oliver explained the issues surrounding net neutrality, viewers submitted forty-seven thousand new comments to the FCC, enough to crash its website. He did a segment on how badly large poultry companies treat their suppliers, and the next appropriations bill to pass the House of Representatives strengthened legal protections for chicken farmers. A month after Oliver complained about the bail bond system in America, New York mayor Bill de Blasio announced reforms to the city’s bail procedures. None of these issues were drifting anywhere close to the top of the public mind before Last Week Tonight’s writers dressed them up in jokes.
Humorists also have rhetorical tricks at their disposal that reporters do not. “Straight journalism can’t use hyperbole,” Lindy West observed. “What satire does is it just makes something truer than the truth. You spin it out to its ultimate conclusion and then you can really look at how absurd or dangerous or cruel or petty this thing is.” That can lead to real-world change—most famously, in the case of William Tweed, the corrupt boss of the Democratic political machine in Gilded Age New York. In the early 1870s, the New York Times was documenting “Boss” Tweed’s shady world of kickbacks and extortion in a series of exposés, but what really stuck in the popular imagination were the caricatures of Tweed that cartoonist Thomas Nast published in Harper’s Weekly, which depicted him variously as a vulture, Napoleon, a corpulent titan with a money bag for a head, and a giant thumb crushing Manhattan. “Stop them damn pictures!” Tweed fumed to his Tammany Hall underlings. The Tweed Ring offered Nast half a million dollars to “go study art in Europe,” but Nast refused. In the end, it was Tweed who fled to Europe to avoid trial—only to be arrested by Spanish officials, who recognized him from one of Nast’s drawings! The cartoon they had seen showed Tweed in prison stripes, hauling two street kids around by the collar, and the guardia thought they had tracked down a dastardly child kidnapper. The power of hyperbole!
Finally, humor has the distinct advantage of overcoming power asymmetries: if protesters can drag a debate into the level of the ridiculous, the powers that be have much more to lose than they do. In his book Blueprint for Revolution, Serbian activist Srdja Popovic lists examples of what he calls “laughtivism”: deflating authority in ways that are hard to retaliate against, because they provoke laughter instead of anger or violence:
• Opposition leaders in Serbia painted dictator Slobodan Milosevic onto barrels, then placed them around Belgrade along with baseball bats. “Smash his face for just a dinar,” read the sign. Delighted citizens lined up for a turn. When police showed up, there were no organizers to arrest—so they arrested the barrels.
• Syrian protesters wrote antigovernment slogans on Ping-Pong balls and dumped them out in public places. Soon cops were being deployed to chase little bouncing Ping-Pong balls, something that no one in history has ever looked cool or scary doing. The demonstrators also rigged up tiny USB speakers to say things like “Assad is a pig!” on a loop, and left them in garbage cans and manure piles, for the authorities to dig around in.
• Russians in one Siberian city were denied permits to protest against Putin, so they placed little plastic toys in the streets to march in their place. The trend for toy demonstrations began to spread, so the government was forced to ban assemblies of Lego mini-figures and the little plastic toys from Kinder eggs.
As the Italian situationists warned oppressive governments, “a laugh will bury you!” This line of protest seemed especially promising when it came to the thin-skinned Donald Trump. The marchers with funny signs may not have wounded him, but TV and Internet jokers realized that the president’s massive ego, his own deluded mystique of mastery, was his greatest weakness. Jokes about the unimpressive crowds at his inauguration immediately produced defiant tweets and defensive press conferences. Jokes referring to White House aide Steve Bannon as “President Bannon” led to Bannon’s swift demotion from the National Security Council, the New York Times reported. The leader of the free world could be manipulated into changing policy by pointing and laughing at him; this was either hopeful or horrifying, depending on your point of view.
Thermometers and Thermostats
There is abundant precedent for world leaders who, like Trump and Kim Jong-un, took jokes about their government seriously. The Nazis made joking about the Reich a capital crime in 1935, and Joseph Goebbels banned all political humor in 1939.XII Thousands were sentenced to death under the law. Under the czars as well as under Stalin, Russians could be sentenced to ten years of forced labor for telling jokes about the government or the party. Given the condition of czarist prisons and Siberian gulags, that was usually a death sentence as well.
But satire and comedy haven’t had a great track record against totalitarianism. Popovic’s student movement in Serbia did actually help to topple the government of Slobodan Milošević, who ended up dead in a Dutch prison cell while on trial for war crimes. But there’s not a long list of powerful people brought low by jokes. Putin and Assad have so far managed to survive the Ping-Pong balls and Lego sets strewn on sidewalks by their unhappier citizens. “There are those who thought that we could laugh Hitler and Mussolini out of court,” remembered theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “but laughter alone never destroys a great seat of power and authority in history.”
This raises the possibility that subversive jokes might actually be counterproductive. What if they’re just a convenient escape valve, a way for unhappy people to let off steam and feel better about their lot without actually fighting back against oppression? Medieval kings and churchmen, even at the height of Christianity’s distaste for comedy, long tolerated yearly spring carnivals and “feasts of fools” at which social rules were suspended and topsy-turvy merriment reigned: a peasant boy was dressed as a bishop, pigs were put on mock trials, processioners cross-dressed and danced the night away. The powers that be didn’t mind a little mockery, because the peasants would generally work all the harder for the rest of the season. “Wine barrels burst from time to time if we do not open them and let in some air,” the Paris School of Theology wrote in defense of the festivities. Some later revolutionaries avoided humor for the same reason: it seemed to undermine the seriousness of their struggle. Hungarian humorist George Mikes claimed that, in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the secret police would actually invent and spread their own antiregime jokes, so they’d have more control over the level of discontent in the comedy climate.
It’s easy to find evidence that today’s topical comedy, no matter how sharp it feels, can be more of an opiate than a cattle prod. Late-night monologues are on before bedtime. We don’t watch someone make fun of the bad men and then feel empowered to call our senator or volunteer for a nonprofit. We hear the jokes and drop off to sleep. In 2011, an eighty-year longevity study announced the counterintuitive finding that cheerful people actually die younger, which goes against everything we thought we knew from Patch Adams about the healing power of laughter. Coauthor Leslie Martin speculated that in some cases, people with a cheery, optimistic outlook might actually take their health too blithely or find themselves emotionally unequipped to deal with setbacks.
A Lithuanian émigré named Alexander Shtromas was the only political scientist to predict the end of the Soviet Union as early as the late 1970s, when the Soviet Union seemed to be thriving to other onlookers. How was Shtromas so sure? Because of the jokes. Officially, there was no dissident movement in the USSR, and yet Shtromas was collecting hundreds of whispered jokes, from an informal news apparatus that Russians jokingly called the OBS (Odna Baba Skazala, “an old woman said”).
A woman is walking down the street with a bag full of rolls of toilet paper. A passerby sees her and asks, “Hey, mothe
r, where did you buy them?” “Buy? Are you crazy? Where could I buy them nowadays? They’re five years old. I’m taking them back from the cleaners.”
A man called KGB headquarters on business and was told, “We can’t help you today, the KGB has just burned down.” Five minutes later he called back and was again told that the KGB has burned. When he called a third time, the operator recognized his voice and asked, “Why do you keep calling back? I just told you, the KGB has burned down!” “I know,” the man replied. “I just like to hear it.”
But it’s important to note that Shtromas described these jokes as the result, not the cause, of Russian dissatisfaction. They didn’t bring down the party. In the words of Christie Davies, “jokes are thermometers, not thermostats.”
The makers of The Daily Show know that better than anyone. When I asked former staff writer Rob Kutner about the influence the show had on the real world, he laughed. “Mostly you’d find the opposite: not having an effect,” he said. In the run-up to the 2004 election, the writers’ room felt pretty good about their nightly lampooning of the war on terror: mission accomplished. “We all thought that we had exposed Bush’s follies and there would be some kind of reckoning. We didn’t think he’d get reelected.” When the New York Times asked Jon Stewart the same question at a panel shortly after the 2016 election, he was even more damning. “Controlling a culture is not the same as power,” he said. “While we were all passing around really remarkable, eviscerating videos of the Tea Party—that we had all made great fun of—[they were] sitting off a highway at a Friendly’s taking over a local school board.” Organizing is always a thermostat.
