by Meghan Daum
My rented house was about a mile from campus. I walked there most days, even the twenty-degree days that made time feel like a slow march across a frozen plain. On these walks, I asked myself over and over again why I was so determined to make my students uncomfortable. One of my courses was on the topic of cultural criticism. My syllabus emphasized intellectual risk-taking, controversial opinion, and even ribald humor. I wanted my students to understand that there was little point in going to the trouble of writing anything (and to write anything well you usually have to go to a lot of trouble) if you’re not going to challenge your reader. I wanted them to understand that playing it safe defeated the whole purpose. But what exactly constituted “challenge”? Why did I assume that edgy satire was more challenging—not to mention more artistically significant—than earnest invectives against patriarchy and white privilege?
There was a part of me that wanted to force my students to sit down and listen to Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys all the way through. Since there was no way I could make a pedagogical case for such a lesson, I settled for other forms of exposure therapy. I made them read one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 Vanity Fair article “Why Women Aren’t Funny.”
I went through a spiel about how Hitchens was really making a feminist point (or at least what I considered to sort of be one) because he was essentially saying that comedy was a low art and women were above it. Then I forced them to watch the video Hitchens had made defending himself from the inevitable backlash. In the video, Hitchens maintains a self-satisfied smile as he blithely opines about female comedians tending to be either “dykes or Jews or butch.”
What a cruel teacher I was! I was effectively prying their eyes open and forcing them to watch aversion therapies à la the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange! Watching their shocked faces, I recalled being made in college to sit through the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Salò, a grotesque interpretation of the Marquis de Sade’s already grotesque novel The 120 Days of Sodom. The film depicted forms of torture ranging from rape to forced eating of human feces, and I’ll never forget sitting in that dark screening room with my Vassar classmates from Italian Film Studies, gagging together even as we struggled to take notes in the dark. As I remember it, the collective gagging caused us to laugh, and from this combination arose a solidarity that rendered the whole experience too absurd to be traumatic, at least as far as I was concerned.
Nearly three decades later, I wondered what was keeping my own students from laughing their way out of discomfort. (I knew they could laugh at other things; I’d heard their chortles echoing through the hallways of the cold 1960s building that housed us.) Hitchens was a son of a bitch, but he was pretty damn funny and singularly insightful. Why couldn’t they see that it was possible to be more than one thing at the same time? Was this not the essence of the intersectional theory they so adored? Or was I getting this all terribly wrong?
I taught my students “Isn’t It Romantic?,” the glorious essay by the brilliant, late David Rakoff, about the vapid sentimentality of the rock opera Rent. For context, I showed a video clip from the original Broadway production of Rent. The show hasn’t exactly held up well. Based on the Puccini opera La Bohème, which is set in nineteenth-century Paris, Rent substitutes AIDS for the tuberculosis epidemic and essentially hands every character a death sentence. By the end, just about every character is infected.
Then, because I could not resist, I showed a clip from Team America: World Police, the 2004 raunch movie with a cast made up entirely of marionettes. Coincidentally enough, the movie, whose creative team includes the guys behind South Park, contains a scene (later cut from the DVD edition but easily accessible on YouTube) wherein the marionettes engage in coprophiliac sex not unlike what goes on in Salò. I did not show that scene to my students. What I did show them was a scene that sends up Rent. As far as I’m concerned, it is one of the funniest things in recorded history.
The scene is a musical number and therefore nearly impossible to describe in writing, but suffice it to say it features a character named Gary who’s about to be recruited into a paramilitary anti-terrorism brigade. For the moment, though, Gary is an actor performing in the stage production of a show called Lease. We see him leading the grand finale, a song called “Everyone Has AIDS.” Here he exuberantly calls out all the friends, family members, and pets that have died of AIDS. His delivery is akin to a preacher praising the Lord for his salvation.
My father (AIDS!)
My sister (AIDS!)
My uncle and my cousin and her best friend (AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!)
The gays and the straights
And the whites and the spades
Everyone has AIDS!
It’s a major production, a wall of sight and sound. It’s a twisted hybrid of Christian rock, a Super Bowl halftime show, and Up with People, that slick but earnest traveling music and educational organization that you’d really only know about if you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s. The song concludes with the word “AIDS” being sung for every note of a long, syncopated rhythm passage: AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS: AIDS!
The singer raises his arm on the final note and then lowers it somberly. The audience rises to its feet in thunderous and awestruck applause.
I’ve probably watched this clip no fewer than thirty times. Never once have I done so without convulsing in laughter. The classroom in which I showed it had a giant screen. The video stretched wide across my students’ line of vision, the puppets larger than our own bodies, the lyrics louder than our voices. From my desk at the front, I was nearly falling out of my chair laughing. I was crossing my legs to avoid peeing in my pants. A few of my pupils were also laughing. A few of them looked like they might need to go to the emergency room.
The nice thing about teaching a class in cultural criticism is that you can basically shoehorn anything into the curriculum. Except Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, of course.
“So you see how the plague narrative has evolved over time,” I said. “Puccini begat Rent begat Team America: World Police. I think that’s enough for today!”
* * *
When I was the age of my students, HIV and AIDS were the wallpaper of urban life. I was finishing up grad school in 1996, the year Rent debuted Off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop. Though the official plague years were over, HIV awareness had gone from a public health initiative to a kind of fashion statement. Mandatory as it was to be a sexually liberated person in the world, it was even more mandatory to be terrified of sex and avoid it under all but the most risk-free circumstances. For a period lasting from the late 1980s until the first anti-retroviral treatments were approved in 1995, the standard prevention line was that everyone was equally vulnerable. It didn’t matter if you were a gay IV drug user in Haiti or a corn-fed choirboy in Kansas. AIDS doesn’t discriminate. I have a distinct, though now impossible-to-believe, memory of some kind of student health advocate at my college declaring during some kind of information session that there were “lesbians on this campus transmitting HIV to other lesbians.” (Tellingly, there is a moment in Rent that hints at such a scenario.) In other words, it didn’t matter if you and your partner got tested every other Thursday. It didn’t matter if you had sex only with yourself. If you didn’t use a condom every time, you were as good as dead.
Everyone knew this wasn’t true and so continued to use condoms in the haphazard way people had been using them for years. But the disconnect created a cognitive dissonance that I believe left a mark on an entire generation. If college students and other young people today are obsessed with sexual consent, we were obsessed with sexual histories. I remember sitting across bar tables from men on dates in the 1990s and studying them for signs that they might once have had sex with another man or injected drugs. I remember getting tested for HIV repeatedly in my twenties even though I’d done exactly nothing to put myself at undue risk. I remember sitting in terror in the clinic waiting rooms because t
hey weren’t allowed to give you the results on the telephone. I remember becoming totally convinced in those moments that I was about to be called into a testing counselor’s office and informed that my life was effectively over. I remember wondering how I would break this news to my parents, my friends, whatever sexual partners I’d had since the last time I was tested. I would entertain this series of thoughts even if I’d had zero partners since the last time I was tested.
Then the counselor would call me in and sit me down and open up a manila folder and tell me the test was negative. I would skip down the street in relief, at least until I passed the next “Silence = Death” public service ad at a bus stop. Then I’d freak out all over again.
Is this the reason AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS: AIDS! is the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard? Is this what leads to a world in which lowbrow, racially charged humor from singing puppets can have a forty-seven-year-old professor doubled over in stitches while her mostly early-twentysomething students either stare at her blankly or glower in contempt?
In my twenties and thirties I would try to explain to older people just how much of an imprint the AIDS crisis made on my generation, especially the sliver of us that happened to come of age right in that window of time when the disease had finally been recognized but was not yet under control. I would try to explain to baby boomers that the sexual revolution they had enjoyed was essentially in thrust reversal for us.
In recent years, I’ve had to explain the same thing to younger people. There is now medication available that lowers the chances of being infected with HIV by more than 90 percent. A gay man in his twenties once told me that he refuses to take this medication on political grounds because he feels it problematizes his homosexuality. Intellectually, I understood his logic, but nonetheless I found it stunning in its heedlessness. When I relayed the conversation to a friend in his sixties who’s been HIV-positive for twenty-five years, he shook his head and said, “Fuck that guy.”
The comedian Sarah Silverman, who is exactly my age, used to tell a lot of jokes about AIDS. In the mid-2000s she had a bit where she described getting an HIV test and being asked if she had a blood transfusion in the eighties. She mistakenly hears eighties as Haiti and says, “I used to live there.” When asked how long she lived there, she says, “I don’t remember, I was doing a lot of heroin at the time.”
On the surface, it was a dumb joke. So was her joke “If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man with AIDS on the moon. And then someday we can put everyone with AIDS on the moon.” But there’s something so Gen X about these jokes that I can’t help but adore them. As with the humor of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are each within a year of my age, the modus operandi seems to be to take the piss out of things. There must be something about being born in the late sixties through the seventies that triggered an allergy to earnestness. Silverman also had a penchant for Holocaust jokes (What do Jews hate most about the Holocaust? The cost!) and, moreover, rape jokes. Her 2005 comedy tour included this classic: I was raped by a doctor, which, you know, is bittersweet for a Jewish girl. In her 2013 stand-up special, We Are Miracles, she explained her logic thusly: “Rape, obviously, the most heinous crime imaginable. Rape jokes are great!”
But in 2017, when an interviewer for the Guardian quoted the raped-by-a-doctor joke back to her, Silverman reportedly looked panicked.
“There are jokes I made fifteen years ago that I absolutely would not make today, because I am less ignorant than I was,” Silverman told the reporter. “I know more now than I did. I change with more information.”
That first part of that quote—There are jokes I made fifteen years ago that I absolutely would not make today—became the headline of the article. It’s a good headline. When I saw it, I clicked on the story immediately. But the story didn’t take me where I expected to go. I assumed Silverman was going to be lamenting the comedic drought in which we now find ourselves. I thought she’d echo comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, who’ve publicly voiced their trepidation about performing for college audiences. “You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive,” Rock has said.
In a 2015 Atlantic article, Caitlin Flanagan (yes, the Caitlin Flanagan of the #MeToo mention several chapters back) described the scene at the National Association for Campus Activities annual conference, in which comics and others showcase their acts in the hopes of getting booked at colleges. As it turns out, colleges are the network television of comedy venues; only the mildest material makes it past the gatekeepers, though in this case the gatekeepers aren’t General Mills or Procter & Gamble but students themselves. As a result, many of the most exciting acts don’t get booked. Instead, performers deliver low-risk routines that, in a sad self-fulfilling prophecy, may reinforce students’ preexisting belief that comedy, like so much else in the world, just isn’t funny.
“These young people have decided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics,” Flanagan wrote. “They want a world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’t rigged in favor of the powerful.”
Should societies be organized around their weakest members or their strongest? Should marginalized groups be afforded special status or integrated out of the margins and into the mainstream? Should trauma survivors expect the world to tread lightly around them until the end of their days? And since some trauma is invisible to the naked eye, does that mean every interaction should err on the side of inoffensiveness? If not, are we only allowed to punch up? And if so, does that mean those of us perceived to be on the highest rungs are left just waving our fists in the air, with nothing to punch?
Maybe. But I still feel like punching something a lot of the time.
CHAPTER 8 What’s the Problem?
Until very recently, one of my most abiding ideas about myself was that I was young. The other was that I was tough. The former is ridiculous. The latter is just meaningless. Everyone loses their youth, and everyone is exactly as tough as they need to be at any given time. Another idea I had about myself was that I was a liberal and a feminist. I believe those things are still true, but I also now think those labels no longer serve me the way they once did. I actually think labels are part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Labels—be they badass or bigot, SJW or white supremacist—tamp down contradiction. They leave no room for cognitive dissonance. They deny us our basic human right to be conflicted. And as I like to tell my students, if you’re not conflicted you’re either lying or not very smart. (I also like to tell them, “No one will love you unless somebody hates you.” I’m full of these gems.)
So what is the problem with everything?
Is it that we’re all lonely? That we’re needy? That social media has flattened us into one-dimensional objects, rendering us stupid, unsocialized, unhinged, ungenerous, unwell? Is the problem that the personal is masquerading as the political? Or is it that the political is taken way too personally? Is the problem that you can’t trust anyone over forty? Or is it that you can no longer hear anyone over forty? Maybe it’s that people over forty are slowly losing their hearing.
Whatever the root cause—and this is a tangle of roots, a giant fig tree siphoning our collective derangement from the crumbling earth—it’s evident that this era routinely brings out the worst in most of us. Trumpism has made us feel that the world is out of control. In turn, we’ve forgotten how to control ourselves. We’ve become toddler versions of ourselves. We’ve given in to a culture in which narcissism is affirmed with clicks and likes on the internet and then reaffirmed in direct proportion to its alliance with in-group thinking. We’re raising the next generations to fear their most original thoughts.
Sometimes I think the problem is that we’re being let in on too much. We’re not only getting front-row seats to everyone’s dopiest inklings, we’re getting backstage passes and discounted merchandise. Social media sneaks int
o our brains, steals half-formed thoughts, and broadcasts those thoughts before they’re anything close to being ready for what used to be called “public consumption” (or, as we used to say, “ready for prime time”). I realize now that much of what I’ve been reacting to these last few years is nothing more than undeveloped versions of already undeveloped thoughts. I think about what this means for young people, especially teenagers, whose thoughts are supposed to be undeveloped, even stupid. I think about all the stupid thoughts I had as a teenager, all the uninformed, half-baked, insensitive, self-serving, grandiose, totally-embarrassing-in-retrospect things I said to my friends and my parents and my teachers. What if someone had handed me a microphone and invited me to say them to the whole world instead? Would I have taken them up on it? Of course. Would the world have been worse for it? Of course.
It’s easier to define ourselves in opposition to something than in alignment with something. It’s easier to browse clothing store racks, used car lots, and online dating sites and note what we don’t want—no zippers! no sedans! no sapiosexuals!—than to home in on what we do. In 2017 a Pew Research poll found that nearly half of all people who identify as either Democrats or Republicans do so more because they oppose the values of the other party than embrace the values of their own.
Another study from that year, conducted by two political-science scholars with help from the polling firm YouGov, asked self-identified Democrats and Republicans how they perceived the demographic makeup of the other party. The results were astonishing. Republicans believed that 36 percent of Democrats were agnostic or atheist, 38 percent were lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and 44 percent were union members. The actual figures are 9 percent, 6 percent, and 11 percent, respectively. In turn, Democrats believed that 44 percent of Republicans were age 65 or older, 44 percent were evangelical, and 44 percent had annual incomes higher than $250,000. The actual figures are 21 percent, 34 percent, and 2 percent, respectively.
