We critics of the progressive Left have often made the point that comedians shouldn’t be inhibited by our hypersensitive social norms in pursuit of funniness. It’s true! But somehow, comedians have taken that to mean that their first job is to criticize hypersensitive social norms and not, you know, to be funny.
A few days ago, I caught the opening of a comedy special by a popular young comedian called Matt Rife. Rife, a favorite of women young and old for his tousled hair and almost supernaturally swollen lips, ended the introduction to his special by saying, “Let’s see who gets offended,” and rolling his eyes.
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Ah, he’s a dangerous comedian, is he? A real iconoclast. A firebrand! He walks the line between acceptance and cancellation. Be careful when this one’s around! You never know when s*** is about to get real.
In his first few jokes, Rife talked about how gay men are good dressers, women love astrology, and dating is hard in Los Angeles. My point isn’t that Rife is untalented. He’s not for me, but he’s a quick-witted, charismatic guy who clearly has an audience. It’s just the high claims for his edginess that made my fingernails curl. It’s like a band insisting they are “punk as f***” before launching into some nice mellow jazz.
We often hear that “political correctness,” “wokeness,” or “cancel culture” is killing comedy. Political correctness isn’t killing comedy. Not really. Political incorrectness is doing a better job, by which I do not mean that comedians are being too offensive but that they are taking too much pride in being offense-givers — even when they aren’t actually giving offense.
Only one thing separates stand-up comedians from evangelists: humor. Truth be told, the line has always been blurred. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin are legends of comedy, but listen to their work, and you will hear a lot of relatively humorless sermonizing. Sometimes, in comedy, opinions are framed in brilliant jokes. Sometimes, you suffer through opinions to get to jokes. Sometimes, opinions are all you have, and you’re left feeling as short-changed as if you’d eaten a gigantic stale doughnut that contained no jelly.
Leftists are big offenders here, of course. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette famously took pride in its humorlessness — being hailed by tedious social justice-minded critics for its innovative style, which existed only inasmuch as it would take an “innovative style” for a singer to keep schtum or a dentist to pull out your fingernails. But it isn’t just leftists. Take Dave Chappelle. Chappelle is a great performer and an impressive figure for the way he’s put creative independence over profit, but his last special, The Closer, was an indefensible comedic dud. It wasn’t “problematic” because it made fun of trans people. It was “problematic” because it wasn’t funny.
Stumbling into the culture wars enabled Chappelle’s worst evangelistic instincts. Criticism of his edgier jokes about trans people got him. Understandably, he wanted to respond. But he came across as seeming far more like a preacher than a comedian. You didn’t leave thinking he was a bad bloke, but you didn’t leave thinking he was among the funniest men in the world, as you should have.
Worse: Take Ricky Gervais. Had Gervais made The Office alone, his comic legacy would have been secure. No one can doubt his exceptional talents as a writer and performer. But as himself, he’s a bit David Brent. He keeps on talking, and talking, and talking, and talking about how people are offended by him. Ask him to pass the wine at a Christmas party, and you half-suspect that he would launch into a tirade against people who whine about comedians’ offensive jokes. He almost sounds offended that people find him offensive. But I think that much is bogus. I think he loves it, really. If people stopped being offended by him, I suspect he’d be offended. Something he treasures about himself, his sense of being dangerous, would be lost.
But it is on podcasts where comedians are at their most insufferable. A podcast is a wonderful platform — cheap to maintain and easy to access. But most comedians, like most of us, have a limited number of things to talk about. Few of them have access to the quality of guests Joe Rogan attracts. So, how to fill the time? Talking about their inability to talk. Really, guys, I want to talk about controversial issues, but I can’t! It’s not because I neither know nor care about them! It’s because of that damn cancel culture! Look: Sometimes, it’s good and proper to oppose this or that instance of censoriousness. But sometimes, we just have to talk about the darned issue and ward off the brickbats that will follow. Talking about our inability to talk is ultimately still not talking, and it’s rarely very funny.
I hope no readers have been inferring that I dislike provocative comedy. It’s great! The harsh sting of an uncomfortable truth can make a good joke more strikingly and memorably intense. It is welcome, too, that comedians are not caving to cultural censoriousness. It was heartening, for example, to see Theo Von upload an interview with Roseanne Barr that had been deleted from YouTube to Twitter, on which it was seen by tens of millions of people.
It’s just unfortunate when provocation takes precedence over humor — or when it becomes a cheap ploy for gaining unearned artistic status. The late Norm Macdonald was as entertaining when he made fun of bad Carrot Top films as when he satirized PC priorities or mocked sentimentality about 9/11. His jokes could be extremely provocative, but that seemed almost incidental to being funny. Chris Morris’s pseudo-documentary series Brass Eye contained eye-wateringly on-the-nose jokes about pedophiles and AIDS and was all the funnier for being performed with a straight face. If he had broken character to ramble on about how offensiveness is subjective and people should toughen up, it would have killed the vibe.
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Ben Sixsmith is contributing editor at the Critic.
