Comedy Casualties
One of the best things about being alive is the ability to laugh. I mean, imagine being dead and laughing? Isn't that what makes up the crux of most horror stories? If I could build one floor for every time someone has said "Laughter is the best medicine", I would have a Burj Khalifa like tower - and still growing.
But at what point does that laughter become medicine to most but poison to someone else? I am of course, talking about audience targeted standup comedy. I love standup comedy and it is one of the most deep forms of human expression. But every now and then you come across videos of the host bullying the audience by pointing at their weight, their age, their better looking partner or simply just their race.
Modern standup comedy has finally solved racism by making every ethnicity equally exhausted and nothing unites humanity quite like paying $43 plus parking to be publicly informed that Asians are bad drivers.
Let's consider comedians who love talking about race. I am yet to find a standup comedian who bypasses this genre. When I see a clip of a host of color I know that something related to their race is about to come up. Then they go on to talk about behaviors of other races and cultures and Ivy League schools, here is the Social Studies and Ethnic Relations thesis for which you have been looking! Let's graduate these researchers already and give them their Ph.D in Anthropology.
Standup comedians have the savoir faire of interrogation detectives because, none of their questions ever go unanswered. I have even seen cheating couples open up about their love proudly to them, an act which they have tried very hard to hide from coworkers, friends and family, in respective order of who would hate them the most. I imagine it would have been incredible if the FBI had hired a standup comedian to interrogate Ted Bundy in a room full of admirers, to open up about the location of his various victims. By this time, we would have established an entirely new field of behavioral science dedicated to comedic interrogation and crowd-induced confession.
The frightening thing about repetitive stereotype humor is not even the joke itself, but the efficiency with which it settles into already judgmental minds. Human beings are naturally eager to place one another into neat little drawers, and standup comedians arrive like unpaid administrative assistants helping label the folders. A person who previously possessed only mild ignorance about another culture now leaves the comedy club feeling strangely educated, as though hearing three accent impressions and one joke about spicy food constitutes anthropological research. Entire races are slowly transformed into shortcuts in people’s brains; Indians become strict parents, Asians become bad drivers, British people develop bad teeth, certain religions become airport security side quests and the French apparently spend their entire lives emotionally negotiating over cheese and cigarettes. At some point, comedy stopped being observation and quietly became a low-budget international orientation program for people who refuse to read books.
I sometimes wonder whether standup comedians could replace teachers at schools so that childhood bullies are finally served their own flavor of justice, or perhaps replace government representatives entirely so that national crises become more entertaining. Perhaps hospitals could employ them to deliver bad news in waiting rooms. After all, few professionals possess the ability to emotionally dismantle complete strangers with such speed and confidence.
Whatever the profession, every human being eventually grows exhausted and bitter, so perhaps corporations should hire standup comedians to publicly roast workplace bullies once every fiscal quarter. If not a meaningful monetary bonus, at least the sight of your most hated manager being emotionally dismantled beneath fluorescent lighting could provide some degree of employee satisfaction. Because if we can learn to laugh at innocent cultural norms, then surely we can also revel in the misery of the people we genuinely despise.
