Comedians Should Stop Complaining About Not Being Allowed to Do Comedy
You can't complain your way into being funny
I’ll be honest with you—when I started this thing, I thought this was going to be a funny newsletter.
I’m not an expert on comedy but I did just spend the best part of a decade faking being funny and writing for a comedy website without getting caught, so I figured I could just go on doing that until someone ratted me out. But then a war happened, and another war happened, and the supply of things to say funny stuff about began to dwindle.
Then there’s the fact that someone made comedy illegal at some point. I’m not actually sure when that happened, it missed my attention, but a bunch of real comedians noticed. Increasingly, the topic is becoming some comedians’ entire set.
It used to be that the biggest threats to comedy were humourless conservative busybodies, but now the real enemy has made itself known, and it’s the Wokeness, and it’s the Kids These Days. The slate of our long developed cultural history of what humour even is has been wiped clean and erased by the humourless void that is Kids These Days.
Hear Jimmy Carr lament about it. Ten years from now, the last generation who understood jokes is going to be sitting in a cave trying to explain how people used to “make light of serious situations” to a bunch of humourless woke kids who refer to him as “Non Binary Elder.”
Wait just a second—why is the narrator of this scenario (the person who understands jokes) non-binary? The narrator is supposed to be the non-woke character in this joke, right? Am I one of the humourless woke comedy police if I point out the continuity error here?
Once again, I don’t consider myself a comedy expert by any means, but I think Jimmy Carr’s biggest problems are, first of all, that he’s trying to do stand up comedy when his wheelhouse is clearly dinner timeslot network game show host, and second, that he’s decided his comedy persona should be “super edgy dark offensive humour” when he is about as threatening as Jimmy fucking Fallon. His offensive jokes, the ones Kids These Days are too sensitive to appreciate, include bangers like “When Zayn left One Direction it was like my 9/11 – I didn’t care about either.”
There are people who will be voting for Donald Trump for the third consecutive time this year who hadn’t taken their first steps when 9/11 happened. Trust me, the problem with that joke isn’t that the youth are too raw about it.
Here's an observation of my own: When comedians complain about the current generation being too sensitive or stupid or whatever else to appreciate their comedy, they do it for one of two reasons, or sometimes both—it’s either an excuse or a crutch. The difference is in how much of the whinge is presented as part of the act.
For Jerry Seinfeld, it’s very much an excuse. He recently interviewed with Graham Bensinger to complain, as he has in the past, about how the left has killed comedy and you just can’t joke about anything these days. Seinfeld always has a lecturing tone when he talks about his trade, and it’s clear that he considers himself something like one of the Elder Statesmen of comedy.
I’ll admit that I do very much love Seinfeld, the sitcom, and I think it deserves its reputation as one of the best sitcoms of the modern era at the very least. But sometimes I honestly wonder whether Seinfeld himself understands why it worked.
Jerry, the character, wasn’t a world famous stand-up. Put aside the detail of asking us to believe a local gig comedian can afford a New York City apartment on that income alone, Jerry was a bit of a hack. That was kind of the point of his character. With respect to the man, it wasn’t entirely an act.
“What’s the deal with airline peanuts” is a well-known cliché that has become shorthand for the unfunny or unoriginal comic, and even decades since the end of Seinfeld, anyone can tell you it’s a specific reference to him. Unlike other comics who complain about left-wing snowflakes neutering comedy, Seinfeld has never attempted to be an edgy, filthy comedian. His observational comedy is about as mainstream and all-ages as anything you can find. It’s not the worst stuff I’ve ever sat through but you could take your kids to it and they’d probably get a decent amount of the jokes. He riffs about cellphones and trouser sizes and the habits of married people.
Nobody is going to cancel Jerry Seinfeld, is what I’m saying—not for his comedy, anyway.
In case you’re tempted to think that’s why he’s so tame—he’s just dodging the censors—maybe so if there were any evidence that he’s able to tell an edgy, funny, joke. The example he gives of a Seinfeld episode that he wouldn’t be able to make today is the one where Kramer starts a business getting homeless people to pull rickshaws around New York.
Is that a little eyebrow-raising? Maybe. But what does he mean that he wouldn’t be able to write a joke like that these days? The same plotline would, comparatively speaking, be really tame for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is one of the most successful sitcoms in history as well as being the longest still running. That’s the show that has given us notorious sketches like “the implication.”
People aren’t shouting down Always Sunny, even as they make jokes like that in the same “MeToo” era that punished Louis C.K. There’s edgier comedy than homeless rickshaw drivers in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which, by the way, is written by and stars Seinfeld’s Seinfeld co-writer, Larry David.
I went to university and, yes, I did one of those maligned liberal arts style degrees and knew some of those rainbow haired nonbinary kids and they all fucking loved Curb. One of them loved Seinfeld, too, but I actually think that was a post-ironic thing he was doing.
So what, exactly, is the problem? What would prevent Seinfeld from telling an edgy joke? Who would stop him if he tried? According to him, it’s a meddling consortium of four or five “committees” or “groups” that kill the joke by giving their unwanted opinions. What he really wants, in other words, is to be left to do and say whatever he likes without editorial oversight. He wants to be trusted, as the Elder Statesman of comedy, to be left completely to his own devices.
But this isn’t the way comedy shows are made, and it never has been, or at least not for a long time. That’s not the fault of the “extreme left,” it’s showbusiness. If that’s news to Jerry Seinfeld then maybe he was spoiled from the beginning. If you can believe Sam Seder, who’s been inside that industry, a big part of the reason Seinfeld was kept on the air with such creative freedom in the first place was because the executives wanted to keep him nearby as they were eyeing him off for another role in television—as a late night host.
Once again—a Jimmy Fallon style gig. Something about this complaint from comics who feel incapable of telling an effective offensive joke seems less like being smothered by the woke mob and more like pigeonhole resentment. A skill issue.
Seinfeld’s attitude, fittingly, is as predictable as his comedy. He’s a 70 year old man who doesn’t seem particularly clued into politics and hasn’t kept up with modern society at all. (I was a little bemused that one of his recent Netflix specials, 23 Hours to Kill, includes some jokes about answering machines). That’s a textbook recipe for sliding conservative, and I don’t even know who he votes for. When he lectures Bensinger on sitcoms, he namedrops Cheers, Mary Tyler Moore, and All In the Family.
When he tells a joke today that would have been edgy for a Cheers audience and nobody laughs, he can’t tell the difference between the audience being offended or simply being confused.
Comedians like Seinfeld using Kids These Days as an excuse for the sounds of laughter growing fainter in their audience aren’t as insufferable, though, as the ones who use it as a crutch. By that I mean those who embrace their inability to entertain some segment of the population, blame that demographic for it, and use that complaint as a means to entertain another demographic that also hates those people.
Ricky Gervais opened his most recent special, Armageddon, with a line about how he’s got some brand new material. It sounds like he’s being sincere, which makes it ironic that he launches right into a long tirade about how offended the woke left was about his previous special, SuperNature—which he opened with a long tirade about how offended the woke left was about his previous special, Humanity.
Look, I’m not knocking anyone who makes a living saying the exact same thing over, and over, and over again, day in and day out. I do that too, it’s called having an office job. But for Gervais, it’s turned into his entire obsession. Whenever the man steps onto the stage, you more or less know what you can expect—it’s written on the tin, now. The latest news on what whiny little woke pissbabies are on his case about on Twitter or just in general.
The problem with criticising comedians for their political material, of course, is that you easily run into the “it’s just a joke” wall. Ricky Gervais can carry on for three Netflix specials or more about nothing but how he’s not allowed to talk about how the woke mind virus is smuggling packs of transgender illegal immigrants into western countries to rape our white women and I want to be clear—I know that he’s joking about that. What’s unclear is that he’s truly joking about how upset he is that people aren’t finding those jokes funny. Especially when he has a tendency to get honestly upset about the wokeness outside of the comedy context. It’s like that Wojak meme with the upset guy wearing a smug guy mask. It looks transparent and kind of awkward.
For example, I think there’s a contextual difference between this joke:
And this joke from unfunny right wing shithead Rob Schneider:
The context is that Gervais, while maybe partially sympathetic to the attitudes he’s satirising, is still satirising. Schneider, on the other hand, thinks he’s speaking truth to power, like a shitty Bill Hicks in a universe where saying “Rob Schneider” and “Bill Hicks” in the same breath wouldn’t be worth at least a few years in a medieval dungeon.
People are going to get upset about Gervais’ joke anyway and his job is to roll with those punches instead of betraying the fact that he takes them personally, and I think that’s his problem—you can’t really do a great comedy set about Kids These Days and how offended they are if it’s clear that you, yourself, are offended.
Though Gervais and Seinfeld deal with this in their own ways, I can’t help thinking that their shared problem, the thing that ties them back, is in both cases their ego. And it’s a real shame with Gervais because in his case it feels like a waste—he might actually have been in reach of that title of an Elder Statesman of comedy for all his talent, had he taken a different route.
Compare Gervais’ approach with someone who I feel, and I suspect I’ll get very little pushback on this, might be the greatest stand-up comedian the profession has ever known. He, too, had his issues with cancellation. He had his issues with people taking offense. He had his issues with things similar to what we might today call wokeness.
He had some words to say about it—seven, to be exact.
George Carlin was not a man of ego. He knew that he wasn’t above anyone and for him the enemy wasn’t Kids These Days. He was a man who knew how stupid the average person is and realised half of them were stupider than that. But he never punched down. I don’t think future history will ever question the wisdom in that.
bless you for adding George Carlin at the end
That was really, really, good. I don’t have a clever way to say that cuz it’s too early in the day and I haven’t had enough caffeine yet.