The Comic Misanthrope in a Moral age
There has been in recent years an interest in enforcing moral correctness on people through the use of the tools that the internet provides.
I suppose it’s to be expected, every medium has the ability to provoke outrage but in the case of the internet maybe a greater ability to direct the outrage, sustain that outrage, and to help those who experience outrage to immediately act on behalf of whatever moral issue from which the outrage stems.
Historically movements to enforce morality have, in the U.S at least, been a tool of the right, they have been organized and enforced in a top down manner. Perhaps this is because the ability to enforce morality is an exercise of power, and would normally support the powerful. Enforcing morality from a position of no power would look a lot like revolution.
The internet allows a more free and individualistic expression of the moralizing urge to take place, people can be informed by the millions of bad acts in near real time and can all, on their own volition, choose to respond. A free exercise of power by many people coming together at once without overt direction is often called a mob, and is thus unlikely to be really threatening to anyone with the power to withstand a mob, which is anyone wealthy enough to pay for protection and response in kind.
The phenomenon is widespread, causing people to go to high altitudes to get a better overview in order to describe it. As I already have a stratospheric tendency I think I should instead narrow the view and thereby hopefully remain grounded.
Thus I will focus on how this moralizing tendency affects a certain type of comedian.
The Comic Misanthrope
There is a common narrative trope that those attracted to comedy are sad and miserable themselves, in those cases where this is true it is often because comedy is an early manifestation of the comics natural inclination for misanthropy. Comedic misanthropy is often a defense against the embittered misanthropy so prevalent with age or, perhaps, just experience.
The comic misanthrope is drawn to the viewpoint that life and human existence are jokes.
The comic misanthrope jokes about many things, refrigerators, dogs sniffing each other’s butts, fat people, etc. etc. ad infinitum, because if you think everything is a joke, all of existence is funny, there is a lot of material out there.
Indeed there is no reason to assume that a comic misanthrope will say something offensive to anyone, ever, where it not that sooner or later something offensive must present itself, and challenge the comedian to respond.
Question and Answer time
What — do you mean that a comic misanthrope finds the holocaust funny?
Yes most definitely, Nazis are hilarious, why would anyone do that!? Look at how they dressed, they dressed like they were the baddies. Of course if the comic misanthrope thinks of Nazis, Hitler or Germany they are going to put it together and start joking about it.
So what about Pedophilia, is that something funny?
To the Comic Misanthrope, yes, it is hilarious that people would want to have sex with children, hurt children, and really, again what is wrong with these people!? If a comic misanthrope hears about the worst things in life they are impelled to craft a joke about it, to be able to process it.
Luckily the professional comic misanthrope will probably be able to keep from saying anything if they can’t come up with something sufficiently funny. Essentially they hope to sum up the awful things in a zippy one-liner and then banish them from their consciousness. If it comes back, well, then they have a one liner for that to deploy and send it back again to the ridiculous darkness where it belongs.
But of course, the comic misanthrope finds all of human existence and reality equally comic, not just the awful depressing parts.
People going about their lives are absurd, politics, doctor’s visits, the attempt to escape ones own mortality, all forms of virtue, being woke..
Yeah, the comic misanthrope really doesn’t like wokeness much either. Why is that?
Why does the Misanthrope hate Wokeness
The reason why so many comedians talk smack about wokeness and people who are woke is that to be woke is to be a moralist, and misanthropes hate morality more than they hate immorality.
It is essentially the age-old philosophical battle between pessimism and optimism; the misanthrope believes that humanity cannot be improved and the world is going to shit, the moral crusader of any stripe believes that humanity can be improved and it is the duty of people to get rid of the shit. Even if the misanthrope agrees with all of the moralist’s other beliefs as to what is morally good, they cannot agree that the world can be improved and that the shit can be shoveled away without stopping their misanthropy.
The moralist dislikes the misanthrope because the belief that people cannot be made moral is to the moralist the supreme immorality.
The misanthrope hates the moralist for three reasons:
- The first is the same reason that everyone else does (leaving out those who explicitly oppose the moralist’s goals), because the moralist demands that they get up off their ass and do something. The misanthrope just dislikes the moralist more because the misanthrope is not just lazy, they believe that change for the better in human nature is not really possible. Nobody likes working for nothing.
- The second reason is that the comedic misanthrope will often make comedic statements that goes against their values — if for example you think that everyone should be equal but your misanthropic view of humanity is such that it will not happen then there is a large incentive to make fun of the attempts to bring equality about — that is to say the comedian may believe in moral uprightness but is compelled to make fun of it as not possible given how awful humanity is. Thus the comedic misanthrope is the target of the moralist.
- Since the misanthrope believes in the inherent badness of people it strikes them that a moralist must in some way be faking it. That is to say the moralist seems worse than other people because the misanthrope suspects the moralist is a hypocrite and the moralist is also attacking the misanthrope.
In conclusion the misanthrope thinks that humanity is bad, the misanthrope is bad but a little bit better than the rest of humanity because at least they see the truth, and the moralist is perhaps the worse (barring extreme outliers like cannibal Nazi serial killers or some such.)
Life is just one big joke
A comic misanthrope may feel that things are inherently bad, but is drawn to joke about them. I believe we’ve already established that.
Let us call it the dead baby principle. Almost everyone thinks dead babies are awful, and while very few people like dead baby jokes, nonetheless it is a recognizable subcategory of joke that somehow came into existence.
Of course it may be that not every comic misanthrope is funny, but professional comedians who are also comic misanthropes I suppose will attempt to be funny. They are drawn to joke about the awful things in life but they cannot just do so all the time, because lots of these things are by their nature unfunny. For the comic misanthrope to satisfy their itch to make fun of the things that one should not make fun of they have to find a unique and interesting angle on the subject to make it funny.
This is why professional comedians do not make dead baby jokes, because they are not funny, they are gross and unoriginal. But the comic misanthrope is severely tempted by just this challenge, and thus sometimes professional comedians do make dead baby jokes https://www.nme.com/news/ricky-gervais-dead-baby-joke-belfast-2030526
That said I will give a shout out here for the only dead baby joke I ever liked. You may have heard this one yourself, if you were in high school in the time of dead baby jokes being popular;
Question is asked (generally asker is male and reasonably good looking, a good looking female should be one of the targets of the joke.); How do you unload dead babies off a truck?
Someone says I don’t know.
Asker: Use a pitchfork (mimes stabbing pitchfork into bodies of dead babies that evidently are piled quite high in the truck and tossing them off the truck with wild abandon.
Now I always liked this joke because whenever I was watching the joke teller with his inane grin trying to pantomime the gruesome work of unloading dead babies off a truck with a pitchfork, the repeated stabbing motions, the wild swings of the pitchfork over their deads and so forth. It just became absolutely, unmistakably clear that this idiot really didn’t know how to use a pitchfork.
First off a pitchfork is for unloading densely packed material like hay, not things that will obviously get stuck on the prongs of the pitchfork and will be difficult to get off without scraping it along some edge to dislodge it!
Think of it like using a fork, if you use a fork to pick up spaghetti and move it from one plate to another it just comes right off, but if you stick a piece of steak with the fork so that the fork is all the way through the steak when you want that bit of steak to come off on the other plate you are going to be whipping that fork up and down trying your best to shake it off and when that probably doesn’t work scraping off along the rim, and probably having bits of the steak come off the fork. It’s messy and awful and obviously dead babies should not be unloaded with a pitchfork. The sheer incompetence was galling!
Actually I used to worry about the future prospects of the people telling this joke, they definitely seemed too stupid to do anything but manual unskilled labor, but they obviously didn’t even know how to use a pitchfork. What were these idiots going to do with their lives?
To this day I still sometimes wonder what happened to those jerks, and did they ever get to have sex with that girl they were grossing out with their advanced pitchfork technique display.
I mean I hope so, given their future job prospects getting laid for telling a dead baby joke might have been the high point of their lives, and if the girl did decide to have sex with the gross, good-looking guy well, in some ways I even kind of get the logic, once you are totally disgusted and grossed out by a guy — why not touch his penis? It can only go up from there.
An Unhappy Nihilist
Of course in the end a misanthrope represents a nihilistic view. It is the behavioral symptoms of a mind not especially happy nor destined for happiness, even should the person possessed of that view be successful and have, in the estimation of more positive people, every reason for happiness in this world. To defend against the unhappiness they joke, as in the old saying it hurts too much to cry, and their continuous laughter allows them to not think about whatever things make them unhappy — their oversensitive protective mechanism makes them look like an unempathetic jerk.
Often misanthropes are unempathetic jerks though.
The progress of these misanthropes tend to follow several paths, one is exemplified by our most famous comic misanthrope Mark Twain
Great early success with comedy, a move to more ‘serious’ work but still informed with comedic intent, some hack work to make money off of ability to do comedy at the drop of a hat, ending with pretty bleak misanthropic viewpoints That of course was his ‘work’, in public however he showed the other successful misanthrope face, that of someone bemused by the world, aware that it is not wonderful but due to their own position in that world reasonably able to accommodate their own dissatisfaction with the world and a the miserable human beings that inhabit it. This face of a successful misanthrope can be mistaken for a perpetual ironist.
The third unsuccessful misanthropic result tends to be depression and suicide.
Obviously a number of examples spring to mind.
Comedy Tends to Fail before Misanthropy
As our preceding section would imply. And logic would seem to dictate, as life piles up there are more things to be unsatisfied with, many of which directly affect you. Over time the jokes start to wear thin, especially as your inner audience perhaps gets bored with the jokes, they ring hollow and the zippy one liner does not zip like it used to.
If we think of comedy and misanthropy as a manic / depressive cycle, the comic is up when joking but then the jokes start to not give enough protection against the darkness they see in the world, and then the misanthropy kicks in.
The Golden Age of Misanthropic Comedy
Comedy from the 1960s to the earlier part of the last decade was a period especially conducive to misanthropy and nihilism. Starting with the obvious Lenny Bruce
And continuing on with any number of people who would say awful things about just about everything while laughing their heads off about it, but still somehow looking like they were coming apart the happier and more successful they seemed.
During this period there grew up a mythology about comics, I think mainly drawn from the personas of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin, that the comic existed as a form of truth teller.
In the ‘truth-teller’ idea he comic misanthrope has developed a false consciousness as to why they do what they do, they believe that what they are doing is telling it how it really is, which is, when you think of it, a very misanthropic thing to think. They are providing a public service for all those poor deluded fools who don’t see how it really is. This is a pretty great self-image to have, and it of course helps alleviate the stresses that misanthropy naturally gives.
But as a downside, when you have a view of human existence that it is absurd and perhaps evil, and then get attacked by moralists (the hypocrites) about the things you are saying which you have convinced yourself is a form of truth telling and a public service, and the moralists seem to be winning!
Well, it’s going to drive the comic misanthrope a little bit crazy.
“The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It’s dismissive. “I don’t understand this person. So they’re crazy.” That’s bullshit. These people are not crazy. They strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick.”
― dave chappelle
This article was written by IG Agents 77, 19 and 84.
