Comedy and Politics: Facing Uncomfortable Realities with a Smile
You can’t do stand-up and bury your head in the sand
It was great to be back on stage performing stand-up in front of a live crowd after a sixteen-months forced absence. I teach public speaking and I will share with you the simple secret to doing stand-up comedy:
Xanax.
Yes, even though I have spent countless hours in front of the classroom performing for students, being on the lighted stage is very different and still makes me wildly nervous.
Everything started off great. Whenever I talk about my daughter, it’s a success. “She’s eleven now and we are starting to have those talks about the facts of life, and I have to tell you, I am learning SO much.”
Then, in the middle of the set, I became political and the vibe of the room suddenly changed. “So there is a new Purge movie coming out. Isn’t it amazing that, a few years ago when the first one came out, it seemed like science fiction. The U.S. government allowing citizens to kill each other? Get out of here. But then Trump comes along in 2020 and tells people they don’t need to wear masks and it’s basically the same thing.”
I kept going, “Now with this new movie, if you are unvaccinated and go to see it in a theater down south, you can watch a fictional purge happening on the screen while you participate in an actual one happening right there in the theater.”
The room was now silent. It’s not that they didn’t get it, or agree with the point, or appreciate the clever connection of what I said. It’s that I made them uncomfortable in ways that I did not anticipate.
After that, I went back to personal anecdotes with self-effacing punchlines, and the laughter and enthusiasm returned. Overall, it was a good set. Friends whose opinions I trust said it went well and strangers complimented me. Yet, it’s that awkward moment of collective internal disquiet that I want to understand. I struck a nerve. What happened?
Ruining the party
One of my friends speculated that the mood changed because when most people go to a comedy show, he thinks, they just want to laugh and have a good time. They don’t want to have their views challenges. They don’t want to have to think or be bummed out. “Even if they agree with you,” he said, “you are ruining the party.”
This may be true. While lots of the comedians talk about embarrassing moments, disturbing fantasies, bizarre bathroom experiences and other things that can make the audience cringe, it isn’t often, in my experience, that the comedian challenges the audience’s perspective on topical issues. In fact, what they say often has an opposite, reassuring effect. You can listen and think, I’m not that weird or perverted or disgusting. And if secretly you are, well, you aren’t the only one. Even bits that describe dealing with racism and sexism often have the effect of letting listeners of different races or genders feel good about themselves as their worlds are enlarged. They can think, That’s terrible. I know I would never do something like that!
Hanif Abdurraqib writes in “Redemption Song” that the protest songs of today are not like they were in the past because of how the music business has changed. Musical artists, reliant on earnings from streaming services not sales of physical records, cannot risk alienating their fans because they are scraping by. When I read this, I thought, perhaps naively, that nowadays we look to the stand-up performer to be the provocateur who shows us ourselves in ways we cannot see on our own. I thought, and still believe, that comedy is a sort of rebellion that can upend the status quo and inspire transformative reflection and positive change.
So every so often I’m going to throw in a dose of shake things up, and if it makes the crowd uncomfortable, too bad. They need it, we all do, so I think.
I just want it to be over already
Another possible reason I momentarily sucked the air out of the room is that so many people want the pandemic to be over so much that they are in denial, trying to will it away. That’s a consistent theme in my zip code where there are currently zero cases and vaccination rates are high. “It’s over, man.” “What are you going to do now that life is back to normal?” And here I come bursting that bubble, reminding them that it’s not true. We got variants and people choosing not to get vaccinated.
This is not the time to sugar coat things, or make nice, or agree to disagree. There were over fifty people in the comedy club that night, all unmasked. I assumed they were all vaccinated because the club is in a liberal-leaning area full of educated people. And comedy and intelligence correlate. These are all indicators of who gets vaccinated. But anyone there not vaccinated could be getting purged or purging while I’m talking about The Purge. These people need to be called out and made uncomfortable. They are making the country more dangerous for children such as my daughter who are still too young to get vaccinated.
A virus ran through some of them
Then I realized something I hadn’t considered. Surely, some people in the audience must have had COVID. Statistically, it must be well over ten percent. Whether they got it through bad luck or carelessness, they probably passed the disease on, and they know this. They may know who they infected and possibly killed. Some of them may have a body count, and if they do, it is still very likely growing.
It was not my intention to shame anyone for something that was done in the past, something that cannot be undone now. So many people who took every precaution possible and still got sick and infected others must be carrying incredible guilt. And those who know their irresponsible actions had lethal consequences — I have no idea how they are coping. This is part of the reason I was super careful for over year; I knew I would find the guilt of being a disease vector unbearable.
This is an issue that needs to get a lot more attention. We need to find a way to talk about it. People who are being reckless now need to learn from those who live with the regret. And those who are suffering now the consequence of their actions but not their intentions — of course you didn’t want to harm anyone — need to be helped to find a way to heal.
I believe comedy has a roll to play in the healing process. Being able to laugh at ourselves, we realize we can’t always live up to who we would like to be and who wish we were. We are then able to forgive ourselves. I’d like to be able to help with that kind of healing.
Maybe I’ll find a way next time I hop up on stage.
