Comedy is Dead
Long live comedy.
Recently, I did something I almost never do: I watched (and participated in) a YouTube live stream event. Yeah, I know, YouTube. Curiously, there was a surprisingly small number of trolls in attendance, but those present were pretty consistent in their (often ALL CAPS) message. More on that later, but I thought I’d start this with an observation on the subject of the livestream:
Comedy is dead.
If that complaint sounds familiar, it should. Google turns up about 437,000,000 results for “comedy is dead” and, this being Google, about a fourth are probably relevant. Maybe. There are hundreds if not thousands of “reasons” why comedy is dead, even after eliminating all the duplicates, and scores of “examples” of things that have killed comedy. But the story goes deeper than Google indicates. People have been complaining about comedy being dead for decades, if not centuries. I can remember the complaint from my own youth. I recall a critique of a Regency comedy in a scan of a newspaper I turned up for an unrelated project. Roman critics were savage about failed comedies. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ancient Greek citizens complained about the differences between the Old Comedy of Aristophanes and the New Comedy of Menander. (Eurocentric, I know, but the other cultures I’m familiar with had this nasty habit of executing anyone who tried to be funny.)
Of more recent vintage, just about any attempt at humor on social media can and probably has been described as the death of comedy. Memes are a frequent culprit, as are funny cat videos, sitcoms, movies, reality TV, Political Correctness, trolls, politicians, Americans, and just about anything else one could imagine. There’s an enormous range of possible murderers of comedy and murder weapons, as if the entire question was a game of Clue with infinite character, room, and object cards. Not what I’d consider an especially fun game, but one with a noticeable common theme:
Subjectivity.
In every single instance of the assertion that comedy is dead, the person making the assertion is expressing their opinion. Sometimes it’s obvious, such as when a political affiliation or subset of humanity is allegedly at fault. Other times, it’s more subtle, such as when comedy has allegedly been murdered by an individual or genre the person making the assertion doesn’t like regardless of the qualities responsible. Opinions are feelings and, as we are all human, feelings can easily be biased. There’s no objective standard of humor, no way to empirically measure how much “humor value” a given example has, as even measuring physical response in test subjects relies on subjective reactions. Consequently, the humor asserted to be “dead” may have never been alive to start, may be perfectly healthy and thriving, or anything in between, and it’s simply the biases of the person doing the assertion that blinds them to humor’s pulse or lack thereof.
I fully expect that, two hundred years from now, an uploaded personality matrix existing on the evolved form of the internet will connect to a live chat stream, where it will make a fart joke that no one will laugh at. Perhaps the audience consists of AIs lacking emotions, or perhaps of uploaded entities that have forgotten all those tedious biological processes they left behind, or perhaps the joke is simply bad. Regardless of why its audience didn’t laugh, the jokester will declare comedy to be dead, and the entire cycle will repeat. Fingers of whatever sort will be pointed, “examples” of humor throughout history will be cherry-picked, agendas will be regurgitated, opinions will be inflicted… and in its own little corner of virtual reality, a snarky little subroutine will generate and post a few paragraphs about the subjectivity of humor and the absurdity of declaring it dead.
Schrödinger’s humor, perhaps?
As to the YouTube commenters I mentioned before, said sparkling examples of wit were all of a particular EXTREMELY VOCAL bloc of opinions. Specifically, that liberals, feminists, trigger warnings, PC culture, woke culture, outrage culture, liberals, diversity, LGBTQ people, and liberals were the death of comedy. (Most likely on account of that bloc being the butt of so many jokes, but I digress.) They do serve as an example of why, for me, comedy is not dead, and will live forever: I find instances of people being unironically offended by what they themselves are to be extremely amusing. Or, to put it another way, I find easily-triggered snowflakes being triggered by people they describe as snowflakes to be funny.
I acknowledge my sense of humor doesn’t conform to artificially-generated ideas of “normal” but I can’t help laughing at that sort of absurd hypocrisy. For me, it reminds me of the sort of social satire I enjoy — the people having the reaction are the people satirized and caricatured in any number of works I find amusing, which aren’t confined to the modern era. The ones I often describe as pearl clutchers remind me of the more ridiculous characters in Victorian-era works, the more pompous and self-aggrandizing remind me of Shakespeare, and more than a few may as well be complaining about comedy to pass the time until Godot finally turns up. Or just are the sorts of characters that turn up in Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett, to name a few. I can’t help laughing at them, and their ignorance of their nature only makes the entire thing funnier. It also makes it almost impossible to be offended by such people, but that’s a happy accident.
I’m also pretty good at abstract thinking, so the agenda of the person doesn’t matter. True, some agendas are inherently funnier to me (I agree with a certain well-known quote from Benjamin Disraeli for entirely non-partisan reasons), but the behavior I find amusing isn’t restricted to a single agenda by any stretch of the imagination, which means more for me to laugh at. So for me, comedy will never die, not so long as humans are humans. There will always be someone doing something absurd in total seriousness, and so long as there is social media, they’ll always be happy to broadcast their absurdity where I can see it… for entirely unironic reasons, of course.
Comedy is dead. Long live comedy.
