In a bid for the same level of notoriety as Pizza Rat, Melissa McCarthy recently donned her now-signature Sean Spicer costume and hit the streets of New York City in a motorized version of the podium familiar from her serial press secretary skit. By any measure, the stunt is inherently funny — reaching back to comedy’s fundamentals of surprise, daring, slapstick, and the clever act of focusing attention while paradoxically lowering the stakes.
And so it’s a welcome respite from comedy’s grueling recent past, which has fallen into a rut of ideological ritual and deadpan cynicism where the high-end humor of wit and the low-end humor of yuks both once flourished.
The templates that define today’s comedy industry are now so well defined they hardly need review. There’s the flat anti-humor of so much television and film, where one character grinds another’s remarks to a halt with some meta criticism or another, turning the moment into a non-conversation that’s intended to get more laughs the more awkward it gets. Example: the agonizingly stilted and crushingly boring dialogue about one character’s hots for another given pride of place in the trailer for the new “Guardians of the Galaxy” sequel.
Then, there’s the weaponized identitarian performance that has leached its way into the traditional late-night TV format, where Samantha Bee, John Oliver and even Stephen Colbert get their biggest laughs not through actual jokes but by assuaging the identity of their anxious and angry audiences, sometimes through cultural coddling, sometimes simply talking about designated enemies in whatever way it’s imagined those enemies would least like to hear themselves talked about.
Entertainment is entertainment, of course, and to each his or her own. But these kinds of amusement are being confused with humor — oftentimes, it seems, on purpose — and the effect is that Americans are losing conceptual contact with comedy.
Notably, there’s more at work here than the so-called “coarsening of the culture,” or of politics. We’ve known since at least Shakespeare that comedy can get very crude without squeezing out clever jokes, happy endings, or recognizably human characters. Although watered-down postmodern theory, amateur value relativism, and the social disturbance of the Trump presidency clearly factor into pseudo-comic entertainment, they’re probably not at the root of the problem.
To figure out what is, we might look back to Don DeLillo, the grumpy, apocalyptic novelist of the 20th century who saw the Boomers take over American culture from a generational distance. (He was born in 1936.) DeLillo once remarked that the humor in his novels wasn’t “intended to counteract the fear. It’s almost part of it,” he explained. “We ourselves may almost instantaneously use humor to offset a particular moment of discomfort or fear, but this reflex is so deeply woven into the original fear that they almost become the same thing.”
On a surface level, this idea might help suggest that many entertainers and their audiences are simply afraid that they’re losing control of the culture — that their most prized values are being challenged by a more or less malevolent faction. Here, the Trump controversy would be just one part of a broader reactionary movement that many Americans refuse on principle to be curious about. Drained of curiosity, comedy becomes brittle and dull in one way or another. What we see today could be the latest manifestation of that.
On a deeper level, however, a culture critic might suggest that the fear involved in replacing comedy with today’s other form of entertainment is an internal fear, a fear that the dominant culture is actually hollow and without safe harbor. “Pure Comedy,” Father John Misty’s new album, gets across something like this idea, challenging members of the dominant entertainment culture to reckon with the low-grade terror that permeates lives so often spent performing in great comfort and self-satisfaction. But this approach jumps into a hard argument to win.
So much of what has replaced comedy today perversely uses awkwardness and popular nihilism as a form of collective self-care. Experienced individually, our recognition of being senselessly unmoored from anything in life that’s redeeming in an ultimate sense may be crushing; experienced together, however, it becomes a source of solidarity and forbearance. This is more or less the lesson of “Seinfeld,” and the lesson of today’s casual but durable quasi-cult of Seinfeld.
Nevertheless, someone with a little more interest in solidarity and forbearance than the average culture critic might ask whether the fear fueling today’s entertaining avoidance of actual comedy comes from a different source. What if the root issue is that so many of us are simply losing the ability and the confidence to risk meeting one another as strangers?
We complain about the politicization of everything, yet fail to recognize how politics is becoming the last comfortable way to socialize. Not that long ago, a whole host of social and civil organizations gave us a range of safe-but-not-too-safe, real-life realms where we could get to know other people. Now, those social oases are drying up.
A kind of cultural desertification is taking place, wiping out sites for people to take structured gambles that can deliver bearable psychological shocks that can lead to happy endings — that is, gambles that take the form of comedy as it has so long been understood.
Without those cosmic risks, which still capture our imaginations so strongly in fiction and in person, life will become not only a terribly boring business, but a terribly fragile one too. To rediscover comedy and truly save us all, many more entertainers need to slap some wheels on their podiums and brave the mean streets of being fully human.
James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.