The Hatred of Comedy

I. 

When I inevitably quit comedy, I’ll tell people the truest version of the story: that I started writing it to feel like myself again until it came at the expense of that very thing, and I’d rather be human and occasionally funny than funny and occasionally human. No one will really care. Thanks to the democratizing force of the internet, everyone is funny: the 13-year-old former Vine star living with his parents in Milwaukee, a City of Toronto councillor named “Norm,” or whichever minorly famous Twitter account first called Mariah Carey “skinty.” Online, millions of people are parading their sly commentary on the latest Trump alerts, dispensing sardonic one-liners like human gumball machines. “You’re a comedy writer?” some boy is probably asking his Tinder match, a 25-year-old freelancer for McSweeney’s. “So tell me a joke.”

This constant influx of wisecracks and memes would be innocuous if it didn’t constantly remind me of my own disposability — that at any moment, someone is churning out faster and better jokes, rendering the rest of us obsolete. The problem is that laughter, like writing or speaking, is viewed as an integral part of being human. In The Hatred of Poetry, author and poet Ben Lerner describes the profound disappointment of failing at a craft so intricately wound with our humanity. “If I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me,” Lerner explains. I think a stronger claim could be made for comedy as a form of collectivity: Our ability to incite and respond to laughter orients our relationship to others and, to some extent, constitutes our identity. No one is advised to seek partners who are excellent poets (good with words, maybe), but delete all of the starry-eyed blog posts advising you to “fall in love a boy who makes you laugh” and you might drive Thought Catalog into bankruptcy.

On the feedback survey the former editor-in-chief of my satire publication sent out last year, someone anonymously recommended we get rid of pre-pitch icebreakers. The exercise is designed to lubricate the mind for writing jokes and quickly induce the feeling of camaraderie among writers, but for some it was the subject of intense anxiety, a fraught competition to see who can split ribs with elaborate tales about their quirky dream jobs or middle school mishaps. You could argue that we all need to develop tougher egos; it’s just college comedy. But to be fair, it’s hard when your pre-professional worth and personal likability is bound up in one short performance to a group of relative strangers. Imagine bombing in front of your friends at an open-mic. No one wants to console you when you’re not funny.

II.

Two years ago, I fell out of love, and writing jokes in Google Docs became a mechanism for staving off grief. Too anxious to go home after work, I’d ride the train from Metro Center to DuPont Station and walk to a gentrifying coffee shop called Emissary, which had natural sunlight and fragrant heirloom tomato toasts sprinkled with tiny violet flowers. I drained their cold brew slowly as I wrote various attempts at comedy, plays and satirical articles and sketches. For a second they’d incite a moment of giddiness, make me feel lighter, at least temporarily. The afternoons I filled agonizing over syntax and obsessing over the cadence of a joke were ones I didn’t waste ruminating over what was so fundamentally wrong with me that someone would want to leave.

When it happened, my roommate was still at happy hour with her friends. I stripped down to my underwear and blasted Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” thrashing my body to sparkling synths like a mopey, self-loathing protagonist in a Lena Dunham series, so that the campiness of it all would be too perfect — I could pretend to be a parody, an imitation of the real thing instead of the thing itself. That summer was a slow movement through grief, the days disorienting, existentially anxious, emotionally unstable. In my apartment, I was a bad roommate: absent, with a tendency to avoid saying “hello” by pretending I wasn’t home, even when my roommates called out to me. They pulled me into the bedroom and said “oh,” when I told them flatly that I was now single, sympathetic but still moving at a time when I needed stasis, and so I hid from them quietly.

If I could have removed myself from the terror of it all, I could have seen how excruciatingly funny the summer was: the hot pink children’s underwear lying next to us in the sand as my friend D* tried to console me on a beach in Williamsburg, the imploring wooden sign in the park we walked to, speaking on behalf of the humble grass: “PLEASE DON’T PEE ON ME.” The weekend my partner had intended to visit me I shared a yurt in Shenandoah National Park with six other women, buoyed temporarily by the ludicrousness of living some second-wave eco-feminist dream.

Before we broke up, I thought funny was a useless thing, the bread displayed before a meatier course or the sugary thing you eat afterward, which is fun but cannot sustain you. When we first began flirting I had a grand, larger than life Facebook presence — “Submitted My Resume to Someone the Same Age as Me,” I’d post, in the same self-congratulatory format that acquaintances announce premature weddings or decisions from colleges they’re not even that into — and he thought I was cool, I think. Later, I’d joke to minimize the parts of myself he’d find ugly, to derail philosophical inquiries before I was required to have an opinion and obscure all of the intellectual references I didn’t know. We’d sprawl out on my futon and I’d practice being inane — striving to glide past our friction, to please. But across the dinner table from my friends I worried that’s all I would ever be. “Don’t let him make you feel small,” my high school teacher insisted, when I panicked over hot pot about my inability to recite Cicero. That semester I made it onto the satire publication, but not before I succumbed to personal anxiety.

Five months after we broke up, I rearranged the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” at a stand-up comedy show: You like Foucault, I like Flo Rida / You tell me — “Cat, it’s “Derrida” not Der-I-da.” I’m dreaming about the day / When I wake up and find that what I’m looking for / Spoken: is not another male “intellectual.” If I play up facets of his personality, shift things to the right light, I can reduce him to a trope. Parodying the thing you fear is wrenching it from someone else’s control. If I repeat something enough times, it ossifies into the final version of the story. My freshman roommate, who took a leave of absence during the year of our relationship, put that story bluntly: “He seemed like kind of a dick.”

III.

In 2017, the serial Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings complained in the New York Times that Twitter was turning everything into a joke. “For most of human history, laughter and comedy were scarce resources in bleak times,” he wrote, “but that’s not remotely true anymore.” Twitter turned the whole world into an NBC writers room. Late night hosts, quirky corporate accounts, and online personalities battled in all-consuming chase to metabolize the news and churn out timely laughter. Funny became a “brand,” and brands never sleep. At first, Jennings participated in this constant joke-making, addicted to the dopamine rush of being told that he said something funny. Suddenly, he saw jokes everywhere: in airline demonstration videos, Superbowl ads, and of course, political comedy shows. “This crazy overabundance,” Jennings said, “has not been a net good for me.”

The term “irony poisoning” refers to what happens when you cease to take anything seriously: your worldview is so clouded by nihilism and detached irony that you lose your grasp on reality. Jennings’ “hedonic treadmill” of punchlines dulled him to genuine earnestness and empathy. “My snarky repartee is smoother than ever, but in situations when a more heartfelt connection is required, I find that I’m a little out of my element,” he wrote. Around a quarter into my term running the satire magazine, I started to become desensitized to puns, the inside of greeting cards, one-liners on popsicle sticks or Laffy Taffy. The only thing I liked were screenshots of nonsensical Tinder conversations that began with “send nudes” and ended with commentary about the inexorable death of the sun. Even then, “laughing” meant briefly exhaling through my nose before scrolling onto other tweets. Being desensitized to humor was like being desensitized to orgasms or birthday cake; it sucked.

In her viral stand-up set Nanette, the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby laments that comedy has suspended her “in a perpetual state of adolescence.” A joke is marked by brutal efficiency: It has a set-up and a punchline shorn of inconvenient details to deliver quick release. Maintaining constant hysterics demands Gadsby deprive herself of a richer, more complicated story. Her early stand-up was “wall to wall” lesbian content, with jokes coloring over painful experiences of homophobia. A drunk man nearly beat her up at a bus stop, she says, confusing her for male. The audience laughs. But later, when she reveals that she truncated the story, that she did in fact get beaten up after the man realized she’s a lesbian, the audience doesn’t know what to do with themselves. For Gadsby, comedy functions as a form of self-abuse, requiring her to reproduce anguish for laughter. “I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off into jokes,” she states. The cycle of producing and defusing tension with selective rehearsals of trauma makes her sick: “I have to quit comedy,” Gadsby declares. It’s this refusal to accept laughter as God that makes Nanette so extraordinary.

I’m jaded by comedy’s promise, in 2019, to live everywhere, do everything. Commercializable humor offers us an antidote to the daily inanities of the Trump administration, heartwarming lessons on civility, and droll distractions about Post Malone’s Olive Garden breadstick-eating strategy. It purports to speak truth to power, challenging the powerful and mighty. Meanwhile, the comedy industry itself hides its abuses: a tight network of male gatekeepers, sexual harassment, and exploitative labor practices, which makes it difficult for anyone who isn’t well-connected in the industry to make a living. In December, the “disgraced” comedian Louis C.K. returned to the stage after admitting to sexual misconduct in 2017. In his set, he mocked school shooting survivors for being uninteresting and Asian men for having small dicks because “they’re all women.” While he gets a stage, those who are traditionally excluded from comedy are constantly forced to bargain between their ambition and their morality.

An uncritical embrace of comedy posits laughter as a default good. Laughter is valueless: It’s not the medicine for collective ills as much as the faucet water that eases the pill down your throat. To believe that it performs social good is to assume that what you’re swallowing is healthy. Plato thought of laughter as an expression of malice and scorn, a means of overpowering others. Those who easily dismiss Plato should remember the searing testimony of Christine Blasey Ford: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”

IV.

The funniest people I ever met had no intention of being funny. They were 55-plus-year-olds at a philosophy circle I joined the summer my partner broke up with me. One was a retired IT professional who attended five think tank lectures a day and wrote 95-page Medium posts on “American values.” Another was a lonely private-sector pollster whose most repeated statements were “meritocracy does not encompass a moral vision” and “you’re so lucky you’ve found someone.” There was a French woman with Kool-Aid red hair, a sober financial lawyer, and a democratic socialist who signed off his emails “YO!” I liked them for the boldness with which they inhabited the Tenleytown Public Library, shrieking at each other over Hume, getting riled over the pronunciation of “égalité.” I liked how they didn’t strain to present themselves as cool or witty or relatable. They were funny in their refusal to be anything, perform anything, that they were not.

There’s a difference between the private humor you practice for yourself and then the public persona that you’re forced to repeat until it becomes a commercializable personality. A friend of mine, a stand-up comedian, used to worry about being cured of depression because, as he claimed, “I’m less funny when I’m happy.” I thought about that as I considered returning to all of my old drafts I wrote that summer. The exercise of always having to distort your experience into something funny, worth the attention of other people, can be dehumanizing. There are spaces and uncertainties in my life that I cannot distill easily into something suitable for public consumption. And so the sketches and short plays stay buried within my Google Drive, abandoned for late-night calls with friends and trips to museums, post-grad job searches and documentary filmmaking. I think quitting comedy will make things better:  I’ll rediscover subtle pockets of levity in my everyday life. I’ll find more things funny.