In almost every TV comedy special, there’s a telling cutaway that the director felt obliged to insert. It shows spectators in the theatre rented for the occasion—usually a half row, half a dozen people—erupting in laughter at something outrageous that the comedian has just said while turning with quick, happy complicity to exchange a guilty glance for having done so. As often as not, someone in the row covers her face or offers an abashed look, before rocking back and forth with renewed delight. It is a heightened emotion and clearly meant to allow us, watching, to join in. Can we laugh at that? they ask one another, giving us permission to laugh as they laugh.
It is, in a way, a version of the canned laughter that once enwrapped every situation comedy, and which, when now encountered on ancient shows on TV Land, sounds downright eerie in its mechanical, obviously overlaid quality. The two practices arise from a common idea: that laughter is a shared, not a solitary, experience, and needs a little kindling of collectivity to catch fire.
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Mere physical, unmediated laughter might be a good place to begin exploring the higher morality of comedy—for comedy, like pornography, is the rare form that has a physical end, either achieved or not. The flutter in our heart we say we feel upon viewing a great painting is largely metaphoric; the laughter in our chests which comedy elicits is not. We can easily imagine an actor who is deeply “moving” but never makes us cry; it’s a different kind of moving, we say. (Daniel Day-Lewis is like that.) But a clown who makes no one laugh is not a clown, or else is stuck in a Beckett play.
The harder question, these days, is what lines the clown may cross. It’s easy to complain about neo-puritanism, but neo-puritanism does have the virtue of indicting comedy that is merely snickering cruelty. Yet the urge to make comedy “positive” runs up against the truth that comedy has always been a series of transgressions against piety and high-mindedness, stretching back to Aristophanes mocking Socrates’ pretensions in “The Clouds,” while Socrates sat there in the theatre, laughing at the mockery. So how to explain this urge: has comedy changed dramatically in purpose in our era? Or have its ideological trappings gone pious in ways that are at odds with what comedians have always done?
Kliph Nesteroff’s “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” (Abrams) comes with significant recommendations from various comedy worthies, including Judd Apatow, but it is essentially a history of American censorship of all kinds of popular culture. Many examples are drawn from obscure century-old sources. When someone with a provincial printing press attacks a form of American popular culture (“The so-called jazz music is an abomination,” the Greeley Daily Tribune pronounced in 1920), Nesteroff sees proof that the form was under relentless assault, even though the assault was coming from the small-town paper exactly because the art form was becoming so successful outside the small town. Despite the notorious attempts, which Nesteroff documents in detail, to suppress Elvis’s hips and Mick Jagger’s lips, the final score in that battle was Rock and Roll: 100, Censorship: 0. (The real early rock-and-roll scandals—Chuck Berry’s imprisonment for having sex with an underage girl and Jerry Lee Lewis’s notoriety for having married one—look worse by contemporary standards than they did in their time.)
When it comes to comedy, Nesteroff describes American attempts to censor theatre and vaudeville and burlesque which date almost to the beginning of the Republic, along with all the misbegotten efforts to purge “vulgarity” from popular entertainment. Though he’s generally cheerfully contemptuous of the censors, he is himself rather censorious about the indulgence back then of what is unacceptable to us now: not just blackface but also ethnic stereotyping of the kind produced by Jewish- and Italian-dialect comedians. “The Topeka Daily Capital argued that vaudeville’s greatest sin was not insult comedy nor blackface caricature, but references to unwed mothers,” he marvels.
“Vaudeville largely consisted of assimilated immigrants who held contempt for newer arrivals,” he goes on. “And yet, the more established the immigrant group, the less patience they had for being insulted. By the end of the 1890s, Irish and Italian immigrants were objecting to portrayals of intoxicated leprechauns and moronic organ-grinders.” He might have noted that the best and longest-surviving of all vaudeville acts, the Marx Brothers, depended on dated dialect comedy well into the nineteen-forties, with Chico Marx persisting in what are still some of the funniest of all American comedy routines—try the “Sanity Clause” bit, from “A Night at the Opera,” sometime. What renders it harmless is the fact that its “ethnic” quality is dissolved into general commedia-dell’arte stylization, so that it can no more be taken as a stereotype of the Italians than Pierrot can be taken as one of the French.
“What if there’s no such thing as recycling and when it’s over it’s just over?”
Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski
What about the more overt persecution of comedy that Nesteroff traces? It’s true that various comedians have been arrested for obscenity—and that for a long time the range of acceptable comedy was very limited—and yet none of them, in historical perspective, truly suffered for their transgressions. Lenny Bruce famously underwent a series of trials; his disciple George Carlin, who was present at one of Bruce’s arrests and, allergic to authority, refused to show I.D., once travelled to the police station with him. But Bruce never went to prison, and the demons that tormented him were mostly personal. Carlin himself was arrested a few times for onstage performances of his famous “seven dirty words” routine, in which he itemized the words forbidden on the radio. But he, too, spent no time in prison, or even stood trial.
The fact is that, historically, censorship in a more or less open society has had little permanent impact on art or on entertainment. Bruce was put through hell by (mostly Catholic) prosecutors, but nobody had any trouble buying his albums, and he died of an overdose, not a broken heart. While absolutist states can imprison their authors and performers, as in contemporary Iran, this hasn’t really happened in America, for all its Watch and Ward Societies and Hays Codes. The list of would-be censors is long, but one need only consider Tipper Gore’s efforts to regulate rap to recognize a losing cause when one sees it. The Moral Majority was never a majority. Had Lenny Bruce not killed himself with morphine, he would be a grand old man of comedy, taking bows and grumbling about social media.
Nesteroff eventually goes from documenting, skeptically, the efforts that people have made to condemn comedy they deemed an affront to decency to joining those condemning comedy they deem an affront to decency, albeit from a progressive perspective. He endorses the assaults on the genuinely tasteless nineties standup Andrew Dice Clay, quoting the sainted Carlin: “Comedy traditionally has picked on people in power, people who abuse their power. . . . Women and gays and immigrants are kind of, to my way of thinking, underdogs.” Henny Youngman himself gets to take a swing at Clay: “You’re wrong if you think poking fun at helpless people makes you a comedian. My second opinion is that your jokes aren’t jokes, they’re ugliness.” Even if the critics have a point, it’s a little awkward to see this piling on after we’ve been instructed in the preceding pages to mistrust all moral censoriousness.
But social consensus can alter swiftly. A dozen years ago, an episode of HBO’s “Talking Funny” showed three comedians (Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., and Chris Rock) throwing the N-word around, as if to establish their sophistication and fearlessness. Jerry Seinfeld, who was seated with them, said he “wouldn’t use it anywhere.” At the time, he might have seemed unduly cautious and commercial; he now sounds like the voice of common sense and courtesy. The square becomes the sage.
It is similarly easy to forget that Chris Rock preceded Donald Trump in deriding John McCain for having been captured, during a 2008 performance in defense of Obama: “There’s a lot of guys in jail that got captured. I don’t wanna vote for nobody that got captured—I wanna vote for the motherfucker who got away!” What seems daring and courageous at one moment can seem cruel and unregarding at another; what’s perceived as merrily provocative and what’s perceived as mortally dangerous to the polity can shift overnight. Go ask Socrates.
Nesteroff’s somewhat censorious study of censorship provides a useful reminder that censorship and censoriousness are significantly different things. Censorship is the actual government interdiction of forbidden speech, and in liberal-democratic countries there’s essentially none of this when it comes to culturally contested zones. It’s just that we’re inclined to voice emphatic disapproval about certain forms of speech, which, though disconcerting for the subject of our disapproval, is not at all what we mean by censorship. Organized boycotts are unpleasant, and illiberal in their effects, but they have no resemblance to the actual government interdiction of free speech. Any user of Twitter (oh, fine, X) in its Musk era can see what happens when common sense and caution are removed from conversation. Censorship may be doomed; censoriousness has its uses.
Jesse David Fox’s baldly named “Comedy Book” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is an attempt to study laughter as a common enterprise, as is suggested by its subtitle, “How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work.” In Fox’s view, comedy conquered culture only starting in the nineteen-nineties, with the success of “Seinfeld.” The sum of his historical perspective is conveyed in this sentence: “Comedy has steadily grown in cultural relevance, from vaudeville around the turn of the twentieth century to Seinfeld.” What preceded the nine-season NBC comedy was, he evidently thinks, a form “still in its nascency.” Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, S. J. Perelman, Jack Benny, Gracie Allen, Sid Caesar, Godfrey Cambridge, Bob Hope, Nipsey Russell, Carol Burnett—none of them gets so much as a mention. Comedy was marginal, now it’s central, and “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons” made it so. This is odd. In your book about baseball, even if the point you are going to make is that Babe Ruth’s way of playing baseball is not our way of playing baseball, it would still seem wise to include Babe Ruth. Fox genuinely seems to have zero historical sense of comedy—and by historical sense here one doesn’t mean some excursus into the Lord of Misrule figures who preceded Falstaff. One means Bob Hope.
What’s curious about this is that Seinfeld, his hero and central figure, has a sharp sense of comedy history, and has devoted himself to producing a documentary tribute to Abbott and Costello—demonstrating a slightly perverse anti-arty taste—and cannot praise his observational predecessor Robert Klein often enough. More important, when a chronicler lacks a sense of history, everything old seems new. The famous line about Seinfeld’s comedy being about nothing, which Fox gives an existential twist, saying it’s really about “nothingness,” changes meaning when you reflect that much great comedy, from Congreve to Wilde, has been about nothing—that is, it’s about manners, how they change and how they serve to soothe and enrage us at the same time. Samuel Johnson called these kinds of manners “fictitious benevolence”—all the things we say to ease our lives with other people, even if we do not mean them for a moment. In the work of both Molière and Larry David, the comedy lies in the main character’s extreme self-awareness about the fictitious nature of the benevolence. You are expected to praise a friend’s poem when it is passed to you, even if it’s terrible; you should thank both members of the couple who have picked up the tab at a restaurant, even if only one earned the money being spent; you should seem bewildered if upbraided for having sex with a cleaning woman on the desk at your new job. Once you become aware that benevolence is fictitious, it’s funny.
What people call “woke” is, in large part, just a more exquisitely attenuated system of fictitious benevolence, focussing on things you shouldn’t say or perform because they might injure someone. We all recognize how fictitious it is—how could we not?—but we have a sense of its benevolence, too. Satiric comedy may have particular targets, but a comedy of manners—as in “situation comedy,” a revolving set of people and predicaments responding each week to small social pressures—is always about nothing important and about everything human all at once. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” in the nineteen-seventies, was about the manners of its time, and so about “nothing,” in the same way as “Seinfeld” was. The episodes depicted struggles with fictitious benevolence, inspecting the rules of decorum which insist that, say, a funeral can never be funny, even when the deceased was crushed by an elephant while dressed as a peanut. Those who don’t know the comic past may not be condemned to repeat it, but they’ll miss the chance to laugh at it.
On the question of the “magic that makes it work,” Fox has more interesting things to say, or, at least, to summarize. He reviews all the prominent theories of comedy, including Freudian theories of tension and release (we’re letting out psychic energy connected with a repressed topic), classical superiority theory (we laugh at others’ misfortunes to feel better about ourselves), structural theories of incongruity (the setup points one way, the punch line another), and ends favoring a theory that roots our need for comedy in an instinct to play, a theory whose fulfillment lies in the uses of comedy to create community. It is this ability to gather unlike listeners into an empathetic space that makes comedy worth celebrating, he proposes.
In this spirit, Fox recounts watching the wonderful John Mulaney performing, at Madison Square Garden, a show devoted to his experience with rehab. Mulaney observed, at a certain point, that his relationship with his audience was “the longest-lasting, most intimate one of his life.” Fox was dismayed by the audience’s response: “Many began to clap. He cringed and asked them to stop—he hadn’t meant it was a good thing. Probably even more than Mulaney, I grew frustrated as the show wore on. I had felt connected to Mulaney and his process, but at the same time felt the audience wasn’t giving him what he needed from us and, in turn, what we needed to give each other.” It was supposed to be “a collective moment of healing,” Fox tells us, but the audience fell down on the job. Only connect, he’s saying.
The spirit of play, he suggests, is the spirit of connection. “The feeling of mirth one experiences watching comedy is similar at the most basic neurological level to the feeling one has joking around with one’s friends and family,” he writes. “Similarly, as we mature, we search for ever more sophisticated versions of laughing at a funny face a relative makes when we’re a child. Comedians are able to artificially create that state of play by generating the same feelings of trust and safety that free you up to laugh most easily.”
Are feelings of trust and safety what we typically feel in the presence of a great comedian? The idea jars a little. Those cutaways don’t show moist exchanges of empathy; they show people checking to see if the redrawn boundary of the acceptable is indeed acceptable. Surely any relaxation that we feel, any release, has more to do with that sudden acceptance of our shared helplessness in the face of the comedian’s gift for naming our best-kept secrets. Comedy is more likely to involve shared shock than communal bonding; impiety is its theme far more often than is any collective “moment of healing.” In truth, the happiness we experience is the happiness of escape, however momentary, from the enforced good feelings that phrases like “a moment of healing” suggest. Piety is poison to comedy. A world in which comedy plays a healthy, constructive role in bridging social divides and making people share their feelings might be a good thing, but it would not be a funny thing. Bringing people together in high-minded community is the task of folk music.
“Is there a doctor in this beautiful studio apartment with a balcony for only thirty-one hundred dollars per month?!”
Cartoon by Dan Misdea
If there is any kind of comic grammar that underlines comedy, it surely derives from the fact that our earliest experience of laughter comes when we are first tickled: laughter arrives at the moment when a baby grasps the difference between a real threat and a mock threat. If the baby senses she is in danger, she cries; recognizing that she is not, she laughs. This shift seems foundational to what comedy is. If comedy begins here, it rises to more complex forms, as this basic grammar encircles ever larger areas of experience. Comedy has a range as large as human feeling, and can express optimism (the Marx Brothers), pessimism (Jacques Tati), stoicism (Buster Keaton), and even humanism (Chaplin). But all comedians have to walk the line between real attack and mock attack as skillfully as lion tamers walk the line between the animal’s attack space and its escape space. They violate our norms and then offer new ones, while reminding us that the norms are ours to violate and to make. What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump is that Rock knows the liminal space he’s in, poised between actual revelation and wicked hyperbole—a truth to which we are clued in as much by his performance style (his constant nervous pacing, his sidelong glances) as by his words. The impieties are to be taken as possibilities, not as actual truths. It may be that Trump intuitively understands this, too, and that one reason his sneers and terrifying invocation of cruelty are not taken as seriously as they should be is that some people think of Trump’s discourse as that of the insult comedian: He doesn’t really mean it. He does.