In the course of the introduction, I had occasion to quote some journalistic comments on contemporary comedy. The reader of this book may well be stimulated to ponder parallels between the comic themes, characters, and strategies examined here and the practices of comedy ubiquitous in today's entertainment media: on television (including situation comedies, political satire and parody, stand-up routines as part of late-night revues); in the movies and the theater; at improv and comedy clubs, casino nightclubs, and other venues; and on the Internet (in e-mail chains, on Youtube, and so on).
It's certainly true that with respect to the particular subjects under scrutiny in the following pages, there is abundant continuity between the perspective of an Ovid, a Chaucer, or an Ariosto and the present moment: the foibles and complexities of desire continue to amuse and (perhaps) chasten, as do the overstuffed egos and underdeveloped intelligence or judgment of authority at all levels, domestic, corporate and institutional, or governmental. But the way in which comedy is produced, consumed, and evaluated—and thus rewarded or (as it were) punished—has completely changed (at least in the United States) from what obtained in premodern (including ancient) Europe, for three reasons: technology, democracy, and capitalism.
Accordingly, although I will not attempt a comparative analysis of premodern and contemporary comic substance and styles—such a task lies outside my competence and, truth to tell, my interests—I will conclude this book by outlining some of the aspects of the production, consumption, and evaluation of comedy in twenty-first-century America that distinguish it from the circumstances in which Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto composed and, we assume, performed their comic poetry. My comments will focus on television, since that is the medium, thanks to technology, through which most Americans experience comedy (not only in formats expressly designed for television but also in transmissions of solo acts performed at comedy clubs and casinos).
Capitalism has made the production of comedy a business; in response, those who actually produce comedy have become unionized members of a profession. (The exception to this generalization would be comic novelists, writers of short fiction, or satirists and parodists in print; however, their works account for only a tiny minority of comedy produced in the United States today.) For the most part—again, with exceptions—the profession is characterized by a division of labor between performers and writers of comedy, who work together in order to earn a living. (This dichotomy has obtained in the European theater at least since the early modern period; Ariosto wrote plays for the Este court that were acted, of course, by others. But the Elizabethan/Jacobean theater in London seems to have been characterized by a much greater overlap between the two professions, as Shakespeare's acting career testifies.)
The professional comic writer for television is usually part of a staff that writes what has been commissioned by its employer: jokey dialogue as well as comic plots that frequently revolve around desire and authority. (In movies, another technology-based medium, usually only one or two people are given writing credit for a film, but multiple rewrites are nonetheless common, with many people paid but not credited for their work, in accord with arrangements between union and production company.) In addition to skill, versatility—not commitment to a particular social, political, or philosophical perspective—is the hallmark of today's professional comic writer, who can produce what is required of him or her, usually within a very restricted time frame, to fit the needs of performers within a contractually defined situation. The frequent borrowing and recycling of earlier material, as well as the references to contemporaneous events and people, may appear to parallel the appropriation and adaptation of antecedent poetry by the poets discussed in this book (as well as their topical allusions), but the ephemeral nature of the material (especially if the TV show fails) makes such borrowings an incidental, and not quite respectable, part of the overall comic effect, not authorial comments on poetic continuity or responses to political authority.
The sheer multiplicity of venues and media—the technological added to the traditional (i.e., ensemble and solo performance to live audiences)—has a major effect on how comedy is received because it enables the presentation of a broad spectrum of comic productions, aimed at and deemed suitable for divergent target groups. There are, to be sure, a few cases of comic entertainment tailored for inclusiveness, to attract and amuse people of many ages, classes, professions, occupations, religions, ethnicities, and levels of education. More usually, a particular kind of comedy is aimed at “niche groups,” often in connection with a specific medium—television, movies, theater, nightclubs—with the result that the potential audience for comedy in America today is in fact a multiplicity of overlapping or mutually exclusive audiences, catered to on the assumption that, in a democracy, every group expects to be entertained in a way aimed at its sensibilities and experience: children, teenagers, men and women (especially in the age cohort twenty-five to fifty), seniors, African Americans, sexual sophisticates, evangelicals, and so forth. Neither Ovid, nor Chaucer, nor Ariosto had to deal with this range of (real or commercially constructed) audiences, although Chaucer, according to a recent critical orthodoxy to which I've alluded, aimed some of his poetry at the royal court of King Richard II of England and some at a circle (or “coterie,” in modish parlance) comprising literate, officially connected fellow Londoners. The audiences of all three poets were small and culturally elite; Ariosto, writing after the printing press revolutionized the production and consumption of literature, saw the Orlando Furioso through three editions, but even his audience was, by today's publishing standards, small and exclusive.
Responses to comedy, approving or disapproving, and how they are determined provide the greatest contrast between premodern and contemporary comic writing. For a considerable period, spanning the mid-twentieth century, there was a consensual system of evaluation imposed on the subject matter of radio and television programs and motion pictures. Sponsored by church groups (especially the Catholic Church) and conservative business groups, it sharply limited, among other things, sexual content and reference, thereby denying comedy access to a major component of its dealings with desire. By the late 1960s, however, this system was in the process of breaking down; the creation of a rating system for films and television programs and the rise of cable television, with its self-selected, paying audience, liberated comedy from what must be called puritanical constraints.
Comic production today operates in a fairly complex cultural environment. From one perspective, democracy in action means that in matters of morals and taste there is no one powerful person or group that has the last word. Instead, what various interest groups (be they religious, ethnic, or political in nature) want is in dialectic with what they don't want, what offends them. From yet another perspective, producing comedy in a pluralistic society comes down to what you can get away with—how far you can push the envelope—before running afoul of a group or groups that finds its sensibilities being violated or its beliefs insulted. Interestingly enough, the arbiter in such matters of permissiveness and limitation is not a religious or political body, but an advertiser (in the case of electronic media) or an employer or investor (in the case of theatrical and individual performance, i.e., plays and nightclub routines).
This is because, thanks to capitalism, most forms of comedy appear under not patronage but sponsorship; comic writers and performers are employed and paid in order to make money for others. In such a system, evaluation proceeds along financial, as opposed to moral or political, lines. As long as comedy is profitable, it can be offensive to some; when it ceases to be profitable, it fails (and disappears from view), no matter how praised or popular it may be in certain quarters. Nor is negative evaluation simply a matter of numbers: of course, if no one is watching a TV show, going to see a movie, or coming to a nightclub to see a comedy act, this will mean the end of a program or a career. But since network television, for example, depends on advertising revenue to enable the production of comedy shows, if members of a particular group find a program (or an actor in the cast of a program) offensive, and those members galvanize others in the group (even if they have not seen the program) to boycott the products of the advertising sponsors, and if the boycott begins to affect sales of goods or services, then the sponsors may exert pressure on the network to cancel the show, under threat of withdrawing sponsorship and thus costing the network a good deal of money. In such a case, the fact that, say, three-quarters of the audience enjoys and approves of the show will be outweighed by the sponsor's concerns.
Given the large sums of money involved in these considerations, it is not surprising that (in the case of television and movies, at least) a good deal of time and money is invested by networks, sponsors, and studios in attempting to guess in advance what will make comedy financially successful and to tailor the production of comedy to accord with what are thought to be the tastes of particularly valuable (because wealthy and free-spending) audiences (or, in Holly-woodspeak, “demographics”). This is what I meant by my earlier reference to “commercially constructed” audiences. (One amusing byproduct of shaping comedy to attract a particular audience is the use of the code term “mature audience” to refer to material—bathroom humor, raunchy sex comedy—in fact likely to be most attractive to male adolescents.)
The use of “focus groups”—carefully selected mini-audiences who view programs still in development and offer their opinions on what has amused, bored, or offended them—is a mechanism of what one might call preemptive evaluation, designed to maximize the chances of profit and head off financial disasters. Other ex post facto evaluative techniques adopt a more indirect, and to the uninitiated perhaps more wishful (not to say more bizarre), approach. In an August 2009 article in the New York Times, Bill Carter reports on a scheme designed by a network to extract ever-larger payments from advertisers.1 In a “‘multi-engagement study’ conducted by Harris Interactive Research,” commissioned by the cable television channel, Comedy Central on behalf of “the politically charged versions of late-night humor that [it] offers”—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert—viewers of other late-night talk shows with strong comedy components (including political satire) are offered a checklist of complimentary terms to describe, not Stewart and Colbert but their cohort of fans. By documenting that “more than sixty percent of people answering the survey” described frequent viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as “‘enthusiastic,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘fun,’ ‘more informed,’ ‘more intelligent,’ ‘trustworthy,’ ‘warm,’ and ‘witty,’” the study supposedly provides Comedy Central with evidence sufficient to “prove that its late-night viewers are so impassioned about their hosts that their shows offer special value to beleaguered television advertisers looking to ensure that their messages reach truly engaged viewers.”
Such engagement (the channel's reasoning apparently goes) will extend not just to the hosts but to the products advertised on their programs. As the executive vice president for advertising sales for MTV Entertainment Networks (Comedy Central's parent company), puts it, “The quality of the viewers is a big determinant in getting advertisers to spend money, especially in tough economic times.” That, at least, is the hope: as the article reports, “Comedy Central is trying to use the Harris research to persuade advertisers that its late-night shows deserve a premium price.” What really matters, in other words, is not how good the comedy provided for Stewart or Colbert by their writers may be, nor even how devoted their audience may be. Instead, the crucial, game-changing criterion is whether still other television viewers admire that audience and, by confessing their admiration in a multiple-choice survey, provide an advantage to the two comedians’ employers in their financial tug-of-war with the sponsors.
Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto would doubtless find this situation perplexing, perhaps maddening, but certainly amusing. Whatever else, it clearly epitomizes the distance—cultural even more than chronological—between their comic universe and ours.
1. Bill Carter, “Comedy Central Tries to Gauge Passions of Its Viewers,” New York Times, 26 August 2009.