THE FIRST TIME A JOKE WAS EVER TOLD, you can bet someone died from it. They didn’t have picket signs or letter-writing campaigns back then, but they had hurt feelings. They registered it by bashing your head in with a club.
My good friend Joe DeRosa is a successful comic and actor who happens to live two floors above me. I see him in the elevator a lot, and we often end up accidentally drunk—before we reach the ground floor. He tells me about a phenomenon called selective listening, when he tells a joke one way but the audience hears it another way.
“I tell a joke about Jesus Christ. Basically I make fun of people who pray to Jesus for stupid shit, when basically this guy died on the cross for their sins. The whole point was, telling people to stop asking this poor guy for shit. He’s a tough dude; he had nails hammered into his hands! And you’re praying for a job promotion.” So what is essentially a salute to Jesus Christ is misconstrued as the opposite, because all people hear is a joke that has Jesus in it. “It doesn’t matter what the message of the joke is,” Joe says. He says the Jesus joke is his parents’ favorite joke, and his dad is a deacon. The fact is, people just get angry, because all they hear is something they believe should make them angry. It’s blasphemous, when in reality, it’s actually honest and perceptive. Jesus might have laughed.
People get angry not because of the joke but because it hits too close to home. Think about it: When someone cracks a joke, it is meant to be taken as a joke. It’s not real. Yet that is ignored—selectively. Offense over a joke is a dog whistle, selectively heard by those with a dog in the hunt. (And if that metaphor confused you, as it did me, you can selectively tune it out.)
Meaning, the same person who laughs uproariously over a joke ridiculing the ethnic background of the scamps on Jersey Shore will get pissed when you target the Kardashians. Because they’re Armenian, and the offended person had an aunt who was Armenian. Who died in a fire. So you’d better not make any Armenians-who-died-in-a-fire jokes. (There goes half my act.)
Now, should every comedian demand his audience fill out questionnaires regarding areas that are off-limits? Perhaps a checklist that reads, “Are you black, gay, Hispanic, transgender, missing a limb? Do you have a relative with arthritis, have you worked in a labor camp in China, do you have thirty-four toes, can you see colors, do you have a fish-smelling disease or overgrown eyebrows, are you too short for roller coaster rides, do you have an unattractive unibrow or a penis shaped like Florida, do you have a mom who was a prostitute, a sister who was in the Manson family, or a dad who ran Jonestown?”
The assumption is that when someone makes a joke, it’s a joke. We’re all adults and we understand no one is actually trying to “hurt” someone.
So why the outrage, then? Why does someone get mad when Rush Limbaugh makes a joke about Barack Obama? Why do groups get angry when Louis C.K. unloads a crass, drunken tweet about Sarah Palin? Why did Gilbert Gottfried lose work over earthquake jokes? Why do people have to apologize over things that don’t inflict real pain on people?
Perhaps it’s not about outrage. In a way, it could be about jealousy, which is the basis of much manufactured grievance. The anger toward a comedian erupts not because the comment simply strikes a nerve, but because the angered person feels unable to say the same thing, and that’s unfair. Why should you have the freedom to say something sick, but I can’t? I don’t mean “won’t” or “wouldn’t.” I mean “can’t.” It’s a joke I can’t make, because it might get me in trouble.
See, it’s not that people can’t say it, it’s that people can’t take it. So I’ll shut up about it.
Sure, I’ve been guilty of this in the past. Someone will say something I don’t like, and I will write something about that person, ridiculing them. Later, I realize I was mad I didn’t come up with it first! But I stopped getting outraged, because I realized it wasn’t worth it.
First, the worst sin for a comedian is laziness. That explains all the Palin jokes, churned out by the dolts who write Bill Maher’s material. But it’s nothing to be outraged about, really. And don’t get me wrong, I think creepy jokes done on women simply because they’re conservative are shitty, but they are far from outrageous. They’re just lame. But they are also providing a service. When someone laughs at one of those jokes, you know that person doesn’t get out much. In scientific terms, they are called “dumb-shits.” It’s like when dogs sniff each other’s asses. This ritual inspection is how they identify each other. Once you hear Maher make a lame Palin joke, you know he’s a dope without even having to sniff his ass (the way many of his guests do so painfully on his show). It’s a real time-saver!
But if someone writes or tells a joke that’s funny, and it’s about someone you like, you owe it to yourself to laugh. Sure, you should expect a wider range of targets from today’s comics, but don’t hold your breath. I’d like Louis C.K. to make fun of Obama as much as he does Palin, but he’s a liberal, so he won’t. I’d like to see Ricky Gervais make fun of liberals as much as he ridicules the religious, but that’s not what he cares about. After a while fans of Gervais like me will find his schtick tiresome, but he doesn’t care, nor should he. He is obsessed with atheism, and what he perceives as the harmful effects of religion—and so what? The existence of God and the origins of the universe are the real questions that keep us up at night, so why shouldn’t he devote all his talents to that? It’s not offensive as long as he makes me laugh and think, or even get angry. But yeah, it can get tiresome. And he may end up being pretentious, like if you saw his cover shot on The Humanist magazine, in which he was crucified—the nadir of his self-satisfied martyr complex. I’d still love him though. Were I capable of love.
The second worst reaction is to turn into a prude bent on admonishment. When you watch Bill Maher’s Real Time and he goes there yet again, calling Palin a twat, or Bachmann a bitch, turn off your outrage meter. Instead feel satisfied in the fact that Maher has lost whatever gift he had for real ridicule. And watch something else, for God’s sake, like Hoarders. Now there’s feel-good television. It makes me feel well adjusted. And it’s cheaper than paying a therapist.