Category: Comedy

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comedy show before like the one I saw at Doc’s Lab last night. Typically, standup showcases are hosted by one guy (usually), himself a comic, who does 5 or 10 before bringing out the first comic, and then maybe a joke or two in between. The host is an emcee, which is where the standup comic started, back in the postwar Catskills.

Kiss My Ass is hosted by Josh Fadem and Dicker Troy, a studio driver who grew up on a charcoal farm in Bakersfield. The latter wears a ballcap and dark glasses inside a nightclub and has a braided rattail about as long as a Slim Jim.^[*] Dicker is an amateur DJ and sits at a table with a laptop and sound FX machine, which modifies his already low voice into weird echoes and flangerings between his cueing up such hits as “Red Red Wine” and “Plush.” While he does this, Josh talks to the crowd and gets people excited to see a show. There are no bits?no rehearsed ones at least. It’s all extemperaneous and chaotic.

That chaos and unpredictability is what makes Kiss My Ass such a joy. Dicker is a sharp and quick-witted one-linerman, like a less-precious Mitch Hedberg crossed with Sam Elliott ready for a barfight. Josh rolls with every punch thrown at him, and he knows how to turn the discomfort he himself has instilled in the audience (“I like losing a crowd!” he admitted at one point last night) into a source for more laughs. They’re two comics expert at “being themselves”^[**] on stage.

Which is made all the more apparent when the local comics come up (i.e. when the showcase starts). Chad Opitz begins a joke about Sex on the Beach (the drink) that contrasts it with a drink of his own invention: a Rimjob on the Bus, “which is a PBR where the rim of the can has been licked by a guy with a cold sore.” It’s a fine joke, and comes to us with a fine joke’s standard rhythm and timing. Very few of us in the audience laugh. “See you shoulda played ‘Red Red Wine’ at the punchline,” Opitz tells Dicker.

“Do it again,” Dicker says, working his laptop, and Opitz sets up the joke again. He gets to the punchline, says “cold sore”, and silence. Another beat of silence. Then the drumbeat and “Red Red Wiiiiiine”, and that’s when the room finally laughs.

**

The old saw that comedy is all about timing might always be true, but Kiss My Ass shows how even this is subjective. Opitz’s act was timed to the second through practice and rehearsal. (Later he had a bit about Robocopera, which was a Robocop opera, which he sung word for word from a thing he’d written and memorized.) On its own, it works fine. On the stage that Dicker and Josh have set, though, it all fell apart. So did DJ Real, the next comic, whose bits involve pre-recorded music and sounds he responds to in perfect time on stage. Dicker’s timing in the “Red Red Wine” moment was traditionally poor timing. Josh often stood and looked at us in silence, patiently waiting for the next idea to come to him.

Their bad timings made the good timings less funny, because too worked.

With the showcased comics, the material is what had been practiced and worked toward perfection. Whereas Dicker and Josh had no material. Came with no material (well, Josh brought a watermelon-sized ball of yarn, but in bringing it on stage he admitted he had no ideas on how to make it funny). And yet they were the funniest people in the room because what they had practiced and worked toward perfection was their selves. Their personas. They spoke from the experience of having thrown themselves at chaos. It’s not quite improv, but it was definitely improv-adjacent. It was trickstery, looser, and I ate it up.

I should say it was also funny. It was so funny I hurt from laughing. Kiss My Ass is off to Portland and Vancouver and Seattle, and if you live anywhere near those places you should go see them.

I.
Early Sunday, as everyone knows by now, a man went into a gay club and shot more than 50 people with an assault rifle. I woke up to the news. I tell myself not to go online before I’ve gotten out of bed, but that morning I did, and I saw the news, and I didn’t know what to think, so I stopped thinking. I saw that Orlando, where the shooting happened, was low on blood, desperate for donors, and I thought about how gay men continue to be barred from donating blood in this country, and then I stopped thinking about that.

Neal and I had a busy day planned. We’re redecorating?which sounds fancier and more expensive than what it really is: we’re swapping out beat-up furniture that’s gone through two moves with replacements he’s finding on the cheap through Craigslist. It’s requiring a lot of loading and unloading of our Volvo. Renting moving vans by the hour via apps. Our place, after three years, is slowly coming together.

II.
More and more I’m coming to adopt?or maybe it’s that I’m coming to trust?an absurdist view of life. I’ve been worried it was making me colder, harsher, and more cynical than I’ve always been. But yesterday I stopped worrying.

Here’s what happened. We were watching Veep,^[1] where this season a jackass character named Jonah is being puppetstringed into running for a vacant congressional seat in New Hampshire so that he could help vote to keep Selina Meyer in the presidency. In last night’s episode, Jonah shot himself in the foot while on a televised hunt, and his opponent?who also was his 2nd-grade teacher?commented afterward that he should be more careful. That guns are dangerous.

Despite trailing her in polls by double-digits, he turns around and wins the election. Why? Because the NRA began running ads that pinpointed his opponent as being?with her comment about their danger?anti-gun.

It’s Christmastime in this episode, strangely (given the air date). When Jonah’s campaign manager sees the NRA billboard, he says, “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

I laughed and laughed. I cackled throughout the whole great episode. Yes, I believe that the people who were shot the other night are dead as a result of the NRA’s lobbying. I’ll go to the grave believing that. To be led through another instance of the NRA’s incessant madness driven by money and self-interest, and then to be invited to laugh, was maybe the best thing to happen to me on Sunday.

It didn’t make light of the tragedy, is what I’m saying. And it didn’t help me run away from the truth of what happened. It took away some of my fear and helped me see the shooting as it was.

III.
Absurdism, as I’ve been brought to understand it, has much to do with alienation, and borders on a kind of nihilism, but all the same makes me feel closer to (or at least more warmly toward) others. Here’s my trusty Handbook of Literary Terms doing a better job of defining it than I could:

Absurdism is the sense that human beings, cut off from their roots, live in meaningless isolation in an alien universe. Although the literature of the absurd employs many of the devices of expressionism and surrealism, its philosophical base is a form of existentialism that views human beings as moving from the nothingness from which they came to the nothingness in which they will end through an existence marked by anguish and absurdity.

It seems so bleak on the page. And maybe it is. But I’ve come to see it in opposition to romanticism. A romantic view of life holds on to narratives, particularly the narrative of forward progress. The narrative of heroes and villains. It views thoughts and prayers, or candlelight vigils, as messages that will be seen and understood by their intended audiences.

I’ve long been, and might still at times think like, a romantic. I’ve been concerned with how things should be. How I should be, should act. What is right and wrong. I’ve been googling things like “how to be a good person” in the faith that such a thing, such a character, even exists. It’s kept me from looking at the world as it is, from looking at myself as I am (instead of how I’m coming across to others).

Listen: I’d never want to disparage thinking, praying, or candlelight vigils. Some people are romantics, and through such a viewpoint is how they choose to handle and manage the unmanageable feeling of grief and tragedy. It’s not, though, the only way to do this. And these days I don’t think it’s mine.

IV.
There’s an idea I get exposed to every now and then that some things are too serious, or too dire, to joke about. Most recently I came across it in Roxane Gay’s essay (in Bad Feminist) on Daniel Tosh, written for Salon after his rape-heckling fiasco of 2012. “Humor about sexual violence suggests permissiveness,” she writes, for those people who might “do terrible things unto others.” In other words, it’s possible that would-be rapists are only waiting for the right joke to allow them to become actual rapists. As a claim, it’s probably unsupportable and definitely unsupported in her essay. But also: it shows a terrible lack of imagination.

The essay begins with an anecdote about the day of the Challenger explosion. Gay and her classmates are watching the liftoff, including James, the class clown. It blows up and everyone is silent. Then James says, “I guess there are a lot of dead fish now.”

As Gay tells it, the joke had bad consequences for James. “He had finally crossed an invisible line about what one can or cannot joke about,” she writes, and “suddenly became an outcast.” It was, everyone decided, “too soon” to tell that joke.

My sympathies are with James, telling for himself the joke that nobody would tell to him. I imagine death was very scary to him, the way it is to me. Murder, accidents, tragedy. School shootings. As a professor I worry very gravely about being shot one day, just for showing up at work. Which is to say that death and murder hold a certain power over me. This is what fear is and does. It traps you, it heightens your emotions, and it convinces you to react emotionally against that which scares you.

V.
Laughter is maybe the best way everyday people can disenfranchise the powerful.^[2] We seem to understand this about our politicians, but we don’t understand it about our fears. For some, a joke told from tragedy is a kind of gift that weakens the sting of what hurts us. For others, a joke told from tragedy disturbs that narrative which reads that silence and solemnity are the way through grief. That tragedies are things to act reverently toward.

This is why nothing is too serious to joke about, why nothing should be off-limits for humor: you never know whose pain that joke is going to alleviate. And you never know how soon that person needs a joke. When Neal went to the Mayo Clinic years back about some troubling long-term stomach issues he couldn’t get diagnosed, I was living alone in Alabama. He called me to fill me in on the news.

“They say it might be Celiac,” he said, a disease I know well since my sister has it, and as a result she hasn’t touched gluten in more than a decade. “Or it could, actually be cancer.” I didn’t want to believe it. Cancer happened to people on TV. I didn’t know what to say. Then Neal, gratefully, spoke again: “I hope to God it’s cancer.”

It remains the most generous joke I’ve been told.

With little fanfare other than a daily Tweet about it, the comedian Josh Fadem has been writing a short story every day for a year, and then posting it to his blog. On the whole, the stories are funny, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes sad or even heartbreaking. Often uplifting or inspiring. One of my favorite moments comes in “The Introspective Human Men’s Club”, when a robot pretending to be a person misspeaks and nearly breaks his cover:

The robot pretending to be a person made a mistake. It was eerily similar to human beings in that it even made human mistakes like letting true motives, that were meant to remain concealed, slip. He was just as human as the rest of them. He even felt shame and embarrassment for his learned imperfection.

Tomorrow marks the publication of his 365th story. (As of “press time” he doesn’t yet know what it’ll be about.) On the eve of such an achievement, I asked him some questions about comedy, short-stories, and the impetus behind the whole project.

—

You write for TV and you write your own standup material and you write sketch comedy?all of which are genres that seem to get good attention from the public. Why, then, did you decide to write short stories, which like 1 percent of the public ever talks about?

Thanks for your interest! It sort of turned into being something I could do, and put out, and have control over, where the success or the reaction of them didn’t matter in the same way writing for someone else, or even acting for someone does. I could do it and act like no one was watching, but still put it out there and say, “Check this out!” No one is going to give me a deal based off a one-page story called “Pussydad’s Big Farm” (not a story I wrote, but could have easily been). I’m not competing, it just turned into a thing to do for fun and practice.
Continue reading “I Still Have to Write a Story Today” ? An Interview with Josh Fadem

I’m asking myself, mostly. How can I explain this? Look here:

This is funny and I laughed at it, and I was delighted to laugh at it because child abduction is something we should be making lots and lots of jokes about. Lots. Of the number of children who are abducted or kidnapped (the Dept of Justice has different shades of meaning for these terms [PDF]) in a given year, 99 percent are returned alive and .08 percent are either killed or never returned. In fact, it’s better to look at the hard numbers and not the statistics, in that on the average 50.7 kids each year are killed by kidnappers or never returned. There are 73.6 million kids under the age of 18 living in this country as of the latest census data, which means, each year, .00006 percent of US kids are killed by kidnappers or get abducted and never returned.

It happens, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. And yet people are. I imagine I might understand it better if I were a parent, but I don’t understand it. It’s an irrational fear that leads to important news getting shut out of the airwaves when a child is abducted and to increased paranoia about one’s neighbors.

The problem is that it can be easy to equate “laughing at child abduction” with “laughing at a parent who has lost a child from kidnapping”. It’s not the same. Nor is “laughing at child abduction” the same as “dismissing child abduction as not tragic”. It is tragic. It is rare and tragic, like sarcomatoid renal cancer, which kills its victims, on the average, within 9 months of diagnosis, but accounts for .02 percent of all cancer deaths. That’s less than one person a year.

Straight people beating or killing gay people because they are gay or perceived as gay isn’t rare. In fact, Psychology Today reported last year that it’s on the rise. I live in a city of gays, but I also live in a city of people and violent crime. There’s a poster in my building’s stairwell that says if you can walk down the street holding your partner’s hand without fear of exposure or reprimand you are suffering from heterosexual privilege. Here, I pretty much suffer from heterosexual privilege. And yet, I make sure I look around before grabbing Neal’s hand. Last time I did it, actually, was during Pride.

So there’s this joke:

I’m kind of a magician. I can turn fruits into vegetables. Or, as the police call it, “gay-bashing”.

It’s not great, but it’s not bad. It does its jokework fine. Rendered within the voice and character of a relatively innocuous standup comedian I can easily imagine laughing at this joke within a set. And again, I’m happy to laugh. Because what I’m laughing at is not my fellow gay men having been victims of violence, nor is it even the idiot bragging about what he can do to gays. It’s this: laughing at dark stuff takes its power away. I’m less anxious when I’m laughing, and it becomes really hard to be afraid of something you can laugh at. Hence J.K. Rowling’s riddikulus charm. Laughter is such great defense.

I know myself and trust myself to know what’s right and to act and move my life toward goodness whenever I can. I can also laugh at jokes about gay men being beaten into comas. One more problem: some jokes are op-eds. But it’s good to remember that most jokes are balms.

Among other things going on in our apartment, we’re watching CMT’s broadcast of the Starsky & Hutch remake. I thought about tweeting this:

It seems the Ben Stiller character just messed things up irreparably. (Watching every Ben Stiller movie at once.)

It was unsatisfactory, because this is just a sarcastic and convoluted way of saying “Man, Hollywood movies are so formulaic.” So then I came up with this one:

This year for Halloween I’m going as that moment when the Ben Stiller character messes everything up irreparably.

More dissatisfaction. I mean, it performs a kind of cleverness in how it turns something abstract (hackneyed film trope) into something concrete (costume), and there’s a kind of surrealness to the tweet that (at least initially) feels nice. But that surrealness is just trumped-up artifice, and that’s why I think it’s a lousy joke tweet.

Then, when trying a third time, I realized why I wasn’t going to succeed: this is a tweet about watching TV and feeling like I’m smarter than the TV I’m by choice here watching.

This morning I read much of Mike Sacks’s And Here’s the Kicker, a collection of interviews with comedy writers. There were a number of refrains among these men (and two women) when it came time to give budding comedy writers advice, but the one that stands out now is how many people urged writers to get out in the world and write about what they find. That too often writers write jokes about the kinds of jokes they’ve seen before and know are funny.

It’s how I tend to tweet.

Twitter is neat, but too often it becomes a tool to socially enhance our (mostly) solitary TV watching. This is not the same as being social.

I.
@midnight is a show on Comedy Central that combines the worst characteristics of two things I enjoy—standup comics and Twitter—in a way that with repeated exposure I’d be forced to swear off both. I watched one half of one episode, featuring the great Rory Scovel and, one of my favorite comics, Jon Dore, and I couldn’t finish. This post will briefly get at why.
Continue reading On @midnight

Maybe you noticed the opening sentence of my last blog post? It’s an ad. I got paid to write that sentence and link it to a Web-based proofreading service. Word-for-word, it’s the most money I’ve ever made as a writer in my entire life. I need money these days. My and N’s flights to Virginia for Xmas came to more than $1000, and then there’s presents, and so I dithered on whether to accept the invitation to sponsor one of my blog posts only because the teen I once was told me to. I never listened to him seriously.^[1]

I wouldn’t trust a Web site to proof my copy the way a doctor wouldn’t run to WebMD for advice. Proofing copy’s maybe the one thing I feel trained to do. I can’t recommend the service, having never used it. When I pasted into the window of its homepage the opening paragraph of a forthcoming article of mine, which graf already got OK’d by my editor, it found 3 spelling issues, 1 issue of commonly confused words, 1 issue of wordiness, 1 use of the passive voice, 2 issues of punctuation within a sentence, and 3 issues with the writing style. I need to sign up for a trial to see precisely what these issues of style and wordiness are, but I’m not about to.

Look, I recognize that this online proofreader and other such sites are where we are in the world: individual outsourcing. The city I live in is the global center for people making sites and apps that other people can use to take care of such time-consuming tasks as finding a parking spot to learning driving directions. It’s maybe the opposite of a DIY culture. Rather than build your own Web site, you can have a blog. Rather than put together your own photo albums, you can use any Photo-sharing service. Rather than self-publish and distro a zine, you can post on social-media apps and rack up followers. No wonder knitting and pickling got so big around the time Facebook and Twitter did: our phones do everything for us now. Ours is a DNY culture.

More than my framed longbox of the Reality Bites soundtrack, this post is branding me as a child of the Nineties. Growing up, the worst thing I could imagine anyone being was a sellout, which while historically as slippery to define as ironic I understood as performing inauthentically for monetary gain. Abandoning one’s principles when it’s personally advantageous to do so.

What I want to do to end this post before it gets tedious and preachy is to ask a question. I don’t have enough readers to warrant a response, so I’ll go ahead and let it be leading. Has the participatory Internet (a.k.a. Web 2.0) turned us all into sellouts?

Or has reality television? Has anyone made famous via viral DIY videos ever turned down a book or TV offer in order to stay true to his or her vision? No. Because I don’t think there’s any cultural pressure to do so.

The final question is what’s the new selling out? What’s the new worst thing a person can do these days? My money’s on Not Be Funny. If there’s any cultural pressure I feel here, where we are in the world, it’s to be clever, to make jokes, to entertain.

MFA-app season is coming up. In search of other documents, I found the personal statement I wrote in 2002 the first time (of three total times) I applied to graduate writing programs. It’s complicatedly awful. As a kind of aid for others, it’s posted here, word-for-word:

On a trip across the country in a car with a lifelong friend, I dreamt mostly of homes. Not home, mind you, but homes: three-story, five-bedroom houses decorated everywhere in robin’s-egg blue; sleek and modern apartments seemingly ripped from the pages of the IKEA catalogue; brightly colored houses filled with passageways and compartments, much like the ones I dreamt of as a kid. Dreaming about homes while living as a transient made some pop-psychological sense, but something else about this recurring dream-setting struck me. Even though I had never seen these homes before—awake or asleep—I knew immediately and intuitively that they were mine. In the logic of these dreams, I was always home.

This is in no way a dream-practice particular to me; everyone’s dreams distort his or her life’s realities. We all get a kick out of our minds’ abilities to create this sensual familiarity out of our own visual innovation, it’s one of the greatest yet most common powers we feel as dreamers. In other words, when we tell each other, “I dreamt about you last night, but it wasn’t you. Y’know?” our response is always: “Yeah, sure…so what did I look like?”

The dreams I love the most are these where I dupe myself, making it all up but staying honest, showing myself some possible life I could lead. Similarly, the writing I love the most has these same qualities, presenting the fake and fabricated as plausible and true-to-life. Only fiction—set in the arena of possibilities—can do this. Nonfiction—set in the arena of actualities—abhors the fake and the fabricated. It loves facts and things that have been done. And thus, while nonfiction can only let us know everything that has happened or is happening, fiction tells us everything that could happen. It’s a much sexier arena to work in.

I’ve seen this make-it-all up approach to fiction in the writers I’ve been reading fervently in the past few years. It’s in the more recent fiction of David Foster Wallace and almost all of George Saunders’ work. It’s also, perhaps most comprehensively, in Ben Katchor’s comic strip, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Knipl lives in an unnamed metropolis of ointment experts, travelogue theaters, and nail-biting salons that is very clearly the New York City of Katchor’s wildest dreams. The strip is a weekly absurdist tableau underneath which lie the subtle human truths of salesmen’s ambitions, unbreakable routines, and lonely urbanites. It’s the strangest of fictions, and it affects you in the strangest of ways.

Because of this affection I feel for my finest dreams and my favorite novels, it’s clear to me that fiction can create a relationship between writer and reader more intimate and direct than nonfiction can. It’s this reason that I want to learn to write fiction. At this stage in my career, I’m a wholly untrained fiction writer, working on instinct, feeling out the medium. What I need now is study, practice, and guidance. What I crave is the opportunity to learn something new, while also developing my current talents.

This is why graduate study in fiction writing at Emerson—with its courses in publishing and its possibilities for multidisciplinary study—is an ideal choice for me. I’m ready to work; Emerson’s high credit requirements aren’t daunting, they’re exciting. Plus, I’m looking forward to studying at Emerson for its feeling of community, letting me take intimate workshops to develop alongside my peers—all of us, hopefully, with a thing or two to teach each other.

I did not get into Emerson. I didn’t get in anywhere, if I recall. Or maybe this is the one that got me into Nebraska? I didn’t get in anywhere else, and this statement, it goes without saying, would not have landed me the jobs I’ve got since graduate school. Take that, nonfiction!

• 10: 1 to change the lightbulb, and 9 to wrestle with the giant gecko in the bathroom!
• A: Two, one to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
• Spoon.
• Potato.
• Fish.
• Two. One to change it and one to throw a bucket of water out the window.
• It takes one. Wait for the lightbulb to melt downward.
• 51 – One to float to the ceiling to change it, while 50 more discuss the meaning of it…
• Just the one, his name is Dali… but he is usually too tripped out on acid to change it.
• The bicycle’s broken.
• To get to the other side.
• Two. One to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bathtub.
• A fish.
• Chair.
• Sweden.
• Three. One to make the Jello, and two to fill the bathtub with brightly-painted power tools.
• Purple.

Culled from the first two pages of search results.

How did I miss this incredible bit of James Adomian doing an dead-on impression of Louis CK? (Check ca. 00:30, 00:50, et al.) I’m reminded of the rise of “What is the deal with X?” mock-Seinfeld jokes back in the mid-90s, except CK is so much harder to pin down vocally. “I want Kleenex and … cake. That’s all I want.”

Even more telling is Lake Bell’s response: “Oh my god, he gets me. He gets me!”

I love everything about this relic:

I love that Bill Hicks is still alive, and that Carlin gets interviewed with some amazing TV production effects. I love that the animated bumps make fun of hack comics as though hack comics aren’t part of the actual show (Elon Gold, I’m looking in your 1990 direction). Gold’s kind of interesting as a hack impressionist in that he opens his set with impressions of other better-known comics. Which seems like hackwork to a new unhacky degree?

BUT: can anyone who watches this identify the second comic he impersonates (around 2:20) after Ed Grimley and before Bobcat Goldthwait?

ALSO: Watch this for the commercials, if anything. There’s an AMAZING Scientology commercial at 09:10 (after a promo for MTV’s radio station giveaway you might remember) and a great AT&T commercial starring David Duchovny and I think Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air that starts around 20:45.

I’d go down on “perky Martha Quinn” to nab a complete set of episodes….

From my 10th-grade creative writing class journal:

When I’m a teacher, I’ll be sure that my students get something out of everything we do. I will be sure to put variety in my teachings, and my kids will never be bored.

Also, from my obituary (d: Feb 29, 2052), in the same notebook: “Angry at the new taxes, he refused to do them and was forced to leave the country.”

Just a quick post, because I just got this news, and it’s the second best news I got today. Which means the other news was super great, because this news? Jesus!

TIG NOTARO’S “I HAVE CANCER” SET’S COMING TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE!

For those not obsessively following standup news, a few weeks ago the very incredible Tig Notaro (you may know her as sexy lady cop “Tig” on The Sarah Silverman Program) did a set at Largo in LA that revealed she had Stage 2 breast cancer. She killed in ways that everyone who was there said were amazing, one-of-a-kind, and indescribable.

Here’s Louis CK, who was lucky enough to decide to do a surprise set at Largo that night, tweeting about it:

I’ve told people two things about this:

1. I would pay Seinfeld-at-the-Kennedy-Center money to see a video of this set.
2. That no fan-shot video of this set exists on YouTube is perfect and awesome and exactly why I think standup is important and should never be recorded for uploading to YouTube.

I’ve been torn, in other words. Now, it seems as though Notaro has sent audio to increasingly-big-friend-to-standups Ira Glass, and we’ll be hearing it on NPR very soon.

Thanks to the ever-swift Splitsider for breaking the news (to me).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this xkcd comic:

Short version: sex tarp is so much funnier than sex dungeon or (for God’s sake) sex party because it’s something we’ve never heard before. That is: either universally or for a certain portion of the comedy audience, laughter comes as the result of invention and novelty.

Long version: that’s not the whole story. I mean “sex sandbox” or “sex atrium” are equally unheard of and novel. But they’re also inaccurate, in that no one wants to have sex in a sandbox and there’s nothing even remotely sex-related about an atrium. Also, this is a sketchiness continuum, so neither of these has an adequate amount of unease. A tarp however, is so perfectly situated at the intersection of wetness-concepts and filth-concepts that it is precisely sketchy.

So we laugh at the accuracy.

So good comedy is about telling sudden truths succinctly.

Still not entirely satisfied. It’s not so much that “sex party” or “dungeon” is uninspired and inaccurate (perfectly normal and unsketchy people host sex parties, I imagine, plus they’re social events, whereas nobody else’ll be joining you two on that sick tarp), it’s I want to argue unintelligent, too. This is where talking about comedy gets dangerous and borders on snobbery and elitism.^[1] Because I can envision a certain probable dialogue between two people:

A: How was your date last night?
B: Ugh. He said he wanted to take me back to his sex dungeon.
A: Wow, really?
B: He was the sketchiest guy ever.
A: Well….
B: What? He was.
A: I guess. But he could have offered to take you back to his sex tarp.
B: …
A: !!!
B: What?

“Sex tarp” (et al.) is a punchline that betrays its own weariness with everything that’s come before it. As a punchline it shows evidence of an act of striving. Maybe this has nothing to do with intelligence and is just bringing us back to novelty. But in the same way that, for jokes to be funny, punchlines need to catch us by surprise (hence Stop me if you’ve heard this one), things that want to be funny have to be smarter than we are.

So we laugh when we’re innocuously outsmarted? I don’t know what it means for a joke to be smarter than a person. But if I believe (as I do, see the footnote) that one thing can’t be funnier than another thing, then that I can’t believe I believe such a thing (I mean it feels wrong on every level) means that I believe one person can be smarter than another person.^[2] Thus, the same joke can be smarter than one audience member (who finds it funny) and not smarter than another audience member (who doesn’t).

Is this madness? One thing I know about myself is that I’m a sucker for things that make me feel smart. I’ve written repeatedly (and very recently) about how comedy operates outside intellect, so everything about the above feels inaccurate, if not outright wrong. Anybody willing to put in their 2 cents in the comments will be, collectively, my best friend. At issue: is it universally true that funny jokes are smarter than we are, or is this some personal comedy taste on my part?

UPDATE: Okay here’s a clearer example. This here is some of the worst bylined writing I’ve found online. Sorry Mr. Schlossman, but you’re not good at what you do. And while I can see you being humorous you’re not at all funny. And yet there’s Cory, moved and delighted enough by the piece to comment: “You’re hilarious!” Why don’t I find any of it funny?