Are You Offended? Does it Matter?

This video is one of the clips from the sketch that ended Chappelle's Show.


That might be an oversimplification, but it was this sketch--the racist pixies--that Chappelle has since cited in interviews as the reason he left the show (and walked away from $50 million). This is the topic of my paper for this class; I want to explore what it is about this sketch, amongst a plethora of envelope-pushing racial satire, that pushed Chappelle over the edge.

I don't think it's the content itself. This content, while possibly a little racier, isn't that much different from previous content on the show. Chappelle has always been one to make his audience a little uncomfortable with the social atmosphere around them, and, in my opinion, that's the whole point.

He's said in interviews that the problem was the audience, or at least one member of it. While filming the black pixie (who Chappelle portrays in blackface) one member of the audience laughed "particularly long and loud" (interview with Time) and made Chappelle uncomfortable. Chappelle began to question "if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them" (Time).

There's the problem: Chappelle can't control what it is his satire does. He always runs the risk of reinforcing stereotypes. He just became more aware of that risk as his audience broadened and he became exposed to the different readings present in his work. As one scholar I'm reading puts it: "I know what I'm laughing at, but I don't know what you're laughing at" (Haggins, Laughing Mad, 205). Chappelle cannot control his audience, not even that one physically present in his studio. He certainly cannot control that audience that grows infinitely larger as DVDs are bought and sold, as youtube videos are shared.

I really like Dave Chappelle's comedy. I think that Chappelle's Show did a great job of pushing the boundaries in a way that potentially opened eyes to injustice and absurdity. Discussions of race in America are often muted, and Chappelle's is certainly not. As Haggins says later in her essay, the "task of the provocateur is to incite dissension--to make people question things as they are--it's not necessarily his job to provide the answers" (236).

I don't know how I feel about this sketch. He was obviously uncomfortable with it and never wanted it aired. Comedy Central released it as part of the unfinished third season in the "Lost Episodes," which I had refused to watch before because I thought it was wrong of them to release them. I watched it for this paper. I think it is important to tease out the subtleties of satire and try to figure out where the line is. How much of this is completely up to the audience? How much of an audience can a performer control?

Oh Humor, You're Such A Fickle Creature

So, I've blogged that humor is audience-dependent and time-sensitive. Now, while reading for my final paper, I've also learned that "we are all condemned to parody, for we can do no more than parrot another's word as it comes to be our turn to speak it" (Dentith, Parody, 3).

How many things have to go exactly right for a piece of comedy to succeed? The audience has to be in the right frame of mind, that is, primed for laughter. The material has to be timely so that it can be of interest, and that means that jokes must constantly be re-written to adapt to the newest demands of the audience. At the same time, however, the comedian is saying nothing new; instead, the joke has to be refreshed into an utterance that meets all these other demands while still pulling from a general pool of past comedic (or non-comedic) performances.

Are other genres this demanding? And what is it that allows some things to remain funny years later (and out of their contemporary contexts) while others fizzle in weeks?

It made me think of some contemporary poetry. Obviously, we have an affinity for poetry that can lasts centuries; it doesn't necessarily have to be timely. However, is it possible to make it too timely to survive into the future? I'm thinking of a poet named Terrance Hayes, who I think is a tremendous writer. He visited one of my creative writing classes when I was an undergraduate. His poems have a lot of cultural references: Wal-Mart, song titles, hip hop artists. I wonder if this timeliness (which adds a lot to them in their contemporary context) can be a liability for posterity? Does humor always have to skirt this line?

Do I Expect Too Much?

Our recent discussion in class on African American humorists was interesting to me. I am very interested, as I may have mentioned before, in racial humor, particularly self-deprecating humor. In fact, I am writing my final paper on Chappelle's Show and the where the line is crossed through parody/satire. I will probably blog about some of my ideas for that later.

However, I first wanted to blog about why this topic interests me in the first place. Humor, to me, is at its best when it has a social purpose. I think that all works of creative expression can serve in this way, and humor is perhaps one of the most powerful. It is a great work that can make you laugh and later make you think.

Racial humor often works in this way. Gender humor does, too. But there are risks.

Self-deprecating humor can often act as a parody of the real injustice toward the group. When Chris Rock makes jokes about white people using the n-word, he is parodying a real issue. What does this parody do? Who does it reach?

Parody can draw attention to the real problem in a new way. People may not have recognized their own participation in the problem before hearing the joke. Often, though, I think the effect is much more subtle. Sometimes the audience doesn't really recognize themselves as part of the problem, but they can still be enlightened by a comedic performance on the topic.

Who's the audience, then? Is it humor's responsibility to open the eyes of people who are doing wrong? Probably not. An overt racist is probably not going to be watching Chris Rock in the first place, and even if he/she was, it is unlikely that the show would cause any dramatic changes in thought.

People who recognize the injustice but are victims of it may find cathartic release in humor. It is a defense mechanism (a common theory about how humor works). But pointing out the obvious in a humorous way isn't necessarily socially helpful.

What about people who just haven't recognized the problem in the first place? This seems to be the audience that stands to benefit the most from this sort of parody. People who are neither victims nor perpetrators stand in a position to do something about injustice. Can humor help them recognize both the problem itself and their unique position to help solve it?

Am I asking too much of humor when I look at this possibility? I know that not all humor has this goal in mind, and I think that there are other equally valid goals, but this is the one that is most interesting to me.

Excising the Joke: A Problem for Scholarship

Continuing from my last post about how we should approach studying humor, I argue that we should, indeed, study it. The question remains about which approach to doing so is the best.

In class, we've taken a few different approaches.

For many of the stand-up comedians we watched full length shows of their performances, analyzing them (mostly) in their entirety. Though we may have focused on particular jokes momentarily, the brunt of the discussion centered around thematic elements: Chris Rock's use of gestures, Ralphie May's tendency to make the audience uncomfortable, etc.

We took a similar approach when we looked at the female stand-ups, but we only got short glimpses (five minutes!) at most of their work. The conclusions we drew, to me, highlighted the small sample we had to work with. They seemed contrived, forced, and not very insightful. Perhaps a longer view of these works would have provided much more illumination into the elusive female stand-up.

For written works, for a few authors we have read multiple pieces. Similar to the longer stand-up, reading multiple works allows for a more holistic view of the writer's use of humor. This enabled us to make (as we did in class on Wednesday) a catalog of "typical" tropes for individual authors or for an entire genre of humor. As we discussed, the Southwestern comics used dialogue, played on the country v. city tension, and frequently depicted slapstick.

In other written works, we had smaller sample sizes, but for some reason these were more fulfilling scholarly endeavors for me than the short clips of stand-up. The pieces, even though not as revealing as a series of the author's work, were typically complete, stand alone works. This allowed insight into the way that individual authors used familar tropes successfully (or unsuccessfully).

We haven't, however, done much close textual analysis of individual jokes. The book I am reading for the review works almost entirely from this methodology and I am questioning its validity. For example, the author, John Limon, closely analyzes a joke from Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks skit to conclude that a "male-male comedy team is an odd couple, and an odd couple is a union that cannot declare its essence to be this or that" (49). He extends this to an examination of the abjection of homosexuality in these duo comedy teams.

Regardless of my opinion on the conclusion, I do think this method is questionable. Can a single joke be that revealing? Jokes, as Limon himself points out, are more audience and context-dependent than just about any other art form. Doesn't taking a single joke in this way negate that context and radically alter the audience? What about all of the performance leading up to this joke? What about all of the performance moving away from it?

We do similar things with other literary criticism. I have written a paper about a single line of a poem. Somehow that doesn't seem as questionable to me, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because the poetry is less audience dependent than a comedic performance?

In Defense of Studying Humor

There has been some chatter on other blogs about the fact that this class isn't "fun." I guess that could be true, depending on your expectations of a class. However, I want to explore why we think that it should be fun.

When you study the Civil War, you don't expect to get bloody. When you study genetics, you don't expect to get cloned. Examination, by its very nature, alters your perspective on the thing you are studying in such a way as to make it no longer the experience it was "meant" to be.

But we do it anyway.



Here is a (incomplete) list of the things we've determined about humor so far:
1. It is often timely.
2. It is commonly used by in-groups.
3. Everyone's opinion on what is or is not funny differs.
4. It often pushes social boundaries.
5. No critic can agree on what makes something humorous (see 3).



Okay, so, our position as students studying humor makes us:
1. View pieces that are often no longer timely.
2. Definitely step outside of the in-group. Even if we are part of the demograph the original act was meant for, when we are in the classroom we are part of a different group, one I'm sure no comedian has in mind as the audience. Perhaps this is why I laughed more when I was watching the stand-up or reading the stories at home than I did in the classroom; I was in a different group. Essentially, I was a different audience.
3. We're trying to have a conversation as a class full of diverse opinions. This can be great as long as we don't approach it as something we have to agree on to understand.
4. Pushing the social boundaries is the reason to study humor, at least in my opinion. If it served no societal function, then maybe a class on it should just be fun, but the fact that it can be a vehicle for many larger issues makes it a field worth trying to understand.
5. We're English majors! Surely we can deal with critics who can't agree with one another.



In order to enjoy studying humor, our expectations have to change. I admit that coming in, I wasn't quite sure how to approach this task, and at times I wanted to just watch the clips, read the story, and be the audience the creator probably intended, but that doesn't help me understand humor. In other words, if the class was too fun, we probably wouldn't be doing a very good job.

Why Stand-Up?

Stand-up seems to be the golden standard with which we measure just how funny someone is (or is not). It seems to be by this golden standard that women have failed (or at least not conquered the way men have). So, maybe stand up lends itself more to men, but aren't there other kinds of humor? Why is this the way we measure a successful comic?

As the selections we read for this week prove, women can be funny in print. (I think they can be funny in stand-up, too, but so many of the examples we watched felt forced, out of place, like they were trying to fit in at the boys club they didn't belong to.) Women can also be funny in situational comedy, which I think parallels with many of the stories we read recently.

"Xingu" and "The Petrified Man" are good examples of this sort of situational humor. In both of these stories, the narrative revolves around character interaction. The humor is largely in creating the characters and the back-and-forth dialogue that transpires between them. We see this constantly in sit-coms.

I was reading a piece once (though I cannot remember the title or author, I know, what a horrible grad student!) that talked about the difference between women's mode of composition and men's. Women were more circular, less direct. If women write differently, is it any wonder that they would be funny differently as well. If women "cannot be funny" as some of the critics of female humor have said, then it's because we're measuring from a very narrow perspective.

Quit Whining

Finally! With Dorthy Parker's "The Waltz" a comic has put some responsibility on women for this "condition" we're in.

I guess it could have been there subtly before, but the repetitive themes of the stand-up were getting a little grating. Boo-hoo women feel fat. Boo-hoo men don't appreciate us.

Don't get me wrong. I do not think that equality for the sexes has suddenly been solved and I whole-heartedly support the feminist movement. But it needs to be just that: a movement. Complaining about the existence of these gender differences does not really do anything about them.

Parker's "The Waltz" does a great job of pointing out the fact that women need to take responsibility for their own happiness.

I loved looking at the incongruity between the narrator's thoughts and her words. I loved the irony that the narrator, though occassionally questioning her decision to dance, doesn't really recognize that her current misery is entirely her own fault. Instead, she calls her dancing partner a "creature [she's] chained to" (261) and assures herself that she should "kill him this instant, with my naked hands" (260).

Brilliantly, Parker's story works on many levels. First of all, the narrator is clearly illustrated as the product of her own demise. There is nothing wrong with the man asking her to dance, and it is only her fear of stepping outside of social boundaries that has put her in this situation.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Parker subtly illustrates that the stereotypes about women are not necessarily true. This woman in certainly not docile, meek, and well-behaved (at least not in the privacy of her own mind). Those who could think such vicious thoughts about their dance partners should be able to hold their own in the tough world around them.

I read "The Waltz" as both a call to action and a (more subtle and therefore more palatable) affirmation of women's strength. Yes, Parker seems to be saying, we are strong and capable, so stand up and do something about it.