Punch Line
Last night Stacey and I went out to a comedy club called Punch Line for the late show. I'm a huge fan of stand up, and it amounts to a crime against entertainment that I haven't seen a live comedy show since moving to the world's entertainment capital.
The show's headliner was a comedian named Bobby Slayton, who did the offensive angry man schtick, picking people out of the audience to serve as exemplars for the barbing of their of their race, gender, age group, marital status, body size, and so on.
Although Slayton was funny enough, that brand isn't my favorite funny. There's a school of comic thinking that boils down to the belief that all humor derives from the humiliation of people, but that's a philosophy I've never agreed with. I subscribe to the idea that all humor arises from incongruity, from "comic discrepancy." The humor of humiliation is part of that, of course. It amounts to the discrepancy between the way most people believe humans ought to be treated ó with respect for basic human dignity ó and the humiliation at hand. That said, I'm not one to get all bent out of shape over something that's intended to be funny, no matter how offensive it may be. I honestly believe that irreverence is its own reward. Getting bent out of shape only makes it funnier for those who are in on the joke, anyway. Given the choice, though, I'd rather see humor crafted more elegantly, and more in tune with basic values of human dignity.
Comments
So, did he pick on you or what??
No, I just would have preferred better comedy.
The New Yorker recently ran a portrait of Don Rickles, who, until I read the piece, was on my "Oh, he died a long time ago" list. Now he's on my "Oh, wow, he's still alive?" list. (This is anecdotally, not statistically verified, but I have an odd track record of people slipping from the latter to the former shortly after I stumbled across the fact that person was still living.)
Anyhow, I never liked Rickles as I thought his humor was rather crass and based purely on insult. Though the portrait was fairly warm, there was nothing in its content to make me change my mind about the comedian or that brand of levity.
So I guess this is a long-winded way of agreeing with your observations on what makes for decent humor.
Totally unrelated: see http://www.popvssoda.com
It offers some interesting regional observations.