I'm too lazy to go find the section that sparked the following for me, but it's there somewhere in the words above this box, and it's the idea that there's a spectrum. It starts with completely acting as if there is no pain, no trauma, no bad stuff happening at all, individually or in the world -- the pre normalizing therapy/self help era of manners, politeness, reserve, etc. THere's a sweet spot in the middle where people get to not be ashamed of being flawed and having emotional Stuff To Deal With that requires some special handling.
But we've now moved firmly to the other extreme where most people are so in love with their special and unique and precious trauma and pain that they don't want to let go of it because it's become the way they "identify" in the world. And if they let go of their sad story and move on, they have to construct a new identity, and well, fuck, that's a lot of work when the world already gives them so much attention for being so damaged and traumatized and broken. We've romanticized being broken, fetishized it, really. And it's a problem. And I think to some extent maybe -- and this might be the part I'm remembering from your piece -- Lenny Bruce was part of that.
I speak from some experience here, having inadvertently marooned myself in Victimland for too many years before figuring out that there are lots better ways of getting attention and feeling special than identifying with my sad story.
I have no idea what my comment has to do with comedy. It's just my Hyde Park soapbox and I seized the opportunity.
The Answer Man and his fancy learnin’ does a great job explaining when it’s appropriate to laugh at somebody slipping on a karmic banana peel, and also why bananas were never allowed into Nazi Germany…or currently in the half of Congress controlled by the GOP. They do enough pratfalls without any help.
OK, OK, Mike, I’ll stop with the joking. I can't stomach a rewatch of Godfather III.
But still, excellent food for thought in this post.
Coming from another perspective than that of a previous poster, I'll wonder aloud.
As one of our many, all too many "angry, sad, powerless or depressed (a/s/p/d) people," with diagnostic codes and everything we'll not discuss, I'd say my identity (whatever the hell that fiction even means in a universe more akin to Heraclitus' understanding than anyone's - everything is made of change; things and people are not stable things that undergo changes - the stability is imaginary inside this world), uh, as I was saying, my "identity" is affected by the a/s/p/d, but it's not the stuff out of which I'm made. How I deal with it - or don't - is more "who I am" than anything else. Humor is one way to "deal with it": as long as one doesn't ONLY deal with it by means of humor.
No one can reduce themselves to one means of "dealing with" anything terrible without becoming a one dimensional caricature of a human. No matter how marketable, how romantic-seeming from the outside, no matter how much attention one garners in the process. A person on a stage (or wherever one performs) is a fictional character for the extent of the performance. The rest of their lives they're eating those damned Gingermen and not sharing and doing the things humans may get up to out of the limelight when not playing the stage-role and, instead, are playing other dimensions of who they are choosing to be. Well or poorly, as their choices may be.
Our culture may have lost or dulled an ability (if it has ever been widespread) to distinguish a fictional, entertaining character from the person who performs the character. I recall Hunter Thompson once complaining that he went to speak about journalism as Hunter S. Thompson but college audiences wanted Raoul Duke (his fictional alter ego in articles and in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"). So he started just showing up and acting like Raoul Duke and everyone was "happy."
Except Thompson. Who is no longer with us due to eating a pistol, eventually.
Yeats once asked, in a poem, "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" which is a beautiful thing to consider - but the dancer damn well better know the difference, when to be the dancer dancing and when to go buy groceries and when to go to therapy and ask for help. Even if the damage powers the dance. On bananas. In Nazi Germany or the House of Representatives. Trauma or no trauma.
Memory tends to hang around in some form if desired (or not). After enough therapy and meds and learning some skills - well, the memory of pain can power art just as actually being stuck in "trauma" can. No one can voluntarily control the symptoms of, say, PTSD - and no one winds up with a PTSD diagnosis (or needing one) because they began desiring to have an "identity group." Sneering at people who have difficulty dealing with trauma denotes - or suggests - a certain lack of understanding or empathy; and demanding they all go shut up about it because it aggravates one is the root of mental health stigma.... Blah blah blah.
But dissuading a comic from using trauma and autobiographical "anger, sadness, powerlessness or depression (a/s/p/d)" just because that alone will "fix" nothing... mmmmm - I think it's better to get it out. AS LONG AS ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL HELP IS ALSO SOUGHT. So effort is made to lean into changing in some way one would and should prefer instead of being rolled over and buried by self-medicating e.g. Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Sam Kinison, Doug Kenney, Hunter S. Thompson....
*****
That's enough of that.
In any case, all I really came to say was I am suspicious that you PROFESSIONALS (dingdingding) in comedy might try to dissuade us entirely inferior dilettantes from using our mere "comedy" to deal with the a/s/p/d and the horror of daily existence. Because you secretly fear - things being what they are in this world - having to share those g.d. Gingermen. If Carrot Top and Pauly Shore can have their inexplicable moments (well, yeah - I know whose kid Shore is, but still, his career remains ** inexplicable**) of cash generating "fame" and an audience, hell - one of us might pull off our 15 minutes as well and the already small world of gigs will become that much smaller. Won't it, Mr. Gerber?
I called the Gingerman and asked, sir. And Pepperidge Farm remembers.
@Richard, I wrote a reply yesterday, then deleted it because I wanted to respond more thoughtfully to your reply.
Many, many people will say that comedy is the sanest, most helpful response to a "world gone mad," and certainly among the readers of a Substack written by a humor magazine editor, this is going to be taken as a given. But in myself--and in many others who have similarly employed comedy in this regard for decades, to an intensity where professional status quite naturally arose--I have found generally MORE mental and emotional difficulties than in non-comedy people. Even more troubling, I've found something folks mordantly call "comedy poisoning," where you lose the ability to be surprised enough for the limbic release of a laugh, and comedy itself is an entirely an act of mentation: "Hm. I can see how that's funny."
I think it's pretty logical that people only go into comedy if they have a craving for the release it brings; that craving is first satisfied by consuming others' work, but over time the stronger hit of one's own joking is required. And I have found that comedy professionals are generally less mentally healthy or well-adjusted, at least from the outside, than "civilians"; this goes for people in therapy and on medication, too. And finally I have found that past a certain point in both professionals or devoted fans that they treat their comedy like a drug--in that if you deviate in any way from the standard cultural shibboleths praising comedy and its effectiveness and usefulness as a means to chase away the blues--they are at best snarky, and at worst say shitty things to you. Toxic fandoms seem to me very much like groups of addicts.
I'm interested in sharing what I've learned in my own life--that to me seems to be what an advice column is for. And what I've learned in my own life is that while the comic mechanism perhaps kept me alive during a difficult boyhood and teen years, after I became an adult it seemed to CREATE a depressive and anxiety-producing effect. Far from alleviating a/s/p/d, the place my mind lived *to make jokes* seemed to generate a/s/p/d. And after going through a physical experience where I had to change the way I thought, I found myself much less funny, but much more mentally healthy, and even physically healthy, too.
This all seems like stuff I should share--even if comedy fans don't like hearing it. Maybe especially if they don't like hearing it? As with all such things, YMMV, but my answer wasn't given in the spirit of "don't make jokes, proles!" but "nobody should believe that jokes are the answer to anything important, like our culture so often says they are, or even good for you, because in my case they kinda weren't."
As to my not wanting competition, well, I cannot pretend that the internet's making everybody into a prose comedy writer has been good for me, professionally. But think of all the undiscovered talent that is now published, right? Well, after 35 years of editing others' humor, I can say with some authority that access to audience has not unleashed more prose comedy genius. It all kinda sounds the same, @Richard, especially now that everyone comes up reading the same thing, ie, social media, and writes humor using simple, rote structures like "an Onion piece" or "a McSweeney's piece," and chasing the same thing, i.e., virality. Yes, there are your Danny Laverys, but Danny would've have been even MORE successful in the days of yore. Some talents are unsinkable, even by the internet.
That's not me. The internet alienates me, deeply. In this endless chatter, I often despair that I have anything truly unique to say, and no longer have much of a desire to write books. This may--and I offer this with all due humility--represent some small cultural loss; I did, after all, write the best-selling self-published humor book of all time at age 32. Or perhaps whatever I might've contributed has been amply provided by the endless tidal wave of internet casuals and tweets. Who knows? I can only say the pre-internet, pre-social media world fit me better, as a writer/editor, and as a person, too.
I wish everyone who hopes to do this type of writing the best of luck. I would just like them to avoid suffering for it, if that is possible. Because I like them.
'This all seems like stuff I should share--even if comedy fans don't like hearing it. Maybe especially if they don't like hearing it? As with all such things, YMMV, but my answer wasn't given in the spirit of "don't make jokes, proles!" but "nobody should believe that jokes are the answer to anything important, like our culture so often says they are, or even good for you, because in my case they kinda weren't."'
Who am I to disagree with that? No one. I can see, and agree, with what you're saying. It's a warning about a tendency that is real:
"And finally I have found that past a certain point in both professionals or devoted fans that they treat their comedy like a drug--in that if you deviate in any way from the standard cultural shibboleths praising comedy and its effectiveness and usefulness as a means to chase away the blues--they are at best snarky, and at worst say shitty things to you. Toxic fandoms seem to me very much like groups of addicts."
I've seen this as well, from my perspective, which obviously is not as a pro. For years, I've assumed - and said aloud to friends - that the better the comic or comedic writing, the deeper the depression behind it. Which was just my catch-all term for "darkness" of some form, illness, damage. And I've never assumed that being comedic, even mildly, makes the least dent in feeling horrible. The few times I've managed to be funny didn't do much for dealing with the darkness. The attention it garnered was very much like a hit of something pure... but very brief in duration at best. It never replaced doctors, meds, and therapy; it never could, I suppose. I'm not good enough to find out.
You, however, ARE good enough to know, and I'll take you at your word that this is a "thing." Fame and fandoms -- all of that, at this point, appears (to me) to involve, unavoidably, toxicity. The fans push for more and what may be worse for the performer -- in a consumerist society, it's still somewhat shocking (to me) to watch a mass of people cannibalize a fellow human being just to be entertained. We could switch the subject here to music and run the list of musicians and singers who are dead from heroin/opioids alone -- and we all knew they were burning themselves down to keep delivering what we wanted - to keep the "happy" cycle of payment in all forms running.
We're a pretty callous bunch when it comes to our expectations of and from "the talented." And, you're right, most never even ask whether what the person who entertains us suffers to keep delivering the goods. Or whether they SHOULD.
"As to my not wanting competition, well, I cannot pretend that the internet's making everybody into a prose comedy writer has been good for me, professionally. "
That portion of my missive was, uh, the joke part. To tie it back around to not sharing the Gingermen, real and metaphorical. I was NOT serious. I fear I come off about as dry in writing and tone as I do in person. Which is why I'm only barely amusing, at best.
I agree with you about the net and humor and the death of print -- assuming it has really completely died (I keep hoping -- in vain, I'm sure). Sure, now I can read more comedy at the flip of a switch; is it better? Not on the whole, no it is not. And it's like drinking from the proverbial firehose: an actually talented person is more likely to be drowned out by the sheer noise than elevated (or paid for the trouble). I've taken to calling this "being ignored to death," a much more effective form of censorship than actually banning anyone or thing. There is no way to compete on the internet. Editors and publications with even minimal editing from "back in the day" (e.g. The Lampoon; Trump; Humbug; Playboy; Hustler, etc.) served an invaluable function -- and those who made it through some sort of gate were almost guaranteed to be of higher quality. And the audience had to savor the work and appreciate it because you weren't getting a comedy writing fix again for at least a month and it was always a bit of a gamble.
Myself, I wanted to work in THAT world, too: the print world. I've read your brief autobiography of arriving just in time to watch everything collapse and it's not dissimilar from my own story -- except I gave up more quickly and started writing and illustrating for pen and paper role playing games, smuggling in a lot of dark humor where all the other companies seemed hell bent on pushing super-serious Goth-ness (e.g. White Wolf). Me, I satirized them in my horror writing. And got paid to do so in the 1990s.
Then publishing crashed for all sorts of reasons involving speculative bubbles and the arrival of the internet. Where you can get everything for FREE, apparently, and you have to work FOR FREE and hope you make something off selling merchandise and bling associated with all that free work you do.
If I thought I could regularly write comedy online and make enough to pay some bills and insurance, I'd be all over that gig. IF I thought I could keep up and compete and not get lost in that tidal wave of unbridled background noise turned up to 11. And I lack such confidence in my "skills."
YOU are good enough and have proven it. Me? Feh. Hardly.
Like I said, that part of what I wrote was the "joke" appended to the end of an extended speculation. And given what you say first-hand, I'll have to say my speculation is probably not worth a puddle of warm spit. Or cold. (I'm not sure why the temperature was ever supposed to make a difference.)
"I wish everyone who hopes to do this type of writing the best of luck. I would just like them to avoid suffering for it, if that is possible. Because I like them."
THAT sentence is one of the reasons I follow you. (I'll even pay as soon as my income becomes steady - as is, I share what you do. Because it's worth reading and worthwhile.) You're a great deal less abstract and a good deal more ethical than I was in considering this issue, I think. So, I reconsider and have to say I believe your position is stronger than mine. And more caring -- which is a damn good thing.
So, sorry, but here I go. The impression I got was you wanted to do an advice column at least partly to get back to comedy writing. And you just sort of condemned comedy. I like.
Henri Bergson covered some of this ground in his treatise on Laughter. Speaking for myself, I find that the source of much comedy is grounded in the absurdity of human existence, and the best comics are the ones that are really good at pointing this out to an audience. What is revealed is concealed, what is concealed is revealed, and there is no good reason for us to be here but we're stuck with us so we might as well have a little fun with our predicament. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go set my pants on fire now.
I'm dredging this up from decades past, but wasn't Bergson's theory that comedy is created by rote activity—when the natural acts mechanical? I remember thinking there was a lot to it...but also very much influenced by the core anxieties of his time.
I don't think existence is absurd; it often strikes me as rather eerie and uncanny, but not absurd. I think reality's pretty all right; it's bigger than our comprehension, and that's what makes it fun. The brain thinks it craves certainty and predictability, but after about two minutes of that it's looking for novelty—so the rules of this reality are perfectly tuned for us, and of course they are, because this reality has been the driver of our brain's evolution.
The problem is the simplicity of the comic impulse. There is a great deal of senseless human cruelty and self-destructive, delusional behavior, but it's all for complex reasons. 99% of comedy plays it all very small, and very simple, because that's what the mechanism seems to require.
Take Putin as an example. We can look at his playing hockey with an All-Star team and scoring six goals as the key to a comic insight into his character. And we might say, "That's like when your gym teacher played dodgeball. 'Motherfucker, you're not ELUSIVE. I just don't want to get expelled for breaking your nose.'"
But the problem ISN'T simply that Putin is a vain asshole. It's a thousand years of kleptocracy under the Tsars, alcoholism, lousy education, and so forth. Comedy is attempting to deal with this via shows like TDS and Oliver, but I don't think it's really possible; at some point you have to go small, and visceral. At some point you have to downshift to stuff like "'I am Death, destroyer of worlds' is what Oppenheimer shouted every time he came."
The explosion of comedy that has come from wiring us all up together is actually misleading us and seems to be making us less able to do the hard things we need to do. COVID could have been eradicated, if we'd all pulled together; global warming might still be ameliorated by a worldwide Manhattan Project—but comedy moves us in exactly the opposite direction.
I'm too lazy to go find the section that sparked the following for me, but it's there somewhere in the words above this box, and it's the idea that there's a spectrum. It starts with completely acting as if there is no pain, no trauma, no bad stuff happening at all, individually or in the world -- the pre normalizing therapy/self help era of manners, politeness, reserve, etc. THere's a sweet spot in the middle where people get to not be ashamed of being flawed and having emotional Stuff To Deal With that requires some special handling.
But we've now moved firmly to the other extreme where most people are so in love with their special and unique and precious trauma and pain that they don't want to let go of it because it's become the way they "identify" in the world. And if they let go of their sad story and move on, they have to construct a new identity, and well, fuck, that's a lot of work when the world already gives them so much attention for being so damaged and traumatized and broken. We've romanticized being broken, fetishized it, really. And it's a problem. And I think to some extent maybe -- and this might be the part I'm remembering from your piece -- Lenny Bruce was part of that.
I speak from some experience here, having inadvertently marooned myself in Victimland for too many years before figuring out that there are lots better ways of getting attention and feeling special than identifying with my sad story.
I have no idea what my comment has to do with comedy. It's just my Hyde Park soapbox and I seized the opportunity.
The Answer Man and his fancy learnin’ does a great job explaining when it’s appropriate to laugh at somebody slipping on a karmic banana peel, and also why bananas were never allowed into Nazi Germany…or currently in the half of Congress controlled by the GOP. They do enough pratfalls without any help.
OK, OK, Mike, I’ll stop with the joking. I can't stomach a rewatch of Godfather III.
But still, excellent food for thought in this post.
Coming from another perspective than that of a previous poster, I'll wonder aloud.
As one of our many, all too many "angry, sad, powerless or depressed (a/s/p/d) people," with diagnostic codes and everything we'll not discuss, I'd say my identity (whatever the hell that fiction even means in a universe more akin to Heraclitus' understanding than anyone's - everything is made of change; things and people are not stable things that undergo changes - the stability is imaginary inside this world), uh, as I was saying, my "identity" is affected by the a/s/p/d, but it's not the stuff out of which I'm made. How I deal with it - or don't - is more "who I am" than anything else. Humor is one way to "deal with it": as long as one doesn't ONLY deal with it by means of humor.
No one can reduce themselves to one means of "dealing with" anything terrible without becoming a one dimensional caricature of a human. No matter how marketable, how romantic-seeming from the outside, no matter how much attention one garners in the process. A person on a stage (or wherever one performs) is a fictional character for the extent of the performance. The rest of their lives they're eating those damned Gingermen and not sharing and doing the things humans may get up to out of the limelight when not playing the stage-role and, instead, are playing other dimensions of who they are choosing to be. Well or poorly, as their choices may be.
Our culture may have lost or dulled an ability (if it has ever been widespread) to distinguish a fictional, entertaining character from the person who performs the character. I recall Hunter Thompson once complaining that he went to speak about journalism as Hunter S. Thompson but college audiences wanted Raoul Duke (his fictional alter ego in articles and in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"). So he started just showing up and acting like Raoul Duke and everyone was "happy."
Except Thompson. Who is no longer with us due to eating a pistol, eventually.
Yeats once asked, in a poem, "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" which is a beautiful thing to consider - but the dancer damn well better know the difference, when to be the dancer dancing and when to go buy groceries and when to go to therapy and ask for help. Even if the damage powers the dance. On bananas. In Nazi Germany or the House of Representatives. Trauma or no trauma.
Memory tends to hang around in some form if desired (or not). After enough therapy and meds and learning some skills - well, the memory of pain can power art just as actually being stuck in "trauma" can. No one can voluntarily control the symptoms of, say, PTSD - and no one winds up with a PTSD diagnosis (or needing one) because they began desiring to have an "identity group." Sneering at people who have difficulty dealing with trauma denotes - or suggests - a certain lack of understanding or empathy; and demanding they all go shut up about it because it aggravates one is the root of mental health stigma.... Blah blah blah.
But dissuading a comic from using trauma and autobiographical "anger, sadness, powerlessness or depression (a/s/p/d)" just because that alone will "fix" nothing... mmmmm - I think it's better to get it out. AS LONG AS ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL HELP IS ALSO SOUGHT. So effort is made to lean into changing in some way one would and should prefer instead of being rolled over and buried by self-medicating e.g. Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Sam Kinison, Doug Kenney, Hunter S. Thompson....
*****
That's enough of that.
In any case, all I really came to say was I am suspicious that you PROFESSIONALS (dingdingding) in comedy might try to dissuade us entirely inferior dilettantes from using our mere "comedy" to deal with the a/s/p/d and the horror of daily existence. Because you secretly fear - things being what they are in this world - having to share those g.d. Gingermen. If Carrot Top and Pauly Shore can have their inexplicable moments (well, yeah - I know whose kid Shore is, but still, his career remains ** inexplicable**) of cash generating "fame" and an audience, hell - one of us might pull off our 15 minutes as well and the already small world of gigs will become that much smaller. Won't it, Mr. Gerber?
I called the Gingerman and asked, sir. And Pepperidge Farm remembers.
@Richard, I wrote a reply yesterday, then deleted it because I wanted to respond more thoughtfully to your reply.
Many, many people will say that comedy is the sanest, most helpful response to a "world gone mad," and certainly among the readers of a Substack written by a humor magazine editor, this is going to be taken as a given. But in myself--and in many others who have similarly employed comedy in this regard for decades, to an intensity where professional status quite naturally arose--I have found generally MORE mental and emotional difficulties than in non-comedy people. Even more troubling, I've found something folks mordantly call "comedy poisoning," where you lose the ability to be surprised enough for the limbic release of a laugh, and comedy itself is an entirely an act of mentation: "Hm. I can see how that's funny."
I think it's pretty logical that people only go into comedy if they have a craving for the release it brings; that craving is first satisfied by consuming others' work, but over time the stronger hit of one's own joking is required. And I have found that comedy professionals are generally less mentally healthy or well-adjusted, at least from the outside, than "civilians"; this goes for people in therapy and on medication, too. And finally I have found that past a certain point in both professionals or devoted fans that they treat their comedy like a drug--in that if you deviate in any way from the standard cultural shibboleths praising comedy and its effectiveness and usefulness as a means to chase away the blues--they are at best snarky, and at worst say shitty things to you. Toxic fandoms seem to me very much like groups of addicts.
I'm interested in sharing what I've learned in my own life--that to me seems to be what an advice column is for. And what I've learned in my own life is that while the comic mechanism perhaps kept me alive during a difficult boyhood and teen years, after I became an adult it seemed to CREATE a depressive and anxiety-producing effect. Far from alleviating a/s/p/d, the place my mind lived *to make jokes* seemed to generate a/s/p/d. And after going through a physical experience where I had to change the way I thought, I found myself much less funny, but much more mentally healthy, and even physically healthy, too.
This all seems like stuff I should share--even if comedy fans don't like hearing it. Maybe especially if they don't like hearing it? As with all such things, YMMV, but my answer wasn't given in the spirit of "don't make jokes, proles!" but "nobody should believe that jokes are the answer to anything important, like our culture so often says they are, or even good for you, because in my case they kinda weren't."
As to my not wanting competition, well, I cannot pretend that the internet's making everybody into a prose comedy writer has been good for me, professionally. But think of all the undiscovered talent that is now published, right? Well, after 35 years of editing others' humor, I can say with some authority that access to audience has not unleashed more prose comedy genius. It all kinda sounds the same, @Richard, especially now that everyone comes up reading the same thing, ie, social media, and writes humor using simple, rote structures like "an Onion piece" or "a McSweeney's piece," and chasing the same thing, i.e., virality. Yes, there are your Danny Laverys, but Danny would've have been even MORE successful in the days of yore. Some talents are unsinkable, even by the internet.
That's not me. The internet alienates me, deeply. In this endless chatter, I often despair that I have anything truly unique to say, and no longer have much of a desire to write books. This may--and I offer this with all due humility--represent some small cultural loss; I did, after all, write the best-selling self-published humor book of all time at age 32. Or perhaps whatever I might've contributed has been amply provided by the endless tidal wave of internet casuals and tweets. Who knows? I can only say the pre-internet, pre-social media world fit me better, as a writer/editor, and as a person, too.
I wish everyone who hopes to do this type of writing the best of luck. I would just like them to avoid suffering for it, if that is possible. Because I like them.
'This all seems like stuff I should share--even if comedy fans don't like hearing it. Maybe especially if they don't like hearing it? As with all such things, YMMV, but my answer wasn't given in the spirit of "don't make jokes, proles!" but "nobody should believe that jokes are the answer to anything important, like our culture so often says they are, or even good for you, because in my case they kinda weren't."'
Who am I to disagree with that? No one. I can see, and agree, with what you're saying. It's a warning about a tendency that is real:
"And finally I have found that past a certain point in both professionals or devoted fans that they treat their comedy like a drug--in that if you deviate in any way from the standard cultural shibboleths praising comedy and its effectiveness and usefulness as a means to chase away the blues--they are at best snarky, and at worst say shitty things to you. Toxic fandoms seem to me very much like groups of addicts."
I've seen this as well, from my perspective, which obviously is not as a pro. For years, I've assumed - and said aloud to friends - that the better the comic or comedic writing, the deeper the depression behind it. Which was just my catch-all term for "darkness" of some form, illness, damage. And I've never assumed that being comedic, even mildly, makes the least dent in feeling horrible. The few times I've managed to be funny didn't do much for dealing with the darkness. The attention it garnered was very much like a hit of something pure... but very brief in duration at best. It never replaced doctors, meds, and therapy; it never could, I suppose. I'm not good enough to find out.
You, however, ARE good enough to know, and I'll take you at your word that this is a "thing." Fame and fandoms -- all of that, at this point, appears (to me) to involve, unavoidably, toxicity. The fans push for more and what may be worse for the performer -- in a consumerist society, it's still somewhat shocking (to me) to watch a mass of people cannibalize a fellow human being just to be entertained. We could switch the subject here to music and run the list of musicians and singers who are dead from heroin/opioids alone -- and we all knew they were burning themselves down to keep delivering what we wanted - to keep the "happy" cycle of payment in all forms running.
We're a pretty callous bunch when it comes to our expectations of and from "the talented." And, you're right, most never even ask whether what the person who entertains us suffers to keep delivering the goods. Or whether they SHOULD.
"As to my not wanting competition, well, I cannot pretend that the internet's making everybody into a prose comedy writer has been good for me, professionally. "
That portion of my missive was, uh, the joke part. To tie it back around to not sharing the Gingermen, real and metaphorical. I was NOT serious. I fear I come off about as dry in writing and tone as I do in person. Which is why I'm only barely amusing, at best.
I agree with you about the net and humor and the death of print -- assuming it has really completely died (I keep hoping -- in vain, I'm sure). Sure, now I can read more comedy at the flip of a switch; is it better? Not on the whole, no it is not. And it's like drinking from the proverbial firehose: an actually talented person is more likely to be drowned out by the sheer noise than elevated (or paid for the trouble). I've taken to calling this "being ignored to death," a much more effective form of censorship than actually banning anyone or thing. There is no way to compete on the internet. Editors and publications with even minimal editing from "back in the day" (e.g. The Lampoon; Trump; Humbug; Playboy; Hustler, etc.) served an invaluable function -- and those who made it through some sort of gate were almost guaranteed to be of higher quality. And the audience had to savor the work and appreciate it because you weren't getting a comedy writing fix again for at least a month and it was always a bit of a gamble.
Myself, I wanted to work in THAT world, too: the print world. I've read your brief autobiography of arriving just in time to watch everything collapse and it's not dissimilar from my own story -- except I gave up more quickly and started writing and illustrating for pen and paper role playing games, smuggling in a lot of dark humor where all the other companies seemed hell bent on pushing super-serious Goth-ness (e.g. White Wolf). Me, I satirized them in my horror writing. And got paid to do so in the 1990s.
Then publishing crashed for all sorts of reasons involving speculative bubbles and the arrival of the internet. Where you can get everything for FREE, apparently, and you have to work FOR FREE and hope you make something off selling merchandise and bling associated with all that free work you do.
If I thought I could regularly write comedy online and make enough to pay some bills and insurance, I'd be all over that gig. IF I thought I could keep up and compete and not get lost in that tidal wave of unbridled background noise turned up to 11. And I lack such confidence in my "skills."
YOU are good enough and have proven it. Me? Feh. Hardly.
Like I said, that part of what I wrote was the "joke" appended to the end of an extended speculation. And given what you say first-hand, I'll have to say my speculation is probably not worth a puddle of warm spit. Or cold. (I'm not sure why the temperature was ever supposed to make a difference.)
"I wish everyone who hopes to do this type of writing the best of luck. I would just like them to avoid suffering for it, if that is possible. Because I like them."
THAT sentence is one of the reasons I follow you. (I'll even pay as soon as my income becomes steady - as is, I share what you do. Because it's worth reading and worthwhile.) You're a great deal less abstract and a good deal more ethical than I was in considering this issue, I think. So, I reconsider and have to say I believe your position is stronger than mine. And more caring -- which is a damn good thing.
So, sorry, but here I go. The impression I got was you wanted to do an advice column at least partly to get back to comedy writing. And you just sort of condemned comedy. I like.
Oh comedy's in my bad books these days, @Erb. We'll see if it emerges. :-)
@Daniel, I really DON'T believe laughter is the best medicine. I think laughter is much more fun when you're well. :-)
What is this ... “Godfather III” ... to which you refer? That never happened.
No, it didn’t.
Oh god, to live in that world...
Henri Bergson covered some of this ground in his treatise on Laughter. Speaking for myself, I find that the source of much comedy is grounded in the absurdity of human existence, and the best comics are the ones that are really good at pointing this out to an audience. What is revealed is concealed, what is concealed is revealed, and there is no good reason for us to be here but we're stuck with us so we might as well have a little fun with our predicament. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go set my pants on fire now.
I'm dredging this up from decades past, but wasn't Bergson's theory that comedy is created by rote activity—when the natural acts mechanical? I remember thinking there was a lot to it...but also very much influenced by the core anxieties of his time.
I don't think existence is absurd; it often strikes me as rather eerie and uncanny, but not absurd. I think reality's pretty all right; it's bigger than our comprehension, and that's what makes it fun. The brain thinks it craves certainty and predictability, but after about two minutes of that it's looking for novelty—so the rules of this reality are perfectly tuned for us, and of course they are, because this reality has been the driver of our brain's evolution.
The problem is the simplicity of the comic impulse. There is a great deal of senseless human cruelty and self-destructive, delusional behavior, but it's all for complex reasons. 99% of comedy plays it all very small, and very simple, because that's what the mechanism seems to require.
Take Putin as an example. We can look at his playing hockey with an All-Star team and scoring six goals as the key to a comic insight into his character. And we might say, "That's like when your gym teacher played dodgeball. 'Motherfucker, you're not ELUSIVE. I just don't want to get expelled for breaking your nose.'"
But the problem ISN'T simply that Putin is a vain asshole. It's a thousand years of kleptocracy under the Tsars, alcoholism, lousy education, and so forth. Comedy is attempting to deal with this via shows like TDS and Oliver, but I don't think it's really possible; at some point you have to go small, and visceral. At some point you have to downshift to stuff like "'I am Death, destroyer of worlds' is what Oppenheimer shouted every time he came."
The explosion of comedy that has come from wiring us all up together is actually misleading us and seems to be making us less able to do the hard things we need to do. COVID could have been eradicated, if we'd all pulled together; global warming might still be ameliorated by a worldwide Manhattan Project—but comedy moves us in exactly the opposite direction.