I know for myself, the comedy I like to write and the comedy I like to view is the comedy of *connection*- people reaching out to each other and failing because of their own hangups, blindspots, and weaknesses, with the catharsis being when they finally climb over those hills. I see a lot of that kind of comedy- even Bojack Horseman contains a lot of it, on its scaffold of Sick Humor. Ted Lasso is practically an archetype of it. An ethos of *We are all flawed, but we're also all we've got*.
Is that the next school of comedy? I don't know, but I think it speaks to a deep yearning in a modern society built on alienation and social media performance.
This is excellent. Most of it seemed new and eye opening-- which is weird because I’ve read Going Too Far. This suggests to me that I need to read it again, as it’s apparently gone AWOL from my memory.
Among many great moments, I like the analysis of P.J. O’Rourke. I’ve rarely liked him, but then I found out he’d co-written the high school yearbook (which is the gold standard for me) with Doug Kenney. So your point about their relationship explains a lot.
I continue to love your mixture of passion and erudition Mike. Too many people are one or the other - well-read and dry or emotive and uninformed. Please never stop.
It's wild to think that the US', and by extension the world's, fixation on the blunt-but-smart style of humour all descends from the intermingling of the US miltary and academia. Makes sense though. Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both.
Again and again I find that right-wing attempts at humour - Crowder et al - run aground because (a) they offer you a return to the unfiltered libertarian hijinks of the Boomer era ('before PC ruined everything!'), then turn around and prop up the entire restrictive, unjust hierarchy the best of the Boomers were opposing; and (b) clapter isn't funny, but kneejerk opposition to the scolds doesn't automatically make you funny either. You need jokes. And meanness for the sake of meanness, sorry I mean freedom of speech, ain't enough to make a joke out of.
I always make an exception for Norm Macdonald, who had a sizeable reactionary streak but remains my comedic North Star - to me he was just funny in a way that transcends time, space and everything in them (and hey, someone needed to put OJ and the Clintons in their box). It helps that, unlike all the mediocre comics with persecution complexes who go around saying they're fearless, he actually was fearless.
Oh, and incredibly, genuinely strange. If we're going to get a comedic revival any time soon, I think the energy will have to come from strange people. Probably online people. The only comedians allowed on TV these days are maddeningly slick, suffocatingly normal.
Thanks Michael. I always enjoy your take and knowledge of humor and the industry. Technically, I'm a boomer, but that distinction never fit right for my generation. I was too young (thank God) to go to Vietnam, and too old to be a Gen-xer (thank God). My generation was best exemplified by the film Dazed and Confused. Certainly nails the head with a hammer. That's why, if you had older bothers (older sisters wouldn't be into this sort of thing), you'd get to read a National Lampoon laying around until your parents made them put it away. It's where I found the first "Match the breast" game, and thought, Holly Shit! I don't know if this game would play so well in today's environment.
But humor has always interested me. It was (and is) my only defense. The absurd is funny. People unaware of the absurd is funnier. I believe humor is the only weapon that can defeat fascism. It's strange to live in this moment where the confluence of technology, creativity, power, money, greed, and oppression meet. But this is not new, right? Like Eric Idle, always look on the bright side. Just stay away from anyone who might want to nail you to a cross.
I love your columns on humor history. Parody as judo is a perfect metaphor. I’d never considered how manners-oriented our comedy has been, but it certainly explains why The Office (a UK import) continues to be a cultural powerhouse.
Always enjoy and learn a lot from these occasional comedy expositions. Have been bookmarking them to return to in a more cohesive form and comb through more carefully for references and edification. Seems by now you're an expert, apparently mostly autodidactic, on North American comedy history - or at least that of the 20th and 21st centuries - if not comedy history in general, as well as humor 'theory.' Wonder if any university departments out there would offer a 'Chair of Comedy.' Also, with a touch of organization and editing, all these related posts / talks / (presumably) articles put together surely would make a great book on the subject.
Thanks for this education on sick humor. Excellent work. It has taught me to embrace sick and wrong humor with a new found passion. ...OK, I lie. I never stopped loving it.
Thanks for reading Curtice! As I’ve said in the comments, my problem with PJ’s stuff wasn’t that it wasn’t funny (if you bought PJ’s premises), but that the guy did not develop as a writer after around 1980. PJ settled into a very profitable existence as the One Funny Conservative, and woke up much, much too late to the insanity that began with Reagan and really accelerated after Gingrich. The party of Nelson Rockefeller is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that wasn’t hard to see happening, but PJ didn’t, because he was locked into a personal death match with entitled Ivy hippies. Entitled Ivy hippies are gross, for sure, but…are Cato Institute types any better? I’d argue that during the majority of PJ’s career Cato and ilk were by far the bigger problem, and he gave them a pass as the world caught on fire.
It’s s fine fun thing to stand up for boat shoes, neckties, fast cars and scotch in 1978, but you if you look back from 2023, Exxon was a more important thing for a satirist to talk about, precisely because the necktie-bourbon-boatshoe set (of which I am one) was never really under threat. And PJ was too smart not to know that, and push himself, and get better and more humane. He was too GOOD a satirist not to try to be a GREAT one, and who you skewer and why has to be part of that equation. IMHO.
Sick humor is far-better than the "sickness" of social media, which is now not simply suggesting, but demanding how people should think and behave likewise to them. Doesn't seem to work does it - considering all those venting their frustrations at the end of a barrel (i.e., gun)?
I’m glad you liked it! I was wearing my Historian Tie.
I know for myself, the comedy I like to write and the comedy I like to view is the comedy of *connection*- people reaching out to each other and failing because of their own hangups, blindspots, and weaknesses, with the catharsis being when they finally climb over those hills. I see a lot of that kind of comedy- even Bojack Horseman contains a lot of it, on its scaffold of Sick Humor. Ted Lasso is practically an archetype of it. An ethos of *We are all flawed, but we're also all we've got*.
Is that the next school of comedy? I don't know, but I think it speaks to a deep yearning in a modern society built on alienation and social media performance.
This is excellent. Most of it seemed new and eye opening-- which is weird because I’ve read Going Too Far. This suggests to me that I need to read it again, as it’s apparently gone AWOL from my memory.
Among many great moments, I like the analysis of P.J. O’Rourke. I’ve rarely liked him, but then I found out he’d co-written the high school yearbook (which is the gold standard for me) with Doug Kenney. So your point about their relationship explains a lot.
Great insights IMHO. But I’m counting on the ai robot comedy tour to save us.
I continue to love your mixture of passion and erudition Mike. Too many people are one or the other - well-read and dry or emotive and uninformed. Please never stop.
It's wild to think that the US', and by extension the world's, fixation on the blunt-but-smart style of humour all descends from the intermingling of the US miltary and academia. Makes sense though. Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both.
Again and again I find that right-wing attempts at humour - Crowder et al - run aground because (a) they offer you a return to the unfiltered libertarian hijinks of the Boomer era ('before PC ruined everything!'), then turn around and prop up the entire restrictive, unjust hierarchy the best of the Boomers were opposing; and (b) clapter isn't funny, but kneejerk opposition to the scolds doesn't automatically make you funny either. You need jokes. And meanness for the sake of meanness, sorry I mean freedom of speech, ain't enough to make a joke out of.
I always make an exception for Norm Macdonald, who had a sizeable reactionary streak but remains my comedic North Star - to me he was just funny in a way that transcends time, space and everything in them (and hey, someone needed to put OJ and the Clintons in their box). It helps that, unlike all the mediocre comics with persecution complexes who go around saying they're fearless, he actually was fearless.
Oh, and incredibly, genuinely strange. If we're going to get a comedic revival any time soon, I think the energy will have to come from strange people. Probably online people. The only comedians allowed on TV these days are maddeningly slick, suffocatingly normal.
Thanks Michael. I always enjoy your take and knowledge of humor and the industry. Technically, I'm a boomer, but that distinction never fit right for my generation. I was too young (thank God) to go to Vietnam, and too old to be a Gen-xer (thank God). My generation was best exemplified by the film Dazed and Confused. Certainly nails the head with a hammer. That's why, if you had older bothers (older sisters wouldn't be into this sort of thing), you'd get to read a National Lampoon laying around until your parents made them put it away. It's where I found the first "Match the breast" game, and thought, Holly Shit! I don't know if this game would play so well in today's environment.
But humor has always interested me. It was (and is) my only defense. The absurd is funny. People unaware of the absurd is funnier. I believe humor is the only weapon that can defeat fascism. It's strange to live in this moment where the confluence of technology, creativity, power, money, greed, and oppression meet. But this is not new, right? Like Eric Idle, always look on the bright side. Just stay away from anyone who might want to nail you to a cross.
I love your columns on humor history. Parody as judo is a perfect metaphor. I’d never considered how manners-oriented our comedy has been, but it certainly explains why The Office (a UK import) continues to be a cultural powerhouse.
So many layers of Truth in this one. Fine work, sir.
Always enjoy and learn a lot from these occasional comedy expositions. Have been bookmarking them to return to in a more cohesive form and comb through more carefully for references and edification. Seems by now you're an expert, apparently mostly autodidactic, on North American comedy history - or at least that of the 20th and 21st centuries - if not comedy history in general, as well as humor 'theory.' Wonder if any university departments out there would offer a 'Chair of Comedy.' Also, with a touch of organization and editing, all these related posts / talks / (presumably) articles put together surely would make a great book on the subject.
Good piece, although I will take issue with your stance on P.J. O'Rourke, who remained laugh-out-loud funny until the end.
Thanks for this education on sick humor. Excellent work. It has taught me to embrace sick and wrong humor with a new found passion. ...OK, I lie. I never stopped loving it.
Thanks for reading Curtice! As I’ve said in the comments, my problem with PJ’s stuff wasn’t that it wasn’t funny (if you bought PJ’s premises), but that the guy did not develop as a writer after around 1980. PJ settled into a very profitable existence as the One Funny Conservative, and woke up much, much too late to the insanity that began with Reagan and really accelerated after Gingrich. The party of Nelson Rockefeller is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that wasn’t hard to see happening, but PJ didn’t, because he was locked into a personal death match with entitled Ivy hippies. Entitled Ivy hippies are gross, for sure, but…are Cato Institute types any better? I’d argue that during the majority of PJ’s career Cato and ilk were by far the bigger problem, and he gave them a pass as the world caught on fire.
It’s s fine fun thing to stand up for boat shoes, neckties, fast cars and scotch in 1978, but you if you look back from 2023, Exxon was a more important thing for a satirist to talk about, precisely because the necktie-bourbon-boatshoe set (of which I am one) was never really under threat. And PJ was too smart not to know that, and push himself, and get better and more humane. He was too GOOD a satirist not to try to be a GREAT one, and who you skewer and why has to be part of that equation. IMHO.
Sick humor is far-better than the "sickness" of social media, which is now not simply suggesting, but demanding how people should think and behave likewise to them. Doesn't seem to work does it - considering all those venting their frustrations at the end of a barrel (i.e., gun)?
Genius.