How To Tell A Joke

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

There’s been an awful lot of time spent this past week fulminating over the comedic stylings of progressive quasi-celebrities who have stepped out of bounds with their particular brand of humor. As a person who spent the better part of his single adult life earning a living as a professional stand-up comic, I have watched these episodes unfold with a macabre fascination as first Kathy Griffin and then Bill Maher marched triumphantly onstage and then kept right on going into the orchestra pit.

For those who may have missed these episodes they went a little something like this-

How funny is that? I mean she can barely keep a straight face.

Mr. Maher in the middle of a take down of a republican Senator from Nebraska responded to his comment about helping with a corn harvest by stating that he was ‘a house nigger’ before falling all over himself in an attempt to explain his joke.

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Let me state unequivocally that I may well be the last man on earth to try and get a laugh out of, though I frequently laugh aloud. It is just that having spent more than a decade in the clubs I have long become jaded to the imprecations of comics who assure those who fail to laugh that they simply “didn’t get it”. A sense of humor is a very personal thing and unlike humans not all jokes are equal. Men love the Three Stooges, women do not. Some people find profanity to be the height of sophistication while others are repulsed.

Prop comics are looked down upon more than any other group- okay, maybe ventriloquists- and message comics, those who consider themselves quasi-philosophers and artists find niche careers with limited audiences. The really good comics, the ones who “kill” in comedy parlance understand the audience dynamic and the use of both language and physical movement in order to bring their ideas to life in the minds of those who watch them. Jokes are constructions of words and concepts that have a fundamental basis in reality. In the words of Homer Simpson, it’s funny ’cause it’s true.

Sure there are character types who use a persona to motivate laughter, Emo Phillips, Judy Tenuta, Tape Face are but a few that exemplify this strata and they do well with it. Neither of the comics we are talking about fit these genres. Kathy Griffin’s poor imitation of Carrot Top with her bloody Trump head was a departure from her normal shtick, i.e. mocking White heterosexual Christians as dimwitted troglodytes to her SWPL crowds. She claimed in her poorly advised presser a few days after her denouement, that all she ever wanted to do was to make people laugh. I laughed when she said that, but I don’t think that was her intention.

Hey Kathy, why the long face?

A joke, in its simplest form, is a revelation of something the audience already knows. If it is done well they never see the punch line coming. There are tricks in how to set up and deliver one that are every bit as mechanical as repairing a carburetor or shingling a roof. There is a right way and a wrong way and the proof is in the reaction. The joke I just wrote has all the elements of a joke; Kathy is sad, also known as wearing a long face. Kathy has a long face. Hence, a joke.

For her to claim that her prop act with the bloody Trump head is a joke is fine if there is indeed something funny in it. Throughout this entire episode we have heard all about how it was a joke that fell flat, but no one has asked what the joke was supposed to be. I don’t think that was her intention at all, but rather it was a political statement that was meant to be lauded by the majority that elected Hillary Clinton as President if only there wasn’t a Constitution. What happened was the natural result of playing to the back of the room, an inside joke for the cool kids that didn’t make the other comics laugh either.

As I pointed out in an earlier piece you can tell a lot about a comic by the kinds of friends they make in comedy. It is a cut throat business where working without a net is the norm. The ones who have the chops to stay at it, to play the hell gigs and strip clubs for forty bucks and a basket of cheese fries and to develop their act over the course of years based on their ability to deliver solid sets night after night from one end of the country to the other earn a respect not unlike soldiers who have been through combat. Has anyone seen any of these comics come to her defense?

Where’s Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer when you really need them? Quiet as church mice, for once. Kathy has a reputation for being difficult to work with, for being unpleasant and catty and for causing strife and discord wherever she appears, not because she’s a female comic, but because she is a female who got where she is in spite of her lack of comedic talent and who has used her connections to climb the celebrity ladder over the backs of far more talented comics, most of whom are the very White men she claims have kept her down. I found that tearful excuse the funniest of all because of all the talent agencies and all the talent agents in the world she picked the Whitest one in Hollywood. Ditto her agent. Keeping her down, one TV appearance at a time.

Bill Maher’s faux pas was of a very different nature. For a White man to use the word nigger on national TV in anything other than a remake of Huckleberry Finn would be, for anyone else, a career ending slip of the tongue. Look at Paula Deen or Michael Richards, both of whom were forced to grovel at the feet of an imaginary body of the faceless offended only to have the celebrity status torn from their cash stained fingers. But not Bill Maher.

In fact if you Google his name all you will read are mainstream media apologias of what he meant. And this is why I contend that what he said was in fact a joke, because it was true. A house nigger, for those who were born after the advent of “the N-word” was a derisive sobriquet made popular by Malcolm X and used to describe a slave who mistakenly thought of themselves as one of the family in their Master’s house. What more apt description could Mr. Maher have used to define himself? If ever there were someone who has sold out his birthright for a mess of pottage, it is that effete, baby fingered snob and the reaction of the establishment is all the proof you’d ever need. He gets a pass because he props up the narrative nightly for the rubes in flyover country and by saying it he revealed a seminal truth and the audience- unlike Kathy Griffin’s- laughs out loud.

I walked away from that career for a lot of reasons; to raise a family, to get off the road, to escape the rising tide of political correctness that made real comedy almost impossible to perform and I haven’t missed it at all. I have watched as old friends have either OD’ed from the isolation and alienation of the countless hours alone or dropped out all together. A few of the very best have transformed their careers into film and television and a very small number have stuck with it out of a deep and abiding love for the trade they have poured their lives into and found a way to navigate the currents of a profoundly course and humorless culture. If ever there were a time when some real comedy filled with truth was needed, it would be now. Perhaps as the cycle of our cultural history pivots on the wheel of time we will once more find something to laugh about that doesn’t enrage, doesn’t offend, and doesn’t cause rifts in the body politic.

And just because I am not immune to criticism, feel free to rip me a new one when you watch this clip from a 1992 appearance on An Evening At The Improv, recorded in Los Angeles when I had been doing comedy for just over three years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L89HMvMwrS0