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Caroline Hong, “Comedy Humor, and Asian American Representation,”

also from women and politics wk of race and comedy

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Beck Krefting, Introduction from All Joking Aside

on Orbis -- Laguna assigned for "Women and the Politics of Standup Comedy"

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Studies in American Humor

Welcome to the home of Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association. Founded by the American Humor Studi

Laguna assigned

Vivica S. Green, “‘Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets and Redpilling Normies,” Studies in American Humor Vol. 5, No.1

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Racist Humor: Then and Now

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.12411

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Comedy Has Issues by Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai

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Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor

Laguna assigned "No Laughing Matter" from this book

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That's Not Funny (introduction)

-lots about how it's dangerous to ignore right wing comedy because of how important a tool it is in right wing shaping of cultural narratives

-also about young libs who understand comedy as a central part of their political identity

-an inevitable consequence of media coming at this new crazy rate is that each piece has to be built for a specific target audience

-sort of like a similar thing to the whole men dismissing abusive men w "that's not a man, that's a boy" sort of dismisses the harm that those specific men are having and the idea that they themselves could be harmful -- saying right wing comedy isn't true comedy ignores the very real impact it has in favor of making a semantic argument

*umberto eco

*simon critchley

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The King of Anxious Comedy Has Plenty More Where That Came From

Tim Robinson’s 'I Think You Should Leave' is back for a second season on Netflix, with even more characters who will do absolutely anything

"I Think You Should Leave is filled with characters like this, who share Robinson’s desire to avoid embarrassment. Crucially, unlike Robinson, nearly all of them are incapable of making the prudent choice that will save them from humiliation. “There are tons of ways people will try to manipulate themselves or lie, or different tactics they'll use to save themselves from being embarrassed or to save themselves from being the joke,” says Robinson. “We find ourselves fascinated with people digging themselves in holes to save face on something small that ended up making themselves look stupider.” It’s the idea, he says, “of tripping, and then your first instinct is to look back and be like, ‘What the fuck's wrong with this floor?’""

calling them "micro humiliations"

~this sort of reminds me of when Jes Tom talked about harnessing the embarrassment and making it into its own character

this is actually really interesting about the piss dots

"It’s clearly preposterous, and yet carries a whiff of the confessional. You don’t just happen to write multiple jokes in multiple projects across multiple years about piss dots if you haven’t spent a lot of time personally worrying about them. “We all can make fun of these things, but everybody has some version of it,” Robinson tells me. One man’s piss dots are another guy’s pit stains."

i think i tend to see how easily embarrassed or thrown I am as a weakness, but I guess that Tim's whole thing is turning those moments into sketches. like yes it's dumb but also like Tim takes these characters and has them go to insane lengths to escape their embarrassment, which is ultimately counterproductive and that's how the sketch functions

"And though his characters all share certain qualities, he knows how to paint with every color of mortification: in one sketch, he’s the pained date caught in a lie, in another the teeth-gritted interviewee who refuses to admit he’s pulling a door that’s meant to be pushed. Robinson’s conventional appearance makes his inevitable turn to madness all the more striking." !!! useful in the first paragraph

Robinson's conventional appearance -- he like is banking on it! he's banking on it! HE'S BANKING ON IT!

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notes

Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin on the Mysterious Alchemy of Sketch Comedy

A conversation with the two friends behind the cult hit “I Think You Should Leave.”

Robinson started in improv

omg wait Zach Kanin as an illustrator

Tim was always sketch (heartening)

switch to writing from performing at SNL took some of the pressure off

taking a lot of syntactical stuff from kids

"t.r.: We’re writing about funny ways that people behave in situations where they’re at fault, or in trouble and don’t want to be in trouble. We’re trying to think of things that make us laugh, where people behave in those situations, and it just so happens that a lot of these people behave that way.

z.k.: There’s nothing funnier to us than someone who feels embarrassed or ashamed, and, to save face, digs themselves a way deeper hole and reveals much worse things than you thought at first."

lmao they talk about showing their wives as like an outside perspective

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Written by Sarah Duncan, blog contributor for Monstering

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"The Good Place found a way to make personal growth, moral redemption, and the circle of life and death staggeringly hilarious without losing any profundity."

"The second way his anxiety and indecisiveness is framed is as his main character flaw: we learn, along with Chidi, that these attributes were a terrible inconvenience and even a harm to his loved ones, thereby dooming him to the bad place as a bad person. In other words, Chidi spent his life in fear of doing the wrong thing, only to learn after death that the fear itself was immoral. The irony is glaring.

Except it isn’t just ironic. For people with obsessive-compulsive disorder like Chidi and myself, a plot like this is nothing short of condemnation — the very thing we have pathologically feared our whole lives."

also not super relevant, just talks about chidi and the good place sorta

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Chris Rock's poisonous legacy: How to get rich and exalted chastising "bad blacks"

Respectability politics isn't new. But with Charles Barkley and Bill Cosby now joining in, here's why it's so toxic

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about his i love Black people but i hate niggas joke

respectability politics

"anyone who engages in [this sort of dialogue] positions [themself] as some sort of exalted truth teller, revealing the secrets Black America is too afraid to face."

not super relevant -- i mean Chris Rock's joke is something that I think I disagree with and is counterproductive to anti-racism movements, but I don't know that anything here is that crucial or relevant to the argument i'm making or the things i want to say. i guess except in the question of audience, maybe? i have to think about it

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Bodies in Dissent : Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910

chapter 5

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describes a model Negro girl on the public stage

describes Black women performers "balancing aesthetic passion with clear and purposeful commitments to racial uplift"

"[Pauline] Hopkins and [Aida Overton Walker] Walker seized on theatre as a viable site of economic prosperity and political intervention for black women."

"Rapidly ascending to her heralded status as one of the premier (black) choreographers, dancers, and musical actresses of the Gilded Age, Aida Overton Walker self-consciously imagined her work in theatre as a social, political, and aesthetic intervention in American popular culture."

""I venture to think," Walker proclaimed, "and dare to state that our profession does more toward the alleviation of colored people" than any other occupation. Emotionally fulfilling stage performance provided, Walker assured, a source of cathartic "pleasure" for African Americans facing the traumas of migration and resettlement, relentless economic hardships, and the Southern horrors of mob terror. In this era of disenfranchisement and thwarted socioeconomic opportunities, Walked recognized the value in aesthetic self-making and representational autonomy."

encouraged Black people to produce art -- "unless we learn the lesson of self appreciation and practice it, we shall spend our lives imitating other people and depreciating ourselves."

"performance culture might serve as a site of revision and self-making for Black women and their overdetermined bodies in the cultural imaginary"

talks about some of walker's work being a "thematic departure" for Black female comedic performers -- "These numbers marked new strides in strategies of black female characterization on the stage in that they allowed for ways to articulate black women's often disregarded desires for social and cultural mobility in American culture"

"Indeed, rather than transcending race or gender, as Richard Newman suggests of Walker, the performer used the realm of dance and her costumed body to foreground blackness and female corporeality."

~ok so basically -- the stage has been a source of power for black women historically, and they've had to navigate it very specifically, taking into account the way that their bodies look to the audience and what they're "allowed" to do and what the audience is primed to think when seeing them

it's more purpose than anything, i think though -- because i think this sort of suggests that theater making is a site of power for black women, which makes sense, and in the parts that i skimmed more talked about their specific work, but also touches on the idea of like joke refraction and accounting for one's body and shit with the Salome piece

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poking a dead frog

henry beard

"you hate to admit it, but it's all luck." 73

james l brooks

"i can't imagine that any writer doesn't suffer from obsessiveness -- a humility that you feel toward your work. writing is not something you do offhandedly. it should continue to mean as much to you after years of doing it as it did when you first started. i sort of think it's supposed to be ever humbling."

rule of if you hear something three times while doing research you believe it to be generally true

if someone writes a good script, it will eventually be read

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poking a dead frog

mike schur

attribution is messy in comedy tv -- it's all collaborative

(w) sleeper

(w) midnight run

(r) infinite jest -- as a reconciliation between sincerity and humor

"in my opinion, really great pilots don't often later make great shows"

"in a perfect world, no one would discuss a new TV show until it had aired eight episodes, and the creative team had already worked out all the kinks"

schur thinks good stories beat good jokes -- p42 about wanting stories about people caring about each other

"character isn't important in sketches, where everything is two-dimensional by design. you can't really 'sell out' a character in three minutes."

a lot on 47-48 about how a lot of writing is losing any sense of complacency -- you can never feel like you know what you're doing

"writing is an art that has a weird aspect to it... part of its success depends on how the audience reacts to it. You can get philosophical about it, and say that a perfectly written script, just exist in space and time, as a beautiful testament to the power of the human soul or something but the practical reality is that you have to film it and put it on TV actors have to act in it, and the audience gets to weigh in at some point. If you ever feel complacent with yourself, then you’re basically saying you don’t need the other part of the equation and if you’re a TV or movie writer you definitely do. Not just for your career but to have people who way in on whether or not you successfully communicated what you wanted to communicate. It’s a strange business it’s really where the rubber meets the road, the rubber being art, and the road being commerce”

~i do think i'm gonna end up quoting this interview a lot. he says a lot of really useful things that line up with the things i've been thinking about. sketch being 2d. the audience being an undeniable part of the process. what the aim of tv is -- he speaks specifically about tv, but I think for the purposes of this paper, we can extend his argument to comedy tv/comedy in general. he talks about wanting to hear stories of people caring about each other. idk there's a lot here

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Bodies in Dissent : Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910

chapter 5

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we always somebody else

"While these men sold out stadiums, however, women comedians, still combating the social construction of humor as a masculine practice, remained largely excluded from comedy-club main stages and cable network specials, and were hindered from exercising the expanded expressive possibilities of stand-up comedy (Zoglin 2008, 183)."

"In the comedy-club circuit, [Danitra] Vance recognized a “tradition” of performers yielding to audience expectations to secure laughs (Vance 1994, 383). Unwilling to let audiences remain “who they were when they came in,” she made the decision to “say to hell with the audience,” in part by pivoting to performance art and theater (Vance 1994, 384)"

"I use the metaphor to illustrate the challenges of eliciting laughter from an audience whose referents for the performer are girded in a gaze that Toni Morrison assails in The Bluest Eye. In the novel’s afterword, Morrison frames her writing in relationship to an “immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” ([1970] 2004, 210)"

"Misogynoir speaks to how the great distances between the somebody elses’ invented by “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” and the self, are a distinct conundrum for Black women comedians (Du Bois 1903, 3)."

on pg 193 talks about warfield wanting to be as close to herself onstage as possible

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knock yourselves out: "punching up" in american comedy

~not starting with deadnaming caitlyn jenner

"But as the late political satirist, and quite humorous, Molly Ivins once put it, "Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel- it's vulgar.""

Garry Trudeau "Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful...Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny--it's just mean."

"Here, in the land of unbridled speech and plucky self-reliance, even the lowliest among us is free to snark upon the high and mighty-- and playing the scrappy David our entitled Goliaths is, arguably, more important to us than actually being funny."

~i think that being kind and good is more important than being funny, and i think maybe that's unique to me, but i think that that is one of my core beliefs about my life. it's not necessarily how i view comedy, but for me, i'm not going to make a joke that i don't think is good in the moral sense. to me it should hit both of those metrics.

talking about comedy in the time of slavery, "What they reveal is that to punch up, you only have to convince your audience that you are the little guy, while your satirical targets represent the powerful, the elite. In other words, to own the moral high ground, you have to play to the cultural low ground."

maybe this is why it's easier for marginalized comics to make jokes that punch up -- they don't need to convince anyone of their oppression because it's readily visible

talks about how in "chris rock's poisonous legacy" that whoever does respectability politics shit positions themselves as a truthteller that's revealing truths from the inside about black people

interesting stuff about amy schumer~ should look into her more

~ooooo amy.....

describing the bro-centric new york comedy scene "In this crowd, explanations weaken jokes, apologies ruin them, and even Cumia is worth defending."

"Hipster irony is a thin defense for racist jokes, particularly with several centuries of unironic, blatantly racist humor in America preceding them. Last year, comic Heben Nigatu summed up this threadbare line of thought in a cogent tweet: "'It's satire'-ancient white people proverb.""

"in early July, Schumer backed off from the joke. "I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this," she wrote. "I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven't hurt anyone.""

"Schumer's aligned herself with the safer side for now, the liberal comfort comedy you rarely have to explain to Americans--punching up."

sort of talks about amy schumer as someone who was like maybe scorned by like "liberal comedy" and sort of changed as a reaction to that response

I sort of bristle at the notion that liberal comedy or trying to make comedy that is like. punching up? is the safer side. like yes i think that it's probably going to be better received, but i guess that comes back to the question of what is the purpose of comedy. i personally don't think the purpose of comedy is just to reinforce existing oppressive structures. i think it's to be funny. i think comedy is a weapon and i generally don't believe in using it against the little guy. i think that there's like some sense out there that making conservative jokes or like offensive jokes is unsafe and like destabilizing and edgy and cool, but i think that the opposite is true. why is it edgy to say you hate black people or women or queer people or disabled people. like we know you do, everyone does, and it's not great! idk