Velma Wrapup: On Adult Comedy
Hey fam. I know this is mad late, but let’s be honest, trying to write a wrapup on Velma was about as painful as watching it. Enjoy!
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So speaking of HBO, I just watched Marc Maron’s From Bleak to Dark, which is one of the funniest standup routines I’ve seen in a long time.
It was also deeply dark and pretty disturbing in places.
I mean, he didn’t hold back. COVID? Auschwitz? Terminal illness? Abortion? Disinformation? Antisemitism? Suicide?
All there.
And it was funny as fuck.
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I’m gonna keep coming back to Kurt Vonnegut here, because I think he got to the root of comedy: that all humor is based on fear. “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.”
From Bleak to Dark worked because of this fear. We’re exhausted. The state of the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and it’s just hard to navigate being human right now. How on earth can you make this material funny?
And the answer is: by reaching deep into the dark places of the soul, plucking the strings of our agonies and worst fears, and dragging them into the light. Saying: Hey, I’m human, you’re human, and here we are trapped in the mess of our humanity. I see you. Hi.
And we laugh.
Because what else are we gonna do about it?
As both Maron and Vonnegut remarked, the jokes in Auschwitz must’ve been amazing.
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I stumbled on this essay by Matthew Morgan on the state of modern irony, and it stuck a chord:
One feature of the free mind is an ability to entertain contradictory ideas simultaneously; at its most refined, this is an appreciation of the ironic, which Schlegel showed is borne of contradiction. Albert Camus talked about the Absurd as the search for value in a valueless universe. Humans are both the only known creatures who comprehend the meaninglessness of the cosmos and the animals most insistent on discovering meaning, demonstrating that irony is at the heart of the human condition. To embrace irony is, therefore, to embrace life.
Irony, the essay points out, strikes at the contradictions of our messy lives. Vonnegut was a master of irony, using it in such a subtle way that it sailed over many peoples’ heads. In an interview with Playboy in 1973, he famously stated:
You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit...But it’s a useful, comforting sort of horseshit, you see? That’s what I object to about preachers. They don’t say anything to make anybody any happier, when there are all these neat lies you can tell. And everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can’t get very high-grade truths out of them. But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that. That’s what they were designed to do.
Vonnegut’s comforting lies contradict the inherent meaninglessness of life; they give us something to hold onto. Something to reach out with, to show us that we understand each other. That we all want and fear. That we can form community with this shared understanding. An understanding based in irony. In the contradictions of life.
What does all this have to do with Velma? Bear with me. I’m getting there.
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Morgan’s essay also gets at what I think is an issue with a lot of current comedy:
...social commentary has been lost amid the exponential growth of shock-value comedy, the inanity of which is exposed by its label: rather than using shock to change values, the vacuous comedy of something like Family Guy values only the shock. This kind of humour merely consolidates one’s place within the in-group of cynical cool kids by sniggering at increasingly “offensive” jokes, a sort of lack-of-virtue signalling.
...The reason that shows like Family Guy are so empty is that they want to mock everything (because that’s detached and cool) while refusing to show us anything (because that would be old-fashioned and ridiculous).
And here’s where we get to Velma.
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High school is a weird time. Lots of teenage media would have us believe that high school is when we come into our own: amongst the parties and rebellion and teenage love and heartbreak, we are tested, and emerge from this crucible as a fully-formed person. Nothing could be further from the truth. High school is messy, ugly, and painful. It doesn’t look like what it does on the screen. The idea that ‘high school is the best years of your life’ is oft repeated, which in hindsight is horseshit. But maybe we believed that deep down, back when we were in high school, and were terrified that we were doing it wrong.
And so many of us emerge from this with scars.
There is a lot of adult media about high school kids! Because on some level, we’re all still trying to process this time of our lives. Putting it into art, stylizing it or flaying it open, helps us to do so. And for teens watching this media, hopefully we’re saying: it’s ok. This is messy ugly and painful, but you’re not alone.
I think Velma is trying to do this. Velma goes to some serious lengths to dig into this messy high school experience. It also pokes at how the media treats the high school experience, which is awesome in theory.
The problem is, it falls into a very high school sort of trap. The kind of trap that we were supposed to mature past. The kind of trap that a lot of shock comedy hasn’t matured past.
As Morgan says, it’s that Velma wants to mock high school media - because it’s detached and cool. I remember this being a thing in high school. In order to be cool, you had to be detached. You could never show real emotion or real hurt. Everything had to roll off like water on a duck’s back.
Because showing real vulnerability wasn’t cool. Cool was not caring. Cool was being able to hurt others, without showing any hurt yourself. Velma wants to skewer the idealized version of high school we see in media - but instead, it just becomes another high school bully.
And all the criticism that has been levelled at Velma? It’s rolled off. Like water on a duck’s back. HBO has renewed it for a second season.
It’s like watching your high school bully get elected class president.
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I’m not gonna dissect the content of Velma, because enough people have done that already. The piles of shitty jokes, the weird meta commentary, the moments that don’t work, the moments that hurt - it’s all been compiled, and I don’t want to beat a dead horse (I’m the horse in this metaphor. Because dealing with Velma is painful).
But I do want to say, it’s an exquisite study on how comedy fails. Fails to reach out, fails to plunge deep into its audience and pull on its worst fears. Fails to make us seen, fails to find a shared humanity.
Doug Walker, who of all people is qualified to comment on bad comedy, probably said it best:
[Velma has] this wall of protective bullshit that's stopping it from being really funny or really clever.
And that’s that. There’s a wall. Velma is not reaching an audience, because it physically cannot.
Is it the writers’ own fears that built this wall? Fears of being mocked? Wanting to be detached and cool?
Because to make real connections, we run the risk of being hurt. Being hurt is a part of life. And the best comedy overcomes this. Says ‘Hi. I know you’re hurting. So am I. Can we make this less painful together?’
If Velma is to be believed, we cannot. All we can do is carry on hurting each other, with no connection or relief in sight.
But as good comics have shown, we can ease the pain with shared laughter.












