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Anonymous asked: Great to see you back and posting again. I know you have a very British sense of humour and so I was wondering if you ever saw American comedian Dave Chappelle’s special ‘The Closer’ on Netflix? I don’t know if that is, as you Brits might put it, ‘your cup of tea’ but it has caused a huge flashpoint in the culture wars against wokedom here in the US. Appreciate your thoughts as a cultured outsider.

All humour is ‘my cup of tea’. I’m not sniffy where I get my sip of laughter brew. It can be drunk from many cups. I enjoy the literary ironic humour of PG Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh for example to other literary comic writing from Douglas Adams to Tom Sharpe. All very British I know.

But I also grew up in a family saturated on generations of Cambridge Footlights humour (Cambridge University’s famed comedy club) that partly spawned Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Fry & Laurie etc. John Oliver also cut his teeth at Cambridge at the Footlights before he went over the pond to better things. I used to go to the ‘smokers’ (stand up comedy nights) as often as I could when I was a student there. I’ve gone to the odd comedy show but these days I may just listen to an audio especially when I am travelling a lot as I am on a plane for my work. But I love British comedy of Armando Ianucci and Richard Curtis & Ben Elton (the guys behind the Blackadder series) to new faces like Evelyn Mok (a Swedish-Chinese third culture kid).

But I enjoy comedy in other languages for example in France I’ve relied on French friends here in Paris to take me to comedy shows to see Blanche Gardin, Florence Foresti, and Yacine Belhousse for example. And I’ve gone to great lengths to see Eddie Izzard - one of my favourites from behind the bars of my english girls’ boarding school days - do gigs in French.

I also love American humour. As I said, I’m not sniffy about which nation’s humour is better. It’s such a silly waste of time. If it makes you laugh then that’s as pure as it gets. Sure, I don’t like the mainstream canned laughter TV shows that you often see but then we have the same in the UK. But I love 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn 99, Rick & Morty, Community etc. With stand ups I’ve enjoyed comedians who make you think whilst you’re spilling your guts out such as George Carlin and Bill Hicks. And of course I’ve also liked Dave Chappelle.

I got more than a few asks in my inbox about Dave Chappelle’s comedy special ‘The Closer’ and what I made of it. I really don’t want to focus on the toxic politics of this whole drama but focus instead on the nature of humour instead.

I did watch it on a plane on my lap top. I think the air stewardess in my business class flight thought I needed a sedative because I got a severe case of the giggles. I was trying so hard not to laugh out loud out of respect to the sleeping passengers near me. I just couldn’t help myself. I wet my knickers laughing so hard. Oh, was that too much information? Hmmm.

Overall I loved the show. The one part that did give me pause was when he told the heartfelt and tragic story of his transexual friend, Daphne, who took her own life because of either issues in her life or because of online bullying from her own trans community. He made that story funny and ultimately bittersweet. It would be inhuman not to relate to Chappelle’s pain in losing a friend and also the life story of Daphne herself. That whole story was very loving, compassionate, poignant. Oh and also very funny.

And yet in the fall out of the show, no one has talked about that. About Daphne in particular. Chappelle did more to humanise the transexual community to the mainstream with that one story than the shrill rantings of the transexual extreme activists.

Dave Chappelle. Arguably one of America’s greatest living comedian. Hilarious and humane, brutal and true. It’s true I don’t get all the cultural references but what I love about Chapelle is his craft. This is an artist committed to his craft. He is a master at it. He himself said he laughs at the jokes of racist stand up comedians because he may not agree with the content he does respect the craft.

Do I agree with his politics or his views? No, not always. He can say cutting things about women, about white people, about the LGBT people, and just about everyone else. He makes fun of everyone. What is the problem here? It’s just jokes. Damn funny ones too.

I’m sure I don’t agree with his politics. But I don’t have to but I can laugh at his jokes because they are so beautifully crafted and have a ring of truth, otherwise it wouldn’t be funny.

Humour has been on the minds of thinkers for centuries. As Peter McGraw and Joel Warner explain in their insightful book, The Humor Code: A global search for what makes things funny, “Plato and Aristotle contemplated the meaning of comedy while laying the foundations of Western philosophy… Charles Darwin looked for the seeds of laughter in the joyful cries of tickled chimpanzees. Sigmund Freud sought the underlying motivations behind jokes in the nooks and crannies of our unconscious.”

We tend to see comedy through the romantic lens of the one-off inspired comic whose unique view of the world is entertaining. But the focus on the individual witty voice misses the gigantic, political nature of the task of comedy. Comedy isn’t just a bit of fun.

We don’t laugh at things unless they cause us very serious problems at other points in life. We can see this in the standard category of jokes: about relationships, family, sex, money, impotence, bowel movements, identity etc. We laugh most readily around things that in other ways are very distressing. A good joke invariably has a relationship with darkness, anxiety and pain.

I’ve always valued humour in people as a precious gift. I love having a laugh and even more if it’s at my expense because I firmly believe humour should be an equal opportunity offender. Moreover what I love about enjoying a good joke is that one the singular properties of certain comedy when done well is the freedom to explore ideas in an unconventional or counter-intuitive way, to subvert society’s norms.

No one does that better than a comedian. No one does it better than Dave Chappelle. As the great George Carlin put it, “I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.“

Being British we’re always raised to enjoy making fun of ourselves and we enjoy nothing more than to see the self-righteous smug and the boorish taken down a peg or two. It’s just who we are. Most other Europeans are the same. I’m very sure this true elsewhere too if my many travels and experience of living in other cultures is anything to go by.

However I didn’t know the real importance of dark humour until I actually served in the British army and found humour as a form of therapy to deal with stress and situations of life and death with my army brothers and sisters. Our shared jokes were so extremely off colour and un-PC that we would dare not repeat them in polite and respectable company. But that kind of shared humour served a crucial importance as any soldier will tell you. By mocking dangerous things or the situations you might find yourself with others, humour can embolden us.

Dark humour helpfully paints what is potentially very frightening as deeply absurd and ridiculous.This was often when we junior officers would look at each other in confused bewilderment at the thinking and decision making of some of our clueless senior officers before we would lead our soldiers on a battlefield mission in Afghanistan.

The comic perspective fills a central need of every society; it enables us to cope much better with our own follies and disappointments, our troubles around work and love and our difficulties enduring ourselves. Comedy is waiting to be reframed as a central tool behind the creation of a better world.

Comedy offers us a way of having a better time around things which, otherwise, can feel pretty disastrous. Ideally, in the utopia, comedy and its therapeutic potential wouldn’t be left to chance. Humour would be deliberately cultivated as a benign response to a range of entrenched difficulties. Previously, certain countries had an elaborate carnival season devoted to enforced comic activities. For a brief time, the weak could boss around the powerful, priests and nuns were supposed to hold obscene rituals in their churches, serious people were required to get drunk and throw bags of flour over each other’s heads. Humour wasn’t just left to those who felt so inclined: it was a kind of duty.

One of the most enduring theories of humour arrived courtesy of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It asserts that humour is ostensibly about mocking the weak and exerting superiority. While this is clearly the function of some comedy – anyone who has flinched at a comic’s lame attempt to poke fun at, for example, disability will attest to this – it’s a relentlessly bleak and far from complete explanation of the purpose of humour. It’s better for a comedian to punch up then down.

It’s a charge that has been leveled at Dave Chappelle for his many jokes about different groups who have invested a great deal in their identity and also exert their own social and political power. But does he really do that? I don’t think so.

The mainstream media critics publicly hated his comedy special, but the ordinary audience overwhelmingly loved it (if rotten tomatoes metric score of 96% approval is anything to go by). It’s clear that many in the mainstream media had not really watched the show or gave an accurate account. Indeed the mainstream cultural critics in the US and in the UK prevented its readers from knowing that a debate was even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots - aka “TERFs” - hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

One of my favourite conservative writers (and who happens gay), Andrew Sullivan, also happens to be a leading scholarly authority on a little known British conservative philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, who was a huge influence in my thinking, Sullivan put it really well, as he always does:

“Chappelle’s final Netflix special, The Closer, is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be - including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia - and detonating them all.

The Closer is, in fact, a humanely brilliant indictment of elite culture at this moment in time: a brutal exposure of its identitarian monomania, its denial of reality, and its ruthless tactics of personal and public destruction. It marks a real moment: a punching up against the powerful, especially those who pretend they aren’t. Bigoted? Please. Anyone who can watch this special and think Chappelle is homophobic or transphobic is either stupendously dumb or a touchy fanatic. He is no more transphobic than J.K. Rowling, i.e. not at all, and the full set masterfully proves it to anyone with eyes and ears.“

It’s hugely reassuring to see the ‘powerful’ laughing at themselves - in this case the LGBTQ+ community’s more shrill and self-righteous social justice warrior activists that brook no public criticism of their conduct against women and other critics who don’t have the power to fight back. It is a trusim to say that finding oneself comical is a token of maturity. It means being able to see one’s faults, without being too defensive about them.This, I argue, was one of the messages of Chappelle’s comedy show.

The thing that intimidates us isn’t actually power. It’s power that looks like it’s going to be inhumane: insensitive, unkind power. So we’re intently interested in things that reveal a mature, kindly sort of power.

Humour often provides a mechanism whereby the powerless (or at least the less powerful) can give constructive but pointed feedback to the powerful. Whether the powerful - in Chappelle’s view that would be the trans and social just warrior crowd - can take social commentary masked as a joke says a lot about their level of maturity.

Humour, as one neuroscientist friend of mine put it, is a form of psychological processing, a coping mechanism that helps people to deal with complex and contradictory messages, a response to conflict and confusion in our brain. Humour that is in bad taste or cruelly targeted at particular groups may generate conflict, but humour is also our way of working through difficult subjects or feelings. In this sense the comedian’s role is not validate our feelings but to make us think.

As a classicist, I may be speaking outside my lane when I talk about medieval history (I would suggest pinging @oldshrewsburyian who is an actual medieval historian and the kind of professor who cares about her profession in these cynically consumer driven times (she also infectiously shares my love of bollywood and historical detective fiction). But as I understand it in olden days, the idea of the court jester – in effect an officially licensed and salaried comic – was built on the importance of humour to the mental health of the powerful. Even if in the council room or around the dinner high table, the leading people didn’t feel much like joking, the jester was required to make barbed, witty and perhaps mocking remarks to deflate pomposity and restore sane perspective. Of course a lot has changed. These days the high table may not be occupied by the feudal elites anymore but by an outwardly more egalitarian society.

Who can disagree with the fact that all of us - leftist, conservative, revolutionary, traditonalist, straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, colour, and creed - are not in need of our self important egos and the pompous bubbles they inhabit from being burst open from time to time?

If we live in a world where everyone demands equality, in other words to sit at the same high table, then we also sign up to be equally ‘offended’ by the court jester, however fair or unfair it may feel.

The shrill of cancelling a comedian is not the answer if we find a joke offensive. We have the right to protest because that is the flipside to our right to free speech. We can protest by...not laughing. It really is that simple.

I’ll end by saying you won’t get very far in life if you don’t learn how to laugh at yourself. So much of life will pass you by if you don’t stop and see how absurd one can be. I’ve always lived by that and those are the kind of friends I like to surround myself with. Because only self-centred narcissists take themselves seriously.

Thanks for your question.

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