While humor is a matter of personal taste, it's also a matter of misdirection (like magic), of absurd juxtapositions that violate expectations... and taboos. Perhaps you remember the image of one state politician's head pasted onto the body of another's baby -- and the latter's preposterous (and disingenuously exploitive) allegation that it was actually making fun of her child, rather than the politico who was portrayed as a baby. No one has been able to explain how ridiculing a baby could have been intended as funny, or as satire -- but, then, you'd have to be awfully thick to honestly believe that was the intent in the first place.
So, here's another strange one: In his new stand-up show, "Science," Ricky Gervais (best-known co-creator and star of BBC's "The Office" one of the great comic achievements of Modern Man) made a joke about regretting drinking and driving. You may or may not think it's funny, but here's the gist, according to Gervais:
"I've done it once and I'm really ashamed of it. It was Christmas -- I'd had a couple of drinks and I took the car out.
But I learned my lesson. I nearly killed an old lady.
In the end I didn't kill her. In the end, I just raped her."
Now, here's the way a writer in The Independent paraphrased it:
This kind of shtick falls down for me, however, when he describes the only time he found himself drinking and driving. Remarking that he nearly knocked over an old woman he adds: "I didn't though... I raped her." Gervais says that this is his "favourite" joke, but it is ill-judged to say the least.
Well, that's the way the clueless David Brent might tell it, but it's not at all what Gervais said. As he explained on his blog, The Independent's version is indeed unfunny, because it "contains no joke at all":
The joke clearly revolves around the misdirection in the term "nearly killed", suggesting "narrowly avoided". But, as it turns out, "nearly killed" means something much, much worse.
There will still be those, no doubt, who will persist in believing that the intent of the joke is to get a laugh out of the raping of an old lady. There's nothing that can be done for those people. You either understand the way the English language works or you don't.
I think the greater worry is an understanding of humor - while Gervais may or may not have been out-of-line (Carlin has some great "rape" jokes, picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd et al), I think a lot of the so-called funny people don't seem to know what funny is - I name Michael & Michael Have Issues and The Sarah Silverman Program as main offenders. Both shows try to combine observational humor with gross-out scatological humor, and it doesn't work for me. Silverman, in particular, goes too far for me because I can sense she thinks she's being "cutting edge" and she knows her audience isn't in on the joke, yet the comedian's bread and butter is the audience. I get it. I'm just not with it.
Tell the joke, by all means, but remember your job is to make people laugh, not cringe.
People who don't get linguistic misdirection in a joke are often the first to brand it unfunny. Funny that.
It's curious how some people just don't understand this: your very offense is the point of the joke. The fact that you don't think the joke should be told is exactly why it is being told. It's a test of your tolerance, and when you break, the joke is on you. Gervais' line isn't mocking rape, it's mocking The Independent writer, et al.
The best part of his blog response is his zinger about the jokes the Independent "reviewer" must be telling at parties. "My dog's got no nose! What does he smell like? Awful, really awful." Or maybe that one hit home to me because the hardest I've ever laughed at anything in my life was seeing Hitler tell this joke correctly to the SS in the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World."
Jokes aside, I seriously don't know how people can make it through this world with that much of a lack of sense of humor.
And on a side note, this site's pretty funny, it's "broken jokes," which does exactly what the reporter did, only on purpose:
http://www.stevewhite.org/stuff/BrokenJokes.html
Even more off on a tangent, sort of, you should check out Norm MacDonald on Conan from last night. He does a great joke that's sort of the opposite of "The Aristocrats," where he tells a long, meandering, terribly unfunny setup to a joke that seems to be going nowhere (and that probably only he or a select few could pull off) but then has a really good punchline.
Oddly enough I was just re-watching The Office last night and what struck me about it was that it was all about this continuum from drama to comedy and Gervais was seeing how far you could move the bar from comedy over toward drama and still experience it as comedy....of course as you move, you lose more and more of the broad audience but there are moments when you yourself are wondering is this really funny?
Overall it remains so for me but the funny is entering a real world rather than a fantasy funny.
I don't get it...
David Lawler wrote: "Tell the joke, by all means, but remember your job is to make people laugh, not cringe."
Not necessarily, because I think what any good comedian is doing is more complicated than that. You invoked Carlin in your comment, which brings to mind one of my favorite ways he would often describe his act (and in many ways, stand-up in general): "I think of shock as kind of an uptown form of surprise. Comedy is filled with surprise, so when I cross a line... I like to find out where the line might be and then cross it deliberately, and then make the audience happy about crossing the line with me."
That's kind of how the Gervais joke worked for me. It made me cringe, yes, but I couldn't stop myself from laughing out loud -- which perhaps is the sign of a perfect joke (and for the record, Sarah Silverman almost always works for me the same exact way).
And Will M.: Good call on Norm MacDonald, a master of deliberately-broken-joke telling. His routine during the Roast of Bob Saget was one of the gutsiest and funniest things I've seen in a long time (and by far the best part of that pretty awful Roast).
But as for those who, like our intrepid The Independent writer David Brent, simply don't get these kinds of jokes, whenever I see them I just remind myself that there exist in this world completely humorless people, and I pity them.
Two baby seals walk into a club.
I laughed out loud. This puts me in mind of the outrageous fabricated scandal around a Dave Letterman joke involving Sarah Palin's daughter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6FUwBmclo
Palin misrepresented Dave's joke or was wholly ignorant of what his intent behind the joke was (a distinct possibility if her oratory skill is indicative of her intellect).
Like the journalist for the independent, Palin took the joke out of context to make a point about political correctness as it suited her.
The journalist from the independent is against old lady rape? Wow what a bold and courageous stance.
Kris,
I loved Norm's entire shtick throughout that awful, awful roast. He read a paper the entire time, only looking up when he was named. I understood it as pretending to do the bare minimum for the paycheck, and performing the worst standup routine that he couldn't even bother memorizing. In either case, it really did subvert the played out cliche's of the roast.
As far as Gervais' joke, I laughed and wasn't offended in the least. It's a classic case of subverting genre expectations. The last thing you expect in a "close call drunk-driving" story is the subject willfully committing a heinous felony. So the worse the the act (short of murder) the more contrast between the statement and your expectation. He had to use that crime (which is arguably worse than murder in many people's opinion).
Pedophiles are making it hard on regular child murderers. If I had to kill a kid (it could happen; maybe he looked at me wrong) I would do it from a distance, with a rifle and a scope. I would not want anyone to think I was weird.
(Thanks to a Canadian stand-up, I forget the name)
Thinking it isn't funny isn't the same as not getting it.
JE: Yep, that's what I said (twice!) above. Those are two entirely separate issues.
I think I got it, I just didn't find it funny. Because while the juxtaposition between our idea of what he means by "nearly killed" and what he really means by "nearly killed" has a valid comedic structure, it's still about someone nearly getting killed by a drunk driver, and it's still about raping someone.
It reminds me of Immanuel Kant's attempt at humour (paraphrased): the mourners I hired for my father's funeral weren't acting sad enough. But the more I paid them to mourn, the happier they looked!
(Kan't give up his day job...)
There are those for whom the subjects of death by drunk driver and/or rape will never be funny subjects. So while you can with some validity claim that a joke isn't about what it's about, but how it is about it, you still have to put it in context. And there are times when being edgy slides over into being over the edge.
I don't know JMW; rape is pretty funny.
If you can't find the comedy in that than you're hopeless.
Conservatism is like a joke about rape: some people are on board for all the wrong reasons while others just want you to know that they got it, their slow friend didn't get it, they definitely aren't one of those dumb conservatives, and isn't it just so hilariously tragic that this sort of stupidity leaves the comedian standing there, before an audience of millions, all alone.
But still laughing, probably.
With Sarah Silverman (and Micheal Ian Black and Micheal showalter to a lesser extent) the joke is the not the scatalogical humor. It is that 3 such well-educated, modern people in their 30's/40's would find such humor funny or be bizzarely fascinated with it (as Silverman so clearly is).
t wrote: "rape is pretty funny. If you can't find the comedy in that than you're hopeless."
One of the saddest comments I've read in awhile.
Having known a woman who was raped, I just can't
find any comedy in it, no matter the context.
JE: I thought t was making the point quite well: Where's the humor in rape? There is none. So what is the joke? It's in the wording and the point of view.
Reminded me of this classic:
"Take my wife... PLEASE!"
My parents got a divorce, and it was very painful for everyone involved. Please don't joke about it.
"I say to my doctor, it hurts when I do this. He says 'then don't do that'!"
My friend recently died of a heart attack, please don't joke about health issues.
"Why couldn't the child go to the pirate movie? It was rated Arrrrr!"
Have you been reading the news? People are killed by Somalian pirates every single day. Not to mention, I have a speech impediment that makes it difficult for me to pronounce the letter Arrrrrrr.
Taking the approach that Gervais' joke is at the expense of geriatric rape victims, well, what jokes ARE safe to laugh at? How can you find ANYTHING funny with that way of interpreting humor?
JE: Bravo!
http://www.hulu.com/watch/93107/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien-norm-macdonald-part-2#s-p3-sr-i1
A moth walks into a podiatrist's office...
David Lawler wrote:
I disagree. Think Lenny Bruce or Andy Kaufman, guys who were as shocking, or maybe more shocking, than they were funny. Certainly, Carlin early in his career was much the same, before he just became kind of angry.
As to people like Silverman, well, I don't find her particularly funny myself, but humor is indeed something of personal taste. I've met people who just find Monty Python kind of weird and unintelligible, so just because I don't get the joke, doesn't mean that no one else does.
JE: In some cases the laugh depends on the cringe. In this case it's a logical absurdity -- that works almost like a classic Steve Martin or Steven Wright joke. His language leads you to think Gervais is talking about an accident that he almost caused when drunk... and then he unexpectedly "confesses" to a horrible crime that required effort and intent as if he weren't responsible. (Other similar/possible punchlines, arguably not as funny: "I just robbed her." Or: "I just shot her in the leg.") Is he saying he really did that? No. The logical switcheroo, and the cluelessness of his confession, are part of what's funny. As is my feeling that I need to explain that.
Eh, not funny, so it fails. My reaction was just, "Oh, he meant..." And then, "So what?"
So who cares if it's offensive? (It's not.) It's just lame.
Lot of self-congratulation in the comments here, too. "Getting it" isn't rocket science.
JE: Yes, as I say, whether somebody finds it funny or not is an entirely separate issue from whether they understand the joke. I've seen many people not laugh at jokes they didn't "get," of course -- but, even worse, I've seen far more people laugh at jokes they either misinterpreted or didn't understand, just because they felt like they should laugh on cue. This particular instance was an illustration of a critic from The Independent who so misrepresented the joke that it was unrecognizable. Perhaps, for him, "getting it" was indeed rocket science. It shouldn't be, but the evidence of what he wrote stands.
The classic joke regarding laughing on cue.
A blue and a red elephant are taking a shower together.
The blue one says, "please pass the soap."
The red one responds, "no soap - radio?"
So he's saying rather than it relying on saying he raped an old woman, it relies on the turnaround of not having anything to do with drink-driving.
That's pretty crappy, it obviously depends on the shock/surprise pretty strongly still... even if he's managed to convince himself otherwise. His rant about knowing "humour" at the end doesn't help him really either when he's using such a amateurish joke and bothering to defend it. He's an awful stand-up comedian anyway, Merchant always seemed to be the talented on on the radio shows too.
By Gilbert Smith on September 2, 2009 6:21 PM
"Take my wife... PLEASE!"
My parents got a divorce, and it was very painful for everyone involved. Please don't joke about it...
JE: Bravo!
I respectfully disagree with both of you. Each individual is going to draw the line on what is humorous and what is not in a different place. t's comment about my not finding rape funny meaning I was hopeless elicited a brief smile (and, note to Sam, who objected to it, check out Roger Ebert's blog entry "This is the dawning of the age of credulity"). I don't find death by drunk driver, or rape, funny. But, Gilbert, your extension of my attitude toward everything else that is less or more off-colour is the extension of my argument ad absurdum. It's the kind of logic I'm trying to train my 9 year old out of, when she rips a toy out of our 5 year old's hands, and I tell her not to rip things from him and she replies, "Oh, so if he's holding a bomb that's about to go off, I should just let him keep it?" Use some common sense please.
For example, I find the following joke pretty funny, even though there are undoubtedly thousands of families of military casualties who wouldn't.
An American General, a German General and a Canadian General were leading a joint exercise. After the exercise was over, they were standing together at the top of a cliff. The American General was bragging about the bravery of his troops, and to demonstrate, called a private over.
"Private, throw yourself off this cliff."
The private snaps off a crisp salute, shouts, "Sir! Yes sir!", and throws himself from the cliff, screaming all the way to the bottom, and he dies.
The German General raises an eyebrow and says, "Zat is nussink." He calls a German private over. "Zrow yourself off zis cliff, private."
The German private snaps off a crisp salute, shouts, "Herr General! Jawohl Herr General!" and throws himself off the cliff. He falls silently to the bottom and dies.
The Canadian General sadly shakes his head, and calls a Canadian private over. He says, "Private, throw yourself off this cliff."
The private snaps off a crisp salute, and shouts, "Sir! Fuck you, sir!"
The Canadian General turns to the other two and says, "That, gentlemen, is courage."
Of course I've played with the nationalities from where I first read the joke, for purely nationalistic and patriotic reasons...
You know, I don't see what's wrong with getting people to laugh on cue. Jim, I know you don't like Chris Rock's standup very much, and I think he's more skilled than you give him credit for, but even if he's just getting people to laugh on cue, well, good for him. If in his performance he's able to seduce people into the rhythm of his piece, that's still talent. (I don't think that's what he does, I'm just sayin'.)
The Daily Show often successfully seduces me into its rhythm, too. They set up a clip, they play a clip, Jon Stewart makes a funny face, I laugh on cue. Of course, for the funniest jokes, I laugh the hardest.
Getting the timing just right can be tricky. Chris Rock and The Daily Show? They've earned it, and they've got the writing skills to back it up, too.
I recently saw part of a broadcast of the Montreal Just For Laughs Comedy Festival. There was a Scottish comic, would that I could remember his name, and part of his routine was along these lines.
You people [Canadians] are so polite. You never heckle. I did a joke in a show in the United States, and a man stood up and said - and if he meant it ironically it was brilliant, but unfortunately he didn't so it was just stupid - but he said, "That's racist, you Jewish prick!"
Here's the joke.
Isn't it horrible what happened to New Orleans, with Katrina? Wiped away huge parts of the city. But here's my question. What are they going to call it when its rebuilt? I mean, it's already New Orleans. So what are they going to call it?
Maybe they ought to do it the way the laundry detergent industry does. "New and Improved Orleans...Ultra. Now whiter than ever!"
So...show of hands - who thinks that was funny?
recalling from memory, this conversation reminds me of the interview with the surviving members of Monty Python's Flying Circus by Robert Klein at the Aspen Film Festival in 1998. They were honoring Graham Chapman and his morbid sense of humor. They told a story about how they were in Germany filming an episode in German, and being taken around the country to "see the sites" when the bus pulled up outside an infamous concentration camp (I can't recall if it was Aushwitz or Dachau) and the German official got very uncomfortable and wouldn't let them off the bus for a tour. Suddenly Graham pipes up from the back of the bus: "Tell them we're Jewish! They'll let us in!"
Is the Holocaust funny? The systematic extermination of 6,000,000 people? Absolutely not, but Chapman's grotesque twisting of sensibilities makes me cringe and laugh at the same time. I think this is the core of British humor, and the core of the joke by Gervais. It isn't that drunk driving or rape are inherently funny, but somehow his sick defiance of expectations makes me laugh. As if he is implying that rape is not as morally reprehensible as drunk driving. Not in a serious argumentative way, but its the grotesque shock of his willingness to say something so horrible and dismiss it that makes me laugh.
Jeffrey, you should add the clincher to that conversation with the Python crew at Aspen. There's an urn in the middle of the table, and the crew is sitting around it. Said urn contains the ashes of Graham ("So he can be here with us."). As the conversation gravitates to other topics, you forget that the urn is there, and all of a sudden with genius timing, one of them accidentally kicks the urn over, spilling brown ash all over the table, carpet, etc., and all of them, without missing a beat, get up and start grabbing handfuls of ash and throwing it under the carpet or using a broom to sweep it into the audience, and finally one of the well-dressed 'servants' that are helping out comes out with a Dustbuster and proceeds to vacuum up bits of Mr. Graham. It is so inappropriate and done with such aplomb that you literally pee your pants it's so damn funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpL12ilpDnQ#t=8m45s
I have no problem with 'bad taste' humour. My problem with this particular joke is that, once I hear it, I think to myself 'that's clever', but it actually isn't. It's more random than anything. I mean, yes, there's the whole thing with the use of 'nearly' but there's nowhere where you can identify with it, either in a positive way or a negative say; it just feels random.
I compare it to Sarah Silverman, and I think she's wonderful. Her 'I was raped by a doctor, which being a Jewish girl, makes it bitter-sweet" (or to that effect) is IMO fantastic, as she plays off stereotypes about Jewish girls being encouraged to marry doctors. Perhaps because I'm also Jewish, it's easier to find a way into that line. Gervais's seems too random IMO and not all that clever.
But then again, maybe it comes down to my just not thinking he's all that funny. Silverman has said other things (which I won't repeat here), and many are funny IMO but not all relate to her being Jewish.
JMC,
Thanks for the link. I have Live at the Hollywood Bowl Special Edition DVD (we're building a new house so everything is in storage), which includes the full Aspen interview on a DVD extra. And yes I believe Chapman would have appreciated the "humor" of his ashes being a punchline. Hilarious scene. Sometimes we forget that "Life of Brian" contains some heretical humor and was banned in some countries for the religious outrage, yet the insight was savage and right on. "Meaning of Life" contains perhaps the most grotesque movie scene of all times ("Good evening, Mister Creosote!") yet I find myself to this day laughing hysterically at that scene. There is nothing funny about morbidly obese people repeatedly vomiting in a high class restaurant, is there?
misdirection is hilarious. i still remember one i heard years ago by larry "bubbles" brown, an sf comedian:
"Most people like to cuddle after sex; I usually just close the trunk and roll the car into the river..."
laughing at this is not an implicit acceptance of kidnapping, rape, and murder - all true horrors beyond horror. it's laughing at yourself, for rushing ahead of the speaker and guessing (way off) the ending. misdirection.
Hi, Jim.
I sent a couple of comments in a few days ago. One was a reply to Gilbert Smith's comment on 2 Sept (and your reply "Bravo!"); the other contained a joke which contained a 4-letter word. Neither have appeared. I'm figuring the second probably was spam-filtered, but I'm not sure what happened to the first. Anyway, if you don't print this one, I'll understand; I just hope you see fit to salvage the first two.
Thanks!
JE: Found 'em amongst the spam and published 'em.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but the structure of the actual joke isn't very good, either. Something's off. Okay, it turns out "nearly killed" was part of an attack on an old woman, not simply a close call while driving. So what happened to the car?
Maybe it's smoothed over in the delivery. Maybe I'm missing something extremely obvious. But usually I'm quite fine with jokes, and it's bothering me to no end that I seem to be on the outside of this one.
In my eyes, the reporter still gets the gist of the joke across in his review. He changes it from a joke about a guy who you think avoided doing one bad thing but who it turns out actually did a really bad other thing, to a joke about a guy who you think avoided doing one bad thing but who it turns out actually did a really bad other thing.
Am I wrong? Please talk to me as you would talk to a small child (one who understands what rape is, anyway). I need to figure out whether I'm being an idiot or whether I just don't find it that funny.
JE: Gervais explains the key phrase that the joke turns on (and it's not "nearly knocked over," as the reporter misquotes it). I'd like to hear RG's delivery.
Ricky Gervais is a comedy genius and if the bit requires him to rape an old lady than we should all appreciate his dedication. Even the old lady.
I remember one of the funniest moments of South Park had to do with the Queen of England. Now, it's not a well kept secret that the Queen is considered off limits to foul treatment -see Michelle Obama's ill fated hug - and there is a clear line as to what is acceptable and what is inappropriate. That said, the scene that I laughed uncontrollably at was when the Queen -after waging a naval war on America - receives a phone call from her general informing her the plan failed. Promptly after hearing this, she puts a pistol in her mouth and graphically kills herself.
http://video.filestube.com/video,fe22a4be8a87c63f03e9.html
Likely the clip won't be as amusing as it was to me because I already revealed the punchline in the setup. But this gets back to your point. Explaining a joke rarely works because comedic pieces take an absurd amount of time and energy to construct. When we try to tell our friends about the 'funny thing' that happened to us it ends up being a 'you had to be there' comment. Humor is complex, but it contains a very simple goal: to surprise. The specific words Geravis uses to setup that joke are a cleverly designed attempt to mislead the audience and then surprise. When the reviewer said it, he left out a key word and the joke was ruined. It's like you repeat a funny joke you've heard at a party and you wonder why no one laughs. You may have effectively explained the content of the joke, but explanation will do nothing if you forget some critical word in the joke like 'nearly killed" or some other carefully placed deceptive device.Jokes, whether it be from Southpark or Geravis, do not work when someone explains it.
This I believe is one of the reasons people get so offended when they watch South Park and other raunchy comedians. With some notable exceptions -Andrew Dice Clay for instance- most dirty jokes are not designed with the intent to spew hatred. But people do not have time to listen to every joke, so when they hear some commentator repeating it they think that it is a danger to the public.
Forget whether the joke is actually funny or not (I happen to think it is). I am extremely suspicious of the motives of anyone who essentially says:
"I was terribly offended by a joke I heard the other day. It was in such bad taste! Okay, it goes like this..."
If you really and truly think that a joke is in such bad taste that it shouldn't have been told, you don't publish it in a forum where millions of people will be exposed to it. If this Independent writer had really thought the joke was indecent, he would have said something like, "I thought some of his subject matter--including rape--was inappropriate." By repeating the joke (even if inaccurately) and drawing attention to it, he just undermines his own point.
It's like the whole Sarah Palin/David Letterman thing. If Palin had really been concerned about her daughter being joked about in front of the public eye, she wouldn't have taken a joke that was heard and then forgotten by maybe a million Letterman watchers, and drawn so much attention to it that probably a hundred million people not only heard it, but thought about it over and over again. By doing that, she exposed her daughter to a hundred times as much unnecessary attention and ridicule as Letterman did.
That's not what you do when you're offended. That's what you do when you want attention.
JE: It was clear from day one that Palin sees her kids as tools to bolster her ambitions. And I'm sure loves them in her way. You're right, though: Often when people say they are "offended" by something, they're really saying they think somebody else should be offended. I like to ask them, as politely and non-confrontationally as possible: "What was it that really bugged you about it?" Too often they either can't explain or they're just parroting something they heard somewhere else in ways that don't make sense. I encourage everyone to ask those kinds of questions. It's fun and revealing!
We need to distinguish between a couple of things here. You can understand and appreciate a joke without finding it funny. I don't find the joke in question funny, but (having studied and performed comedy myself) I "get" it. The problem is people who don't get it and then blame the comedian for their own misinterpretation. Unfortunately, these people will never back down from their stance even when their error is pointed out to them.
JE: Found 'em amongst the spam and published 'em.
Thanks! Too bad they weren't interesting enough for anyone else to comment. Perhaps they should have remained where they were...