Is Anything Off-Limits?
This was written in response to the a question I received asking if I thought comedians should talk about certain touchy subjects.
I think that Comedians can and should talk about anything they want to. No topic is off limits. But that doesn’t mean that anything should be said. Dave Chapelle and Carlos Mencia both talk *about* race, but their points of view could not be more different. One breaks down and mocks racial stereotyping and the other just re-presents and embodies them. The question is not “what should I talk about” the question is “what do I have that’s worth saying?”
And of course the more offensive a given topic might be, the funnier your presentation has to be to make it ‘worth it’. If you bring up rape just to say “I wouldn’t rape rosie o’donnell with Star Jones’ dick” well that might elicit a chuckle but it’s kind of a gross out “I can’t believe you said that” laugh which is all in all a pretty easy laugh to get and (to me) not really worth it. It can also needlessly alienate some of the crowd. For my abortion joke “I saw a bumper sticker that said ‘abortion stops a beating heart and I was like yeah, but so does hearing your girlfriend say she’s pregnant’ I think that’s worth saying because it doesn’t just mock their slogan, but it also weighs a real counter-situation against it that is, to most people, much more unpleasant to contemplate. I can take that joke in front of crowds that normally wouldn’t want to listen to ‘abortion’ jokes, because it’s not just exploiting abortion to score a political point with the audience.
It all depends on your goals within comedy, but I just think that a comedian’s job insofar as he wants to be an ‘artist’ is to find both a funny way to say something, and to figure out something worth being said. Original ideas in original ways. That’s the job of all art, in comedy it just has the addition of working within the constraints of making people laugh.
This doesn’t mean that everything has to be heavy or weighed down with significance. Demetri Martin for instance traffics in lightness. He finds funny and unique things in the every day. Like “From Checkers I learned that when you’ve got a guy with another guy that looks just like him on top of him, that’s called a king, but life taught me that that’s a queen.” Although it discusses something that is somewhat political there is no substantive political value-statement being made it’s just finding an interesting and funny new way of looking at checkers. It’s not just funny, it’s also unique, which is why it’s worth saying.
In classical music this is called display and discourse. Display is what the audience will enjoy and discourse is what composers and musicians will find interesting or exciting. Some composers write music that is intellectually interesting but sounds like shit to most people. In comedy this would be Andy Kaufman. Other composers write music that panders to the audience and is enjoyed but is not respected by any other composers or musicians because it is simple or easy, it doesn’t surprise anyone. In comedy this would be Larry The Cable Guy. Then there are people in the middle, who write music that is both well respected and beautiful to listen to. They find a balance of discourse and display. In comedy, this would be Dave Chapelle, or the guys behind the show “The Office.” Performance is both art and entertainment. A comedian who isn’t an artist is boring; a comedian who isn’t an entertainer is painful.
Lastly I’ll just say that the reason you should look to yourself and talk about things you care about is because while I don’t think that everyone actually is a ‘unique snowflake,’ I do think that most everyone has the potential to be one. The things you care about tell you something about yourself, so writing about them gives you insight into the creative perspective you are developing as you go. The more you develop that perspective the more things you’ll be able to apply it to. You write and you write and you write and eventually you start writing jokes that feel more and more “in your voice” and then you’ll write other ones and you’ll say “no that doesn’t feel like something I would say” for one reason or another and then you’ll either find a way to put them in your voice, or put them in the mouth of a character, or just scrap them and write something better. No matter what you write, you have to tell yourself you can always write something else as good or better. It might not always be true, but that is the self-improvement delusion that we all have to commit ourselves to if we want to grow as artists.
Anyway that’s what I think.
