Comedy Boom Boom

Although stand up comedy has been an identifiable form of entertainment since at least Lenny Bruce in the fifties and sixties, and Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin elevated it to a beloved art form in the seventies and on, it didn't come into its own as an industry until the early eighties.

There weren't comedy clubs until then, but when entrepreneurs realized how much potential there was in building bar/theater hybrids where comedians could play to several mid-sized audiences every night, they sprang up all over the place. Now we sort of take them for granted as an entrenched part of the American entertainment business landscape, so much so that lots of people have stopped going, and many legendary clubs have become unprofitable.

The comedy boom held strong throughout the eighties, when most of the well-known comics of today made their bones. Jerry Seinfeld, Marc Maron, Louis CK, Dave Attell, and countless others came up in the eighties (in Seinfeld's case, the very early eighties), playing legendary clubs that don't exist anymore, making hundreds of dollars every night. A big part of the appeal of a show like Maron's popular WTF podcast is hearing old salts from a bygone heyday recount how much fun it was to be breaking into an industry flush with possibility and opportunity.

All booms end, eventually, in a bust, and the comedy boom was no different. In his WTF appearance, Louis CK recounted how the comedy boom ended for him in dramatic fashion, as he got in a motorcycle accident, lost his hair, and saw many of the clubs that provided him hundreds of dollars a night close their doors all in the same brief time-span.

Still, countless careers and reputations were made, carrying countless comics for twenty years. After a fallow period, it feels like there's a bit of a comedy boom happening again now, but with the wrinkle of a this generation of boomers finding their comedic endeavors demonetized and devalued.

It's not quite the same as what's happening with music--rock and roll is dying, if not dead, because it just isn't interesting to young people today. Play them a really fantastic guitar part from a classic punk rock song, let alone an actual classic rock song, and they most likely just won't get it. They won't like or dislike it--they'll just regard it the way a grizzly bear would regard a Frisbee or something. They've moved on to other kinds of music more appropriate to the post-human future we're hurtling toward.

But comedy is as popular as it was in the nineties, maybe even more so. Comedy podcasts (search turns up 7.5 million results), comedy festivals, Last Comic Standing, entire radio stations devoted to comedy, slews of sitcoms. Comedy, comedy, comedy everywhere you look. The interesting thing is that comedy is possibly as popular as it has ever been, yet comedy clubs are shutting down. Sure, some sitcoms, like The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family are about as big and popular as any sitcom has ever been, but they aren't at the sweet spot of mass appeal and critical consensus that shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, and even Roseanne and the early seasons of Friends managed.

Big Bang and Modern Family are well-written, well-produced shows that are easy and fun to watch, but there's no mistaking them for cultural artifacts that will still be discussed and revered twenty years down the line, like the strongest NBC shows. NBC's attempts, and failures, at reestablishing their sitcom superiority during this present comedy boom are fairly fascinating. There was last year's big swing and a miss of The Michael J. Fox Show, which was essentially just placing a big 80s sitcom star in a show and hoping that simply having him around again would get people to watch out of comfort and habit. Didn't work out.

The more recent, compelling example of NBC's inability to do something that should, given the current cultural climate of comedic conduciveness, is Mulaney. Plenty has been written about its intentional debt to Seinfeld, down to Nasim Pedrad's hypercharged, psychotic take on Elaine Benes, John Mulaney playing himself as an NYC showbiz type, and all the rest. Mulaney's standup comedy is more or less universally liked, as Jerry Seinfeld's was.

The disjunction is clearly glimpsed in this NPR blog entitled "Please Don't Judge John Mulaney by 'Mulaney.'" We like John Mulaney, just not the single best career opportunity available to a person such as him. We like him, but not in a way that will allow him to earn money, like people in his exact position could do twenty years ago. We like him, but the apparatus around which liking someone could allow that person to benefit and create more of what we like has been dismantled (by us).

Is the sitcom still a viable context for comedic entertainment? It seems like it would always be--it's a chance to hang out (sort of), with really funny, familiar people. That is basically what has propelled the podcast boom. It's a more direct, unfiltered version of what used to require huge staffs and production schedules to achieve, and better yet, it's pumped right into your ears, oftentimes several installments worth a week. Stripped of all artifice except the indomitable will of an energetic, opinionated human to shove their view of the world in your direction, comedy podcasts are hailed for their rawness and realness. But the realness doesn't extend to appreciating how the purveyors of this raw entertainment in great volumes make a living (or, more accurately, don't make a living). We want something real, coming from a distinctive place and point of view, but we don't want that place to be one that can afford to not live with its parents. The privilege of offering content-hungry people their hard-created content should be compensation enough!

Here we can see a symptom of the much vaunted openness that internet pervasiveness into every last crevice of the entertainment industry--tearing down without building up. Sure, it was great when all music ever became immediately available to everyone free of charge. But what replaced the record industry was the YouTube lottery: now anyone can record themselves singing and post it to YouTube. Some have gotten popular and made it, only they get a fraction of what a real music star got back in the day. The odds have gotten even longer, and the payout has gotten worse. As this article points out, YouTube is responsible for 70% of music consumption, but under 3% of revenue.

Perhaps one explanation for the current glut of young people going into comedy, fueling the comedy boom, is the lack of legitimate employment options available to the exponentially growing pool of students earning degrees from unprecedentedly numerous (and increasingly valueless) institutions of higher learning. Do a few open mics, and see how many people there have at least Bachelors degrees, and how many even have graduate degrees. Simply going out and saying things on a stage is considered as good, or better, an option as any other available.

Chris Rock, possibly the biggest comedian of the 1990s not named Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news a lot lately as he ramps up the marketing push for his new movie, Top Five. This fawning New Yorker piece by Kelefa Sanneh was fascinating for a few reasons, but mostly for how it bent itself up into a pretzel trying to rationalize Rock's inability to produce anything remotely as compelling, beloved, or relevant in the past nearly twenty years as his 1996 breakout standup comedy special Bring the Pain.

Interestingly, Sanneh cites the a huge chunk, verbatim, of the standout joke from that special--you know the one--comparing "good" African Americans to "bad" ones. It's as if she needs to remind us, and herself, why Chris Rock is still being given such a string of high-profile chances after all this time. There are some laughs in the joke that hold up all these many years later, but ethically, the joke really shows its age. But that (fairly huge) issue aside, isn't Chris Rock's continuing relevance, despite over a decade of making nothing but forgettable stand up and films, at least a bit puzzling? Even so discerning a publication as the New Yorker is hellbent on figuring out a way to rationalize giving so many turns at bat to a comedian who, even by its own admission, is in his enviable position today for writing one very resonant joke nearly twenty years ago.

How come so little went so far in the nineties, while so much counts for so little today, when the means of production, and distribution, have been so radically democratized and horizontalized? Weren't those things supposed to help us? Tell one very good joke in 1996, and you're making million dollar movies twenty years later. Tell one hundred very good jokes in 2014, and you should be grateful that anyone heard them, and go happily on your way to your day job.

The problem is that, in embracing the possibilities digital media provided us to dismantle corporate hegemony, we performed the perverse neoliberal maneuver of energetically thinking of ourselves as our own mini corporations. Stay on brand, bro.

All of this is to leave aside the most fundamental question: is it right to buy and sell the most physically tangible manifestation of human joy? Should it be so bandied about and wasted? What would be a better use of that energy? Laughter is a waste of good happiness, transferring it into a surface, disposable level. It isn't real happiness, which can be meditated upon inwardly and used to sustain a person throughout the unending moment by moment onslaught of dull gray nothingness which constitutes the essence of the experience of life.

Does it really feel good to laugh? Laughing is an unconscious experience--I forget I did it almost before I'm done doing it. It evaporates immediately as it happens. We can laugh hilariously, deeply one moment and be perfectly miserable the next. It augurs neither ill nor well particularly for our daily mood. It is a violent, overbearing, relatively isolated experience, occurring when an aspect of externality invades our consciousness so abruptly and manipulatively that we emit an unintentional, really animalistic noise. Deeply miserable people can laugh hilariously, and indeed often laugh the loudest and deepest, as they are more susceptive to being stirred by life's absurdities.

Does laughter benefit the person who caused the laughter? Comedians are well known for being among the most miserable and darkest people alive. Perhaps they have access to some version of happiness that is beyond the reach of mere mortals, but I doubt it. It seems like being in the trenches where laughter is generated on a full-time basis grinds them down into nubs of wretchedness.

The cliché "everyone's a comedian" is generally mocked for (besides being a cliché), being weirdly bitter about people partaking in an activity that generates a response (laughter) which causes smiling. Its bitterness seems to imply that the energy people expend toward generating laughter in others could, and should, be spent in more worthwhile, less ephemeral pursuits. Laughter is a momentary experience of inexplicable physiological response. Its popularity perhaps comes from the ability to abandon oneself to this momentary physiological response. Love of comedy is in this way a desperate, untenable form of existence--stringing together moments of surrender, crawling from one opportunity of being overpowered to the next.

It might be that a more humane, decent society, in which human life was taken seriously as a valuable thing that ought to be given firm direction and purpose, would have little, or at least less, use for comedy. It seems a cynical world in which every public experience of truth is permitted only because it is always leading to a punch line. Everyone is bored until they have something make them laugh.

Comedy is the most potent form of cultural information ever devised--it shakes you so that your throat makes an involuntary noise. Only a society as accustomed to, and in love with, doing nothing, would have such a deep, unending need for comedy. A healthy society would have little need or time for comedy.