When Comedy Goes Wrong

Julia Forest

Copy Editor 

From literature to late night television, humor is valued across many mediums, and comedy has a funny way of relaying information in the modern world. “…the conditions of truth have changed so much that it doesn’t really matter what the fact is, what matters is how you feel about it, and then how you circulate that feeling. And if you do that, if you manipulate that feeling by manipulating the funny, all to the better in some way, because then you can have fun while doing it,” Professor Christopher Gilbert said. 

On Oct 14, Professor Gilbert of the English department, spoke about his most recent book “When Comedy Goes Wrong” as part of the Conversations with Assumption Authors series. Theology Professor Ty Monroe was the moderator. The event was sponsored by the Assumption University Provost Office. 

“When Comedy Goes Wrong” is a follow up to Gilbert’s first book “Caricature and National Character: The United States at War.” “I’ve always been really interested in appeals to collective identity, cultural identity, and then as I say, specifically through comic representations. The first book looked at how war times across U.S. American history have provided a really interesting index for asking questions about who we are and why we do what we do and what’s worth fighting for. And to use the reconstruction of the argumentative fallacy, to imagine what constitutes a true American or a true Americanism. That book was really centered on caricature as sort of the form of a comic representation in that it has an ability to stretch things to their limits in terms of the grotesque and the strange and the exaggerated”

For Gilbert, the ideas of comic representations, the understanding that comedy is a way to highlight what matters to society, and “the manipulation of the funny” have interested him for many years. “When Comedy Goes Wrong” focuses on the use, presence, and influence of disruptive, disturbing, and problematic humor in the past 40 years. In certain contexts, comedy can become unfunny. 

“I started to notice that there was this odd notion of freedom and entrapment that was at play, of course, in a wider culture and in a wider historical moment. But in the comic sense, there seemed to be a comic sensibility that was very much rooted in sort of this reckless abandon in terms of what could count as funny and what could count as embodying a sense of humor. And then on the other side of that, or maybe I should say intention with that and as part and parcel of it, there was in a sense that there were a lot of jokesters out there and a lot of online comedians in particular, but just comedians across the spectrum, that were sort of finding ways to articulate their own love of being trapped and being in a cage,” Gilbert said. 

Gilbert and Monroe discussed how comedy can both bring people together and tear them apart. “There was in that moment…in the wake of the mid 80s in the media culture, there was a very real purpose behind comedy as a way to provoke an “us vs. them” dichotomy and use almost the butt of the joke kind of a setup as a way to create factions of belonging, so that it wasn’t simply a way to make fun of this or that but really a way to embed a sense of who is with you, who is with them, so to speak,” Gilbert said. 

“When Comedy Goes Wrong” examines the relationship between humor and cultural and political commentary through subjects spanning from Rush Limbaugh to the 2019 film “Joker.” “What I observed in the moment from Limbaugh forward is that you started to see a lot of comic representations that made villains of fools, to put a finer point on it. So, villainy became the point of the comic frame. To villainize, especially when you get into the more digital era, it becomes the point,” Gilbert said. 

In order for some comedy to work, it greatly depends on how others respond. Controversial humor needs the approval of others. “You’re looking at everybody else in the audience to see how they’re reacting…When do we say stand-up comics bomb or when they lose a room? When everybody stops laughing. That’s a form of the audience taking some power to pull their own responsibility into the fold,” said Gilbert.

With the rise and normalization of “cancel culture”, comedy can serve as a way to criticize people and ideas. “…it brings to bear what savage sorts of comic critiques can look like when they are rooted in a common sense of humanity, where yes, you can do the tearing down stuff, but you’re tearing down to the extent that cancellation becomes destruction, maybe even of life.”