It’s not often that I review a book by a right-winger, but I’m making an exception this week with You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together, published today by Gutfeld! co-host and Fox News contributor Kat Timpf. Fortunately for my self-respect and sanity, another book by another female comedian, this one with a progressive slant, also came out today: Not Funny: Essays on Life, Comedy, Culture, Et Cetera, by Jena Friedman, enabling me to do a tandem review.
In recent Nonfiction Views, we have debated the idea of ‘sanitizing’ the language in new editions of classic books, erasing words, descriptions or plotlines that might offend the sensibilities of modern readers. These two books about comedy tackle the same debate in their own particular arena: are there things that just should not be joked about, whether out of concern about causing offense, or concern about actually perpetuating racist, sexist, ageist, ableist or violent ideas under the guise of ‘it’s just a joke.’
***TRIGGER WARNING*** If you are sensitive about insensitive humor, you may want to skip to the new book synopses below, as this review will likely have more triggers than a Waffle House at 3am.
(I have a personal interest in this as well. My wife is a stand-up comic. There is little politics in her material, though there is a lot of family and lifestyle content, And filthy sex (she’s 79, by the way.) Her point of view is mainly cis-female, but she does comedy shows at gay bars and at mostly-lesbian 55+ mobile home communities, and gets plenty of laughs. Funny is funny)
The debate over ethical comedy often revolves around the idea of ‘punching down’ versus ‘punching up.’ In its simplest formation, punching down involves aiming your humor at classes of people with less power or social privilege than you, while punching up involves aiming your humor to tweak at people with power.
This distinction is not particularly clear or helpful. For example, a writer cited George Carlin and Richard Pryor as exemplars of comedians who punched up, who spoke truth to power and got plenty of laughs by doing so. But is it really so simple? Take, for example, this bit on religion by Carlin:
“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
Carlin may be punching up at the institution of religion, the control it exerts and the wealth it amasses, but is he not also punching down at the millions of believers for whom religion is a vital part of their lives? Even here on Daily Kos, a thread of pushback occasionally blows up over writers who tar all religion in their disparaging comments about rightwing evangelists.
And Richard Pryor once got into some hot water over an angry off-the-cuff riff on the LGBTQ community at a gay rights benefit at the Hollywood Bowl in 1977, after noticing too many racist micro-aggressions at the event:
On 18 September 1977, when Richard Pryor took the stage of the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner of the Star-Spangled Night for Rights – a benefit promoted by an early gay rights group – the event had, according to one journalist, “all the makings of a cabaret version of Woodstock”. Less than 15 minutes later, when Pryor ended by asking the audience to “kiss my happy, rich black ass”, the concert was closer to a cabaret version of Altamont. The good vibes had dispersed; a night of unity had turned into a hot, steaming mess. Many in the crowd booed or shouted abuse: “Richard Pryor, you just committed professional suicide!” or “Kiss your ass, hell! I’d like to put a hot poker up it!” Others cheered a provocateur who, before he had dismissed the crowd as self-serving “faggots”, had spoken bravely about the joy of gay sex and exposed the fault lines of the gay rights movement.
Still others sat poleaxed, trying to grasp how, in coming to the Hollywood Bowl, they had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone. “In more than 14 years of covering the great, near-great and terrible of show business, I have never seen anything like it,” wrote John Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle. “To call what happened bizarre would not, for me, do it justice. It was like watching a person come unglued in front of you and then, as in a cartoon, disappear piece by piece.”
It is the conservative comic Kat Timpf who first offers a better way to look at comedy than trying to parse which direction the fists are flying. It is the intention of the comic and the joke that matter most. She cites Joan Rivers’ adlib about model Heidi Klum’s dress on the television program Fashion Police in 2013: “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens.”
Rivers faced massive backlash, including from the Anti-Defamation League.
“There are certain things about the Holocaust that should be taboo,” ADL director and Holocaust survivor Abraham H. Foxman said at the time. “This is especially true for Jews, for whom the Holocaust is still a deeply painful memory. It is vulgar and offensive for anyone to use the death of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust to make a joke, but this is especially true for someone who is Jewish and who proudly wears her Jewishness on her sleeve.”
But Rivers refused to back down, saying, “My husband lost the majority of his family at Auschwitz, and I can assure you that I have always made it a point to remind people of the Holocaust through humor.”
In other words, Rivers didn’t joke about the Holocaust despite the fact that it was a grave subject and the joke would garner controversy and attention, but because it would. Her intention was not to minimize the seriousness of the Holocaust, but to remind people of exactly that.
If it had been, say, Nick Fuentes who made that joke in one of his white supremacist livestreams, you could say that his intention had nothing to do with reminding people of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Timpf refers to Joan Rivers a number of times throughout the book, citing such Rivers lines as “My husband committed suicide. And it was my fault. We were making love and I took the bag off my head” and “I love that she’s [Jennifer Lawrence] telling everyone how wrong it is to worry about retouching and body image, and meanwhile, she has been touched up more than a choirboy at the Vatican.”
Yikes! And yet...I laughed. Dark humor can be healing in its honesty. Anyone’s reaction to a joke is, after all, an opinion. A joke does not have an inherent good or bad quality. It is a starting point, and how one reacts to it is personal, not universal.
A prominent ‘punching down’ controversy arose around Dave Chappelle’s Netflix comedy special The Closer, which was widely criticized as making jokes at the expense of trans people (and women, and gays in particular) to the extent of feeding the prejudice against them to the point of endangerment. I confess that I watched the special and, while much of the routine was edgy, dark and pushing boundaries, I personally never felt his intention was to denigrate and endanger. As someone with great sympathy towards the trans community and great concern about the dangerous prejudice my own teenage trans granddaughter can face, I was ready to be outraged. But in truth, I felt that the intent of his routine was to shine a light on the hate and prejudice. I read a lot of the criticism, such as this New York Times opinion piece by Roxane Gay, who I much admire, but still wasn’t convinced. I was more moved by the fact that there was a controversy, that many in the trans community, including some with direct ties to the person at the center of one of his bits, were supportive of Chappelle.
The problem with intent, of course, is that you can’t really confine your argument to the intention of the performer. There is also the intent of the listener, and in this internet/social media age, comedy routines are chopped into short clips and shared. A complete routine by Chappelle, performed to an audience with an interest in his comedy, might send one message. But a short clip edited out of context and shared in an anti-trans chat room may indeed reinforce prejudice and even promote violence. And so, is there a danger in edgy humor?
There is no easy answer, but still, overall I tend to believe that just about anything is grist for humor. Writers and comedians should be free to push the edges. Dark humor, whether in books, movies or comedy routines, can be healing, instructive and uniting. The more tense the subject, the more it may benefit from humor.
Both of these authors offer strong defenses of the need for dark humor, the freedom to be able to push boundaries. Both offer discussions of many familiar dust-ups, such as the aforementioned Joan Rivers and Dave Chappelle incidents. We have the Tosh.O rape joke controversy, the Roseanne Barr racist tweet, and even Will Smith slapping Chris Rock over a joke at the Oscars. Kat Timpf uses the hashtag #deadbabyjokes early in her book. Jena Friedman has an entire chapter entitled “Dead Baby Jokes, or How to Talk to a Fetus Lawyer.” And yes, it includes dead baby jokes.
As edgy and provocative as dead baby jokes may sound, they’re also completely innocuous. Unlike racist jokes, which can serve to normalize prejudicial views, there’s no danger in telling a joke about some hypothetical baby in a blender. If countless studies have shown that violent video games don’t harm kids, I can’t imagine morbid, equal-opportunity one-liners do either. If anything, joking about a dead baby is far better for society than joking about a live one, and by a live baby, I mean Donald Trump….
Honestly, it’s a shame, when you think about it: Where might we be now if more kids online had been able to use dead baby jokes to steer their peers away from getting sucked down racist, fascist rabbit holes.
I found both books very interesting and very challenging, and they truly reinforce each other, even while coming from different ends of the political spectrum. Both books are also memoirs of sorts, with lots of material drawn from their own lives. Sometimes, I would forget whether the book I was reading was the one by the conservative or the liberal. I thought it might be fun to end with a short quiz. Here are six quotes from the books. Can you tell whether the quote is from A) conservative Kat Timpf, or B) liberal Jena Friedman? Answers below.
1. “Whenever anyone asks what inspired me to go into comedy, my answer is always the same: 9/11. Watching people jump to their deaths on live TV just as I was about to enter my first year of college had a traumatizing effect on me and my entire generation. It made me realize that life is short and random and sometimes tragic and that I didn’t want to die in a business suit.”
2. “My first character [in an American Girl doll parody] was Fallujah Jones, an Iraq war refugee “with a strong spirit and survival instincts” (they all had that), who fled to America after the US military attacked her Baghdad elementary school playground in search of terrorists believed to have set up shop in the jungle gym. In the sketch, Fallujah was marketed to a little girl in the Chicago suburb of Peoria, who could learn about “Western neo-imperialism from the safety and comfort of her pink-and-white Laura Ashley bedroom.””
3. “I have a dead mom. And right after she died, I really felt like I had it the worst, but then I was on Facebook and I saw someone had posted this picture of a bouquet of flowers with the caption “Rest in Peace Sara...2000-2015. Such a tragedy.” And I said to myself: “Oh my God, only fifteen? That’s so sad! I’ve gone through nothing. And then, I keep clicking through the photos, and I realize Sara...is a fucking dog. Like, a big dog too, like a German Shepherd. A German Shepherd dying at fifteen is not a tragedy. That’s fucking remarkable.”
4. “The first sketch I pitched was a darkly comedic piece about date rape. The joke was that instead of saying the word “rape,” the character in the scene said the word “duke” in its place. This was around the time of the Duke lacrosse scandal, and I thought “date duke” might catch on as a clever euphemism.”
5. “If you had someone close to you die, let me ask you this question: Do you remember a single card that made you feel better after it happened? Do you remember what any of them said? Did you even bother to read any of them? I hope you didn’t, because if you did, it probably just made you feel worse. When you are feeling devastated beyond hope, the last thing you want to look at is some kind of flowery bullshit, embossed in gold on a piece of parchment.”
6. “I defended Kathy Griffin’s right to publish that photo [of herself holding Donald Trump’s severed head] at the time, and that’s not just because I enjoyed so many episodes of My Life on the D-List. (Even though I certainly did.) It also wasn’t because I loved that image, because I actually thought it was pretty gross….To me, it’s more important to live in a culture wherein a person, any person, doesn’t have to worry that his or her attempt at communication or humor will result in the complete annihilation of their entire life.”
Answers to the quiz: 1: B. 2: B. 3: A. 4: B. 5: A. 6: A.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington. Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history—how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal—is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.
- Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, by Julia Lee. When Julia was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she? This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers—not through studying Victorian literature, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery.
- Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy. According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, Professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires.
Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world’s major religions.
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The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, by Peter Frankopan. Or maybe it wasn’t the disease...it was the climate that shaped human history. Climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us. Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century.
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A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds, by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal. Three years ago, headlines delivered shocking news: nearly three billion birds in North America have vanished over the past fifty years. No species has been spared, from the most delicate jeweled hummingbirds to scrappy black crows, from a rainbow of warblers to common birds such as owls and sparrows. For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.
- The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann. This sounds like a small, obscure story, but given the writing prowess of Grann, whose Killers of the Flower Moon was excellent, I’d give it a go. It’s billed as a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story.
- Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe, by Philip Plait. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel the universe? How would Saturn’s rings look from a spaceship sailing just above them? If you were falling into a black hole, what’s the last thing you’d see before getting spaghettified? Experience the sudden onset of lunar nightfall, the disorientation of walking—or, rather, shuffling—when you weigh almost nothing, the irritation of jagged regolith dust. Glimpse the frigid mountains and plains of Pluto and the cake-like exterior of a comet called 67P. On a planet trillions of miles from Earth, glance down to see the strange, beautiful shadows cast by a hundred thousand stars.
- The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos, by Jaime Green. And while sightseeing the universe, maybe you’ll meet someone! One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets. Along the way, she interweaves insights from science fiction writers who construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists. Incorporating expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry, and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek to Arrival, The Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?
- Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint, by Lee Durkee. Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee's fascinating memoir about an obsession gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee's own unrelenting search-via X-ray and infrared technologies-for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with spectral technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries plaguing the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee takes us from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the image of the Bard. A lively, bizarre, and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is as entertaining as it is rigorous and sheds new light on one of history's greatest cultural and literary icons.
- Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions, by Kate Cooper. While many know of Saint Augustine and his Confessions, few are aware of how his life and thought were influenced by women. Queens of a Fallen World tells a story of betrayal, love, and ambition in the ancient world as seen through a woman's eyes. Historian Kate Cooper introduces us to four women whose hopes and plans collided in Augustine's early adulthood: his mother, Monnica of Thagaste; his lover; his fiancée; and Justina, the troubled empress of ancient Rome. Drawing upon their depictions in the Confessions, Cooper skilfully reconstructs their lives against the backdrop of their fourth-century society. Though they came from different walks of life, each found her own way of prevailing in a world ruled by men.
- My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir, by Vanessa Schneider, translated by Molly Ringwold.
The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later. To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny. Unsentimental and suffused with deep love, My Cousin Maria Schneider is the story of a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
