Photo by Cynthia Larsen
Why Has Comedy Stopped Being a Laughing Matter?
If laughter’s the best medicine, why’s it turned to cough syrup?
By Ed Goldman
Comedian/writer/director Louis C.K. is in the middle of an apparently successful rehab tour to give audiences a chance to empathize with the suffering he brought on himself when a variety of his actions made him a temporary pariah.
The actions included pleasuring himself in somewhat incongruous venues, such as in public planter boxes and in front of colleagues. Several women accused him of inappropriate behavior or worse. No word yet on whether the planter boxes have retained legal counsel.
Hysterical reacton
I’ve now watched C.K. do a winking mea culpa series of interviews on talk shows, in social media and a few major newspapers. Critics and reporters are burning up the cyberspace thesaurus to dig up synonyms for “courageous” and “resilient” when characterizing C.K.’s self-proclaimed new-and-improved version of him. Yet no one appears ready to make the following comment:
Louis CK isn’t especially funny. In fact, Louis C.K. was never especially funny. Obviously, this is a subjective remark. To paraphrase the great tagline for the movie “Alien” (“In space, no one can hear you scream”), in this space, everyone can hear me snark.
I realize it’s bad form for an alleged humorist to dis about another alleged one. But lately, I’ve been finding it difficult to hide my disappointment with the state of comedy. So I ask myself a few questions:
- Is the immensely talented Jimmy Fallon (whose impersonation of The Bee Gees’s Barry Gibb still slays me) funny when he isn’t portraying someone else? And given the way he interacts with guests on his show, should he consider rechristening himself Jimmy Fawnin’?
- Do you laugh uproariously at Jimmy Kimmel or just kind of like him because he was a victim of our President’s 100-year war on everything and seems like a nice guy?
- Are you as pleased with Stephen Colbert as Stephen Colbert seems to be—especially now that the selfsame President has arranged for Colbert’s own show to end this coming May? (And has Colbert now surpassed the late Johnny Carson’s record for weekdays off?) Listen, I’m no fan of Trump’s, as even an occasional reader of this column would notice. Making fun of Trump’s hair, policies and utterances is fair game because Trump does all of those deliberately. But calling out a septuagenarian for having swollen ankles, gnarly hands, stubby fingers and much worse, anatomically, seems a little like the sick joke about the epileptic guy who has a fit at a theme park, causing 30 people to jump on him in the belief he’s a new ride. I had a cousin who suffered from epilepsy. There was nothing remotely funny about her seizures.
- Which of these top-dollar comics actually make you laugh—Bill Burr, Pete Holmes, Hannibal Buress, Rory Scovel, Dave Chappell and Whoopi Goldberg? For some reason, Chappell and Goldberg now think of themselves as wise and even pious, which is what slowed down the career of the late (and once-hilarious), Dick Gregory. Chappell does make some solid, if not especially risible or trenchant observations. Goldberg is simply a pompous idiot. And will someone tell her and House Speaker Chuck Schumer that peering over your glasses is a child’s idea of looking smart?
5. Bonus question: How many of you have even heard of Holmes, Buress and Scovel?
People who continue to make me laugh include Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres (her first HBO concert was brilliant), Billy Crystal, Jon Stewart (except when his own material supposedly breaks him up), Martin Short (always) and Steve Martin (ditto). Lewis Black, the apoplectic commentator, is hilarious but I always fear for his blood pressure. I’d include Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig on the list of people who always bring the funny, as comics say, but I tend to think of them more as actors than as standups.
In closing (out of town, as comics also like to say), I’ll confess that very early in my journey to the center of the earth (i.e., middle age), I did occasional standup comedy at the Armed Forces YMCA in Long Beach, which was affiliated with the USO. Sometimes I slew—but I had to remind myself that this was a captive audience of servicemen on their way to Vietnam at the height of our un-declared war there. They had a desperate need to laugh and I desperately accommodated them.
But when I tried out some of the same routine at an “open mic” night in a Pasadena club, I didn’t go onstage until 3 a.m. There were four or five people left in the audience; they didn’t find me the least bit amusing, unless snoring is how people in Pasadena signal their enjoyment of entertainers.
My friend Phil, who drove there with me that night, asked what I thought the problem had been. “I wasn’t funny,” I said. Weirdly, that made him laugh like hell.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
