Every tuesday night at a Vancouver restaurant called The Kino, comedians take the stage to work on their routines, to practise before bringing an act somewhere bigger. For a while, The Kino’s biggest claim to fame was that, one evening a few years back and before all the sexual misconduct allegations against him came to light, Louis C. K. stopped by for an impromptu set. The host doesn’t brag about that anymore.
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Sometimes, Tuesdays at The Kino have meant gritting my teeth in the audience as bro comics rattle through lukewarm bits about their girlfriends talking too much or shopping obsessively. In this brand of comedy, women are, at best, aliens to be theorized about by the Jerry Seinfelds of the world; at worst, we become the objects of violent fantasies. These sorts of jokes turned me off of mainstream stand-up for much of my life, but what has kept me coming back to The Kino is the occasional bit of gold. Recently, that came in the form of a set by Sophie Buddle, a twenty-five-year-old comic whose day job is writing for the cbc’s satirical news show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Between jokes about her sex life and Vancouver’s murderous crow population, Buddle isn’t afraid to poke at serious topics. She does one bit about the children of millennials: “Our kids are going to be the first generation of kids that can be whatever they want, sexually and, like, gender-wise. And that’s it—you know, we’re not going to have money to, like, feed them.” During one set, at the SiriusXM Top Comic competition, she veered into the #MeToo movement, bringing up the idea that those kids of millennials will be the first generation to be properly taught about consent. “I like that,” she quipped, before looking down at the people crowded around the narrow stage. “Big frown up front from this man,” she noted, gesturing to one person in particular. His obvious discomfort became a running gag during her next bit, about rape culture.
The relationship between a comedian and their audience is a complicated one. Finnish anthropologist-turned-comedian Marianna Keisalo argues that the line between the performer’s onstage persona and their real identity is often incredibly thin. It’s the kind of thing you learn in Comedy 101: if there’s something unusual about you, acknowledge it and move on. For a long time in Canada and the United States, “unusual” applied to anyone not straight, white, cisgender, or male. Even stars that didn’t fit this mould, like Joan Rivers or Richard Pryor, had to work harder to get audiences onboard. Pushing the wrong crowd to an uncomfortable place often meant losing the room entirely.
But, in recent years, audiences have been changing. Today, podcasting, streaming, and social media are bringing large and diverse audiences to comedians who might once have been dismissed as “niche.” A handful of years ago, writer Christopher Hitchens and comedian Adam Carolla were proclaiming that women could never be as funny as men. Those arguments now seem quaint: in the past five years, there have been four acclaimed Netflix specials featuring pregnant women alone (Ali Wong, Natasha Leggero, Amy Schumer, and Ali Wong again). In fact, many of the most exciting new performers are women, people of colour, lgbtq people, or some combination thereof, bringing with them a raft of underexplored experiences that are transforming the nature of comedy.
But this shift has also meant a growing divide. On one side, new faces have meant less tolerance for the flippant bigotry that has long been a part of stand-up—Shane Gillis, for example, recently lost a spot on Saturday Night Live after people called out his history of using homophobic and racist slurs. On the other side—which includes some of the biggest names in the business, like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, and Ricky Gervais—comedians complain that people can no longer take a joke and that the art is losing its edge because of what they dismiss as “cancel culture.” It doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds that comedy is changing, and though they might have once been provocative or dangerous, they are now far from the cutting edge.
Tin lorica likes to test the room with a joke. “My name is Tin,” they announce in a deadpan voice. “I use they/them pronouns, in case you want to talk shit about me after the show.” The amount of laughter defines the rest of the set: a few nervous giggles mean a turn toward “universal” jokes about life as a barista; gales of laughter allow Lorica to move on to their bit about why they quit dating white women. “That one I have to address,” Lorica explains over coffee one afternoon in Vancouver. For certain crowds—like those attending Yellow Fever, the all-Asian lineup that Lorica co-produced for Just for Laughs Northwest, or Millennial Line, the monthly show they co-host—jokes about pronouns and queer-dating perils generally get a warm reception. But for other audiences? “I’m about to alienate half the room,” Lorica explains.
Not too long ago, comedians like Lorica might have struggled to perform in front of large crowds. Recently, however, a growing cohort of artists is finding success in pushing back against comedy’s exclusionary history. In her 2018 Netflix special, Nanette, Hannah Gadsby announces that she is quitting comedy, then spends her time onstage exploring the violence she experienced growing up as a non-gender-conforming lesbian in Tasmania. Early in her career, Gadsby learned that the best way to make audiences comfortable with her appearance was to ply familiar stereotypes, like that old saw about lesbians having no sense of humour. Over time, she realized this habit was doing her and her community more harm than good. “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins?” she asks her audience. “It’s not humility—it’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore, not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.”
By choosing to no longer capitulate to her audiences’ prejudices, Gadsby risked losing them. But, in Nanette, she succeeds magnificently, and the special received wide acclaim. “Nanette isn’t just brilliantly written, or emotionally honest,” gushed Peter Rubin in Wired. “It’s challenging.”
This new willingness to be critical of comedy’s tendency to pick on marginalized identities has led some more-established performers to think of themselves as being “bullied,” as Ricky Gervais, star of the UK’s The Office, has put it. “It’s a slippery slope,” he said in one interview. “[If] you start going by these rules—what it’s okay to joke about—it’s a nonsense.” According to Gervais, if comedians start limiting themselves, thinking they can’t make jokes about certain subjects, the range of acceptable areas will narrow and narrow, and soon, joking about anything will be off the table. But I think this conflict really goes back to the issue of persona. Gervais seems to think of himself as an underdog, but he’s a multimillionaire with a slew of TV shows to his name. He’s nothing if not part of the establishment—and seeing him go on about Twitter users and other comics criticizing his work just isn’t that funny.
As another example, take Louis C. K. For many years, C. K. reigned on TV and the stage as a schlubby philosopher, someone who played around with darkness in order to help audiences find their better selves. As Marianna Keisalo pointed out in a 2016 essay, C. K.’s more violent jokes worked because “his demeanor and overall comportment . . . suggest he is not actually a violent man: the reversals into violence are reversible.” Then, in 2017, the news came out that C. K. had been masturbating in front of women without their consent, and that shell of trustworthiness was shattered. Those same jokes would no longer land.
To a lesser extent, a similar phenomenon has happened with the once-radical Dave Chappelle. In the early 2000s, he delved head on into the racial politics of America in both his stand-up and the acclaimed Chappelle’s Show; in his latest special, Sticks & Stones, he spends a lot of time uncritically plumbing his relationships with his famous, wealthy friends. Structurally, his jokes are still strong, but his habit of poking fun at Michael Jackson’s accusers and his tirades about the imagined cultural power of the lgbtq community feel more self-serving than scathing.
His newer material about transgender people has drawn particular ire. In a Q&A at the end of Sticks & Stones, Chappelle responds to his critics with a story about meeting a trans woman named Daphne, herself an aspiring comedian, after one of his shows. As Chappelle tells it, Daphne told him how much she loves his work and how she thinks of his jokes as normalizing transgender people. The anecdote ends with the two making out, as if to illustrate how cool Chappelle is with trans women. It’s a story designed to absolve him of any responsibility for his jokes, but the punchline, which has him reaching under the woman’s skirt, relies on the same obsession with trans women’s genitalia found everywhere in our culture. Like the white people who went around repeating Chappelle’s most famous lines in the 2000s, oblivious to the cultural criticisms his words contained, it doesn’t seem to occur to Chappelle that the history of cisgender people making jokes about trans women is wrapped up in terrible violence that continues today. Last October, shortly after identifying herself as the woman in Chappelle’s story, Daphne Dorman died by suicide.
Fans still show up in droves to see Chappelle and Gervais perform. They even show up for Louis C. K., who is currently on tour (though, in his case, they come in smaller numbers). But audiences don’t pack their venues or watch them on Netflix to be challenged or to see groundbreaking stand-up; they go for the same reason people attend classic-rock reunion tours: to have their worldview reflected and reinforced by familiar faces. What these comedians are doing today doesn’t pose a threat to them or to traditional audiences. It’s profoundly, comfortingly safe.
There is no shortage of performers today who rattle cages, carrying on the tradition of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, and Margaret Cho. In Douglas, Gadsby’s most recent tour (which will eventually become her second Netflix special), she does a bit about anti-vaxers, those truthers who believe the conspiracy theory that vaccination leads to autism. As an autistic person herself, Gadsby takes the issue personally, and the bit culminates in a glorious deluge of expletives at the selfishness of those who would choose their child’s imagined health over the return of terrible diseases. In February, when I saw Gadsby perform the bit at Vancouver’s Orpheum theatre, I noticed a woman across the aisle go still, her face screwed up in an expression of discomfort and anger. I saw the same reaction from a man in front of me when Gadsby did a blistering bit about golf.
If Gadsby seems too tame, consider the absurdist humour of Patti Harrison, best known as the mercurial office assistant on TV’s Shrill. Harrison’s Twitter account is one of the most hilariously scabrous feeds I’ve had the pleasure of following. One recent skit, a faux leaked sex tape, sees her being furiously ploughed by an off-camera beau while stifling a sneeze, making grotesque faces, and picking her nose.
Comedy has changed, but comedy has always been changing—edginess wouldn’t be edgy if it stood still. Marc Maron may have outlined the state of stand-up best in a recent episode of his podcast, wtf: “There are still lines to be rode if you like to ride a line . . . If you want to take chances, you can still take chances. Really, the only thing that’s off the table, culturally, at this juncture, and not even entirely, is shamelessly punching down for the sheer joy of hurting people, for the sheer excitement and laughter that some people get from causing people pain, from making people uncomfortable, from making people feel excluded.” There will be no more polite giggles, no more shrugs and sighs of “boys will be boys.” It’s no longer possible to pretend we’re not in the room.
