What makes something funny? Philosophers debate the question to no end, as they do the meaning of love, because humor, like love, reflects the complexity of human life in all its glory and misery.
And senses of humor vary as much as susceptibility to the attractions of love. I find Jerry Seinfeld’s sidekick George Constanza’s antics to be quite amusing, but my wife (whom I love, and who can be very funny, by the way, sometimes intentionally) finds him unbearably annoying.
But one constant in the theory of funniness is the comic effect of the collapse of the great into the ridiculous — the classic slip on the banana peel, especially when the subject is pompous, puffed-up, self-important. Our laughter at such a mishap expresses a kind of relief of tension and a release from an illusion, an illusion supported by the authority of respectable opinion. When something becomes an acceptable subject of laughter, that means the authority and prestige that are maintaining the illusion have become vulnerable. This is not a trivial matter morally and politically, because the authority of shared beliefs defines the very contours and boundaries of a society. There are always some things that are sacred, some things you’re not allowed to make fun of.
At this very moment, some sacred cows are becoming, well, just plain cows. The process of desacralization is by definition untidy, even in some cases rightly reprehensible. The brave energy of comedy does not carefully distinguish its more and less deserving targets, and it does not construct an alternative respectability to the one it is demolishing; that is someone else’s job. Comedy on a grand scale is subversive and liberating; it doesn’t open a little window to let in the fresh air, it breaks down a wall.
You could see the walls crumbling in the perplexed scowls worn on the faces of celebrities being taken down several notches by Ricky Gervais last Sunday at the Golden Globe Awards. If (like me) you didn’t hear the wicked broadsides live, you can read them online in a hundred places. I suppose this was my favorite, and the most comprehensive take down: “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. …”
This takes aim at the whole super-inflated bubble of Hollywood’s moral preening, but also, beyond Hollywood, at the stifling cultural authority of “wokeness” in general. And the poor little Swedish girl who is being abused by being cast as a secular prophet is the perfect example of what is ridiculous in this authority.
Gervais’ takedown involves more than poking at hypocrisy, a worthy and eternal theme in humor. This is comic liberation on a grand scale because it takes aim at grotesque contradictions in the ruling ideology itself. This was seen nicely by Brendan O’Neill at Spectator-USA: “People … are sick of being lectured about their carbon footprint by alarmingly rich celebs who fly about in private jets. People (have) had enough of being instructed on the importance of feminism by an industry saturated with sexual madness. People … don’t take kindly to being told to use PC language and the correct pronouns by people who make movies containing graphic violence and ceaseless expletives. …”
Such contradictions were at the heart of another comic bull-dozing of wokeness: Dave Chappelle’s “controversial” Netflix show, “Sticks and Stones” (Rotten Tomatoes rating: Critics give it 35%, the people give it 99%). I have watched it, so you won’t have to subject yourself to the verbal violence. There are some blazing insights nested in the profanities — or I should say, some outbreaks of real moral sensibility, or at least common sense, which finally comes to the same thing.
Chappelle’s riff on abortion was monumental. He starts off gently: First, he says he’s not for it, then he says he’s OK with it, and it’s not a man’s business ... and then he turns it around and says, “just don’t ask me to pay for it ... if you’ve got a right to kill it, I at least have a right to abandon it (note the “it”). “My money, my choice.” But then comes the little-reported kicker, delivered like a throw-away line. The audience wasn’t able to digest it, I sensed, but it reframes everything and is the most politically incorrect thing Chappelle said: “Well then, if I’m wrong, then maybe we’re both wrong.” (That is, maybe the unborn person is not an “it,” and maybe we don’t have the right to dispose of him or her.)
Chappelle’s monologue is a nonstop thumb in the eye of the reigning liberal-progressive (“woke”) ideology. And this is very good news, because it is another clear sign that the solid front of progressivism is breaking down. What you can laugh at is no longer obvious or sacred. The emperor’s nakedness has just been publicly acknowledged. The taunts of Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle are the sound of the walls of woke orthodoxy cracking.
Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His views are his own.