If you have a menial job in today’s economy and are under the age of 40, you likely listen to podcasts. If you listen to a large amount of podcasts, a large percentage of them are likely comedy or comedy-related. If they are comedy or comedy-related, they are likely hosted by stand-up comedians. Since I find myself in this position, I have begun to think over my position on standup comedy. What is standup? What is its end? What purpose does it serve in a broader political context? Finally, is it justified either theoretically or in our particular circumstance i.e. is it good for us in the here and now or only in the abstract?

Standup comedy is, according to Wikipedia, “a comedic performance to a live audience in which a performer addresses the audience directly from the stage.” We might think that comedic performances are justified so long as their humor does not a) rest on a genuine supposition of falsehoods either moral or theoretical and b) do not insult or undermine legitimate authority. However, this seems presumptuous since because truth and authority are matters of debate in our society at almost every level, but clearly these claims are reasonable if a society contains both a coherent moral standard for itself and, through that standard, a legitimate authority. Both claims rest on the presupposition that comedy is good at one time and not another, and what is at the base of the claim that comedy is good generally is the supposition that man is a risible animal i.e. man, through is reason or maybe in spite of it, is an animal that laughs and, furthermore, laughter is a perfection of the human person. It is good that man laughs. What the two givens posit are qualifiers for laughter: man ought to laugh at some things and not others, specifically sound morals or legitimate authority. For the sake of our argument, however, we might want to limit ourselves to the claim that comedy is rooted in man’s nature and is therefore good for man, what we need to determine is whether comedy—specifically standup comedy as it has arisen since the 1960’s in the US—presupposes that it is good to laugh at some things and not others. What is clear is that standup comedy is a solo rhetorical performance that pursues laughter as a good of the human person. This does not mean that we have established the limits of comedy—whether comedy can be good or bad—or whether standup as we know it cares whether the content of the comedy is good for the audience or the comic to either hear or perform respectively.

Comedy’s end, then, is laughter of one kind or another. Standup is one way of doing that. I have often thought of standup as a kind of out-sourcing of a certain social role: rather than finding an interesting friend who makes good jokes and hanging out with him, American citizens of the last 70 years instead taken to paying someone else to make the same kind of jokes only in a condensed format. Instead of spending the time learning the ins-and-outs of a particular social group such that they can determine who they find funny and cultivating a friendship with them—something which is much less technical and more natural than my stiff prose can indicate—Americans spend money to get a year’s worth of good jokes in an hour or so. Presumably they do this for one of two reasons: either their social groups are so boring to start with that they feel compelled to pay comedians to inject some humor into their drab existence, or the condensed format of stand-up made the role of the funny guy seem drab by comparison i.e. they simply spent money on a good product, regardless of the role of the funny friend. I suspect that the answer is some complicated blend of the two, but it seems clear that standup’s inception, at least, was not a result of the first reason. The first popular—and, possibly, greatest comedian, depending on who you ask—was Richard Pryor, who got his start in the black community. From my experience of black folk, they do not live lives that could in any way be described as “drab”: they are by far the funniest people you can sling dirt with. Therefore I don’t think it likely that the black community gave birth to standup for the first reason, but rather for the second: Pryor and those like him “elevated” their humor to a new level which they could not reach in their daily lives even with the role of the funny guy. The first reason, I suspect, really applies to the white appreciation of standup which drove it into public consciousness in the 70’s and 80’s. The white population in America slowly realized that they craved the kind of comedy which Pryor embodied: bold, honest, and flippant towards the status quo. This could be alternatively described as crass, profane, disrespectful and immoral comedy, but we will discuss that later. What is important is that both answers are true for different reasons: the black community fostered standup because comedy is a prominent good in the function of community, while the white population propelled standup to common acceptance because it brought life—the life suggested by the idea of man qua risible animal—into the drabness suggested by the word “population.” In other words, the white population was reminded of its shared human nature with the black community through comedy. The end of standup comedy is laughter, and the white population had forgotten how to laugh. The question remains, however, whether or not standup itself presupposes any limit to what one may laugh at, for this is crucial to understanding whether or not standup can have a political purpose.

It is obvious that laughter is good for the human person under the conception of risible man. Given that man is not as static as his concept, however, it is clear that man will have the ability to laugh at things which he ought not laugh at: man can “swerve” from his end through a misapplication of his will. Thus it is clear that man must laugh at some things and not others, and, further, it is clear that there is a difference between not laughing at something for prudential reasons and not laughing at something for principled reasons. It might be funny in principle for a philosophy professor to absentmindedly knock a computer off a desk while describing his oblivious tendencies, for instance, but it would be imprudent to laugh at him to his face given his power over your grades. The two presuppositions I outlined in my second paragraph can be taken in both senses: it might or might not be permissible in principle to laugh at morals or authority, but nevertheless imprudent to do so and therefore, in a certain sense, “wrong”: man as a rational animal ought to be prudent and to be imprudent while pursuing his end qua risible would be doing violence to his unified end as man. In either case it is necessary that man laugh at some things and not others.

To clarify, I am pointing out that there are two conceptions of man wherein prudence and risibility interact in such a way that they agree that man ought to laugh at some things and not others i.e. they agree that unqualified laughter is, in some sense, wrong or bad. They differ in that one conception takes laughter as an end to be pursued so long as it is prudent, while the other takes laughter to be pursued so long as it is prudent and good. One man laughs at all things except when it is prudent not to, while the other laughs when it is prudent to do so and it is something to be laughed at. For our class, we might say that it is simply prudent not to laugh at someone’s speech impediment, but we will say it is neither prudent nor good to laugh at the death of an infant. We are unquestionably followers of the second conception. I am merely indicating that we might unwittingly find ourselves in league with those who hold to the first and that this difference will only make itself apparent when discussing standup as I do here.

Regardless of this split, it is clear that if anyone holds to man as risible then they will, if they are to be consistent, hold that laughter is not an unqualified good i.e. it will be at least prudent, if not prudent and good, to laugh at some things and not others. It is my contention that standup as it has arisen and as it exists now is inconsistent in both senses: all standup—and in this sense I draw no distinction between comedians and audience—presupposes that whatever makes people laugh is self-justifying. If I am correct in this, then it only serves a destabilizing role in society and is not justified either in principle or in our particular circumstance. Let us return to Richard Pryor.

Pryor was, in no sense of the term, a good person. He was a drunk, a liar, an adulterer, an addict, and sexual deviant. If there was some kind of pleasure available to him, he likely tried it and it is unclear if he ever felt any shame or regret about having done any of it. However, he could make people laugh. Rather than using this well, he used it to support his vices. In characterizing him in this way, I am standing firmly under the conception that it is permissible to laugh when it is prudent and good to do so: Pryor evidently held to little or anything being good besides his ability to make others laugh at whatever he wished them to laugh at. In doing so, he did not show himself to be prudent in the fullest sense, at least insofar as we should not accustom people to laughing at anything for any reason but at least only at things when it is prudent to do so, because those that hold everything to be potentially the butt of a joke are not likely to submit to any kind of regulation either moral or political. From his bearing and behavior his audience learned not only that anything could be laughed at but also that whatever it is that you are good at you ought to use indiscriminately to attain the completion of your indiscriminate desires. The people—both white and black—were exposed, through Richard Pryor and those that followed him, to the possibility of trading their virtue for short-term gratification, and the root of that exposure was lack of consideration as whether it was prudent or good to laugh at anything whatsoever. Thus while the broader turn towards standup contains a genuine recognition of man qua risible, it also contains a deeper and more dangerous turn towards man as unexamined and vicious. So long as standup is rooted in the idea of laughter as self-justifying, it remains wrong both in principle and in our particular circumstance. A good man’s laugh is worth any number of degenerates’ laughter, regardless of comedians’ opinion on the subject.