Father’s Day

So, Sunday was Father’s Day. And I got a really… weird text.

It was from someone I don’t talk to very often- we had worked together on some art projects a long long long time ago. The text simply said “Happy Father’s Day!” and had a link to an episode of Arthur on some small domain.

Yeah, that Arthur. The one you thought stopped airing twenty years ago until it was revealed Mr. Ratburn got married.

Only, it wasn’t really Arthur. It was dubbed over by a couple of jackasses and was basically them going “fuck” and “shit” and using a lot of shitty, homophobic language (and why I haven’t shared the link here).

Part of me actually admired how awful it was- which was clearly the intent- but I was actually offended. Not just by the slew of anti-queer slurs being casually tossed around- which is bad enough that it speaks for itself- but from the perspective of an idiot who writes jokes online.

It was lazy. And that pissed me off.

“Fuck my ass and call me Grandpa,” the video said. There wasn’t any real context for this, it didn’t mean anything- it was just “haha, the cute cartoon from your childhood has bad words in it!” Maybe a minute later, there was a cheap, sort-of payoff to that joke, but it was just as cheap as its setup.

I was prepared to dismiss it as just another piece of internet trash, but then I had a dream that night. In this dream, I was in some random apartment building, huddled around a TV with a bunch of my friends, and we were watching some weird variation on the Daily Show- with Jon Stewart still as the host. In this fictional Daily Show, everyone on screen was just hurling insults at each other.

And nobody was laughing.

We were all just kind of looking at the screen, then each other awkwardly, then back at the screen, wondering when the good part was coming. And it never came.

And since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy. I’m proud to call myself an idiot who writes internet jokes and stories. And while they’re all based on real interactions, they’re all tweaked. Tailored to the medium (Facebook, blog, whatever), altered to have clearer context or maybe I polished up the punch line a little bit. And I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. In so doing, I feel like I have a finger on the trends of comedy as a whole, and I’ve been making some observations.

A lot of people- generally white men my age or older- still think that being “politically incorrect” by stepping up on stage and going “COCK! PUSSY!” gets some sort of shock value from the audience. “It’s a naughty word,” they think, “And I’m a goddamn rebel!”

But they’re not rebelling against anything. That’s the norm. That’s what I grew up watching on Comedy Central. That’s not innovative, weird, or even shocking. It’s just cock and pussy.

The real value, the real innovation in comedy right now is coming from the weird parts of the internet. Surreal memes, wholesome memes- look at this crazy shit right here. I saw this on reddit last week and I chuckle every time I look at it.

What does this even mean? It’s wild, it’s absurdist, and I love it. This kind of stuff is resonating with audiences because audiences are tired of laughing at peoples’ expense. There’s no butt of the joke here- the closest thing you could call a victim would be Generic Corporate Executive Officer-Man… but that’s a real stretch.

This is a great trend, and I’m glad to see comedians- either stand-up or sit-at-a-desk-and-make-dumb-memes are trending away from punching down. Punching down, is the laziest, most boring and innovation-free comedy there is, and I’m not here for it.

All of this to say, I hope I’m doing better than cheap fan-dubs of Arthur. I think I am. I get juuuuuust enough feedback on my work that I’m confident I’m not just some shithead. I don’t want to be a shithead.

Oh, rats. This post is 37 minutes overdue. I’M LATE FOR BUSINESS

-M