I Get It and Its Not Funny
Three comics sabbatum around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. "Don't do what's in your gut," Zoltan Kaszas said. "Better rubber than sorry," Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused well-nigh the beginning time he'd ever washed stand up-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend canker and banging his grandma. That was out.
This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the respond. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a vicious wintertime for the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), to sell themselves and their comedy on the higher circuit. Representatives of more than than 350 colleges had come up as well, to book comics, musicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists, magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, and every kind of boat human action, inspirational speaker, and one-trick pony you could imagine for the next academic year.
For the comics, the higher circuit offers a lucrative culling to Chuckle Hut gigs out on the pitiless road, spots that pay a couple hundred bucks and a complimentary night in whatsoever squat the gild owner uses to warehouse out-of-town talent. College gigs pay easily a grand a night—often much more—and they can come up in a firecracker string, with relatively brusque drives between schools, each hour-long performance paid for (without a moment'due south ugliness or hesitation) by a friendly educatee-activities kid holding out a check and hoping for a selfie. For all these reasons, thousands of comics dream of being invited to the convention.
The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students' taste in amusement was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the appurtenances in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent run a risk-costless, comedy that could non trigger or upset or mildly trouble a unmarried educatee. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and assailment that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft pelting, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and embark a dreamless sleep—non text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.
Ii of the most respected American comedians, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, have discussed the unique problems that comics confront on college campuses. In November, Rock told Frank Rich in an interview for New York magazine that he no longer plays colleges, because they're "too conservative." He didn't necessarily mean that the students were Republican; he meant that they were far too eager "not to offend everyone." In college gigs, he said, "you tin't even be offensive on your fashion to existence inoffensive." Then, in June, Seinfeld reopened the debate—and set up off a frenzied round of op-eds—when he said in a radio interview that comics warn him not to "become near colleges—they're and so PC."
When I attended the convention in Minneapolis in Feb, I saw aplenty testify of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, every bit well every bit another, not unrelated gene: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this grapheme's evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this alter, information technology helps to retrieve of college non as an establishment of scholarly pursuit but equally the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years go—and and so to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers every bit an early checkout. Keeping concur of that child for all four years has become a primal obsession of the college-ed-industrial complex. How practice you lot do it? In part, by importing plenty jesters and bards to keep him from wandering abroad to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.
Merely which jesters, which bards? Ones who can handle the challenge. Because when you put all of these forces together—political definiteness, coddling, and the need to keep kids at once amused and unoffended (not to mention the absence of a two-beverage minimum and its crowd-lubricating issue)—the black-box theater of an obscure liberal-arts higher deep in flyover territory may merely be the toughest comedy room in the land.
"You tin can't apply logic on these people," Geoff Keith told me over dinner at the Hilton, "or then they think you're a dick." He was about to walk through i of the frigid skyways connecting a cluster of downtown hotels to the Minneapolis Convention Center, where he would perform for 1,000 potential buyers, just he evinced not a trace of feet other than to glance at his iPhone now and then to make certain he wasn't late.
Keith is one of the kings of the college excursion. A few years ago, he was the most-booked college comic, playing 120 campuses. He charges $two,300 for a single performance.
Keith is 31, fast-witted and handsome, possessed of an acute and often witheringly precise ability to appraise people and situations. He rocketed into comedy at a young historic period; at 22 he spent a twelvemonth and a half on the road, performing with a popular headliner: Pablo Francisco, who permit him practice half an 60 minutes, and allowed him to tell filthy stories onstage. (Keith was a good-looking kid working big gigs in Vegas and Dallas and Chicago; he wasn't short on filthy stories.) For a while he was in danger of condign also dirty for mainstream audiences, only he'south smart and ambitious, so he toned downwards his material, put together a television reel, and sharpened his crowd work. He now has TV credits and a following. He lives in Los Angeles, where he kills at clubs, goes on auditions, and waits—impatiently, as do all the immature and talented people in Hollywood who take passed 30—for the large suspension.
Until so, there's the college market, and the logic problem. Trying to explain to these kids any of the fundamental truths of stand-up—from why information technology's non a good idea to agree a comedy show in the deli during lunch hour, to why jokes involving gay people aren't necessarily homophobic—is a nonstarter, and only serves to antagonize the customers. The logic problem is as well responsible for the fact that many of the comics at the convention weren't very funny, and several of those who were funny didn't go much work, despite garnering huge laughs and even continuing ovations.
A young gay man with a Broadway background named Kevin Yee sang novelty songs nearly his life, producing a delirium of affection from the audience. "We beloved you, Kevin!" a grouping of kids yelled between numbers. He invited students to the front of the auditorium for a "gay dance party," and they charged down to take part. His terminal song, about the shut relationship that can develop betwixt a gay man and his "sassy black friend," was a killer closer; the kids roared in delight, and several African American young women in the crowd seemed to be self-identifying equally sassy black friends. I causeless Yee would soon be barnstorming the state. But afterward, two white students from an Iowa higher shook their heads: no. He was "perpetuating stereotypes," one of them said, firmly. "We're a very forrad-thinking schoolhouse," she told me. "That thing about the 'sassy black friend'? That wouldn't piece of work for us." Many others, plainly, felt the aforementioned way: Yee concluded upwards with 18 bookings—a respectable showing, but hardly a reflection of the excitement in the room when he performed.
If your goal were simply to bring great comics to a college campus, information technology would be hands accomplished. You would assemble the schoolhouse's comedy nerds, give them a upkeep, and tell them to volume the best acts they could afford. But then y'all'd have Doug Stanhope explaining to religious kids that in that location's no God, or Dennis Miller telling an audition of social-justice warriors that France's efforts to limit junk food in schools are part of the country's "principal plan to raise healthier cowards." Y'all would have, in other words, performers whose desire is not to soothe an audience merely to unsettle it, performers who hew to Roseanne Barr's understanding of comedy: "I beloved stand up-up. I'm totally addicted to it," she once said. "It's gratis spoken language. It'due south all that'due south left."
College campuses have never been incubators for cracking stand-up; during the 1960s and '70s, schools didn't dedicate much money to bringing in entertainers, and by the fourth dimension they did, PC culture had taken off. This civilization—its noble aspirations and inevitable finish game—was everywhere credible at the convention. In the lavishly produced, 144-page brochure, I found a densely written block of text that began with a trumpet blast of idealism—"NACA is committed to advancing diversity development and the principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action through its respective programs"—but wound downward to a deadened fart of unintended consequences: "There is no intent to back up censorship."
Bringing great artists to colleges is not NACA'southward mission. Its mission involves presenting for potential employment on American campuses a group of entertainers whose work upholds a ready of ideas that has been codified by bureaucrats. And in the comedians' desperate attempts to grasp the realpolitik of the higher market—and to somehow reverse engineer an human activity catered to it—you lot could see why stand up-up is such a singular class: it is mercilessly ineffective as agitprop.
Because the inclination to hold a convention in Minneapolis in Feb is not widely shared, the convention middle was largely deserted and dystopian. Homeless men, some wearing hospital gowns and ID bracelets nether their parkas, slunk quietly inside to keep warm, although if they panhandled or menaced anyone they were bounced back onto the urban tundra past security guards. Vast expanses of the construction loomed in all directions, and empty escalators wheeled always up. During the day, "educational sessions" on topics of inexpressible tedium—"Moving ridge Goodbye to Low Volunteer Memory"—droned on, testament (as are the educational sessions of a hundred other conferences) to the fact that the growth field in higher instruction is non Elizabethan literature or organic chemical science only mid-level assistants.
All of this was enlivened—mightily—by the fact that the doors of the principal auditorium regularly swung open up for two-60 minutes diversity shows. These shows were like episodes of America's Got Talent—jolly and sparkly, sometimes diverting and sometimes boring—merely in contrast to the lectures on volunteer memory, the gloomy convention center, and the gelid urban center beyond, they came to seem like examples of the highest reaches of human accomplishment, and it was not mere journalistic zeal that had me thundering downwards the main aisle to grab a good seat for each new showcase.
The kids in the audience belonged to their schools' student-activities committees, and had thus been appointed the task of picking the paid entertainment for the next year. I found them, as a type, to be cheerful, helpful, rule-following, and nerdy. They were also—in the best sense of a loaded word—inclusive. "We don't desire to sponsor an outcome that would offend anyone," Courtney Bennett, the incoming president of the educatee-activities board at Western Michigan Academy, told me. The NACA kids were impossible non to like, although null about them suggested a natural talent for identifying original forms of artistic expression. They would cluster effectually their grown-upwardly directorate like flocks of ducklings to confab about the performers they had seen. Then, with the casual ease of people spending someone else'south money, they would apply an app to smash potential dates to the artists they liked. These were the buyers, and then: one half of the equation.
The entertainers were the other half. They had come up to the result on their own dime, and were trying to practise whatever it took to please these young people so that they could get some road work. Their first pace might have been to read the convention brochure. NACA, it explained, is dedicated to "promoting the importance" of "eliminating" any language that is "discriminatory or culturally insensitive."
O, Utopia. Why must your sugariness governance always turn and then quickly from the Edenic to the Stalinist? The college revolutions of the 1960s—the ones that gave rise to the social-justice warriors of today's campuses—were fueled by free spoken communication. Just in one case you've won a civilization war, free spoken communication is a nuisance, and "eliminating" linguistic communication becomes a necessity.
The process begins, every bit such processes always do, in a committee of "undisclosed members." In the fall, an anonymous group of staff and volunteers reviews hundreds of submission tapes to determine which performers will get to showcase their acts at the convention. What this seemed to boil downwardly to, when I looked at the slate of performers who had gotten a golden ticket, was that comics who fifty-fifty gestured toward the insensitive had been screened out, and those whose racial or ethnic background contributed to the diversity of the slate had been given special consideration.
At that place were comics of Nigerian, Afghan Pakistani, Indian, Hispanic, and Korean–African American heritage. Some were very skillful. Just others barely had the 15 minutes necessary for a showcase; information technology was hard to believe they would accept the hour needed for college work. Many of these younger artists thought that if they could just get the gigs off this audition, they could and so do their regular club act once they showed up on campus. They were mistaken. Tell a joke that upsets the kids, and the next morning the pupil-activities director is going to exist on the telephone: to your amanuensis, to NACA, and—more crucially—to his or her co-equals at the other iv colleges in the region that you booked.
Geoff Keith had counseled Chinedu Unaka and Feraz Ozel not only to piece of work clean, only also to confine any jokes about ethnicity to their ain heritage. Unaka delivered an original and interesting set about growing up black in Los Angeles, the son of Nigerian—not African American—parents; Ozel, whose family is Middle Eastern, besides did a bit about his cultural groundwork. They were both well received, but they earned few bookings. Who could predict how such jokes would get over back on campus? Zoltan Kaszas, on the other hand, did a cheerful, anodyne gear up almost Costco, camping, and pets. He was the breakout star of the convention. "Await at him," one educatee group's adviser said to me as more than 40 campus reps clamored for a visit from Kaszas. "His career just got made." Another victory for better-safe-than-deplorable.
Equally I listened to the kids hash out whom to invite, it became articulate that to go work, a comic had to be at once funny—genuinely funny—and also deeply respectful of a particular set of behavior. These behavior included, but were in no way limited to, the following: women, every bit a group, should never exist made to feel uncomfortable; people whose sexual orientation falls beyond the spectrum of heterosexuality must be reassured of their special value; racial injustice is best addressed in tones of bitter anguish or inspirational calls to action; Muslims are friendly helpers whom nosotros should cherish; and belonging to any potentially "marginalized" community involves a crippling hypersensitivity that must ever be respected.
The students' conclusion to avoid booking whatever acts that might conceivably injure the feelings of a classmate was in its way quite admirable. They seemed wholly animated past kindness and by an open up-mindedness to the many varieties of the homo feel. But the flip side of this sensitivity is the savagery with which reputations and even bookish careers tin can exist destroyed by a single annotate—perhaps thoughtless, perhaps misinterpreted, perhaps (God help you) intended every bit a joke—that violates the values of the herd.
When you talk with higher students outside of formal settings, many reveal nuanced opinions on the problems that NACA was then anxious to police. Just almost all of them accept internalized the code that you don't laugh at politically incorrect statements; you complain about them. In office, this is considering they are the inheritors of three decades of identity politics, which take come to exist a central driver of attitudes on college campuses. But in that location'south more to it than that. These kids aren't dummies; they look around their colleges and encounter that there are huge incentives to join the ideological bandwagon and harsh penalties for questioning the platform's core ideas.
Meanwhile—equally obvious reaction to all of this—frat boys and other campus punksters regularly flout the thought police by staging events forth elaborately racist themes, events that, while evidently vile, are starting time to constitute the gratuitous-oral communication movement of our time. The closest you're going to get to Mario Savio—sick at centre most the operation of the machine and willing to throw himself upon its gears and levers—is less the campus president of Homo Rights Lookout man than the moron over at Phi Sigma Kappa who plans the Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos mixer.
After Geoff Keith and I finished dinner, we made our way to the auditorium and brutal in with a group of other comics who were heading over to catch his set. Keith is deeply respected in this crowd: he may still be developing his career in the real comedy earth, the one where you lot perform for grown-ups, but he can book as many colleges as he wants.
Keith was dressed non in the understated vesture he wears in one-act clubs, but in an virtually clownish getup: brilliant-pink pants, a green shirt, a polka-dot tie. The outfit was strategic—he didn't want a kid forgetting his name and booking the incorrect comic; he would remind the audience to think of him every bit the guy in the pink pants. Instead of performing for xv minutes, he would cut his gear up brusk at the starting time big laugh afterwards the 12-minute mark, so that the act would seem to fly by. He would tell jokes most his fiancée'southward strict father, and getting out of jury duty, and tricking someone by using an English accent. The students would love him, and volume him in neat numbers, as they ever practise.
But he would not tell the jokes that kill at the clubs. He would not exercise the fleck that ends with him offering oral sex to the sorcerer David Copperfield, or the one about a seductive woman warning him that she might be an ax murderer, or the one virtually why men don't similar to use condoms. Those jokes include observations about ability and sex activity and even rape—and each, in its complicated way, addresses certain ugly and perchance immutable truths. Merely they are jokes, not lessons from the gender-studies classroom. Their showtime objective is to be funny, not to service whatsoever philosophical platonic. They become where comedy always wants to get, to the darkness, and they sucker-punch you with a express joy when yous don't think yous should laugh.
And maybe you shouldn't. These young people have decided that some subjects—amongst them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn't exist fodder for comics. They want a world that's less cruel; they want to play a game that isn't rigged in favor of the powerful. And information technology's their student-activities coin, after all—they have every right to hire the verbal type of entertainment that matches their behavior. Notwithstanding, there'due south always a price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughts and ideas. Drive those ideas undercover, especially the dark ones, and they fester.
Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a "rima oris full of blood"—the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not equally a critique of some vile notion only every bit an endorsement of it. It's the essential peril of comedy, every bit performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, Amy Schumer empathise all too well. But to enroll in college and discover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand up-up comics who tell jokes in the pupil matrimony—great care has been taken to expose you to but the narrowest range of canonical social and political opinions: that's the mouth full of blood right there.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/
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