The Dark Side of Comedy

The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy, edited by Patrice A. Oppliger and Eric Shouse sets out to destabilize the sad-clown myth of stand-up comedians and ultimately succeeds. By the end of the volume's sixteen contributions (and four responses), the popular idea of comedy as essentially bound to a “troubled comedian” (6) is thoroughly dissected, torn apart, and put into perspective. In its first half, the book's essays interrogate the origin of dark topics—including mass death, childhood trauma and neglect, alcohol and food addiction, disability, sexual violence, and mental illness—in the material of well-known American comics, including George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Maria Bamford, and one Canadian comic, Mike Ward. Each contribution takes a distinct theoretical approach, but all of them interrogate the identity gap between comedians and their personae, decoupling comedy that makes light from dark human experiences.The book's second half compiles contributions from amateur and aspiring comedians, who collectively expose the dark side of developing stand-up personae, a task undertaken in alcohol-infused, off-hour environments that make for unsafe working conditions. These authors offer an alternative to the picture of comedians as people who are, at the core of their personality, essentially broken. Their accounts of the physical, mental, and social risks for those who aim to make others laugh, as well as the financial and opportunity costs of choosing this profession, argue instead that being a stand-up is sure to wear you down. The shift in the book's topography—from a section titled “Darkness from the Outside” section to one titled “Darkness from the Inside”—effectively moves from a critique of the popular turn to tragedy to explanations of the origins of stand-up material, establishing a meaningful foundation on which to build future accounts of the complex psychosocial realities from and in which laughter arises.To my mind, the strongest essay in the volume bears the name that most closely corresponds to its avowed mission. Edward David Naessens's “Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona” tidily rejects the general impression of comics as figures who turn psychic tragedy into social light, eloquently articulating how the stage personae they construct emerge through engagements with audiences. The latter's laughter shapes the former's material, from the nature of its topics to the timing of its delivery. In refusing the “myth of catharsis” (240), Naessens's essay takes up another theme of the volume: the idea of humor “as a powerful source of healing” (4), a theme that many of the other essays wonderfully complicate. In “An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy: How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness,” a nuanced discussion of how comedy often brings audiences into intimate contact with the heaviness of being human, Kathryn Mears and editors Oppliger and Shouse intervene in familiar theories of humor, including Freud's so-called relief theory and Warren and McGraw's more recent benign violation theory, complicating the oversimplified role of the audience embedded within both. The careful comparative reading of Bamford's style against the traditional setup-punchline is illuminating.Also strong is Deborah M. Thomson's exquisite reading of Blayr Nias's retelling of being sexually assaulted while working as a stand-up, “The Ballad of Drunk McCreepster.” She similarly captures the discursive dimension of comedy that Mears et al touch upon, while unfolding its transformative potential via Michel de Certeau's concept of “making do,” or “‘a calculated action’ that takes place in ‘the space of the other’” (274). Indeed, throughout the volume, a theme of restorative justice either supplants or thoroughly inflects what the book understands the therapeutic potential of laughter to be; this thread reaches its acme in Cait Hogan's must-read chapter, “The Ethics of ‘Rape Jokes,’” a careful interweaving of personal sexual assault and comic responsibility. With its best essays, The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy complicates the interrelation of light and dark, amplifying that binary's tension, and thereby demanding its authors articulate the potency of moral responsibility and just action in stand-up comedy.Though the volume generally attests to “a willingness to live with incongruity and paradox,” a handful of essays seek to resolve rather than “explore” the entanglement of “pain and tragedy,” on one hand, and “humor and laughter,” on the other (5). Perhaps most surprising is Oppliger's timely piece, “Comedy in the Era of #MeToo: Masking and Unmasking Sexual Misconduct in Stand-Up Comedy,” which effectively captures the tenor and contours of the tumultuous public response to sexual malfeasance by male comedians, as well as shows the challenges of achieving restorative justice when fans and comics struggle to acknowledge there is a long-standing, urgent problem within comedy. To be sure, capturing that moment is an important foundation for subsequent scholarly work. Nevertheless, in Oppliger's essay, comedy becomes tragic. The critical, scholarly voice naturalizes an ideological stance, one that collapses the tension between comic art and artists—or personas and performers—thereby suppressing the paradox between representation and being in which all humans live. Thus, the internal tensions within both gendered responses to the sexual(ized) violence of Louis C. K., Aziz Ansari, Al Franken, and Bill Cosby remain unscrutinized, as does the cultural imaginary underlying both those men's dereliction and audience responses to it. While other essays avoid insinuating that lay audiences are uncritical about the people and ideas that resonate with them by providing insightful biographical details about familiar comedians, they sometimes neutralize the light/dark tension in comedy by balancing it out. Such is the case in Sean Springer's account of Steve Martin's fraught relationship with his father in “Between Goofball and Rebel: Steve Martin's Disney-Styled Comedy.” Their many other merits notwithstanding, the explorations of George Carlin, Craig Ferguson, Mike Ward, and Jim Gaffigan in different essays come close to stabilizing comedy and tragedy in an equilibrium, promoting something more like a resolution to light/dark tensions than an embrace of their paradox.On the whole, The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy is at its best when its “tragicomic” revelations open onto critical reflection of the “surprising, nuanced,” and situated implications of such tragicomedy (24). For this reason, the essays in the book's second half, which are written by comedians, are more illuminating. As Ian Brodie writes in the concluding piece, which is itself a response to the final chapter by Larry Fulford, “The work of stand-up is to learn how to play, and to do so, the stand-up must venture workmanlike into … differing sites of play” (311). Such venturing ultimately involves both handing oneself over to, and a studied examination of, the vicissitudes, risks, limits, and possibilities of the spaces of stand-up comedy. Reading this book, scholars of humor, practicing comics, and stand-up comedy fans alike will find estimable insights into how to “make do,” as de Certeau puts it. In stand-up comedy at its best the tragedy of self-abandon becomes a way to find oneself—an experience of acclimation and adaptation, bringing into the light, time and again, the darkness of everyday norms and worlds.

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