Why Comedy Ain't Too Damn Funny Anymore.

Why Comedy Ain’t Too Damned Funny Anymore.  Stand-up comedy, television satire, cutting edge theater, comedic movies…they just don’t generate the laughs they once did.  Why is that?  Have we lost our sense of humor?  Are the comedians, actors, writers and directors less talented?  It simply cannot be the fact that there is insufficient material out there because we are definitely living in the most ridiculous times ever.  Maybe…just maybe…the comedians have become too offensive and we, the audience, have become too sensitive.

Good comedy has always been somewhat offensive.  “Offending” was a way to break down walls, to chip away at taboos, and to help us all take ourselves (and the world around us) a bit less seriously.  There has always been, and there will always be, those in comedy and satire that push too hard and cross the line between satire/sarcasm/editorialism and basic human decency.  You might even make the case that a certain amount of this “poor taste humor” is necessary so that we can recognize, in real terms, exactly where the line is.  But at some point in the last few years (I think it was somewhere in the Bush 43 Administration) the cutting edge of comedy took a dark turn.  Up to that point, offense was used as tool to be funny.  We now seem to be in a place where funny is used to create offense. 

It is also a fact that as a group, we have all become more polarized and opinionated about life in general and this has naturally spilled over into the realm of comedy.  I find that when I now partake of commercial comedy, I look for a balance between targeting conservatism and targeting liberalism.  If after some time I do not perceive this balance, I tend to turn away from the subject comedy and brand them for future purposes as biased.  Now you tell me…who in heck ever used the term biased to describe comedy twenty-five years ago?  It’s one thing to judge comedy as unfunny, crude, too graphic, or even over-the-line insensitive; but have we reached the point where we demand that our comedy be fair and balanced?  I think we have.

Our citizenry is so divided that comedians have given up on trying to be funny to the population in general.  They seem to have accepted Lincoln’s and Lydgate’s thoughts that they can’t please all of the people all of the time, so…they choose which audience they want to entertain and use the others for ridicule.   This comedic strategy has a mean streak to it and has served to further the divide between segments of our people.   SNL, for all intents and purposes, is today an extension of the Democratic Party specifically and Liberalism in general.  That is not how the show started off years ago.  Now I am sympathetic for the plight of those in the comedy industry.  Trying to come up with material that would be equally humorous to Rush Limbaugh and Elizabeth Warren would seem nigh on impossible.  One can understand why a person producing comedy for a living would simply make a business decision about which segment will purchase the most product and then cater to that segment.  If that assumption is correct on my part, Democrats are a damn sight funnier than Republicans.

Not sure how it can, or will, be accomplished, but we need to get most of our comedy back to the middle; back to a centerline where funny cuts both ways politically.  Where satire doesn’t feel like a sharp knife in the gut, people are not cruelly ridiculed for the way they choose to live their lives, one group doesn’t laugh at the other group out of malice, and we can all rediscover the very healthy therapy of laughing at ourselves.