:: Saturday, November 06, 2004 ::

the comedy lobotomy

Why is it that so many male comedians focus 90% of their material on making fun of women? I mean, please, how many dumb blonde jokes and "my girlfriend's got me by the short hairs" jokes do we really need? Does anyone find them funny anymore?

I'm up late watching Conan and I left the TV on while I cleaned up my kitchen during which time The Late Show with Carson Daly comes on. Generally, I find his show annoying anyway and can't even deal with it as background noise (often the only function the TV has late at night) but tonight was particularly bad. There was some lame twenty-something (maybe thirty-ish) comedian with a baseball hat on backwards, a sad little scraggly goatee on his chin and an equally lame white t-shirt stretched over his significant paunch, doing stand-up. And of course, cliche boy's entire ( not part of) but entire monologue consists of bitching about hanging out with girls, dating girls, living with girls. You name any of the tired jokes that people tell about women and he will have surely touched on it. The funny thing is, even though I was listening, I didn't actually realize what he was doing until I went to turn the TV off.

Now, clearly I consider myself a feminist; but I'm not even really bringing this up as a feminist issue so much as issue of stupidity and laziness. How easy is it to make cracks about women based on the tired and overused stereotypes that we have heard and continue to hear everywhere? Does this really pass for humor? Did this guy read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Becoming a Lame Stand-up Comedian or does he really find this material funny? I suppose that he has every reason to believe that audiences would like it, since comedians have made their careers on derogatory humor. I, however, find it tasteless and completely lacking in humor.

I don't really have a lot of experience with stand-up comedy. It's never really been that appealing to me and maybe that's because of guys like this one, but about a year ago, I saw part of a stand-up act on HBO. It was Ellen DeGeneres and it was amazingly clever and witty. I was so impressed that I bought the DVD and showed the entire thing to my students while we were discussing the rhetoric of performance. They loved it; more recently, my boyfriend has seen it, loved it and refused to give the DVD back. I simply took that to mean that she was a good comedian and did not interrogate why her comedy was funny where others failed. Then, I watched the Chris Rock DVD that I had also ordered on Amazon. I had seen the segment in Bowling for Columbine where they show an excerpt from one of his monologues: the one about doing away with gun control for the more effective system of bullet control (make bullets really expensive and then people will think twice before they waste that money or will have to save up to shoot somebody). It was funny and witty and I was definitely impressed. After seeing his entire act, my opinion changed dramatically. Although I still found that section amusing and clever, the rest was humor based on degrading others and using profanity. It was like when you buy an album for that one song that's really great only to find out that every other song on the album sucks. I am certainly no prude; in fact, I have a tendency to say lots of things that I shouldn't ("fuck" is one of the most frequently used words in my vocabulary) but even I was put off by his excessive bad language and derogatory statements about women. However, it was less the language itself that bothered me than it was the fact that it was being used as a substitute for humor.

My point here is, I guess, that I'm tired of seeing people working their way to the top by stepping on the hands, feet and backs of others. The jokes were bad. They were not funny and sadly, this guy probably goes home to the girlfriend who seems to be so often the butt of his jokes and complains that he doesn't know why his career isn't taking off. Here's an idea: think of something remotely original to say. Just because it's humor doesn't mean it must be stupid.

:: Cat 2:15 AM [+] ::
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