Dylan Brody is an award winning playwright, humorist, thrice-published author and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. His fantastic new album, Chronological Disorder, is out now on Stand Up! Records.
As election season looms large in our collective consciousness, the importance of comedy grows exponentially. I think it grows exponentially. I don’t actually know what that means, ’cause I’ve never been good at math. But it definitely grows. Fast.
Comedy holds a unique place amongst the arts. Only comedy allows truths, even widely unpopular or forbidden truth, to be openly expressed. Comedy can expose hypocrisies, reveal ironic contradictions and diminish the bloviated. Once we know that Newt Gingrich is an anagram of Twinge Grinch, it becomes more difficult to take him seriously. When we point out that Mitt Romney’s hair was clearly designed in 1963 by Jack Kirby, his once-authoritative coif loses much of its reassuringly paternal sheen. Rick Santorum’s work in the debates, his best since playing Davey alongside his dog Goliath in the ultra-religious animated series of my childhood, serves to make him an absurdist figure in American politics. I have yet to figure out how Ron Paul even has time to run for president, what with his heavy performance schedule playing Walter, the grumpy old man who banters with Jeff Dunham in an endless series of racist comedy specials on television. I digress.
My point is this: Under the protective cover of laughter, an audience finds itself able to digest truths it might otherwise find distasteful. Using the power of laughter, a performer can present ideas, opinions and revelations that might otherwise go unspoken. Like honeyed medicine, that which is so unpleasant as to be repressed or entirely avoided slips painlessly down our gullets with a good guffaw.
Comedy’s power can be turned to evil as easily as it can be used for good, and the fact that it seems so innocuous makes that a dangerous proposition indeed. Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, nationalism and hatred of all sorts can be reinforced through jokes as readily as they can be broken down. Every joke that relies on a stereotype to work perpetuates the mythology on which it is built; just as recognition of a hidden truth is startlingly funny, the elicitation of a laugh can create an illusion of truth.
George Carlin didn’t just say the seven words that can never be spoken on television. He got them entered into the Congressional Record. That was a huge accomplishment and never could have been managed if not for the power of comedy. We like to think that freedom of speech is sacrosanct in this country, but that freedom is more severely limited than most people are ever allowed to be aware. In the mid-1980s, Sam Kinison’s Saturday Night Live appearance was curtailed when the show aired on tape for the West Coast. What idea was so outrageous that its very expression could not be allowed? He said, “We’ll stop doing crack if you give us back our pot.” It’s a funny line. It barely seems to push an envelope. Still, here in the land of the free, that thought seemed dangerous enough that network executives preferred dead air to the broadcasting of it.
When I worked as artist in residence at the prep school from which I had neglected to graduate years earlier, I was asked to perform. Then, when the administration heard what I said on stage, I was asked to shut up. Needing the money I had been promised for my work as an instructor for the term, I acquiesced to censorship. At the time, I felt powerless. It was not until years later that I realized just how wrong that was. If I had been powerless there would have been no need to silence me. No, by being funny I had demonstrated the depth of my potential influence.
For the past 30 years, anti-intellectualism has pervaded the cultural landscape. We have been told that education is a form of snobbery, that tolerance of other cultures is immoral or anti-American, that the only way to compete in a complex global economy is for our kids to learn to do well on multiple-choice tests. Nuance is derided in favor of polarization. Critical thinking itself is perceived as dissent. None of it makes any sense, but the ideas are fed to us day after day until eventually the latest crop of Republican candidates seems a reasonable group of possible nominees.
We have been systematically rendered so certain of our own powerlessness that when more than 50 percent of Republicans in a state say they wish they had a different option, nobody wonders when democracy stopped having any mechanism whereby the voters have some input. We cast our votes in an election and then go home less to see who won than to find out whether we guessed right. At the last statewide election, the guy ahead of me in line asked if he could take his chosen candidate to win, place or show.
The political landscape has become an entertainment. Soundbites make the evening news with no regard for veracity, validity or gravity. They are chosen purely for pithiness and mass appeal. Whether they elicit laughter or outrage, phrases make the air chosen only for their ability to keep us tuned in and, in a paradoxical irony, to simultaneously keep us tuned out.
Only comics have the ability to speak hard truths unencumbered by comforting niceties. Only comics have the ability to slip in under the radar, to alter the course of a society by sneaking to the rudder while everyone else is focused on the hazy horizon. It’s not just our prerogative; it’s our responsibility.
Nobody in this nation seems to be taking our political discourse seriously. That makes it our job as comedians, humorists, comics and clowns. No kidding.