I understand that you are claiming all humor is immoral. The “what” refers not to “what does that sentence mean” but rather “upon what do you base this unusual and contentious claim”
“All humor is transgressive” continues to be a perplexing statement, as it’s trivial to reference examples of humor without obvious transgressive elements?…
Only the last one is a pun, and I don't see how any of them would be upsetting. I got laughs with all of these, which come from a tin of Dad jokes my kids got me last Christmas.
I very much agree with your broader point about the undesirability and unworkability of the "punching up/punching down" framework, but I especially love how quickly people like Harvilla who claim to subscribe to it will either change the rules or ignore reality to justify their own tastes. Another great example is the reaction to the more recent Chappelle specials and his jokes about trans people. People who loved Chappelle Show at its heyday needed to assure themselves that they had always been good guys but Chappelle had changed, so they adopted the line "he used to punch up but now he's punching down." But as Jesse Singal noted in a Substack post, during the period that Chappelle was supposedly "punching up", one of his most popular running bits was "crackheads are funny because of their willingness to totally debase themselves for crack."
The Louis CK section is, in my opinion, a perfect illustration of why the punching up/down framework is incoherent. The author just happened to find the joke funny -- all the rest of the commentary was rationalization and excuses, which have aged hilariously badly.
I think most Chappelle fans know that Black and LGBT culture have always been the target of his jokes. And they don't have a problem with the new stuff either. Sticks & Stones won a Grammy. If anything, he has softened and become less offensive and more thoughtful.
It seems more that like "punching up" is a term only used by occasional comedy viewers who feel the need to contribute to the conversation. I'm reading through the Rotten Tomato Critics reviews of it. Very few of them are comedy fans. Most of them were like 5 years old when the Chappelle Show aired.
Chappelle also demolishes the bogus punching up/punching down dichotomy in Sticks and Stones when he makes fun of white heroin addicts. I mean, are we really to suppose he's punching "up" because he's black and they're white? It's absurd. (And also funny!)
This piece seems a bit wide of the mark. Yes, the world is complicated in its power relationships, and yes, everyone on Twitter has no real moral framework, but it seems obvious to me that people in general feel it's somehow worse for, say, someone who's lived a cushy life to make fun of the circumstances of those who haven't in a way it wouldn't be bad for another non-cushy-life-haver to do. It seems to me that you're arguing that context doesn't matter; can you really be doing that?
Also I read that Guardian piece about Grimsby, which I had never heard of, and while it has a brief mention of Mexican, Chinese, Black, etc. towards the end, the large majority of it is taking issue with the movie's smugly buffoonish portrayal of the English working class and not about identity stuff.
Not really, no. I'm saying that you appear to be arguing (against what I perceive to be your previous views) that jokes or whatever exist in a kind of moral vacuum where context doesn't exist and making fun of something or someone is good or bad regardless of who is doing the fun making, but that doesn't seem to me to be how people's moral reflexes work. Then I mentioned that you also seem to be mischaracterizing the nature of the Guardian writer's main objection to Grimsby, which looks to me like the exact kind of example I gave of what most people innately perceive to be bad, where a rich person with no experience of poverty mean-spiritedly makes fun of poor people essentially for the crime of being poor (that's how the Guardian writer makes it sound; again I never heard of the movie until today).
The very fact that you and I perceive the power valences in Grimsby and the article differently demonstrates that the frame is useless; no one will ever agree about the facts of power sufficiently to let it inform their opinions independently of their priors. Even if I agreed that the frame could theoretically make sense, it can never exist outside of our own prejudices sufficiently to establish who is "really" punching up or down.
Take the incident at Smith College. The liberal media immediately ran with the idea that a Black female student was oppressed because she was asked to leave a closed dorm; she's Black and a woman, after all. But she got two employees punished, and the institution fell all over itself to side with her, especially the president. So isn't she the person with power in the relationship, not two working class employees who were completely abandoned by their employer for doing exactly what they were trained to do? The people who think she's the powerless because of her race and gender will never concede that the reaction to the incident proves that in fact, within that context, she holds greater power than a couple of white (now former) employees. So how does it help, at all? If it's just another set of facts that will be fought over on purely partisan terms, what's the use of the frame? It's just more culture war.
Just because people misuse a concept doesn't make it useless, though. I agree that these people often simply invoke concepts when it seems tactically advantageous (although perhaps unconsciously, since I don't think people are usually that calculating). My real objection was that you seem to be saying that moral intuition either plays or should play no part in whether people in general feel that a joke lands or not, which I think is just untrue.
I think people should say things that are true and right, and if they're true and right then the relative power of the target doesn't matter. And yeah, I also think no one is ever going to agree on even minimally complicated cases about who actually has the power.
Isn't the idea that all utterances can be reduced to either "true and right" or "not true and not right" itself an oversimplification of the inherent complexity of the world? Leaving aside totally the question of whether this ought to determine whether or not a joke is funny.
There are other moral considerations we can use such as whether something is fair and true while taking into account the specifics of the individuals and situation, rather than trying to read everything in terms of identity based power imbalances that are not necessarily consistent and whose rigid, simplistic interpretation just distracts from the facts.
“Power is distributed between different people in myriad and often conflicting ways; when two people interact, their various privileges and poverties are playing out along many axes at once.”
“My own defense of Macdonald’s treatment of that guy? My defense is that Macdonald was correct, that his judgment was sound, that the things he said were an accurate reflection of the deficiencies of that comic.”
That ties in with your book in a way. We have a problem with giving people an honest assessment of their innate ability. Come on Norm, couldn’t you give this guy some happy nonsense about pursuing his dream?
Eh. Norm went on the hacky show to judge the hacky comedians, and then got self righteous about the hackiness.
Freddie made a comment earlier in the piece about people "pretending to be offended," but it seems to me that's what Norm is doing here. The joke doesn't suck because the guy is ignorant about the connection between the New Testament and Harry Potter. The joke sucks because we've all heard it before ("The other, of course, is about orks").
Why must Norm be pretending to be offended? He seems to be actually offended and has every right to be. Norm believed in God and disliked flippant dismissals of religion. Also, in terms of punching up or down, whatever cultural dominance Christianity had in the past, in the modern world of pop culture (movies, TV, standup) it has no power whatsoever. Sure, everyone on TV celebrates a (secular) Christmas, but jokes at the expense of Christians and villainous portrayals of Christians dominate any mention of Christianity. Growing up Christian was to be constantly buffeted by these micro and macro aggressions against one’s faith from creators who believed they were bravely punching up, from within a Hollywood community where there was zero risk of upsetting their peers, who would be more likely to laugh along and praise their courage. If #representationmatters, modern American Christians know as well as other groups what it’s like to be punched down at by those with the power in popular culture. To put it in terms of Freddie’s argument, is Norm punching down at the novice comic? Is the novice punching up at the historical power of Christians or punching down at the marginal cultural influence of modern Christians? Or is Norm punching up at the dominance of lazy anti-Christian/religious comedy? All of these things can be true at once which is what makes the frame useless.
“The worst part is the hypocrisy.” I think Norm was personally offended but took pains to criticize the joke as objectively as he could, even though it was clear he couldn’t totally divorce it from his feelings. He was only human after all. There were legitimate grounds on which to criticize the joke (not actually that brave or original) even if you could tell Norm had some skin in the game.
Christians may have other bases of social and political power in this country but I don’t see it in entertainment. The statement that most Hollywood content creators are Christians is absurd. Many may come from culturally Christian backgrounds but few would identify as actively Christian. Naturally every group will be more sensitive to the portrayal of their own so it’s hard to be fully neutral, but seeing a person on screen who mentions Jesus and doesn’t turn out to be a villain is exceedingly rare. Sure there are bad Christians out there who earned the negative stereotype we see in media, but couldn’t you find examples to prove any negative group stereotype people complain about in movies?
Anyway, what’s so wrong about inventing reasons to be persecuted and acting like an obnoxious morally superior jackass? I thought both sides agreed that was a fun thing now.
It occurred to me that my previous reply is getting bogged down in the specifics, which proves Freddie’s point. The crux of Freddie’s argument is that you and I could go back and forth all day about whether mocking Christians is punching up or down depending on the context and the speaker. But why should it matter? If someone mocks you you’re allowed to be offended, or to shrug off the joke, or to criticize it based on technical grounds or the merits of its underlying truth. Whether you as the target is the up or the down is irrelevant and often impossible to definitively prove.
What on earth does the "innate ability" of the comedian have to do with anything? He made a lazy, boring joke. That's no reason to assume he's *innately* unfunny. Genuinely talented people often make mistakes, and they need honest feedback to develop that talent.
Standing ovation for this column right here. I never watched Nannette because all the self-righteous woke thinkpieces surrounding it, some going so far as to say that comedy itself needs to be torn down, made me so angry that I never wanted to go near it.
And then when those same people lit up Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones (which had me crying laughing), well, that's when I felt truly alienated.
It depends on the person. Some wokesters really do have deeply held, radical beliefs in their hearts whereas others are just along for the ride and will drop it when something more lucrative comes along
I absolutely agree about intentions. And funny is subjective, but I stopped watching Nanette bc I didn't think it was funny or (to it's credit, given that) even trying to be, and I wasn't in the mood for the lecture. Lectures are so much more effective when funny!
Wife and I made it about 20 minutes in before we turned it off. Too self-important to be funny; too facile to be profound. I also always found it funny that this was supposed to be her quitting standup. Then, of course, the whole business proved to be so lucrative that, inevitably, she decides to keep going. Strange how that works...
I should be the target audience (lesbian, finds Australian accents delightful) and I couldn't even finish Nanette. For me it's like, nobody forced you to be a stand-up comedian? And it's hard to break into the field, so it's not like "I had to take this job to feed my family." I don't see the point of advertising a comedy show and then using it to criticize the audience for wanting to laugh. I'm not offended by her thoughts or anything, but we're living in a time when we can watch anything, any time, and I'd rather watch something else.
I liked Nanette, but I think it's probably best understood as a dramatic dialogue than an hour of standup.
But I think it only makes sense to be performed as standup, for the same reason that Bernie Sanders ran as a Democrat in 2016 instead of head of the Green Party. No one was going to watch some dramatic dialogue by a relatively unknown (in the US, at least) Australian comedian, but if you bill it as a standup routine that deconstructs the genre and medium--well, now you've gotten some attention.
I find it fascinating, in terms of how it contrasts with my own experience, that it should suit you on paper but didn't in practice. My experience was almost the opposite. I watched it tonight, fully expecting to hate it, based on what I'd heard about it second-hand, and yet I've come away pleasantly surprised, thinking it was actually quite good. It's a rare treat these days to find a thing that wins me over like that, because anything with the vaguest political tinge is usually vitriolic and incredibly predictable, one way or the other. But while Gadsby definitely is coming from a particular, lefty perspective, I really felt there was a good amount of depth and nuance to the whole thing and the end result.
I watched Nanette. It was moving in places. Her story was compelling. But it was not funny and I don’t understand why it’s regarded as comedy when it’s clearly an off-off-Broadwayesque one-woman show.
I get that your critique here is broadly aimed at liberals, and the liberal media in particular, but how is it that you gloss over the feelings of the *actual disabled person* that Maher mocked? Both your analysis and that of writers I like much less or not at all (Singal, Weiss, etc) seems to be aimed at performative woke liberals and never at the actual human beings who are genuinely offended or hurt, those who the woke liberals believe they're protecting. I think that's a bit shallow, to be honest.
Sure. What I don't believe is that there's a morally useful way to resolve the dispute. I mentioned the Smith College incident. In that incident, the janitor and security guard that got hung out to dry felt that they were punched down at. The Black student who complained felt that way as well. Were either of those claims baseless? No. But they cut directly against each other, and the college ruled based not on moral reasoning but on PR.
I see this a lot on LinkedIn. People have high titles and high salaries but convince themselves they're oppressed due to their demographic profile, imposter syndrome, or something similarly immaterial. No one on LinkedIn even pretends to care about non-office workers.
I don't want to Godwin this entire comment section, but no one more compulsively and consistently played the victim (on behalf of his nation) than Hitler.
The right does it all the time. Literal billionaires were whining about their oppression when Obama proposed like a 5% marginal tax increase. Trump whined about his oppression his whole presidency. Fox news is a 24/7 whine-fest about Christian values or whatever.
The last protest I went to, a young kid was continuously yelling “you’re on the wrong side of history!” at police officers. The thesis of this post finally puts words to my disdain of his actions. I’m not opposed to people airing grievances at cops while protesting, so it must have been his moral hubris that rubbed me the wrong way.
"Am I on the wrong side of history?" is the kind of thing that's supposed to keep *you* up at night and make *you* question your judgments, and it only works because none of us knows the path history will take. As a judgment made against another person in the actual present it's nonsensical.
I find it most irritating because -- on top of its absurd smug self-assurance -- it is making an entirely unearned appeal. It's perhaps the worst form of bad faith argument.
1) The idea of history's judgment is so compelling because history provides us with significant perspective; even though history is a distorted lens, it's typically more clear than the present (or at least seems so).
2) History gains that compelling insight and perspective through hindsight and emotional distance. That enables us to make more confident judgments about it.
3) "You're on the wrong side of history" trades on the power history has to contextualize and judge the past. Its emotional and critical "bite" as polemic rests on that compelling aspect of history.
4) Prior to the point of having that chronological and emotional distance -- that perspective -- its use is totally antithetical to the properties that lend it power in the first place. Its context strips it of the very strength upon which it relies to gain rhetorical advantage.
When I was in school, just learning about the Holocaust, I asked my mom if we'd have been "the good guys". Surely we'd have been the ones resisting Hitler, right?
Her response stuck with me. Compare what percent of people say, "of course we'd have been the good guys" to those who actually kept their heads down in Nazi Germany. You never know if you'll do the right thing until you are tested, and until that day comes, you should reserve your judgment of others.
That gave me a sense of historical humility I am still grateful for. It helped me see how vastly many social movements thought history thought they were on the right side of history, only to become its villains or -- more often -- forgotten by all but historians specializing in their age.
Can't remember the name, but there was Werner Herzog documentary about a guy who fought in Vietnam. He talked about his dad being the one guy in Germany who didn't vote for Hitler, and all the persecution he faced for doing so.
He thought he would follow in his dad's footsteps by enlisting in the US military for the Vietnam war. Dude considered that his moral equivalent to standing up to Hitler.
Granted, Herzog can be a bit... lenient with the truth; there's a good chance he fabricated that whole backstory. Still, it shows how we can easily lack historical perspective. I also hate the 'wrong side of history" retort, just debate the morality and politics of the situation, please.
It's getting funnier the more I think about it. What's to stop your opponent from saying "No u?" Nothing, because it's not an expression that can logically hold any factual content. It's just a forceful expression of moral certainty, which is large with the irony.
Very well stated. That historical humility is important and yet also in short supply. As a child I used to blame the average Germans for their inaction. The two turning points for me were:
1) Meeting actual Germans who were alive then. I had one Professor who was stationed on the Eastern Front!
2) Iraq. We committed wholesale murder and I... Went to a few protests? That's it? And of course, as a society, we largely supported it and then as soon as it was convenient memoryholed it.
But, somehow I'm supposed to believe we all would've been the people stopping the trains going to Auschwitz?
I have also come to realize how hard it is to sacrifice for a cause when you’ve got kids and/or anyone helpless depending on you. When I had my son, every cell in my body told me to protect him before anything else. My days of taking risks were over. Even something like quitting my job to join daily protests is unthinkable—that’s my kid’s health insurance and preschool tuition.
When people say “America is at a breaking point” because of the filibuster or something, I know it’s really not. We’ll keep going to work.
I was bummed about her too, though I’m very happy to report that as far as I can tell (looking at her last stand up special a few years ago) that she was back in top form. I don’t want to spoil anything in case you see it but she opens with the kind of joke where you say “Wow.” before cracking up.
Takes me about 30 seconds of listening to her moralizing "Dear Sugar" podcast-schtick before I feel compelled to start looking for a high bridge. Soooo bad.
I've dubbed this "Santa Clausing" among my friends: trying to determine if a person is overall good or bad.
Take your Glenn Greenwald example. I think his journalism has been great, and his punditry is pretty annoying. Do I need an overall rating of his "goodness"? "Well, when you balance it out, Greenwald is a +8." I think we can just hold multiple opinions of someone.
Greenwald is a great example of that, someone who is endlessly "santa claus'd" by people who enjoy discussing this sort of thing, but it makes a whole lot more sense if you just like, give him a 7 out of 10.
“[A]ny categorical moral position seems ridiculous to me. Man is to man … a tabula rasa … anything you please, depending on the conjunction of circumstances. For this reason, may God give us steadfastness and courage and … circumstances of time and place that are disposed to the good.” -- Dovlatov
I still can't help but feel there is something different about two homeless people mocking each other for being poor and a well of person mocking them. And it seems that "punching down" captures that difference well.
If the comparison is that simple, then yes it seems mean. (Which doesn’t mean it can’t be funny.) But what if the homeless person is a straight white man and the better-off person mocking them is black, and/or a woman? Or queer? What if the homeless man said something racist or sexist? Is he punching up or down? And what if the homeless man said the slur because he’s mentally ill? Is a retaliatory attack of mockery punching up or down?
Great essay about the nuances and complexity of power and of comedy. Not sure if you intended it, but it also seems to be a solid critique of the concept of intersectionality.
This reminds me of when I was at a meeting of an org where they were doing "progressive stack," which means you get called on in turn, but someone with a marginalized identity takes precedence. At one point this guy and I raised our hands at the same time, and we stared at each other in a kind of panic, because nobody was actually taking stack, we had to, uh, self stack. I'm a white woman, and he was a possibly brown (appeared to be of middle eastern descent) man. He insisted I go first, so I did, but AWKWARD!
It doesn't seem like a critique to me at all. More like an endorsement and application to Norm Macdonald and the punching up/down idea. Like, he could title this Can you really punch up? Intersectionality and humor in 21st century America and give it as a TED talk.
Freddie. I'll take the liberty of channeling Jesse Singal channeling Andy Samberg and the rest of The Lonely Island as I celebrate your perspective and your singular way of communicating it with the grateful exhortation: Never stop never stopping.
For me, the concept of punching up/down is useful in very limited contexts, when it helps us to consider *what* we’re mocking exactly. For example, when people made fun of the NYC mayoral candidates for thinking a house in Brooklyn costs $100,000—I’d call that punching up in the sense that it’s mocking how wealth makes people oblivious. But if someone calls Trump fat or Clinton ugly, that’s not ‘punching up’ despite their positions. It’s not like I cry about it, but mocking someone’s looks, even if they’re the most powerful person on earth, will never be punching up.
When people decide who is punching up based on the identity of the target vs. the speaker, I’m in total agreement with Freddie—it’s impossible. Plus, the whole concept of punching up, as we use it today, makes people lazy and cruel. It has become a green light to be a bully, as long as you’re targeting ‘bad people’ such as Trump supporters.
You can really tell that for some writers, a switch flipped when they realized they could be sadistic assholes if they picked the right targets—and they found it really fun and exhilarating, and never looked back.
It's all just part of the broader human need to reduce everything into binary concepts. On the simplest level, punching down isn't good, while punching up at power and privilege is. The problem as Freddie points out is trying to shoehorn everything into that point of view, the same way we want to reduce everything into good and bad. Very little in life is that simple, and when we reduce everything into these categories we miss the rich complexity that actually makes people and life itself interesting.
I think I see what you're getting at, but honestly for me the problem about calling Trump fat or Clinton ugly is that it really doesn't get to the heart of why they might deserve our contempt. Being overweight or unattractive just isn't a good enough reason to condemn another person, and bringing it up even in the context of their greater faults is just irrelevant. Going after a person's appearance is just infra dig; nothing to do with punching up or down, it's a lapse in taste and manners.
"Humor is immoral" is so groundbreakingly ridiculous that I feel staggered by that sentence. I may not be able to see straight for days.
What?
I understand that you are claiming all humor is immoral. The “what” refers not to “what does that sentence mean” but rather “upon what do you base this unusual and contentious claim”
k.
Perhaps "transgressive" would be clearer for these particular readers?
“All humor is transgressive” continues to be a perplexing statement, as it’s trivial to reference examples of humor without obvious transgressive elements?…
Hm ok then I don’t get it either
Why did the picture go to jail? It was framed.
Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? It didn't have the guts.
What is the leading cause of dry skin? Towels.
Why aren't koala bears considered real bears. The don't have the koala-fications.
Humor isn't necessarily punching.
Only the last one is a pun, and I don't see how any of them would be upsetting. I got laughs with all of these, which come from a tin of Dad jokes my kids got me last Christmas.
Okay dude, I think you're pulling my leg.
You nailed it again, Freddie!
I very much agree with your broader point about the undesirability and unworkability of the "punching up/punching down" framework, but I especially love how quickly people like Harvilla who claim to subscribe to it will either change the rules or ignore reality to justify their own tastes. Another great example is the reaction to the more recent Chappelle specials and his jokes about trans people. People who loved Chappelle Show at its heyday needed to assure themselves that they had always been good guys but Chappelle had changed, so they adopted the line "he used to punch up but now he's punching down." But as Jesse Singal noted in a Substack post, during the period that Chappelle was supposedly "punching up", one of his most popular running bits was "crackheads are funny because of their willingness to totally debase themselves for crack."
Great comment. I think this article is relevant:
https://jezebel.com/how-to-make-a-rape-joke-5925186
The Louis CK section is, in my opinion, a perfect illustration of why the punching up/down framework is incoherent. The author just happened to find the joke funny -- all the rest of the commentary was rationalization and excuses, which have aged hilariously badly.
Personally, I think comedians are funniest when we tell them which jokes to make.
I think most Chappelle fans know that Black and LGBT culture have always been the target of his jokes. And they don't have a problem with the new stuff either. Sticks & Stones won a Grammy. If anything, he has softened and become less offensive and more thoughtful.
It seems more that like "punching up" is a term only used by occasional comedy viewers who feel the need to contribute to the conversation. I'm reading through the Rotten Tomato Critics reviews of it. Very few of them are comedy fans. Most of them were like 5 years old when the Chappelle Show aired.
Chappelle also demolishes the bogus punching up/punching down dichotomy in Sticks and Stones when he makes fun of white heroin addicts. I mean, are we really to suppose he's punching "up" because he's black and they're white? It's absurd. (And also funny!)
Like an inverse Ender's Game, the enemy is always defined as up.
Can 5 of us just get together, touch our helmets to the gate corners, and end the game now? I'm tired. #GiantAsteroid2024
This piece seems a bit wide of the mark. Yes, the world is complicated in its power relationships, and yes, everyone on Twitter has no real moral framework, but it seems obvious to me that people in general feel it's somehow worse for, say, someone who's lived a cushy life to make fun of the circumstances of those who haven't in a way it wouldn't be bad for another non-cushy-life-haver to do. It seems to me that you're arguing that context doesn't matter; can you really be doing that?
Also I read that Guardian piece about Grimsby, which I had never heard of, and while it has a brief mention of Mexican, Chinese, Black, etc. towards the end, the large majority of it is taking issue with the movie's smugly buffoonish portrayal of the English working class and not about identity stuff.
Do you really not see how the second paragraph undermines the first?
Not really, no. I'm saying that you appear to be arguing (against what I perceive to be your previous views) that jokes or whatever exist in a kind of moral vacuum where context doesn't exist and making fun of something or someone is good or bad regardless of who is doing the fun making, but that doesn't seem to me to be how people's moral reflexes work. Then I mentioned that you also seem to be mischaracterizing the nature of the Guardian writer's main objection to Grimsby, which looks to me like the exact kind of example I gave of what most people innately perceive to be bad, where a rich person with no experience of poverty mean-spiritedly makes fun of poor people essentially for the crime of being poor (that's how the Guardian writer makes it sound; again I never heard of the movie until today).
The very fact that you and I perceive the power valences in Grimsby and the article differently demonstrates that the frame is useless; no one will ever agree about the facts of power sufficiently to let it inform their opinions independently of their priors. Even if I agreed that the frame could theoretically make sense, it can never exist outside of our own prejudices sufficiently to establish who is "really" punching up or down.
Take the incident at Smith College. The liberal media immediately ran with the idea that a Black female student was oppressed because she was asked to leave a closed dorm; she's Black and a woman, after all. But she got two employees punished, and the institution fell all over itself to side with her, especially the president. So isn't she the person with power in the relationship, not two working class employees who were completely abandoned by their employer for doing exactly what they were trained to do? The people who think she's the powerless because of her race and gender will never concede that the reaction to the incident proves that in fact, within that context, she holds greater power than a couple of white (now former) employees. So how does it help, at all? If it's just another set of facts that will be fought over on purely partisan terms, what's the use of the frame? It's just more culture war.
Just because people misuse a concept doesn't make it useless, though. I agree that these people often simply invoke concepts when it seems tactically advantageous (although perhaps unconsciously, since I don't think people are usually that calculating). My real objection was that you seem to be saying that moral intuition either plays or should play no part in whether people in general feel that a joke lands or not, which I think is just untrue.
I think people should say things that are true and right, and if they're true and right then the relative power of the target doesn't matter. And yeah, I also think no one is ever going to agree on even minimally complicated cases about who actually has the power.
Isn't the idea that all utterances can be reduced to either "true and right" or "not true and not right" itself an oversimplification of the inherent complexity of the world? Leaving aside totally the question of whether this ought to determine whether or not a joke is funny.
There are other moral considerations we can use such as whether something is fair and true while taking into account the specifics of the individuals and situation, rather than trying to read everything in terms of identity based power imbalances that are not necessarily consistent and whose rigid, simplistic interpretation just distracts from the facts.
“Power is distributed between different people in myriad and often conflicting ways; when two people interact, their various privileges and poverties are playing out along many axes at once.”
Thank you.
See also: intersectionality.
“My own defense of Macdonald’s treatment of that guy? My defense is that Macdonald was correct, that his judgment was sound, that the things he said were an accurate reflection of the deficiencies of that comic.”
That ties in with your book in a way. We have a problem with giving people an honest assessment of their innate ability. Come on Norm, couldn’t you give this guy some happy nonsense about pursuing his dream?
Eh. Norm went on the hacky show to judge the hacky comedians, and then got self righteous about the hackiness.
Freddie made a comment earlier in the piece about people "pretending to be offended," but it seems to me that's what Norm is doing here. The joke doesn't suck because the guy is ignorant about the connection between the New Testament and Harry Potter. The joke sucks because we've all heard it before ("The other, of course, is about orks").
Why must Norm be pretending to be offended? He seems to be actually offended and has every right to be. Norm believed in God and disliked flippant dismissals of religion. Also, in terms of punching up or down, whatever cultural dominance Christianity had in the past, in the modern world of pop culture (movies, TV, standup) it has no power whatsoever. Sure, everyone on TV celebrates a (secular) Christmas, but jokes at the expense of Christians and villainous portrayals of Christians dominate any mention of Christianity. Growing up Christian was to be constantly buffeted by these micro and macro aggressions against one’s faith from creators who believed they were bravely punching up, from within a Hollywood community where there was zero risk of upsetting their peers, who would be more likely to laugh along and praise their courage. If #representationmatters, modern American Christians know as well as other groups what it’s like to be punched down at by those with the power in popular culture. To put it in terms of Freddie’s argument, is Norm punching down at the novice comic? Is the novice punching up at the historical power of Christians or punching down at the marginal cultural influence of modern Christians? Or is Norm punching up at the dominance of lazy anti-Christian/religious comedy? All of these things can be true at once which is what makes the frame useless.
“The worst part is the hypocrisy.” I think Norm was personally offended but took pains to criticize the joke as objectively as he could, even though it was clear he couldn’t totally divorce it from his feelings. He was only human after all. There were legitimate grounds on which to criticize the joke (not actually that brave or original) even if you could tell Norm had some skin in the game.
Christians may have other bases of social and political power in this country but I don’t see it in entertainment. The statement that most Hollywood content creators are Christians is absurd. Many may come from culturally Christian backgrounds but few would identify as actively Christian. Naturally every group will be more sensitive to the portrayal of their own so it’s hard to be fully neutral, but seeing a person on screen who mentions Jesus and doesn’t turn out to be a villain is exceedingly rare. Sure there are bad Christians out there who earned the negative stereotype we see in media, but couldn’t you find examples to prove any negative group stereotype people complain about in movies?
Anyway, what’s so wrong about inventing reasons to be persecuted and acting like an obnoxious morally superior jackass? I thought both sides agreed that was a fun thing now.
It does seem like evangelical christians are the most underrepresented group in pop culture.
It occurred to me that my previous reply is getting bogged down in the specifics, which proves Freddie’s point. The crux of Freddie’s argument is that you and I could go back and forth all day about whether mocking Christians is punching up or down depending on the context and the speaker. But why should it matter? If someone mocks you you’re allowed to be offended, or to shrug off the joke, or to criticize it based on technical grounds or the merits of its underlying truth. Whether you as the target is the up or the down is irrelevant and often impossible to definitively prove.
Norm has made fun of Christianity enough that I don't think he had his feelings hurt or anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dafy2r2pPmk
He just really doesn't like bad jokes.
What on earth does the "innate ability" of the comedian have to do with anything? He made a lazy, boring joke. That's no reason to assume he's *innately* unfunny. Genuinely talented people often make mistakes, and they need honest feedback to develop that talent.
Standing ovation for this column right here. I never watched Nannette because all the self-righteous woke thinkpieces surrounding it, some going so far as to say that comedy itself needs to be torn down, made me so angry that I never wanted to go near it.
And then when those same people lit up Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones (which had me crying laughing), well, that's when I felt truly alienated.
Fair enough, but then it's more like a Ted talk, because it isn't funny?
It depends on the person. Some wokesters really do have deeply held, radical beliefs in their hearts whereas others are just along for the ride and will drop it when something more lucrative comes along
I absolutely agree about intentions. And funny is subjective, but I stopped watching Nanette bc I didn't think it was funny or (to it's credit, given that) even trying to be, and I wasn't in the mood for the lecture. Lectures are so much more effective when funny!
Wife and I made it about 20 minutes in before we turned it off. Too self-important to be funny; too facile to be profound. I also always found it funny that this was supposed to be her quitting standup. Then, of course, the whole business proved to be so lucrative that, inevitably, she decides to keep going. Strange how that works...
I should be the target audience (lesbian, finds Australian accents delightful) and I couldn't even finish Nanette. For me it's like, nobody forced you to be a stand-up comedian? And it's hard to break into the field, so it's not like "I had to take this job to feed my family." I don't see the point of advertising a comedy show and then using it to criticize the audience for wanting to laugh. I'm not offended by her thoughts or anything, but we're living in a time when we can watch anything, any time, and I'd rather watch something else.
I liked Nanette, but I think it's probably best understood as a dramatic dialogue than an hour of standup.
But I think it only makes sense to be performed as standup, for the same reason that Bernie Sanders ran as a Democrat in 2016 instead of head of the Green Party. No one was going to watch some dramatic dialogue by a relatively unknown (in the US, at least) Australian comedian, but if you bill it as a standup routine that deconstructs the genre and medium--well, now you've gotten some attention.
I find it fascinating, in terms of how it contrasts with my own experience, that it should suit you on paper but didn't in practice. My experience was almost the opposite. I watched it tonight, fully expecting to hate it, based on what I'd heard about it second-hand, and yet I've come away pleasantly surprised, thinking it was actually quite good. It's a rare treat these days to find a thing that wins me over like that, because anything with the vaguest political tinge is usually vitriolic and incredibly predictable, one way or the other. But while Gadsby definitely is coming from a particular, lefty perspective, I really felt there was a good amount of depth and nuance to the whole thing and the end result.
I watched Nanette. It was moving in places. Her story was compelling. But it was not funny and I don’t understand why it’s regarded as comedy when it’s clearly an off-off-Broadwayesque one-woman show.
I get that your critique here is broadly aimed at liberals, and the liberal media in particular, but how is it that you gloss over the feelings of the *actual disabled person* that Maher mocked? Both your analysis and that of writers I like much less or not at all (Singal, Weiss, etc) seems to be aimed at performative woke liberals and never at the actual human beings who are genuinely offended or hurt, those who the woke liberals believe they're protecting. I think that's a bit shallow, to be honest.
Don't have the slightest idea what you're referring to. No clue.
Okay, I'll pose a simple question then: Do you believe that those who feel they are being "punched down" to have any basis for their feelings?
Sure. What I don't believe is that there's a morally useful way to resolve the dispute. I mentioned the Smith College incident. In that incident, the janitor and security guard that got hung out to dry felt that they were punched down at. The Black student who complained felt that way as well. Were either of those claims baseless? No. But they cut directly against each other, and the college ruled based not on moral reasoning but on PR.
Playing the victim is a great way to gain power over others. After all, how could someone be abusing their power if they're the victim??
I see this a lot on LinkedIn. People have high titles and high salaries but convince themselves they're oppressed due to their demographic profile, imposter syndrome, or something similarly immaterial. No one on LinkedIn even pretends to care about non-office workers.
I don't want to Godwin this entire comment section, but no one more compulsively and consistently played the victim (on behalf of his nation) than Hitler.
The right does it all the time. Literal billionaires were whining about their oppression when Obama proposed like a 5% marginal tax increase. Trump whined about his oppression his whole presidency. Fox news is a 24/7 whine-fest about Christian values or whatever.
How can the answer be anything but "yes"? Do you believe those who are standing are standing on something?
What is the larger point you're trying to make though?
The last protest I went to, a young kid was continuously yelling “you’re on the wrong side of history!” at police officers. The thesis of this post finally puts words to my disdain of his actions. I’m not opposed to people airing grievances at cops while protesting, so it must have been his moral hubris that rubbed me the wrong way.
"Am I on the wrong side of history?" is the kind of thing that's supposed to keep *you* up at night and make *you* question your judgments, and it only works because none of us knows the path history will take. As a judgment made against another person in the actual present it's nonsensical.
I find it most irritating because -- on top of its absurd smug self-assurance -- it is making an entirely unearned appeal. It's perhaps the worst form of bad faith argument.
1) The idea of history's judgment is so compelling because history provides us with significant perspective; even though history is a distorted lens, it's typically more clear than the present (or at least seems so).
2) History gains that compelling insight and perspective through hindsight and emotional distance. That enables us to make more confident judgments about it.
3) "You're on the wrong side of history" trades on the power history has to contextualize and judge the past. Its emotional and critical "bite" as polemic rests on that compelling aspect of history.
4) Prior to the point of having that chronological and emotional distance -- that perspective -- its use is totally antithetical to the properties that lend it power in the first place. Its context strips it of the very strength upon which it relies to gain rhetorical advantage.
When I was in school, just learning about the Holocaust, I asked my mom if we'd have been "the good guys". Surely we'd have been the ones resisting Hitler, right?
Her response stuck with me. Compare what percent of people say, "of course we'd have been the good guys" to those who actually kept their heads down in Nazi Germany. You never know if you'll do the right thing until you are tested, and until that day comes, you should reserve your judgment of others.
That gave me a sense of historical humility I am still grateful for. It helped me see how vastly many social movements thought history thought they were on the right side of history, only to become its villains or -- more often -- forgotten by all but historians specializing in their age.
Can't remember the name, but there was Werner Herzog documentary about a guy who fought in Vietnam. He talked about his dad being the one guy in Germany who didn't vote for Hitler, and all the persecution he faced for doing so.
He thought he would follow in his dad's footsteps by enlisting in the US military for the Vietnam war. Dude considered that his moral equivalent to standing up to Hitler.
Granted, Herzog can be a bit... lenient with the truth; there's a good chance he fabricated that whole backstory. Still, it shows how we can easily lack historical perspective. I also hate the 'wrong side of history" retort, just debate the morality and politics of the situation, please.
It's getting funnier the more I think about it. What's to stop your opponent from saying "No u?" Nothing, because it's not an expression that can logically hold any factual content. It's just a forceful expression of moral certainty, which is large with the irony.
Very well stated. That historical humility is important and yet also in short supply. As a child I used to blame the average Germans for their inaction. The two turning points for me were:
1) Meeting actual Germans who were alive then. I had one Professor who was stationed on the Eastern Front!
2) Iraq. We committed wholesale murder and I... Went to a few protests? That's it? And of course, as a society, we largely supported it and then as soon as it was convenient memoryholed it.
But, somehow I'm supposed to believe we all would've been the people stopping the trains going to Auschwitz?
I have also come to realize how hard it is to sacrifice for a cause when you’ve got kids and/or anyone helpless depending on you. When I had my son, every cell in my body told me to protect him before anything else. My days of taking risks were over. Even something like quitting my job to join daily protests is unthinkable—that’s my kid’s health insurance and preschool tuition.
When people say “America is at a breaking point” because of the filibuster or something, I know it’s really not. We’ll keep going to work.
Sarah Silverman going woke years back is when I knew this movement was all just a game. Seriously. Sarah Silverman.
I was bummed about her too, though I’m very happy to report that as far as I can tell (looking at her last stand up special a few years ago) that she was back in top form. I don’t want to spoil anything in case you see it but she opens with the kind of joke where you say “Wow.” before cracking up.
Takes me about 30 seconds of listening to her moralizing "Dear Sugar" podcast-schtick before I feel compelled to start looking for a high bridge. Soooo bad.
I've dubbed this "Santa Clausing" among my friends: trying to determine if a person is overall good or bad.
Take your Glenn Greenwald example. I think his journalism has been great, and his punditry is pretty annoying. Do I need an overall rating of his "goodness"? "Well, when you balance it out, Greenwald is a +8." I think we can just hold multiple opinions of someone.
I'm stealing "Santa Clausing" thank you.
> I'm stealing "Santa Clausing" thank you.
That'll put you at -2
How about Santa Klaus Kinskiing?
You're at -400 for that one
and now we've diverted down the path of "Krampusing"
Greenwald is a great example of that, someone who is endlessly "santa claus'd" by people who enjoy discussing this sort of thing, but it makes a whole lot more sense if you just like, give him a 7 out of 10.
“[A]ny categorical moral position seems ridiculous to me. Man is to man … a tabula rasa … anything you please, depending on the conjunction of circumstances. For this reason, may God give us steadfastness and courage and … circumstances of time and place that are disposed to the good.” -- Dovlatov
I still can't help but feel there is something different about two homeless people mocking each other for being poor and a well of person mocking them. And it seems that "punching down" captures that difference well.
If the comparison is that simple, then yes it seems mean. (Which doesn’t mean it can’t be funny.) But what if the homeless person is a straight white man and the better-off person mocking them is black, and/or a woman? Or queer? What if the homeless man said something racist or sexist? Is he punching up or down? And what if the homeless man said the slur because he’s mentally ill? Is a retaliatory attack of mockery punching up or down?
Great essay about the nuances and complexity of power and of comedy. Not sure if you intended it, but it also seems to be a solid critique of the concept of intersectionality.
It certainly shows how the supposed complexities of intersectionality go out the window when a simplistic linear power hierarchy is convenient.
This reminds me of when I was at a meeting of an org where they were doing "progressive stack," which means you get called on in turn, but someone with a marginalized identity takes precedence. At one point this guy and I raised our hands at the same time, and we stared at each other in a kind of panic, because nobody was actually taking stack, we had to, uh, self stack. I'm a white woman, and he was a possibly brown (appeared to be of middle eastern descent) man. He insisted I go first, so I did, but AWKWARD!
It doesn't seem like a critique to me at all. More like an endorsement and application to Norm Macdonald and the punching up/down idea. Like, he could title this Can you really punch up? Intersectionality and humor in 21st century America and give it as a TED talk.
Freddie. I'll take the liberty of channeling Jesse Singal channeling Andy Samberg and the rest of The Lonely Island as I celebrate your perspective and your singular way of communicating it with the grateful exhortation: Never stop never stopping.
For me, the concept of punching up/down is useful in very limited contexts, when it helps us to consider *what* we’re mocking exactly. For example, when people made fun of the NYC mayoral candidates for thinking a house in Brooklyn costs $100,000—I’d call that punching up in the sense that it’s mocking how wealth makes people oblivious. But if someone calls Trump fat or Clinton ugly, that’s not ‘punching up’ despite their positions. It’s not like I cry about it, but mocking someone’s looks, even if they’re the most powerful person on earth, will never be punching up.
When people decide who is punching up based on the identity of the target vs. the speaker, I’m in total agreement with Freddie—it’s impossible. Plus, the whole concept of punching up, as we use it today, makes people lazy and cruel. It has become a green light to be a bully, as long as you’re targeting ‘bad people’ such as Trump supporters.
You can really tell that for some writers, a switch flipped when they realized they could be sadistic assholes if they picked the right targets—and they found it really fun and exhilarating, and never looked back.
It's all just part of the broader human need to reduce everything into binary concepts. On the simplest level, punching down isn't good, while punching up at power and privilege is. The problem as Freddie points out is trying to shoehorn everything into that point of view, the same way we want to reduce everything into good and bad. Very little in life is that simple, and when we reduce everything into these categories we miss the rich complexity that actually makes people and life itself interesting.
I think I see what you're getting at, but honestly for me the problem about calling Trump fat or Clinton ugly is that it really doesn't get to the heart of why they might deserve our contempt. Being overweight or unattractive just isn't a good enough reason to condemn another person, and bringing it up even in the context of their greater faults is just irrelevant. Going after a person's appearance is just infra dig; nothing to do with punching up or down, it's a lapse in taste and manners.