still reading through comedy book by jesse david fox. i finished the chapter ālaughterā today (each chapter is titled after, and addresses, a specific aspect of comedy, such as audience, timing, truth, etc.), and it gave me Thoughts unrelated to my upcoming analysis of hecklers welcome, so iām posting about them now to get them out of my head.
fox uses this chapter on laughter to defend what he calls āpost-comedyā comedies, ie, dramadies like the tv show girls and more experimental standup specials like jerrod carmichaelās rothanial. an entire section starts with the sentence āletās talk about nanette!ā and, ok, maybe this is bc i fucking hate shows like girls (and while i appreciate nanette for being spectacularly crafted and adore hannah gadsby generallyādouglas *is* my favorite standup special of all timeānanette aināt for me), but i found the arguments in this chapter to be much weaker than the rest of the book.
fox makes an analogy between the way the internet is changing comedy and the way photographs changed painting. when photographs first came out, there was a whole existential crisis in art bc making realistic images was easy now, so what were artists for? similarly, fox argues, people can now get all the āfunnyā they want online for basically free, so professional comedy is going through a āwhat are we even doing this for?ā moment and exploring new avenues to define itself. very astute. but as he gets further and further into his own attempt to define comedyās relationship to āfunnyā, for me, his train of thought breaks down.
fox says that comedy doesnāt need to aim at only being funny, that it can have other primary goals as well. true, but iād say that was true before the āpost-comedyā era too. then he says comedy doesnāt need to be the sort of funny that makes you laugh out loud. also true, but hard to even say what that sort of āfunnyā is, given the same joke can make you laugh or not, depending on your mood and dozens of other factors. so what works of comedy are we even talking about here?
then he says comedy doesnāt need to be funny at all; that comedy is about āmanipulating funnyā, which sometimes means deliberately withholding it like in nanette. and thatās where he completely loses me. bc if making something not funny is comedy, then what separates comedy from tragedy? (donāt say ātimeā.) or from drama?
and fox also seems to equate all three of these arguments, as if he doesnāt even realize heās saying completely different things each time.
idk, iām willing to call girls a comedy bc i know plenty of people find it funny. iām willing to call nanette standup bc i donāt think standup has to be funny at every moment to qualify as standup. but we do need to keep the funny in comedy.
