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The prompt audience reply came in unison: “Who’s there?”

Arellano: “Zócal-OK, we can now laugh.”

There was playful booing from the in-person audience—a packed house at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles—but, though the joke bombed, it set off a wide-ranging, alternately funny and serious conversation around our comedic zeitgeist. The discussion brought Arellano (no stranger to humor, including in his long-running “¡Ask a Mexican!” column) together with political satirist Bassem Youssef (dubbed the “Egyptian Jon Stewart”) and performance artist, playwright, and actor Kristina Wong (who is currently touring her 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist work, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord).

In an era of public health and climate crises and deep political division, when many feel like they can’t laugh about what they used to, “What should we laugh about?” Arellano asked the two panelists.

“Humor must respond to its current moment,” Wong said—which for comedians means “thinking about where we need a sense of relief and not creating humor that’s a source of abuse.” She later highlighted the importance of a comedian using their platform to “push for something bigger” than crafting good jokes. (Wong’s latest play is in part about how she advocated for mutual aid at the height of the pandemic.)

The role of humor as a source of relief—not hate—was a common reprise throughout the evening.

But Youssef warned of keeping subjects or jokes off-limits. “The word ‘should’ is a dangerous word,” he said. “It’s always about drawing the line.” He recalled being jailed in Egypt and forced to flee after his political satire show Al-Bernameg “punched up” at the leaders of the country. Nonetheless, Youssef argued for giving comedians free rein—and for comedians in turn to take chances and “face the consequences” later.

But what about comedy that makes fun of everyone? Arellano used the 1974 film Blazing Saddles as an example of equal opportunity Borscht Belt-style humor that doesn’t offend. “The joke has to land,” he said.

The venue also matters. Theater audiences, Wong said, have “a lot more patience” for humor to align with social movements. She recalled her time doing stand-up 20 years ago where drunk people would demand her to “be funny” as a tray of French fries bobbed past the stage.

Youssef discussed the power and problems of satire. Yes, it offers opportunity for commentary on bad political leadership, but it also allows people to mistake funny protest march signs for activism and political involvement. Meanwhile, they delegate the fight to comedians. “Comedians are put on a pedestal,” Youssef said, imbued with too much hope and expectation. But “comedians aren’t leaders. My role stops at the edge of the stage.”

Wong agreed. “There is a missing line between the culture that shifts our thinking and the thinking that leads into the voting booth,” she said.  Governing “is so unfunny.”

Youssef does see one important political role for comedy, as a “litmus test,” he said, “to see what kind of people you have in power.” Youssef compared President Donald Trump’s boycott of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to President Ronald Reagan, who phoned in to the 1981 dinner after being shot and wounded in an assassination attempt. Comedy can show people if “you have a good ruler or a tyrant,” Youssef declared.

Wong also highlighted the social value of comedy in offering opportunity for healing. Prompted by a question from the audience, Wong said that marginalized groups she’s worked with, like undocumented immigrants and incarcerated people, “don’t want to trot out tragic stories of their existence.” She, and they, want “to find those moments of levity and laughter.” Arellano agreed, discussing the time he reported on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Orange County. He got criticized for making fun of the abusers and the people covering up the scandal. But the survivors themselves respected his jokes.

Playing the devil’s advocate, Youssef offered an example of a joke that might have helped heal old wounds only to open a new one—about the lack of representation in recent awards show seasons. He suggested that as a result, we can no longer be outraged when white people are cast in roles people think should go to people of color. Wong and Arellano pushed back before moving on; the topic continued in conversations throughout the post-show reception.

An online audience question brought up the topic of cancel culture. Both Wong and Youssef agreed that cancellation is more about resources than subject matter. If a scandal proves too toxic to the bottom line and an entertainer starts losing contracts, they may be effectively canceled. But Youssef pointed to Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey as examples of public figures making post-cancelation comebacks.

The final question of the night came from in-person audience member (and recent Zócalo guest) Josefina López: How do you make fun of your blind spots? She pushed Youssef to specifically speak about his economic and gender privilege. He was introspective, noting that he cannot see his blind spots “because they are blind.” But he employs self-deprecation around what he assumes people think are his blind spots in order “to protect myself and not get into the trauma of discovering who I am.”

“If you don’t have humor, the game is over,” Arellano said, as the conversation closed. Perhaps the healing power of comedy lies in the fact that a joke shows you that there is a life on the other side of things, even one filled with laughter. “Humor is what makes us human,” he said.

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One of Shakespeare’s conceits is the wisdom of clowns. From Feste in Twelfth Night to the Fool in King Lear, they speak truth to power, but tell it slant and do so at their peril.

The stabbing last month of Salman Rushdie, who lived under threat of a decades-long fatwa for his comedic novel, The Satanic Verses, and Will Smith’s Oscars stage assault on Chris Rock remind us that satire is risky business: One person’s hilarity is another’s sacrilege. Satirists, comics, and fools are ideological pathfinders, risking their reputations, and sometimes their health and security, to chart terrain for the rest of us. Comedians are America’s modular, detachable consciences, at times challenging the status quo, at times serving it.

In his critique of pre-Enlightenment culture, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that long before America’s Bill of Rights enshrined free speech, “comic rites and cults, the clowns and fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of parody” formed a sanctioned resistance to the “official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.”

Fools were stabilizing forces in downtrodden societies, enabling peasant classes to lampoon the rich and vent their discontent with poverty, disease, violence, and a totalitarian church and state—within the bounds of stages and jokes.

Americans, too, have relied on comedians for subversive apprehensions of our national circumstance. Thomas Paine’s wry voice of American common sense planted seeds of our first revolution. American humor also served a unifying function after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, and again in the face of expanding American imperialism in Mark Twain’s satire.

Nineteenth-century America’s jester was the blackface minstrel, his artform employing comic skits and dancing, and freighted with tragic irony. Most minstrels were white men—often Irish and Italian immigrants—who caricatured the physicality of African slaves and freedmen, who had themselves developed show dance forms like the cakewalk to parody the mannerisms of white people. Like Bakhtin’s fools, minstrels performed a kind of acceptable populist subversion that gave rise to blackface literature like, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a century later, dissident narratives such as Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, which called for (white) people to abandon postwar conformity for a more rebellious outlook, which Mailer associated with Black people.

Despite being compromised by the racist tropes of its era, minstrelsy amplified a bevy of art forms including jazz, tap dance, and the blues, which were also deemed subversive due, in part, to their origins in Black culture. Minstrel shows also featured authentic African American talents including Scott Joplin, who was known as the King of Ragtime; Gertrude “Ma” Rainey; and Charley Case, who is sometimes credited with inventing stand-up comedy.

Case’s father was an African American musician; his mother was Irish American. At a time when much of America fell under Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws, Case performed unadorned narrations about his mixed heritage family while casually twisting a bit of string around his fingers. He became one of the nation’s highest-paid performers, and yet, off-stage, Case was known for his brooding, morose nature. He shot himself to death in a hotel room in 1916.

Today, America’s comedians have assumed the mantle of public intellectuals. Whether or not one agrees with them, their collective voices are arguably more pervasive and influential than those of traditional intellectuals like Nicholas Kristof or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And like Bakhtin’s clowns, modern comedians play a dual role in our society—sometimes stabilizing it, and other times challenging cultural norms.

On the day Donald Trump was elected president, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock appeared on Saturday Night Live to leaven what seemed a hopeless situation for half of the country’s voters. Rock ridiculed liberals’ surprise that Hillary Clinton lost; Chappelle struck a conciliatory note: “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.” (Chappelle later apologized for his naivete.)

And after at least 59 people were killed in Las Vegas in 2017, victims of the country’s deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman, survivors appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show to make sense of the carnage.

In both instances, American stand-up comics helped smooth out high-stakes incidents. In other situations, comedians tested societal boundaries. DeGeneres herself went against the grain when she came out as a lesbian 25 years ago, depicting the first openly gay character on primetime television. As billionaire British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling desperately rejected accusations that she was a “TERF,” Chappelle defended her and said he identified with that title. Comedian podcaster Joe Rogan has interviewed some of the nation’s most canceled figures—from a vocal vaccine skeptic to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—inviting widespread protests and commanding ever larger audiences.

One of the reasons that comedians appeal to us so much, however, is that their intellectualism is played, first and foremost, for laughs. Comedy is performative, and whatever views they express may not be “real,” but all an act. “I talk shit for a living,” Rogan said in a stand-up routine earlier this year. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.”

Comedians’ riffs on sexual assault, gender identity, electoral politics, abortion, or any other off-limit discourses are creating new canons of critical literature, displacing the intellectual takes of popular academics of the past. But unlike treatises of old, when Jon Stewart rants about bat coronaviruses and burn pits, or Bill Burr takes on abortion rights, millions are listening, watching, guffawing, and sometimes, even agreeing.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you wanted to know what Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, or Cornel West thinks about a given topic? You’re more likely to wonder what HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher said about it. It’s no accident that America’s most popular cable news program, Fox’s The Five, employs comedian Greg Gutfeld to speak about current events. The second most-watched cable news show is Tucker Carlson Tonight, which bounces between rightward diatribes and satirical snark.

In the age of social media, where a wrongfooted sentence can conflagrate a career built over a lifetime, comedians are our ideological crash-test dummies. They press the limits of permissible speech and thought, they challenge social convention, they test our boundaries, and make us roar when they tell us what we’re really thinking (but dare not say aloud).

The comedic mask allows us the liberty of laughter, without any commitment to deeper subversions. Jokes reveal hypocrisies and incite us to laugh at the nakedness of our emperors—even in front of our emperors. American comedy is a sanctioned release of social and ideological pressure, often in service to more durable authorities.

Comedians are America’s public intellectuals, sure, but they’re also just joking.

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A joke can be the best way to present real-life issues. Comedians can poke fun at the absurdity of the human condition, even take on topics that feel taboo—like America’s brutal war in my home country of Afghanistan.

It took until I was in college, when Fahim Anwar’s “So, you’ve been invited to an Afghan wedding” dropped in 2007, to finally see an Afghan man who managed to do what other comedians were doing. Anwar, who was still working his day job as an aerospace engineer, racked up 500,000 views on YouTube for the “how-to” video, which quickly became a cult a hit among Afghan Americans. Finally, one of our own was talking about how ridiculous but endearing our practices and family expectations could be. It wasn’t heavy-handed, but rather put a humorous twist on the conversations we had with our cousins in our bedrooms, a safe distance from our parents.

But comedians like Anwar were outliers in a post 9/11 America. Mostly, we had to suffer through hackneyed, partisan pandering and racist jabs at Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims in general. Think of the Islamophobic jokes that Joan Rivers felt perfectly comfortable making about Palestinians, whom she infamously said “deserved” to die. Or her unfunny joke about there being “one outlet” in all of energy-poor Afghanistan. Plus Kathy Griffin’s dumb “the entire country of Kuwait smells like a fart” standup or her story of finding her “gay, even in Kandahar, Afghanistan.”

And then there is Bill Maher saying, “It’s that time of year again, April 15, taxes. I know it’s depressing, but just remember, you’re paying for roads, bridges, hospitals, and an army to keep the nation free. Unfortunately, that nation is Afghanistan.” He may have had a political point about the military industrial complex (a point he made in other comments following 9/11 that cost him his show). But the joke came off as smug and uncaring, considering his years of Islamophobic rhetoric. Not to mention the numerous reports of abuse, killings, and intimidation of Afghan civilians by U.S.-led forces.

As much as these comedians may have abhorred the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and even Donald Trump, their comedy was not that far off from what those men and their supporters have been spouting since the early 2000s. The jokesters presumably voted Democrat, but their jokes recalled Trump’s “shithole countries” remark.

However, in recent years, some political comedy has evolved beyond crypto-racist cringe to address the hypocrisy of America’s “War on Terror,” signaling people’s fatigue and anger with it. A month before the one-year anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, for instance, the comedian Andrew Schulz opened his comedy special Infamous with a joke about the politics surrounding the war: “Be honest, is there anybody here who loves Joe Biden? We have any Taliban here?” Schulz managed to break down the result of 20 years of U.S.-led occupation in Afghanistan with a single punchline.

At this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner Trevor Noah told a similar joke: “No president in my memory has given more marginalized groups opportunities. I’m talking about women, the LGBTQ community, the Taliban—the list goes on and on.”

These jokes bring some pointed humor where usually there are rushes of anger and resentment at the botched occupation and withdrawal. The humor works because it manages to be both subtle and direct. It’s political, not pandering. And it trades on political realities, not tired punchlines about chadaris, “burqas,” or beards.

Those of us who lived through the 20-year U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan know that it was President Biden who followed through with former President Donald Trump’s 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban. We also know that Biden’s poorly thought-out withdrawal from Afghanistan cost the lives of many Afghans, some trying to flee by clinging to the wheels of departing U.S. military jets days after the Taliban returned to power. Immediately after the Taliban retook the country, Biden instated sanctions, withheld Afghan assets, and cut back on aid, all of which was quickly followed by other Western countries and international organizations. This left the Afghan people unemployed, without money, and hungry just as a government accused of massive human rights abuses had taken control of the country.

That’s the kind of hypocrisy that hurts.

I appeared on a podcast produced by former Obama White House staffers shortly after the Taliban takeover, where I said: “Biden, in a lot of ways, has turned out to be a thousand times worse than Trump.” I stand by those words. For Afghans, Trump’s honesty about hating us lacked the hypocrisy of Biden pretending he ever cared. Especially since he called one of the most beautiful provinces of Afghanistan “hell on Earth” and reportedly told former President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan, whom Afghans have long accused of aiding and abetting the Taliban, is “50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”

My comment led to an online backlash from Democratic Party loyalists, who refused to criticize the 79-year-old politician’s policy on sanctions. My point instantly became lost to entrenched partisanship. Smart comedy, which is becoming more common, is moving in the direction of deriding the rigid partisanship in America and getting to the root of important issues.

In Kabul, where I’ve lived since 2013, we spent years watching sketch comedy shows like Shabak-e Khanda, a popular program that pulled no punches in its criticism of corrupt, self-serving Western-backed politicians and the hypocrisies and double standards of Afghan culture. Now, many of these comedians have left the country in fear of the Taliban. With their programs off the air, we’ve had to rely on our own family, friends, and social media for comedy. When the Taliban’s prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund, asked “Chi shai ghwari?” (“What do you want?”) during an Eid-day address at the palace in Kabul, we mockingly quoted in a multitude of crude punchlines about everything wrong with the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, presenting pressing real-life issues, some literal—we want jobs, we want our teenage daughters back in school—and others cruder and mocking—“You want to know what we want? We’ll show you what we want!” (among other things that can’t be printed in case the Islamic Emirate reads this). As always, each impression and response is a reminder that Afghans have not lost their sense of humor, and that jokes cuts through the most difficult and twisted of times—and is the steadiest hand to the truth.

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Did you know there’s a rich and under-loved canon of periodontic literature? I’ve read a fair amount of it. Did you know that most dentists have not read this work? I’ve checked. None, in my admittedly unscientific survey, know of Solyman Brown’s Dentologia, an early-19th-century verse treatise on oral ailments and treatments. Nor have they pondered Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” a purgatorial, poetic meditation on old magazines. Scottish bard Robert Burns’s “Address to the Toothache”? Shadows lengthen on the ceiling. Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth? Polite nods.

In the wind-up to any cleaning—recliner, bib, chit-chat, shame—I namedrop one of these titles. I poke and prod, test and touch, searching for the tenderness of recognition, a common ground on which my dentist and I might meet. None comes. If this sounds haughty or performative, needy or grasping, well, you’ve got me pegged. I am, in my mind’s eye, a salon host, bon vivant, and elbow-patched prof. (One of these roles is actually mine.) I don’t notice when the conversation grows one-sided or is replaced by the whir of tiny machines. Out come the sickle scaler and tartar remover, the Heidemann spatula and the explorer probe. The light tilts toward me. I open wide.

Perhaps, dear Reader, you’re looking forward to your first post-COVID check-up. Perhaps you’ve already experienced the check-up’s duel between tool and tooth, scraping and speaking. Perhaps it was a welcome return to a post-plague world. If so, I salute you. You’ve a healthy relationship with a person who keeps you healthy. You don’t read a request to stop speaking as a personal affront. I, on the other hand, feel weirdly compelled to assert my literary self-worth when someone sticks a sucking wand in my mouth. I’ll rattle off lines of poetry until, of course, I can’t. This makes me want to talk more.

I want to expound, for instance, on Frank Norris’s McTeague, an 1899 novel which, according to the critic Alfred Kazin, “could just as easily have been called ‘Teeth.’” It’s got a great protagonist, the titular McTeague, and plot twists and violence. McTeague is a dentist, and a brutish man who—having etherized a young woman he’s treating for a cavity—“kisse[s] her, grossly, full on the mouth.” When she comes to, unaware of his sexual assault, he proposes marriage. She refuses, “shrinking down before him in the operating chair,” retreating from his “immense square-cut head.” He proposes again, looming closer. She then vomits, a “not unusual after effect,” our narrator reminds us, “of the ether.”

You should not, under any circumstances, discuss this novel with your dentist. But the moment I read it, I wanted to go in for a cleaning. I wanted to recount this episode in lurid detail before opining on the role of orality and appetite in the novel. (In a later scene, McTeague and his frenemy, Marcus, stick billiard balls in their mouths; McTeague almost chokes.) I wanted to ask about 19th-century dental rivalries and analyze the tooth sign, “a gigantic fossil, golden and dazzling,” that hangs over McTeague’s practice, the envy of his peers. (In San Francisco, where the novel is set, McTeague’s Saloon boasts a replica tooth in homage.)

McTeague’s victim, Trina Sieppe, does eventually marry him, and it occurred to me—as the desire to speak recklessly often occurs to me—to ask my dentist if he’d ever married a patient? Dated one? Maybe imagined one, before a particularly tricky procedure, as I hear nervous actors do, unclothed? These were the discussion questions that would cap off my talk, an attempt—or so I told myself—to get my putative student, this dentist, to think about their place in the text. This, of course, is one of narrative’s joys: to imagine what you’d do if you were the protagonist. And who better than my dentist to empathize with the odious McTeague?

I’d like to note now, for the record, that I’ve never actually asked about my dentist’s sex life. Still, I’ve considered it, which begs the question: What’s my problem? One possible answer: A dentist’s chair inhibits my impulse control. I give over, like McTeague, to the “sudden panther leap of the animal.” At a cleaning, I’m wild, mildly monstrous, and/or the pissant I surely was as a kid. And don’t all dentists, if we’re honest, turn their patients back into kids? Dentists play Santa with that miniature toothpaste and toothbrush; they ask, during the polish, if we want bubblegum or mint. They mean for us to respect them, but mostly we just bear them, and their lordly opinions about floss.

Here’s one name for my malediction: “The Imp of the Perverse.” This was Edgar Allan Poe’s term for doing exactly what you should not do at the exact moment you shouldn’t do it. But you do it anyway because some urge or itch tells you that the act will feel good. Teeth, at least for Poe, played an oversized role in provoking the imp. In Poe’s lackluster 1835 story “Berenice,” the narrator “struggle[s] in vain against [the] strange and irresistible influence” of his beloved’s teeth. When that beloved dies—as all of Poe’s beloveds do—a small box drops through a plot hole and onto the narrator’s desk. There he finds dental tools “intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances.” The narrator, in some bookish fugue state, extracted them, one by one, from his beloved before she died.

Here’s another explanation for my behavior: old-fashioned revenge. “Nothing locks me into a pathological cycle of guilt, shame, and failure,” a whip-smart friend of mine once tweeted, “quite like the dentist.” I concur. The analyst asks us literary loners to recline, but lets us talk. The medical doctor often plies our own trade; Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, and Oliver Sacks were all M.D.s. The dentist’s office, however, is part interrogation cell (silhouetted faces, personal questions) and part torture chamber (hooks, fluids, moans). Blinded by a halogen light, I think of the other painful but necessary tasks that might’ve filled my time: a colonoscopy, a tutorial on tax law.

And isn’t psychological scarring my purview—as poet? as professor? Aren’t I supposed to render my subjects speechless, wheedled into reviewing their otherwise unexamined life? This is one more reason for me to maintain my petty dental grudge: professional jealousy. The mouth isn’t just a “secure kingdom,” as Nabokov writes in Pnin, that the dentist assails. A tongue is more than “a fat sleek seal [that can] flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks” (also Pnin). It’s the source for all speech, all writing—and teeth are its pearly portcullis, keeping those treasures intact. It’s the place where the bond between author and reader begins.

Poetry, as I’ve written elsewhere, is a transhistorical union based on our unchanging anatomical forms. When we read poems, even silently, we move our lips, tongue, and teeth, replicating movements first made in the mouth of our authors. (It’s true.) “It is you talking just as much as myself,” Walt Whitman writes in “Song of Myself”—“I act as the tongue of you.” You’re probably doing it now too, just a little, as your eyes pass down the screen. (I am the tongue of you.) This is what makes literature so embodied, so erotic. All reading is two bodies moving—mouths first!—in sync.

Dentists, though, sanitize our mouths. They’re the oral street sweepers, the inadvertent voiders, of all our bibliophilic romps. They can’t help it, of course; that’s their job, and for doing it well, I’ve chosen to punish them in the mode I know best: as a pedant. “Have you read Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth? I hear it’s exquisite,” I can hear myself asking during my next check-up. “Did you know that dentists and poets both have high suicide rates?” I’ll muse. “I get why we’re depressed. Why are you?” These are questions meant to both bond us and break us, to reassert our similarity, and to remind them, with small-minded snubs, that we’re not remotely alike.

Which brings me, once more, to literature. I think of classic tales of sons who rebel against fathers. I think of Harold Bloom’s theory, the anxiety of influence, wherein poets must overcome their poetic influences and ersatz dads. Can such anxiety leap between two mutually oral professions? Why have all my dentists been men?

Next month, when I return for a cleaning—my first since last July, when a flurry of guilt-inducing emails met a lull in community spread—this is what I’ll be thinking about. Then I’ll tell my dentist that Pushkin loved Byron’s shiny white teeth. The visit will end much like it began, reminding me, once more, of reading. There’s a piece of paper spread out between us. A short time has passed, and we’ve spent it together. He tears the paper away—a mere bib now, rumpled and blood-stained—and then disappears.

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In 1918, a flu virus spread around the world in a matter of months and killed an estimated 50 million people before fizzling out in 1919. The few surviving photographs of the 1918-19 pandemic primarily feature rows of beds in makeshift hospitals and the masked faces of doctors, nurses, barbers and other workers. Documentaries, fictional films, stories, and images paint the Spanish Flu as a solemn crisis. But this collective memory of the Spanish Flu offers little insight into everyday life. We forget how people lived through the 1918 pandemic: through isolation, the temporary closure of schools and businesses, the proliferation of illness and death, the cancellation of sports. And we forget that levity can exist in even the most dire circumstances.

Take, as an example, poems everyday people wrote about the Spanish Flu, which were published widely in local and national newspapers. Media of the time labored under the close watch of World War I media censorship, which aimed to curb public dissent. However, newspapers did frequently publish poetry, providing an outlet for regular people to submit their work and vent their frustrations. Some papers contained specific pages for humorous pieces, “odd” facts, and anecdotes. Others placed poems in the midst of local or national news.

In 1918, like today, a lot of people thought the threat was overblown. A writer for the Vancouver Daily World, for example, published a poem that satirized widespread perceptions that influenza had been overhyped, interspersing lines such as “I think it is nothing but grippe—” and “But just a big scare” with onomatopoeic bouts of sneezing and coughing. During that pandemic, as today, health authorities asked people to combat the spread of the virus by wearing masks and avoiding crowds. And then, as now, people didn’t much like it.

As public health authorities encouraged, and sometimes required, people to cover their faces, mask humor emerged in print. Many of the jokes were highly gendered: The Bismarck Tribune printed, “Every woman secretly believes she would be fascinating in a harem veil. Wearing a flu mask is a good, safe way to try the effect.” Similarly, a writer for the Jasper Weekly Courier quipped, “‘Flu’ masks improve the appearance of many men, but when worn by women, they take much of the joy and beauty out of life.” While our collective memory of 1918’s Spanish Flu suggests that people universally cooperated with quarantines and mask-wearing, this poetry tells a different story.

“Social distancing” did not exist as a phrase, but manifested in concept as communities shut down public spaces. Many people writing about the flu took a personal approach, lamenting all the things they were missing. In “Flu Bound,” children’s author Edna Groff Diehl griped about this new reality:

The street crowd surged—but where to go?
The bar? The concert? Movies? No!
Old Influenza’s locked the door to Pleasure Land.
Oh what a bore!

Similarly, Jesse Daniel Boone published his poem “The Spanish Flu May Get You, Too” in his own newspaper, the Carolina Mountaineer. He described the quarantine, “This old world is in the lurch; For we cannot go to church; And the children cannot roam, For they now are kept at home, And they’ve put a good, strong ban on the moving pictures, man,” In the Greenville News, the first stanza of the very relatable poem “Spanish Flu” read:

Oh, we are quarantined, I guess
For ‘bout a million years
But if we don’t get out of here
We’ll burst right out in tears

One thing that the pandemic could alter, but not stop, was the First World War. As an October 23 “Wavelet” in the Evening Telegram stated, “The Kaiser and the Flu are running neck and neck in the world’s popularity contest.” The pandemic did not spare the military and many enlisted men became ill before ever leaving U.S. soil. A “local boy under quarantine at Naval Station” (John Culberson) began his poem, which also ran on October 25, in the Chattanooga News,

There’s a war going on in Europe,
So I’ve heard from newspaper talk;
But the only one I’m having
Is with influenza at the park

Culberson went on to contrast his expectation of combat with his reality of isolation at a naval training station in San Diego, concluding,

So, mother, take down the service flag—
I’m quarantined at Balboa Park

In October 1918, the war and pandemic together had halted professional baseball and football. With nothing to report on for his “Looking ‘Em Over” column, Washington Times sportswriter Louis A. Dougher created a mock line-up, featuring disease-stopping tools as players: “Fresh Air” as “tackle” and “Quinine” as “quarterback,” with the team rounded out by Antiseptic, Ice Pack, Gargle, Alcohol Rub, Castor Oil, Mask, and Sleep. Dougher concluded, “It is not believed that any team would have stopped so many others as has Spanish ‘Flu’ within the past month … Its record will stand for years.”

Influenza impacted other social activities as well, including courtship and dating. Edgar Leslie, Bert Kalmar, and Pete Wendling’s song “Take Your Girlie to the Movies If You Can’t Make Love at Home” recommended the theater for courtship, that a couple should “Pick a cozy corner where it’s nice and dark. Don’t catch influenza kissing in the park.” In “A Spanish Flu-Lay,” a writer mourned for his lost romance when his desired woman became ill: “But soon perhaps the flu will go, And masks be put away, And all the bills Dan Cupid owes, On ruby lips he’ll pay.”

Like those of us who wonder if every throat tickle is COVID-19, individuals in 1918 always felt on the look-out for the first sign of disease. In “The Last Wheeze,” Edmund Vance Cooke laid out this paranoia in the Washington Herald: “When you have appendicitis, parenchymatous nephritis, laryngitis or gastritis, It’s the Flu.” Likewise, the Winnipeg Tribune printed this anonymous poem:

The toothpaste didn’t taste right—
Spanish Flu!
The bath soap burned my eyes—
Spanish Flu!
My beard seemed to have grown pretty fast and tough overnight—
Spanish Flu!

“Everything’s Flu Now!” similarly concluded, “Have you stumped one of your toes? Have you just a bleeding nose? Or no matter what your woes—Spanish Flu.”

For those who did contract the virus, poetic prose conveyed the experience of having the disease, sometimes comically. Newspapers widely reprinted J. P. McEvoy’s “The Flu” from the Chicago Tribune, which began, “When your back is broke and your eyes are blurred, And your shin bones knock and your tongue is furred” and then wrapped up with “Some call it Flu—I call it hell.” Through couplets and various other rhyme schemes, people emphasized the painful persistent cough that “seems cutting like a knife,” as a September 11 Houston Post article “The Worst of It” detailed; a headache equal to “clamped screws on my cranium,” as C. Roy Miller wrote in the Miami Herald on October 24; as well as exhaustion, a lack of appetite, and the impact of fever—alternating between “burning” and “freezing,” according to one Walt Mason, writing in the Coffeyville Weekly Journal on November 21.

In December, when quarantines and mask requirements had been lifted, some people were still getting sick. “Lumberjack poet” Jack W. Yoes sorrowfully wrote in “Marooned,” which ran two days after Christmas in the Vancouver Sun, about missing out on the holiday festivities because he was hospitalized:

But our hearts are right,
And on Christmas night
We’ll jolly along with you,
Despite the pains and aches that come
In the trail of the gol-dinged “flu”

People were clever and creative in how they wrote about the pandemic. Plays on words were common: “What goes up the chimney? Flu!!!,” was published in the Evening Telegram on the October 23, while the Walnut Valley Times poem “Chop Suey,” which ran on November 26, read, “I flew from flu As you said to.” On October 23, the Evening Telegram also printed, “We are not wearing a flu mask, but now and then we meet a gent who makes us wish for a gas mask.”

Such jokes about the pandemic lightened the mood, much like today’s memes and tweets. Through the words influenza survivors left behind, we can relate our own conflicting feelings to theirs—demonstrating the transcending need for creative expression and taking permission to find the light during a dark time.

The post Quarantine Won’t Be Forever, but Pandemic Humor Is Timeless  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Another senator wants to raise taxes on everyone under the age of 67. He, of course, is 68. Yet a third stands up to demand, “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” The Pottsylvanian spies decide their weapon is unnecessary: Congress is already ignorant, corrupt, and feckless.

Hahahahaha. Oh, Washington.

That joke was a wheeze half a century ago, a cornball classic that demonstrates the essential charm of the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, the cartoon show that originally aired between 1959 and 1964 about a moose and a squirrel navigating Cold War politics.

High-flyin’ duo: Giant balloons of Rocky and Bullwinkle soar over Broadway in Manhattan during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Nov. 28, 1996. Photo by Doug Kanter/Associated Press.

I’ve been wistful about the show of late, as I’m sure many of my generation are. Last month, we lost the great June Foray, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and many others. Her passing gave me pause to reflect on how important the show was during my formative years and how far-reaching its influence is on satire today. Bullwinkle was, like so many of the really good cartoons, technically before my time (I was born the year it ended). My sister and I caught it in syndication as part of our regular weekend cartoon lineup of Looney Tunes, Jonny Quest, and The Jetsons, from elementary through high school.

It wasn’t that Bullwinkle the character was especially compelling. He was an affable doofus with a loyal heart, if limited brainpower. Rocky was the more intelligent straight man: a less hostile Abbott to Bullwinkle’s more secure Costello. They were earnest do-gooders who took every obviously shady setup at face value. Their enemies were far cleverer, better resourced, and infinitely more cunning, but Rocky and Bullwinkle always prevailed. Always. For absolutely no good reason. It was a sendup of every Horatio Alger, Tom Swift, plucky-American-hero-wins-against-all-odds story ever made.

What we didn’t know in the ’70s, when we were watching, was that this was pretty subversive stuff for a children’s program made at the height of the Cold War. Watching this dumb moose and his rodent pal continually prevail against well-funded human saboteurs gave me pause to consider, even as a kid, that perhaps it is a silly idea to believe that just because we’re the good guys we should always expect to win.

The animation was stiff but sweet, the puns plentiful and painful. The show poked fun at radio, television, and movie tropes, and took playful aim at Cold War spycraft. Part of the fun was that Bullwinkle wasn’t a regular cartoon, but an animated half-hour variety show. And variety shows used to be so much of a thing that I am stunned there is no niche cable network devoted to them today.

Every episode of the Bullwinkle show featured two cliffhanger segments in the adventures of Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel, pitted against master spies Boris and Natasha, all narrated breathlessly by erstwhile radio star William Conrad. Between each serial installment were stand-alone features, including Peabody’s Improbable History, wherein Mr. Peabody, a genius dog, and his pet boy, Sherman, travel through time to make terrible puns; Fractured Fairy Tales, updated twists on Grimm Brothers classics; Dudley Do-Right, a parody of silent melodramas starring a cleft-chinned Canadian Mountie; and Aesop & Son, modernized versions of Aesop’s fables as told by Charlie Ruggles, star of silent and classic films. Other features included Bullwinkle’s Corner, an over-enunciated poetry reading, and Mr. Know-It-All, in which Bullwinkle tries and fails to teach us something.

Tom Lehrer’s topical, bitingly satirical songs exemplified a dark vein of humor that ran through the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Image courtesy of Lawrence/Flickr.

The variety show format enabled three things. First, its gloss of adult sophistication completely undercut by silliness was incredibly attractive to me and my sister. Secondly, it got us to delight in the work of a revolving cast of top-notch, old school voice actors who’d grown up in radio and knew how to sell a line. June Foray, for example, is the common thread that weaves together the everyman fast-talkers of Warner Bros. films (she voiced Granny and Witch Hazel for Looney Tunes), the pop culture and political satire of Stan Freberg, and the Cold War kiddie fare of Bullwinkle (as Rocky, Nell Fenwick, Natasha, and more).

Fractured Fairy Tales were narrated by veteran actor Edward Everett Horton, a Warner Bros. stable favorite, and featured Daws Butler (Elroy Jetson), a Stan Freberg comedy show veteran, along with Paul Frees and June Foray. Before giving voice to Dudley Do-Right’s nemesis Snidely Whiplash, Hans Conried was better known as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan, as well as for his years’ long yeoman’s work on radio mystery shows, I Love Lucy, and Burns and Allen.

Finally, the show’s format and depth of talent connected my sister and me to a world of comedy that was well before our time, but helped us navigate what came afterwards. Apart from Sesame Street and The Electric Company (whose cast was a gift to future Broadway lovers) the cartoon landscape during the 1970s was bleak. I don’t know what happened during the Summer of Love to cause formerly respectable shops like Hanna-Barbera to go from Jonny Quest to Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, but it can’t have been pretty. In those grim years when cable was not yet available to the common man and one had to physically get up to change the channel (or make one’s sister do it), we relied on three networks, a local PBS affiliate, and a couple of random UHF stations for our home entertainment. By setting the contemporary junk fare right up against reruns of infinitely better material, regular television gave my sister and me a great education in quality satire, voice recognition, and genius parody.

There was also the added benefit of our mother’s healthy collection of comedy albums—Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, Nichols & May, and vintage Woody Allen—all of which are of the same era as Bullwinkle and feature some of the same performers. My parents and these comedians belong to the so-called “Silent” Generation—that cohort born between 1925 and 1945—too young to be the Greatest and too old to be Boomers. Born during times of economic insecurity, this group came of age during the McCarthy Era and is marked, understandably, by a desire not to rock the boat too much. While they weren’t as culturally radical as the Boomers of the ’60s, the artists and cultural provocateurs of the Silent Generation loved to take a whack at the Eisenhower status quo, not to mention psychoanalysis and the Bomb.

The late June Foray, shown on the job on Nov. 2, 1967, gave voice to Rocky the Flying Squirrel, babies, birds, cackling witches, and many other animated characters. Photo by George Brich/Associated Press.

Because we loved these old records and shows, my sister and I ended up singing along with Tom Lehrer about German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (about whom we knew nothing), did the Vatican Rag and the Masochism Tango (ditto).

And so, through Bullwinkle, we were granted access to nearly a century’s worth of comedy and satire, three generations of backhanded patriotism tempered with gentle skepticism going back to vaudeville, a sort of atavistic psychic tool chest for navigating strange and scary times.

Bullwinkle was there when PBS pre-empted all programming to air the Watergate hearings in the summer I was eight, my last before sleepaway camp. At P.S. 19, we were still having bomb drills and the Cold War was still very much on, as was a hot war in Vietnam, but there was no recognition of these facts in the Archies or Hong Kong Fooey.

Bullwinkle’s playful critique lives on today in Spongebob and The Simpsons, shows whose creators openly acknowledge their debts. (Spongebob’s Squidward’s voice is Ned Sparks; Plankton is Walter Brennan. All the male Simpsons have Bullwinkle & Rocky’s middle initial “J.”) These shows are a loving critique of the ways that American ideals and American reality are often out of whack.

The post How Bullwinkle Helped Us Laugh Off Nuclear Annihilation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Humorous protest is a very sophisticated—and even tricky—tool to deploy against authoritarian regimes. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence: “The greatest enemy of authority … is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” But laughter has political advantages as well as limitations, as I have discovered while studying its impact in Serbia and in my home country, Thailand.

Serbia offers a striking example of how humor can be used to resist an oppressive government. In the 1990s, this southeastern European nation faced numerous crises stemming from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, including wars with newly independent neighboring countries, international sanctions, surging domestic crime rates, and the fearsome rule of Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia and, later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Many civic groups took to the streets to challenge the rule of Milošević, who retained strong support among rural Serbians. A heavy NATO bombing campaign in 1999 and mounting international pressure had weakened Milošević’s authority.

Members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) or Red Shirt cheer for news report of the by-election at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. About 200 UDD members took part in the gathering to show their unity and to defy the country’s security act. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

But it took the subversive humor of the Otpor movement (the Serbian word for “resistance”) to finally oust Milošević. Otpor did satirical street theater, parodic protests, and carnivalesque events—all of which were fun and easy to participate in. One of their most famous street skits was “Beating of a Barrel.” In the middle of Belgrade’s busy pedestrian streets, activists placed an empty petrol barrel with an image of Milošević on it. They invited passersby to hit the barrel with a stick they provided. Soon people were lining up to beat the barrel to show their resentment toward the regime. These actions conveyed a critical message to the Serbian public: Milošević was not to be feared, he was no longer legitimate as a leader, and there was a political alternative to him.

As the confrontation escalated, Otpor ratcheted up the ridicule. When the regime baselessly accused Otpor of being a terrorist organization, the activists didn’t respond by defending themselves with words, but instead dressed up in theatrical military uniforms and paraded around toting toy rifles. The crews walked through the streets ignoring traffic signs. Afterward, they proclaimed ironically, “This is a terrorist act because we didn’t obey the traffic sign. This is the kind of terrorists we are.”

Otpor also organized rock concerts and parties (sometimes joined by celebrities) to encourage people across Serbia to imagine a different Serbia without wars, poverty, and political instability. In October 2000, the persistent nonviolent campaigns waged by Otpor and other opposition parties helped remove the weakened Milošević from power. Leading activists from Otpor continued their nonviolent crusades, transferring knowledge of nonviolent protest strategies to other movements in countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, the Maldives, Burma, and more recently Egypt.

A member of the UDD or Red Shirt puts makeup on her face as a dead person at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

A decade later, humorous tactics showed up in Thailand, an unlikely spot because it’s a place where anti-elite jokes and gossip are considered weapons of “the weak.” But in 2010, a loosely-organized movement emerged that used humor to shake up a society that has been politically and economically dominated by the monarchy, army, and aristocratic elites for decades. Since the early 2000s, an alternative, democratic political party has gained increasing support. It was led by Thaksin Shinawatra, a Thai businessman who served as the country’s prime minister for five and a half years before being overthrown in a 2006 military coup. The party’s supporters, from the rural North and Northeast of Thailand, where inequality hit hardest, are sometimes known as the Red Shirts.

The political establishment saw this as a threat, mobilizing their partisan supporters—who became known as the Yellow Shirts—to the street, increasing the bitter political polarization that still grips Thailand today. In 2010, pro-establishment government forces cracked down on the anti-establishment Red Shirts, raising fears that the protesters would morph into an armed underground guerrilla group. Others worried that the government’s new draconian laws prohibiting public assembly would silence all opposition.

Out of this frightening moment came a group named Red Sunday. Led by Sombat Boongnamanong, a social activist, freedom fighter, and former theater performer, Red Sunday’s activities were intended to create a friendlier public face for opposition activities that wouldn’t run afoul of the government. They fused everyday activities (such as dining, donning certain outfits, shopping, and exercising) with political protest. In this way, Red Sunday’s demonstration did not look exactly like a conventional protest, except that they often used the color red.

An unidentified Belgrade boy holds a plastic toy gun mocking police officers in Belgrade, Serbia, May 2000. Members of the pro-opposition student group Otpor, or Resistance, gave out flowers to policemen and appealed for their restraint in the worsening government crackdown on political opponents. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

One of Red Sunday’s most memorable skits was an aerobic dance at the biggest public park in Bangkok in July 2010. Around 400 participants dressed in red sports outfits and ghost makeup intended to remind the public of the crackdown that had taken place few months ago. Like other park visitors, they gathered for a group aerobic dance routine popular among Thais. But theirs was unusual. The “instructor” led them in dancing to Red Shirt songs and in different silly steps that made the multigenerational crowd laugh and captured the attention of passersby. At other times, protesters would dress as ghosts, walk downtown, and hop on the monorail, reminding other passengers of the regime’s repressiveness. Protesters also would meet up for a picnic in a public park, go shopping at the mall en masse, or ride bicycles through Bangkok streets.

Red Sunday’s small acts of defiance carved out a space for political activism in a time of repression and despair, and normalized the act of resistance for Thailand’s middle class, which has traditionally supported the political establishment. The regime would have appeared ridiculous if it had cracked down on a bunch of aerobic dancers. This tactical advantage, called the “dilemma action” because of the bind it places the leadership in, is particularly useful for activists trapped under authoritarian—and unimaginative—rule. Red Sunday’s playful actions paved the way for the resurgence of the anti-establishment movement, which won an important electoral victory in 2011.

The experiences of Serbia and Thailand show how humor can be deployed differently, and toward different ends. In Serbia, Otpor used humorous protest actions in a systematic way, with a well-crafted strategy of nonviolent defiance, with hundreds of local chapters across the country attracting broad-based support. As a result, as the number of humorous events increased, their impact was multiplied. In contrast, Thailand’s Red Sunday was an ad hoc group working on a smaller scale.

Serbian children play with flour around an activist of the anti-government group Otpor, or Resistance, during a protest action entitled “Let’s spice up the food,” meant to bring awareness of the importance of Yugoslav national elections in September 2000 in Belgrade. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

More importantly, while Otpor used humor offensively, Red Sunday used it defensively. Otpor wanted to step up the political momentum to topple Milošević and transform the Serbian political landscape. Red Sunday’s humor, on the other hand, sustained nonviolence as a movement when the Red Shirts were on the brink of becoming militarized, a transformation that could have undermined their long-term goals by provoking another government crackdown.

But the two campaigns also had a lot in common. Both helped reduce fear among the populace and induced participation in protest activities. They also drew media attention to protest movements, increasing publicity and political momentum. And they reversed the effects of repression by exposing the incongruity between a regime’s claims and the reality of its rule.

Finally, both demonstrate how humorous protest can offer a space for utopian enactment: encouraging people to imagine other political possibilities through parties, concerts, and festivals. This ability to imagine is extremely crucial for social change. People can be politically submissive if they think there is no alternative and change is not possible.

For activists, there are no limits to the supply of humor—after all, it comes from deep within our different cultures—but there are limits to how it can be used. Joking “with” others rather than “at” others is important, as is knowing what crosses the line and violates norms, and what does not. Jokes do not fly if they are out of context. Activists who know what, culturally, triggers laughter can use that knowledge to their advantage, even against the most seemingly omnipotent governments.

The post To Defy a Dictator, Send in the Clowns appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“It is vastly different performing in different kinds of spaces,” said Beck Krefting, a Skidmore College scholar, author of All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents, and a former comedian herself. Many spaces are welcome to different voices, “but comedy clubs are not one of those spaces.”

Max Amini, a stand-up comedian who performs internationally, added, “Every setting has its own guidelines.” In Dubai, he has to write out his entire set and is prohibited from, among other things, using bad words, discussing politics, and talking about sex. “In other words, good luck performing.” He told the full house at MOCA Grand Avenue that his solution is to “do jokes about tomato juice.” But with more seriousness, he added that such restrictions also force you to become more creative.

When Kristina Wong graduated from UCLA, she thought she was going to be a performance artist. “I thought I would build a career jumping on a mattress and throwing feathers all over myself, moaning to a metronome,” she said. Even as she started getting introduced as a comedian, she was still intimidated by the maleness and drunkenness of stand-up comedy spaces. In performance art spaces, “if I fail, it’s the audience’s fault.” She called being a performance artist “a buffer” if audiences don’t find her work funny.

Chocano pointed to the quotation that opens Krefting’s book, by the Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu: “There’s a lot of things that people find funny that are really just bullying. When people get bullied, there are people that laugh.” Chocano added, “The comedy club culture is this bullying culture.”

Wong asked if the panel could “unpack this term—politically correct.” Today, she hears it “used resentfully by white male comics who don’t get to pick on people anymore. … It means people can pick on people who can speak back or have a right to self-determine their identity.”

Amini said that what’s politically correct depends, again, on context. “There’s countries where it’s okay to make fun of each other or pick on somebody, but not to talk about a specific prime minister or their leaders,” he said. For him, the question of political correctness or bullying comes down to the fact that his “goal as a comedian is to make people happy,” he said. He does a lot of crowd work, which includes picking on people. But “if I pick on someone, my joke in no shape or form is going to hurt her feelings,” he said. “I’m not going to ridicule her.”

Why, asked Chocano, are some comics like Jerry Seinfeld saying they won’t perform on college campuses? “What are they afraid of encountering?”

The panelists couldn’t come to an agreement on this. Krefting said that she’s brought comics to her campus who are socially just, and they’ve gotten heckled for being too far to the left.

Amini said that he once played UCLA and got no laughs because “the college crowd is difficult because they’re so inexperienced yet smart.”

And Wong said that she has a love-hate relationship with performing on campus but ultimately finds that young people make for an aware audience, and that she appreciates their desire “to have deep conversations that aren’t in comedy clubs. So I’ll take the gigs that these rich comedians don’t want to take.”

Chocano pointed to recent comments from the comedian Patton Oswalt, who thinks anyone should be able to say whatever they want in order to free the rest of us to identify bigotry.

“Just because we’ve established that the n-word is a bad word doesn’t mean people haven’t figured out how to say the n-word without saying the n-word,” said Wong. At the same time, we need to realize that “not everybody has the same platform,” and some people have much bigger platforms and more visibility than others.

Amini, who is of Persian descent, said that he used to talk about his race, but “I don’t do it anymore because I feel that I am not necessarily my race. I feel I’m a person, and I’m trying to talk about my views.”

Wong said, “I tried that.” She failed. Gesturing to her face, she said, “Audiences can’t get over this. They need me to address this.” Plus, “there are a lot of people in my demographic who are not heard, and here is my moment to speak to them.”

Stock identities have always been a part of American humor, said Chocano. How, she asked the panelists, do you engage your identity to subvert those stereotypes?

Krefting pointed to the black comedian Issa Rae, creator and star of the web series Awkward Black Girl and the HBO series Insecure, as an example of someone who is “exploding the stock character.” Rae is “very specific about her agenda, which is that she wants to create complex and varied representations of African-Americans” that she doesn’t see in the popular culture.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to address whether comedians can ever be excused because they’re only kidding, or because they didn’t intend to hurt a particular group.

Comedians need to learn their lessons, said Amini. “If you want to learn how to ride a bike, if you don’t fall a couple times, you’re not going to learn,” he said. And if you make jokes that are racist or sexist, it will catch up with you. “That’s how Michael Richard lost his career,” he said. Even “one of the most loved actors on one of the best sitcoms in America” wasn’t immune.

Wong said that shaming can be powerful. “I know it’s wrong to shame,” she said. “But that’s the only way I feel we’ve gotten this far.”

Krefting said that comedians need to be held to the same standards of political correctness as the rest of us. If a joke hurts someone unintentionally, then it’s on the comedian to set the joke up better.

Another audience member asked if election humor can build bridges between communities, pointing to a Tom Hanks Saturday Night Live skit that he felt was educational in terms of building solidarity between black and white working-class Americans.

Comedy, said Wong, “is where I’m looking for my hard-hitting commentary on what is really happening.” It’s an idea that harked back to a quotation she saw on Instagram and repeated earlier in the evening: “It used to be that we listened to politicians and laughed at comedians. Now we laugh at politicians and listen to comedians.”

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