The it’s-ok-to-say-it-if-it’s-true defense of politically incorrect comedy may be a simplistic one. But it’s a defense that has prevailed for a reason: It’s made for some of the most celebrated humor in modern American comedy.

Although today’s ire over offensive jokes is mostly aimed at privileged white men accused of comedic bullying of minority groups, it’s worth remembering that this kind of line-crossing humor has very different origins. As a historian who studies 20th century humor, I’ve spent countless hours studying the evolution of comedy over the decades. What emerges from the record is that outsider voices—namely Jews and blacks—were the real foundational voices that paved the way for today’s most cutting comedy.

The history begins in the 1950s, when stand-up was a fairly benign genre. Clean and apolitical, it was suitable for viewing on family outlets such as The Ed Sullivan Show. But under the radar, a few comics began to experiment with socially relevant material.

The first breakout star of this era was undeniably Lenny Bruce. The comedian radically transformed the genre by bringing his outlandish, raunchy act from L.A. strip clubs to New York City nightclubs. He pushed the boundaries of taste with provocative routines featuring slang, profanity, and incendiary remarks on sex and race. Although his comedic style was influenced by fast-talking New York Jews, Bruce made it his own by peppering his work with vulgarity and stinging satirical social commentary.

In one of his routines, “Religions Inc.,” he imagines faith leaders like the pope and Billy Graham convening on Madison Avenue to exchange tips for defrauding their followers. In another, “Tits and Ass,” Bruce called out mid-century America’s reflexive squeamishness about sexual language and the supposed dirtiness of the human body. And in the famous bit “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” the comic mocked the way white people use social niceties to shroud their bigotry. He frequently used ethnic and racial slurs on stage, and did so to diffuse their power. Instead of taking aim at the usual victims of the slurs, he used them to lampoon the bourgeois American values and the post-war climate of cultural conformity in which they thrived.

The acts got Bruce in trouble, most notably in the form of multiple arrests for obscenity between 1961 and 1965. He was technically charged for uttering words like “cocksucker” and “schmuck,” on stage. Historians suggest, however, that the comedian was likely targeted for his sacrilegious remarks about the Catholic Church and the government—routines that described Saint Paul having sex or characterized Lyndon Johnson as racially clueless, among others. (Then, unlike now, certain kinds of line-crossing humor could put you through the criminal justice system, not just the social media justice system.) To many, his bold humor and run-ins with the law made him a brazen, anti-establishment hero, a legacy that endures today.

A decade later, Richard Pryor, who was African-American, followed in Bruce’s footsteps with his own subversive routines. Pryor’s early material was safe and race-neutral—“Mickey Mouse,” as he called it—mostly silly slapstick with an easy-to-please stage persona. But Pryor quickly grew tired of catering to the sensibilities of white audiences. In the late 1960s, he moved to Berkeley, the hotbed of student protests and the Free Speech movement, and started reading Malcolm X. He dramatically reworked his act, infusing it with anger, race-consciousness, and dirty words. By the 1970s, he had built a reputation for a style of humor that was at once sociopolitical and salacious.

Among other taboo material, Pryor’s routines included racially charged anti-police jokes. “They give niggers time like it’s lunch, down there,” he quips in one bit about the plight of blacks in the South, “You go looking for justice, that’s just what you find—just us.” Some critics balked, and others accused him of being a Black Panther. But he continued with his searing, sharp racial commentary. “You ever notice how nice white people get when there’s a bunch of niggers around?” Despite his detractors, Pryor’s counterculture appeal ultimately translated into mainstream commercial success. He’s still hailed as a revolutionary and a prophet, and—as fellow comedian Argus Hamilton donned him—our “Dark Twain.”

Although both Bruce and Pryor get much-deserved praise for their prescience, it’s worth noting that some of their material can be cringe-worthy to hear now. Bruce openly joked about the Holocaust, rape, amputees, and homosexuality; Pryor’s bits were often tinged with misogyny. Both performers made liberal use of the word “nigger.” There is, of course, room to critique these jokes. But it’s also important that we not lose sight of the big picture—that, on the whole, these comedians were challenging moral righteousness and creating new spaces to talk about issues previously off limits.

In this way, the pair was wildly influential. Their legacies not only changed stand-up, but also played a role in shaping sketch shows like Saturday Night Live, sitcoms like All in the Family, and satire magazines like the National Lampoon. Bruce and Pryor opened doors for comedians of all backgrounds to approach controversial themes like sex, race, politics, violence, and religion—and showed that this kind of comedy sells. By the 1980s, those looking to make a career in comedy had a clear roadmap for how to generate publicity, revenue, and renown.

That said, not all of the shocking or vulgar humor they gave rise to was inherently good. The popular “shock jock” comedians of the 1980s, such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, were as offensive as their progenitors, but without any of the intimacy, pathos, or insight. They rightly came off as sexist, rage-fueled bullies. Still, their presence on the stage held up a mirror to 1980s tensions over gender and sexuality. Take, for example, the smug jokes Kinison and Dice Clay both made about gay men deserving to get AIDS. Although the jokes were distasteful, the backlash they caused provoked larger conversations about homophobia during the decade. In this way, even crude, derogatory comedy can be valuable as a barometer of the national mood, and an opportunity to bring up dicey issues that are otherwise repressed or ignored.

If Bruce and Pryor created the world in which straight white guys could yell “faggot” in a crowded theater, their comedic boldness also gave rise to some of the best contemporary comedy performed by women and people of color. Bruce and Pryor’s explicit sexual candor—and, of course, the women’s liberation movement—helped pave the way for modern female comedians like Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Ilana Glazer, and Abbi Jacobson to speak frankly, even grotesquely, about their bodies and sexualities. Black comics like Dave Chappelle, Keegan Michael Key, Jordan Peele, and W. Kamau Bell were able to pick up where Pryor left off in the way they mock assumptions about race and masculinity.

Comedians will continue to take on what polite society considers to be out of bounds. Although standards may change, comics will always be pushing buttons and crossing lines because they know it can be a good way to get a laugh. And there’s more to it than just the joke. From Bruce to Pryor and beyond, inflammatory humor has also been a vehicle for tackling social ills. It’s been speaking truth to power, rattling the enfranchised, and exposing hypocrisy. It’s been bringing uncomfortable anxieties and impulses out from the shadows. It’s how offensive comedy became the American way of comedy—and we’re better for it.

The post How the Marginalized Invented Politically Incorrect Comedy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Louis XVI, the king deposed by the French Revolution, climbed onto the scaffold to face his execution in 1793, the first thing on his mind was probably not the thousands of contraband caricatures of him that had started to circulate before his fall from grace. But such revolutionary mockery was central in swaying public opinion, and these cartoons almost certainly helped to seal his fate.

A century later, when Irish folk musicians wanted to spread a political message through their songs, they wrote witty laments on the sorrows of their troubled country, often at the expense of their hated British colonizers.

Move on another century, to any Communist regime behind the Iron Curtain, and it was commonplace to tell jokes ridiculing aberrations and excesses of the ruling regimes. Even the party faithful, in private, would swap their favorites—not knowing that their backstage laughs helped to put the last nails in the coffin of the Soviet empire.

This struggle between those who respect convention and those who transgress it not only shaped the course of European political history, it also created space for the development of certain brands of satire that yielded some of the continent’s wittiest cultural exports. In the United Kingdom, criticism of the stuffy upper classes gave rise to a humor shaped by absurdity, sarcasm, and self-deprecation that lives on in the tradition of comedies like Monty Python and Mr. Bean. In France, the pre-revolutionary counterculture launched a tradition of satirical drawings that the French still chuckle at today, whether it be the daily front-page cartoon that continues to appear on the front pages of the wide-circulation paper Le Monde or the cartoons seen in the more specialized weekly scandal sheets like Le Canard Enchainé or Charlie Hebdo. In Scandinavia, the predominant style—known as galghumor, or gallows humor—still showcases a wit as dark as the long northern winter.

Just as these specific senses of humor can explain what defines these European nations, it can also help explain what binds them together. Charles de Gaulle once famously asked, “How can anyone govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese”? He was talking about the difficulty of finding consensus within a single country, but his point can be taken even further—how do you make a common political culture on a continent which features so many different traditions and sensitivities, including those found in their humor? That’s been a pressing question since World War II, when Europeans began attempting to form an ever-closer union of countries, cheeses, and even transnational jokes.

By far the dominant cross-country humor on the continent involves each of the countries lampooning their neighbors, serving up biting jabs tailored to each nation’s faults. The French depict the Belgians as simple-minded, the Spanish seem arrogant to the Portuguese, the Irish reckon Brits are all repressed, while Swedes portray the Norwegians as a bunch of oil-rich rednecks. In central and eastern Europe, the Estonians mock the hard-drinking Finns, the Slovaks make jokes about the overconfident Czechs, the Macedonians laugh at supposedly corrupt Greeks, and the Ukrainians make fun of the filthy rich but impolite Russians.

You might worry that that these comedic insults would threaten to divide the continent, but really this humor has evolved to bring it closer together. Rather than signaling aggression or propagating ethnic stereotypes, these jokes seem to diminish rather than heighten hostility. In fact, researchers have argued that such humor can help communities to positively interact by reinforcing a common identity (we can laugh at the same thing!) while acknowledging diversity. While Europeans all like a good joke—particularly at someone else’s expense—most of the tellers don’t really buy these caricatures. When Swedes ask in jest why the library closed in Oslo, and answer “because someone stole the book,” they do so more as a good-natured nod to the traditional rivalry between fellow Scandinavians than out of a literal belief in their intellectual superiority. As in a good friendship, a little mischief with those dear to you is worth a thousand “I love you’s.” In this sense, a brotherly sense of humor between countries is the best that could have happened to Europe’s community and sense of self.

We’ve already seen the ways in which these jokes and caricatures have evolved as Europe has integrated, counterbalancing the seriousness of the political process and ushering in more friendly perspectives. After Ireland became independent in 1921, for example, the Irish jokes made by the former British colonizers became taboo. Over time the jabs didn’t go away, but they did change, and now they come across more like a kind of teasing between friendly neighbors. Today the Irishman is more often than not depicted as jovial, if cheeky, bon vivant. The Irish give as good as they get too, using their legendary Celtic wit to poke fun back at the mainlanders. “What’s the English definition of a thrill? Having an After Eight [mint] at 7:30.”

The same applies to Polish jokes. In the mid-1990s, jokes about the post-Soviet Poles started making their first appearance in German TV shows and sketches. The Iron Curtain had just fallen, and Germany began to remember and re-engage with its neighbors to the east. The recognition through humor was only the first step to closer relations—Germany strongly supported Poland’s bid to join the European Union family, which it eventually did in 2004. And, of course, the German jibes at their neighbors to the east were more than matched. Poles have an extensive catalogue of jokes about the infamously humorless Germans.

In this way, humor has been just as important in modern European history—a path for Europeans to embrace their national identities even as they surrender some of their sovereignty to the greater Union. And, as things are shaping up, it looks like it will continue to be an outlet for fellow Europeans to bond over their shared project, including some of its recent misadventures.

Speaking of which, do you know the capital of Greece? It’s about $12. And wasn’t it refreshing to see England leave Europe via referendum, as opposed to the usual, via penalty kicks?

The post In Europe, Good Wisecracks Make Good Neighbors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I thought it was important to let everyone know about my struggle to rip follicles from the root of my face, armpit, and chest every three weeks at a cost of 50 pounds a go. It was a frivolous routine, but that’s how I liked my comedy then—apolitical and areligious. As a Brit of Pakistani Muslim descent, there was always a pressure to explain “my people”—so occasionally I’d liven it up with a few jokes about suicide bombers or arranged marriage. But mostly I stuck to the superficial, and it went down well enough in British clubs filled with drunk men who thought an arranged marriage was something you organized yourself.

There were exceptions, however. One day after doing a show that I thought was funny, for example, a journalist approached me and asked why I was making jokes about something as trivial as my moustache. There were so many other important issues, he insisted—honor killings, terrorism, Zayn Malik. “What a waste of a good Muslim!” he exclaimed.

I tried to explain to him that I’m really not what would be considered “good.” I stalk men, I tell jokes, I wear a G-string on a Tuesday. This certainly wasn’t the first time someone’s expected me to be a professional full-time representative of my religion and, as always, it was too much. I wanted to joke about what I wanted to joke about. So I continued to seek refuge in my moustache and revert back to the mundane material that anyone—an Asian woman, a black man, a white guy—could use. I was just like everyone else, which is exactly what I wanted.

It went on like this for seven years until last February, when three teenage girls from London packed up their bags during the school holidays and went to join ISIS. The news created a media firestorm across the U.K. Most teenagers were getting drunk, reading Harry Potter, or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, but these girls decided to join the world’s worst most barbaric terrorist group?

The story, however, rang differently for me. I immediately thought I knew why they had gone, and felt I had to say something. And I did more than say something—I made it an entire comedy routine.

You may not think that young women risking their lives and well-being to go to one of the most dangerous places on earth would make for humorous fodder. But I had known girls like this. As a native Brit, I had been brought up like these young women, and I instinctively realized that their rash decision had nothing to do with religion. This feeling was confirmed as I watched one of the girls’ sisters testify to Parliament. She explained that she couldn’t understand why this happened, “My sister was into normal teenage things,” she said, “She used to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” Yes, I thought, that’s probably exactly why they left.

I wrote a show about the episode—dubbed, of course, “The Kardashians Made Me Do It”—and based my material on actual things the girls said and did. For instance, police investigating the families’ homes found a handwritten checklist one of the girls made of things to buy before she left: makeup, body lotion, bras, new knickers … and an electric hair remover. “Wait, you’re going to join a sixth-century barbaric terrorist organization, and you are thinking of doing your bikini line? They’re not going to let you out of the cave, never mind let you shave your legs. And if you’re doing your bikini line, you’re probably too old for them anyway.”

In this way, my show makes clear that the reason I think these girls have gone is not radicalization; it’s sexualization. They’ve seen these ISIS guys on TV and yes, they’re barbaric. But they’re also macho, they’re hairy, they’ve got guns, they’ve got a rebellious cause—they’re hot! “Yeh I’ll have a bit of that, he’s a bit of all right.” These girls think they’re going to get an AK-toting Muslim version of Brad Pitt or the One Direction of Islam. Oh how wrong they are. There’s nothing new about being attracted to the bad boys, even if they are barbaric men—Rihanna and Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Punch and Judy. They’re just the latest to join the unfortunate club.

After taking the show public, I expected hate mail, abuse, and threats from people objecting to what I say in my performances. But to my surprise, for a long time I had nothing. Not one negative email, not even from my dad! Come to think of it, I got more abuse for talking about being a hairy woman than joking about jihad.

Instead, the overwhelming response to my show has been audience members telling me things like, “I never saw it that way, you made me see things differently,” or “I was laughing … I didn’t expect to be laughing at this!” Of course, it’s a comedy show not a documentary. I’m a comedian, not CNN.

In fact, the only serious backlash I’ve received for the show has come from the right-wing media. They went after me after I told some of my jokes on a popular daytime talkshow, reprinting some of the more outrageous—and often grammar-challenged—social media posts from “furious” viewers (“Glorifying this woman making jokes about ISIS and terrorism is disgusting!”) and suggesting I was a terrorist sympathizer.

Ironically, it’s the same right-wing mouthpieces that expect “my people” to condemn violence committed by any Muslim-identified terrorist anywhere in the world. Yet when I speak up to belittle and satirize ISIS for the absurdity of the fake jihad-chic lifestyle they sell, I get told to shut up. I’m on their side and they still attack me?

It made me realize that when media talking heads say “Why aren’t Muslims speaking up?” they don’t really want us to speak up. We ruin their tidy us-versus-them narrative. It’s not that they don’t want to hear jokes about ISIS, either. It’s just that they want to hear them from comics like Louis C.K., Bill Burr, and Daniel Tosh. Safe white guys they can relate to and feel comfortable with. Even Donald Trump can get away with saying things like, “Obama was the founder of ISIS” under the guise of “sarcasm.” I’m a brown Muslim woman who is suggesting other ways to look at these situations—maybe the real reason why young girls go off to marry ISIS fighters is less about religion and more about sex and rebellion—and I get accused of supporting terrorism.

Fortunately, freedom of speech—that valuable touchstone of Western democracy—usually comes around to making room for new voices. This is especially true in comedy. The Jews were able to make fun of the Holocaust. The Irish were able to make fun of the IRA. Now it’s time for Muslims to be funny. Let us fight our own war on terror with laughter—it may work even better than the bombs.

The post Why It’s OK to Laugh About ISIS appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Recent conversations dominating the comedy world in the past few years have a lot to do with a changing status quo. We’ve heard it in the arguments about whether the internet is really a democratizing force that rewards the best output (content is king!). We’ve seen it in the back-and-forth over the female comics alleging incidents of sexual harassment and assault.

Finally, and perhaps most visibly, we’ve witnessed it in the debate about whether there’s a place for political correctness in comedy—that profession that profits from poking fun at others, playing with taboo, and pushing the proverbial envelope. From Dennis Miller to Jim Norton to Daniel Lawrence Whitney (a.k.a. Larry the Cable Guy), spates of comics are bemoaning the infringement on their freedom of speech wrought by overly-sensitive listeners. Even Jerry Seinfeld, famous for his harmless observational patter, took to the Late Night with Seth Meyers to voice his objections to what he sees as: “A creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me.” As an example, he refers to a joke in which he dons a stereotypical gay male affect. It hasn’t been going over too well, he says, but explains that it’s only because audiences are too afraid to laugh for fear of seeming bigoted.

While some among the anti-PC ranks are comics of color, like Chris Rock and Russell Peters, and a few are women, like Lisa Lampanelli, queen of shock comedy, those most vocal about this are, by and large, straight white male comics. A male sense of humor has long stood in as humor genera. But with the advent of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, and other social media, fans have myriad avenues for challenging this presumption of a shared comic sensibility willing to take potshots at the disenfranchised, and for finding alternatives that better fit their tastes.

Of course, these conversations are not new or even symptomatic of social media. From the Culture Wars of decades past to more modern debates about multiculturalism and diversity, there have always been those lamenting shifts in our shared identity. Though the critics may cloak it in the language of having the right to say whatever they want, what they’re really trying to safeguard is an old idea of who “we” (as a group, a university, a nation, an industry) are. In the case of comedy, the debates about political incorrectness hit on core questions about who gets to join and stay in the club: What do we think is funny? What isn’t? Who can get away with certain jokes? Who can’t? You can see why the deliberation gets so heated.

The internet has also added an extra layer of public scrutiny to these complex questions. Smartphone videos and social media virality have allowed material once confined to intimate comedy clubs to easily make its way to critical audiences across the world wide web. We’ve already seen this phenomenon in full force: Criticism for Daily Show replacement Trevor Noah’s handful of tasteless anti-Semitic and sexist tweets. A social media storm over Daniel Tosh’s joke about a female audience member being gang-raped. Offense taken at Tracy Morgan’s anti-gay rant. Outrage over Michael Richard’s racist outburst at a heckler. The trend even prompted New Yorker writer Ian Crouch to ask “Is social media ruining comedy?” His answer, for the record, was a definitive “no.”

Social media has, however, undeniably changed the power dynamic between performer and audiences. Spectators, emboldened by these new platforms, are unafraid to unleash cavalcades of criticism aimed at comics who they perceive as expressing homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynistic worldviews.

What’s notable about these new, louder voices is that they aren’t stifling free speech (that bludgeon so often used by incorrectness defenders). They’re creating more. Comics such as Jim Norton may criticize the internet outrage gang for spending too much time railing about matters that are inconsequential, namely jokes told by comics. Upon closer examination, however, a lot of these “petty” conversations speak to issues of great significance in our society like how we portray and treat historically disenfranchised groups.

Does some of the outrage go too far? Yes. Will fear of backlash lead to some performers self-censoring their material? Perhaps. (Though you’ll note that most of these complainers aren’t exactly being silenced.) But it’s a false presumption that being more mindful when it comes to producing humor that punches down will somehow create comedy that’s less funny. If anything, it makes it smarter.

Here, too, change is afoot in the industry. The “the internet changes everything!” trope is a tired one, but it is impossible to ignore that this connectedness changes the way people produce, circulate, and consume humor. Comics are taking their talents to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and podcasts. Retweets, likes, and shares can lead to a big breakthrough or, at the very least, help fill seats at a show. Although a late-night TV spot or a network stand-up special certainly helps a career, they’re no longer the only determinants of who becomes successful. Creators and consumers now have more power than ever to shape what becomes popular comedic content.

Through this confluence of a culture of sharing and a culture that’s more open to hearing from diverse comics (and that’s more diverse itself), we’re seeing a flourishing of all sorts of humor that had a hard time finding opportunities to break through. There’s Hari Kondabolu, who recently dropped a critically-acclaimed digital album joking about waiting for 2042, the predicted year when whites will be the minority in America. There’s Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams, who cohost 2 Dope Queens, a widely successful podcast that features the rhetorical artistry of the pair chatting it up between stand-up sets by guest comics (who usually aren’t one of the #sooomanywhiteguys they often complain about). And of course there’s Tig Notaro, who in 2012 walked on stage and launched into her now legendary viral set—“Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you?”—and proceeded to fill in the details of a rough year that included the surprise death of her mother, a break-up with her girlfriend, a C. diff infection, and a diagnosis of Stage 2 cancer in both breasts.

I could go on.

Now, it seems, we’re entering an era where societal shifts in what we consider funny and who gets to be funny are making more space for all sorts of new voices. These are comics that are tackling the taboo—making provocative observations on race, sex, death, money, politics. But they’re doing it from the perspective of those who were usually the punchlines, not the comedians on stage.

At their noblest essence, comedians have always been cultural soothsayers. They levy critiques that let them be voices for the voiceless, prophets of public ills, conduits of catharsis. Despite all the challenges to the status quo in comedy, none of this core has gone away. The changes we’re seeing aren’t killing comedy. They’re just letting more people in on the jokes.

The post Political Correctness Isn’t Killing Comedy, It’s Making It Better appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Who else could take something everyday and simple and, with a seemingly effortless aside, raise it to a level of complexity that creates mind-shifts in the human psyche? Who other than comedians can take something intimidatingly complex—think masters like George Carlin on the government or even the idea of God—and, in the span of a witty retort, break it down to a simple truth?

Comedians cover it all from laughing off involuntary bodily functions to exposing untouchable powers-that-be. With all that breadth and range and possibility, I can’t help but be in awe of them.

I continue to be surprised that comedian is now my own moniker. To start, I was never the class clown. If anything I was the goody two-shoes who got good grades and played by the rules. But in my family, it was tradition to seek out the humor in situations—the silly, the painful, and sometimes the gruesome. I learned quickly that doing so can make life’s pain sting less. It’s that side of comedy that I bring to the stage. And it’s that side of comedy that has made my 20 years as a performer an indescribable study of the human psyche—both of others and my own—that even Jung and Freud would envy.

It also helps that there are no rules in comedy. Well, save for one: It has to be funny. That was always the attraction and the challenge.

Until a few years ago, I assumed that everyone stuck to this simple standard. Then the “war on comedy” erupted. We’ve seen the battlefield pop up everywhere in the last few years: students protesting visiting comics over perceived sexist or racist sets, the social media storms after a seemingly off-color joke, the explosion of think pieces over the insidious intent behind a thoughtless retort. Although outrage vigilantes waging these battles claim to be stomping out bigotry, instead they have become hypersensitive to the point where they have gone after just about anything. Hard. And the mob rarely suggests starting conversations, instead leaping to cries to cancel sitcoms, boycott comedy shows, or blacklist comedians as unequivocal misogynists or racists.

Take the recent example of what happened when talk show host Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a photoshopped image of her piggybacking on sprinting Olympian Usain Bolt. The joke was a caption that read “This is how I’m running errands from now on. #Rio2016.” Cause he’s the fastest man in the world! Get it?! Well, thousands did not get it, saying the image of a white woman on the back of the black Jamaican runner echoed of the old tradition of slaves carrying their masters and called for Ellen’s head on a platter. As a black woman, I’m attuned to instances of everyday racism that can seep into the lives of African Americans. This wasn’t one of them. This was a funny image of an adult getting a piggyback ride and making fun of L.A. traffic (it really is hell!). The cacophony got to be so much that DeGeneres actually had to reassure the public that she was not a racist.

I would never be so bold as to tell someone how to process humor—it’s as subjective as taste in fashion or food. Based on a complex web of experiences and worldviews, some people are left in stitches, while others are left with a shrug. But in the case of Ellen and in so many other examples (including those captured in the documentary on this troubling trend, Can We Take a Joke?, in which I was a featured comedian), the outrage that follows these jokes seems to be more a reflexive hunt for things to take offense at rather than thoughtful critique.

The real problem, however, isn’t the wasted energy of the political correctness patrollers or the hurt careers of comics. The danger of this outrage phenomenon is that, in the process of policing every sensitive subject, we lose comedy itself—one of the only tools we have to grapple with our testiest issues. Humor is an entryway unlike any other for talking out those things we’re too afraid, too uncomfortable, or too pained to broach head on. If we can’t joke about issues like ethnicity, sexuality, class, politics, pain, and death, we may never get through them or find ways to heal.

I see this power of comedy first-hand when people approach me after my sets (especially those I do in my Stereotyped 101 program, a set of workshops I created for classrooms and workplaces that uses humor to address diversity and inclusion issues). Whether it was a joke about race, size, age, or sexuality, people who say something almost always tell me they are grateful that someone is addressing, rather than shying away from, one of these taboo issues. For example, I have a joke, inspired from real life, where I riff on the less-than-straitlaced members of my black family:

“My cousin just got married, had a baby, and names the daughter … Daijanera.
Someone asked me what that means? What does it mean?! She made it up!
No, I’ll tell you what it means. It’s apparently African-American for ‘I never want my daughter to have a job in corporate America.'”

When my audience laughs at that—and they do, even if it’s uncomfortable laugher—I follow it up with:

“I’m so glad y’all laughed at that because that joke did NOT go over so well in Atlanta. I know this because after the show, Ryshaneequa came up to me and she had some choice words.”

Then I’ll proceed to go into a litany of other names given to Caucasian girls that are equally absurd—showing that this name game crosses all color lines and ethnic barriers. It never fails that at least two people come up to me after a show and either share their name or family member’s name and we all have a laugh. The joke works because underneath the surface, it’s way more of a knock on the racism in corporate America—and on the stereotypes we’re all willing to pile on certain names—than it is on my cousin’s first-born. I’ve heard from audience members about how the joke opened up conversations that make them rethink their prejudices or consoled them that they’re not the only ones unfairly judged for their unusual name. It’s reactions like this that remind me why I fell in love with comedy, and why I’ve stuck with it all these years.

I’ve been in the industry for nearly two decades now, and from what I’ve seen, the majority of us comedians are good people (albeit some a little damaged). Our aim is always to use humor to unite the audience—not divide or exclude them. To do that, we come armed with our stories, our words, our bodies, and our fallibility. Sure, we make some missteps. But comedy is an intricate art that often relies on getting a laugh at the things we’re most afraid to talk about. If we lose our senses of humor about the difficult issues, I’m afraid we may lose our nerve to bring them up at all.

The post Keep the Offensive Comedy Coming appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What do you call a black woman who’s had seven abortions? A crime fighter! … Now I’ve gotta do a Hispanic [sic] joke to even things out … How many Hispanics [sic] does it take to clean a bathroom? None! That’s a nigger’s job!” [Audience members groan, laugh, cheer, applaud.]

The jokes baffled me—how does Lampanelli, who is white, get away with performing these in front of a national audience without being booed off stage and being forced to enter the witness protection program? Lampanelli claims she’s not really a racist and has “good intentions.” But was that all there was to it?

Lampanelli’s routine aired only a few months after Michael Richards’ infamous Laugh Factory disaster, in which the former Seinfeld star unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and insults at a black audience member that lightly heckled his performance. His comments were recorded and soon broadcast around the world. Following his viral blunder, Richards swiftly apologized, noted he was “not a racist,” and also emphasized his “good intentions.”

At the time I watched these performances, I had recently decided to apply to graduate school to research the relationship between race and comedy. As a young man, I had heard the racist jokes told by fellow undergrads and was fascinated by the way they forged and broke social relations. Major public spectacles like these only confirmed my suspicion that this humor was part of a wider public problem. I took the Richards’ incident as a godsend. Well, not really. But examining these types of controversies, and comparing them to performances that didn’t draw as much ire, provided a revealing look into the changing nature of race-talk in American comedy.

Overall, there has been a significant shift in the acceptability of racist speech in public, including under the guise of humor, since the civil rights movement. Take, for instance, the roast of Whoopi Goldberg at the Friars Club in 1993 in which Ted Danson appeared in blackface, performed a series of black stereotypes, and made liberal use of the “n-word.” The performance horrified many in attendance, and the private club famous for its no-holds-barred celebrity roasts issued its first-ever public apology in response. It’s worth remembering that only a few decades earlier, blackface was one of the most popular forms of comedy in the country. The shift from “funny” to “racist” didn’t occur on its own. It took years of opposition and protest from the targets of such racial ridicule.

But in studying the evolution of race in humor, I’m seeing an increasing number of white comics “successfully” making use of racial stereotypes and slurs, despite complaints by some comics and critics who suggest that we’ve all become censoriously hypersensitive and have gone “too far” with all the “PC nonsense.” Think Lisa Lampanelli, Louis C. K., Neal Brennan, Nick Kroll, Amy Schumer, and Jeff Dunham. Sure, there are certain jokes that don’t fly and apologies sometimes follow, but there’s something that’s happening that is allowing these comics to get away with telling these jokes.

To better explore these new bounds in modern comedy, I decided to get my answers from the ground: I enrolled in comedy school. What I learned was incredibly revealing. Over the period of several months in 2008 and 2009, instructors at a reputable L.A.-based comedy school taught my classmates and I not only about the mechanics of comedy writing, but also the social rules that govern its practice.

One of the first things I noticed were the differences between how teachers coached white versus non-white comedy students on the subject of race. Unlike students of color, who were encouraged to use racial stereotypes frequently, uncritically, and unapologetically (at least as applied to their own groups), white students were taught to tread racial matters carefully and strategically. Since the Richards incident was fresh in our collective memory, our instructor—a white male—reminded white students not to make racial slurs and stereotypes central to their acts. But he also noted that the biggest payoffs in the industry often come from provoking the taboo without crossing the line, and didn’t steer students away from approaching controversial topics.

To do that, the teacher taught students to employ tricks like creating characters—a friend, a family member, a stranger—who would “tell” the joke with racial stereotypes or slurs for them. The character would serve as a buffer between the performer and the ownership of the statement. He also advised students to ridicule themselves and expose some of their own vulnerabilities before pivoting to material about those outside their own identity groups. For white students, this self-deprecation allowed them to become “equal opportunity offenders,” a common ploy used in comedy that relies on the defense that if you’re ridiculing everyone, you’re not really bigoted.

Pay close attention to any “successful” race-based comedy routine over the last five decades and you’ll see these strategies in action. From Don Rickles to Louis C.K., approaches like those taught in my comedy school act as a magician’s sleight of hand that go unseen by the untrained eye.

But does it really matter that comics can still get a laugh from some racist jokes? Sure, delivery and intent are mitigating factors, but the inescapable question is whether the jokes are pointing out the absurdity of their racist content, or in fact perpetuating it.

Take, for example, that Lampanelli quip where she “jokingly” equates black abortions with crime fighting. The joke told on stage isn’t one that simply remained in the comedy club. This laugh line, and variations of it, have turned up on multiple white supremacist websites, where it reinforces their racist ideas that African-Americans are naturally more prone to criminality. It also turned up in a 2015 Department of Justice probe, where it was one of several racist jokes found in emails circulating among police officers and court officials in Ferguson, Missouri.

The DOJ reported that this and other forms of racist humor served as evidence of “impermissible bias” among members of the city’s municipal courts and police force—an atmosphere that contributed to a pattern of unconstitutional policing in the community. Similar investigations of police departments across the country reveal a pattern of racist (as well as sexist and homophobic) humor circulating among officers. Though the jokes themselves don’t cause the bigotry, they certainly help justify and perpetuate these prejudiced belief systems. It is rather revealing that those who suggest we grow “thicker skins” and learn to “take a joke” tend to ignore such occurrences.

Not all comics are clamoring for a pushback to political correctness; some comedians are leading the charge against racist jokes. Reflecting on her own past reliance on racial humor, Sarah Silverman recently noted that some “racial jokes that were just trying to be absurd” have “less charm” given the current environment where our nation is confronting issues of police brutality against minorities.

The times continue to change, and comedy will continue to adapt. Those who challenge racist jokes aren’t waging a war against comedy. They are just recognizing that in a society still struggling to achieve basic justice and equality for racial and ethnic minorities, such jokes only add insult to injury.

The post When Bigoted Humor Isn’t Just a Joke appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.