1 COMEDY
This is a love story.
* * *
“You nervous?” In my memory, that was the first thing Jerry Seinfeld ever said to me. It was May 2015, and I was about to interview him onstage at Vulture Festival, in front of five hundred people. That afternoon, Seinfeld looked like a cross between a tech CEO and Jerry Seinfeld. Black T-shirt under a well-made gray checked blazer, small glasses surrounded by only a whisper of silver frames, the very close-cropped hair of a man who gets it cut often. It’s possible he said something else first—I don’t know, like, “Hello” or “How’s it going?” But what I remember was, “You nervous?” See, Seinfeld rose to prominence in the comedy clubs of the 1980s, when comedians were forced to see every onstage interaction as a battle to the death—kill* or be killed. I told him, “No,” by which I meant, “Yes.” How could I not be? I was going to be asking the writer of many of my favorite jokes where they came from.
The audience was younger than I expected, considering how long Seinfeld had been famous. They reminded me of, well, myself. My feeling of How did I get here? transformed into How did we get here? Before that point, I had a narrative of myself as a fan of comedy, starting with me as a kid watching Seinfeld reruns every day while doing my homework and building to me talking onstage with the guy with the name. But in that moment I started seeing myself as a part of a much larger cultural shift.
To quote the question asked by many a Jerry Seinfeld impressionist: Who are these people? Simply put: comedy nerds. Comedy nerds are nerds, but, if you can believe it, for comedy. People who follow the trends and study the foundational texts, and who, if you asked, would say, “Of course comedy is an art form.” A few months before I interviewed Seinfeld, I had been talking to Comedy Central’s head of research at the time, Chanon Cook, about a 2012 survey she conducted, which showed that millennials viewed humor as the number-one factor in their self-definition. “Comedy is to this generation what music was to previous generations,” she told me.1 “They use it to define themselves. They use it to connect with people.” Comedy Central called them Comedy Natives.2 If you look at social media behavior—posting funny videos on Facebook, tweeting a joke reaction to the news of the day, lip-syncing a favorite sitcom scene on TikTok—it seems that comedy has enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate. Cook’s analysis pointed to what life started looking like for young people around 2010. Seinfeld had a sense that something had been changing, but he wasn’t exactly familiar with us comedy nerds. At one point he referred to us with the close but not exactly right “stand-up geeks.” More than he couldn’t comprehend who this new generation of comedy fan was, he couldn’t appreciate his own role in our emergence. It’s hard to say Seinfeld is the reason for modern comedy fandom, but it seems fair to suggest the reason it looks the way it does has a lot to do with the show’s content and popularity. I’ll explain. Let’s go back to the beginning.
It was the summer of 1989. Gorbachev was abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine, Prince had everyone doing the “Batdance,” and the team of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David had a new show about something. Originally called The Seinfeld Chronicles, the initial premise was that each episode would show the day-to-day life of a stand-up comedian and how it got turned into material.3 Though much of that framing dropped when the show went to air, rewatching now, it is amazing how many plots revolved around stand-up. Jerry also periodically tells jokes, but not how a normal sitcom character would. Meaning he knows he’s making a joke and, because he’s a comedian, he’ll comment on how well it worked. My favorite example of this aspect of the show is a scene from the season 8 episode “The Checks,” with Jerry and Elaine coming out of a drugstore:
JERRY: Hey, have you seen all these new commercials for indigestion drugs? Pepcid AC, Tagamet HB.
ELAINE: Ugh, the whole country’s sick to their stomachs.
JERRY: Now, you know you’re supposed to take these things before you get sick?
ELAINE: What is this, a bit?
JERRY: No.
ELAINE: ’Cause I’m not in the mood.
JERRY: We’re just talking. Is this not the greatest marketing ploy ever? If you feel good, you’re supposed to take one!
ELAINE: Yeah, I know that tone. This is a bit.
JERRY: They’ve opened up a whole new market. Medication for the well.
The scene continues and Elaine gives Jerry the sort of feedback comedians give each other, telling him to move “medication for the well” to the start and hit “good” harder. When it aired, in 1996, it was the first time I ever heard the term “bit.” Many of my peers and I were being indoctrinated to care about comedy. The message of 97 percent of sitcoms is that friends are good or family is good or your office is friends or family and thus also good. Not Seinfeld. The idea that it was a show about nothing is misunderstood. It was not that it wasn’t about anything, it was about the idea of nothing. It was about nothingness. Famously, Larry David said he wanted “no hugging, no learning.” Seinfeld hung a photo of space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in the writers’ room to remind the staff how little what they were doing mattered.4 Nothing didn’t mean the nonsense the Seinfeld four tended to focus on; it was an existential nothing. There was one exception: Seinfeld was less Waiting for Godot and more waiting for good joke. For the makers of the show and the characters in the show, the one thing that mattered was comedy.
And the show was remarkably popular. Truly, it is remarkable for a show that specific to be watched by as many people as it was. At the beginning of this chapter, I referenced a well-known line from the second season of the 2019 critical supernova Fleabag (“This is a love story”). I imagine there’s a good deal of Venn diagram overlap among readers of this book and watchers of the second season of that show, and yet I doubt anyone knew with 100 percent certainty that I was copping the line. The monoculture, the time in which everyone watched and listened to the same stuff, is so far in the rearview that you can’t be sure with things like this. Though American streaming numbers for Fleabag aren’t available, you can sense that it didn’t consume mass culture the way Seinfeld did. Now, if I said “yada yada,” it’s unlikely any readers wouldn’t know what I was making a reference to. Over 76 million people watched the Seinfeld finale in 1998.5 There were only 276 million people living in the U.S. at the time, and a lot of those people were babies not allowed to stay up that late. Over 58 million watched the freaking clip retrospective that ran before the finale. For comparison, fewer than 20 million people watched the Game of Thrones finale, the biggest TV event in recent memory.6 That is significantly less than Seinfeld’s weekly viewership. Also, it’s relevant that, given its run from 1989 to 1998, Seinfeld was right in the sweet spot for millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, making it likely the first big show that many of the largest generation in American history watched. Because of David’s no-learning rule, all the show projected to its impressionable fans was that comedy is valuable. Essentially, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David invented the comedy podcast, or, at least, they deserve credit for generating an interest in the basic premise of funny people sitting around talking about comedy and their lives as comedians.
The story is not that Seinfeld premiered and yada yada comedy is a whole thing now. (I told you you’d get it when I referenced “yada yada.”) I don’t want to draw a straight line from Seinfeld to today, because it was not a linear expansion. It was more of a big bang, with the expansion spreading in 360 directions and accelerating as it moved forward. Starting in the nineties, there were countless entry points for comedy fandom. I was a member of the Seinfeld generation, a term I just made up to refer to the sort of millennial who grew up watching Seinfeld and, in turn, always knowing and caring about what goes into a stand-up’s comedy. But you could also call us the Simpsons generation, as I remember at age nine watching an episode and laughing at a joke so hard that something dislodged in my brain and I thought, Someone wrote this thing. I wonder who? I wonder how?
We were a generation raised on a new sort of sketch-show-veteran, blockbuster-comedy movie star, from Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, and Chevy Chase in the eighties, to Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Mike Myers in the nineties, to the Wayans brothers, Will Ferrell, and Melissa McCarthy in the 2000s. We were also the Def Comedy Jam, Martin, In Living Color, UPN, WB generation. Or, maybe, the generation who saw prominent women in comedy like Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho, and new woman-dominated casts of Saturday Night Live. And there was RuPaul’s emergence as the biggest drag queen the world had ever seen. Most succinctly, you could say, we were the Comedy Central generation, being the first to grow up with a network that, appropriately enough, centered comedy. I was not aware of any of this at the time, I was just a kid watching what I liked, but the accessibility of this much comedy is part of how you get a generation of comedy nerds.
Comedy has steadily grown in cultural relevance, from vaudeville around the turn of the twentieth century to Seinfeld toward the end of it, but since then it feels like its growth in both scale and value has sped up. This book focuses on comedy made from 1990 through the early 2020s. This is the period in which millennials, and then Gen Z, emerged as cultural consumers. Also, as will be discussed in chapter 2, this represents the period after the comedy boom of the eighties (when hundreds of comedy clubs opened) went bust (when hundreds closed), and comedy puts itself on a path as an art form and a business that would lead it to where it is today, where there are more comedians of a greater variety performing for larger audiences across more platforms than ever. Maybe the most drastic stat to convey how much things have changed is this: When Seinfeld premiered, in July 1989, no comedy act had headlined a show at the Madison Square Garden arena; since the show ended in 1998, eighteen acts have, at time of writing.† It’s not just that the biggest names are bigger; comedy has built a robust middle class of performers who might not have their own TV show but have millions of followers on social media or a loyal fifty thousand listeners of their podcast.
Moreover, in 2004, a survey revealed that one in five eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds got their presidential campaign news from comedy shows.7 Ever since, comedians’ status in the sociopolitical conversation has only been on the rise, led by Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show and followed by Saturday Night Live’s impact on how young people (especially self-identified Independents and Republicans) exposed to Tina Fey’s impression perceived Sarah Palin.8 By 2014, comedy was seen as so important politically that when the Obama administration was desperate to boost Affordable Care Act enrollment, their bright idea was to have the president appear on Zach Galifianakis’s talk show parody, Between Two Ferns, which featured jokes like “What is it like to be the last Black president?” And it worked, with the Healthcare.gov site experiencing a 40 percent boost in traffic, almost entirely made up of people who had never visited the site before. The American socialist magazine Jacobin would later call it “The Day Zach Galifianakis Saved Obamacare.”9
Comedy—broadly, historically—is the art of taking serious things not seriously. In the classroom of our culture, for a very long time, comedians have been placed in the back, cracking jokes at everything in front of them. Comedians were our society’s ombudsmen, our official bullshit callers. And, as time has gone on, comedians have done such a good job at this that it’s become clearer and clearer that a lot of our assumptions about our society are bullshit. As a result, the media has imbued comedians like Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer, most current late-night hosts, and the entire cast and crew of Saturday Night Live with a status previously granted only to those who claim to be telling us the truth—journalists, politicians, and other public intellectuals. But forget politics. Comedy is, dare I say, cool now. In 2021, the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga chose animated characters from The Simpsons as models for Paris Fashion Week. A year later, at New York Fashion Week, the boutique fashion accessories brand Susan Alexandra held its show at the Comedy Cellar, with up-and-coming comedians performing and serving as models. That same week, the cool-kid streetwear brand KITH used its fall lookbook to introduce its newest model—Jerry Seinfeld. For people around my age and older, comedy seems like a bigger deal than it ever has. For those younger, they’ve never lived in a culture where comedy wasn’t an ever-present, important, valued societal force. This is what culture looks like during the second comedy boom. And there are no signs it’s slowing down.
* * *
Something Seinfeld said that day inspired this book. Our conversation was chugging along nicely but hit a snag when I tried to have him discuss the nitty-gritty of his joke-writing process. “This is my favorite thing to talk about,” he said, “but I really think they’re going to be so bored to hear it.” The interview went on for another thirty minutes, but this sentence played over and over again in my head, as if a DJ had made it the hook of the panel’s dance remix. “This,” meaning the craft of comedy, is the favorite subject of one of the twenty or so most famous people of the last quarter century, and yet he thinks it would bore the five hundred people who were so interested in everything he had to say that they were able to buy forty-dollar tickets in the minutes between when they went on sale and when they sold out. I could tell some people in the first few rows were disappointed, but I wasn’t going to push. I was still quite scared of him. But, upon reflection, I realized this moment of disconnection between Seinfeld and me captured a dichotomy that has persisted, where no matter how much comedy grows in popularity and societal value, there still exists a strong apprehension about appreciating it on its own terms as an art form. This needs to change. So, that’s what this book is: an exploration of the ways of seeing the art of comedy. Throughout our time together, I will embrace the extreme subjectivity around what people find funny, but considering comedy as an art is nonnegotiable.
And I believe I’m not alone in this desire to understand comedy better. There are fans, regardless of what Seinfeld says, who are open, curious, and excited to understand how comedy functions as an art form and as part of our culture. Seinfeld’s comment was tapping into a long-held view that analyzing comedy is a fool’s errand, one that I intend to debunk in this book. See, when Seinfeld was growing up and coming up, jokes were not meant to be explained. If you have to explain a joke, that means it wasn’t funny. If you explain comedy, you’ll kill it. Which brings us to the frog. As E. B. and Katharine S. White wrote in 1941: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”10 Strong premise. Too wordy. It would be punchier if it ended with the frog death. Uh-oh! There I go! E. B. Damned, I dissected their joke. And it is a joke, literally, ironically enough. And like a good joke, it gave people the vocabulary to shape and express their own opinion. The opinion being that by analyzing a joke, you suck the joy out of it.
Before we go forward, we need to establish what a joke is, because the word is used to describe two different, albeit related funny phenomena. There are jokes. Like, joke-jokes. Sometimes called street jokes. They’re the things that start with “Knock knock” or “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar” or “What do you get when you cross a _____ with a _____?” Joke-jokes are jokes you find in joke books. They’re freestanding, authorless, utilitarian tools to produce laughter. They have been around for millennia. They are a bottom-up, folk-cultural product. Modern comedy’s early history—from minstrel shows to vaudeville to burlesque to the borscht belt and chitlin circuit‡—started with jokes like these, but now when comedians say they tell jokes, they are talking about something different.
Norm Macdonald made the distinction between joke-jokes and comedians’ jokes clear in 2015.11 An interviewer wanted to know how he wrote the often long, sometimes meandering jokes he would tell on late-night shows and Howard Stern, like the legendary “moth joke” he told on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, about a moth going through an existential crisis who visits a podiatrist’s office (“‘Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?’ And the moth says, ‘’Cause the light was on.’”). Macdonald said he did not write them. No, comics don’t write “actual” jokes. “They’re just out there,” he explained. “No comic in the world can make up an actual joke like ‘A guy walks into a bar and this happens.’”
He continued, “They call a comedian’s act ‘jokes,’ but they haven’t been jokes for years.” Macdonald had a hard time explaining what he had previously thought was obvious. He threw out the word “observations” to describe them, but “jokes” can be anything to a comedian. A joke can be Sarah Silverman telling her audience not to forget God can see you masturbating, but “don’t stop. He’s almost there.” Then she adds, “I’m just kidding. There’s no God.” A joke can be Wanda Sykes’s examination of how it is harder being gay than Black, in which she plays out her parents’ responses to if she had to come out as Black (“You weren’t born Black. The Bible says, ‘Adam and Eve,’ not ‘Adam and Mary J. Blige.’”). A joke can be Leslie Jones acting out the time she danced so hard to impress Prince, her ponytail flew off her head. To a comedian, a “joke” is a complete comedic idea. And this is how the word will be used in this book. This distinction is necessary because comedy’s jokes are carrying the baggage of joke-jokes, including the belief that they should not be analyzed, at least in polite society.
The thing is, the Whites weren’t talking about analyzing comedy, as in the art form that is currently thriving, because the genre was still in its nascency. I believe that because of the sentence that directly preceded the dead-frog line: “Analysts have had their go at humor and I have read some of this interpretative literature, but without being greatly instructed.” I have also read some of this interpretative literature and similarly found it lacking. Often, it’s because it is oriented around joke-jokes.
Instead of summarizing the “Theories of Humor” Wikipedia page, let me tell you a little story about Noel Meyerhof, a beloved office cut-up, who one day is discovered entering jokes into the Multivac supercomputer by a colleague. This is the plot of “Jokester,” a 1956 short story from Isaac Asimov, who in his free time was a famed joke-joke freak, releasing three collections over the course of his lifetime. When confronted, Meyerhof explains his intentions are to figure out where jokes come from, as they seem to have no origin and he has not been satisfied with the existing literature. “The people who write the books are just guessing,” he argues. “Some of them say we laugh because we feel superior to the people in the joke. Some say it is because of a suddenly realized incongruity, or a sudden relief from tension, or a sudden reinterpretation of events. Is there any simple reason? Different people laugh at different jokes. No joke is universal. Some people don’t laugh at any joke. Yet what may be most important is that man is the only animal with a true sense of humor; the only animal that laughs.” Fortunately for Meyerhof, the Multivac spits out an answer: Aliens made them up!
Extraterrestrials aside, this is a decent summary of the history of comedy philosophy that would have been available to the Whites. You get references to the three most common theories: 1. Superiority theory dates back to the likes of Plato and Aristotle (though the name wouldn’t come until the twentieth century), and argues that we laugh at others’ misfortune because it makes us feel better about our own lot in life.12 2. Relief theory is most associated with Sigmund Freud, who believed people laugh to release psychic energy associated with a repressed topic.13 3. Incongruity theory is the most contemporary of the bunch, with many great thinkers offering their spin on the fundamental idea that we laugh at the juxtaposition of a common/rational concept and an uncommon/absurd one.14 Besides it being easy to think of disproving examples, they all fail for one reason: They’re too focused on joke-jokes. This results in these theories’ being too binary, as they are trying to explain the relationship between setup and punch line. All of them, in one way or another, have a before and an after. Like an on-off switch, one goes from 0 percent laughing to 100 percent laughing and then back to 0. I’m dubious that this is what it feels like to experience a joke-joke, but it’s definitely not what it feels like to experience comedy.
For my money, what it feels like to experience comedy is best captured by play theory, the theory of comedy this book subscribes to. Let me show you, reader, how this interpretation of comedy is not simply about jokes, but is part of the broader human condition born out of the evolutionary need for play. Try to think of comedy as less of a discrete moment and more of a state of being. In scripted movies or TV shows, it’s the story and its characters (or a premise, if it’s a sketch) that put you in the position to laugh when funny things happen. In stand-up, it is the energy created between the comic and the audience. The feeling of mirth one experiences watching comedy is similar at the most basic neurological level to the feeling one has joking around with one’s friends and family. Similarly, as we mature, we search for ever more sophisticated versions of laughing at a funny face a relative makes when we’re a child. Comedians are able to artificially create that state of play by generating the same feelings of trust and safety that free you up to laugh most easily. But what does this mean for jokes? Jokes are the means by which comedians play. Joke theories will highlight the importance of surprise in and of itself, but under play theory, surprise is important only insomuch as surprise is fun. But it’s not essential. A pun is not funny because the language passes through some inherently funny linguistic calculation, but because you are literally playing with words. For those with mathematically wired, puzzle-solving brains, it might feel like a funny calculation, but that’s just because that’s how they play. Free from the need to telegraph what they’re saying, as comedians get more experienced, they understand they can get laughs without their sentences sounding so jokey.
To best understand play theory, it helps to think where it evolved from. Man is not the only animal that laughs. Isn’t that cute? Though humans are the only animal with the biology to make the noise we think of as laughter, other animals make similar repetitive noises. Our sisters the chimpanzees do it.15 As do gorillas, orangutans, and other primates. Elephants laugh. Rats make little giggles. It’s possible dogs and cats laugh. Again, very cute. “Chimps,” writes neuroscientist Robert R. Provine, “laugh most when tickled, during rough-and-tumble play, and during chasing games.” He adds, “Physical contact or threat of such contact is a common denominator of chimp laughter.”16 In contrast, though adult humans’ laughter often involves verbal communication, over the last twenty years, researchers have argued that we are doing our version of rough-and-tumbling. We use comedy as a way to mess around with each other, in the same way chimps tickle each other. It’s why Darwin, who saw comedy in a way similar to how future play theorists would, once called humor a “tickling of the mind.”17
In the 150 or so years since Darwin, new research has advanced the case for play theory.18 “There is a growing consensus among researchers that the purpose of play behavior is to sharpen the mind’s physical, cognitive, and emotional skills,” write the cognitive scientists Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams in Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.19 They add that “laughter is a tool to facilitate nonaggressive play.” Other researchers describe how humor, as a social phenomenon, evolved from this use of laughter.20 To apply this to comedy means to consider the comedian-audience relationship. Comedy exists only when both the comedian and audience are working together to create the state of play. “Comedy is a game, a game that imitates life,” wrote the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his influential 1900 book on comedy, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.21 And it is not a game that can be played alone; as he writes, “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.” Again, this state of play is most naturally entered into with the people closest to you, but the art of comedy evolved into existence because people were willing to pay for professionals to create play and needed to practice processing increasingly sophisticated ideas.
Copyright © 2023 by Jesse David Fox
