Week 34-3: Tosh-é.0
I had posted an entry on this same topic on Friday. A few hours later, I took it down. It was far too long and, as such, was too prone to being partially read / partially misread-- an idea I did not like, given a rather sensitive topic.
porn_this_way got in touch with me, and had apparently read what I'd written before I'd removed it. The resulting fun back-and-forth, along with ongoing dumb discussion of the "current event" that was the focus of my original post in other online hangouts of mine, convinced me to try and rewrite the whole thing from scratch, this time keeping it much shorter. This is the result. Thanks, PTW (and do be sure to enjoy her own, much funnier entry on the topic).
No, I promise, this is not going to be yet another entry on music stuff. But one thing that bothers me a lot, as a guy who ostensibly works in music theory for his current living, is that my field in its present state is barely adequate in one important sense.
Folks have been interested in music theory for centuries, and there's a lot of past work and literature. We can tell you a lot about how music in various periods was constructed from a technical standpoint, often with an understanding that the composers themselves did not apparently possess. There are lots of different approaches to theory, and the approaches often differ by necessity from genre to genre under examination, with scholars coming up with semi-new approaches fairly frequently.
But one thing we're not even close to being able to explain is how music actually works on human beings. We can't explain why we like it. We can't explain individual tastes in music either. This bothers me a great deal. If I'm a music theorist, I should at least be able to understand, from a technical standpoint, why the whole world seems so very willing not only to buy music-- a product with no practical use whatsoever-- but, in general, to buy incredibly shitty music year after year.
Simultaneously, I love comedy. I particularly love so-called "black comedy," in the sense of dark, cynical, macabre, possibly outrageous and/or semi-bizarre stuff. Not everyone digs this kind of comedy. Some people think Dane Cook is hilarious, although I've yet to personally meet anyone who finds him funny. But he's obviously bringing in the paychecks, despite what seems to be universal derision from folks whose sense of humor I do understand.
It seems to me that there ought to be a scholarly field around comedic theory, which-- best I can tell-- does not really exist. Sure, from time to time, a philosopher or perhaps a sociologist of some kind has taken on this issue, but rarely in any meaningful or useful depth.
As it is in my field, we really have no idea why certain things make us laugh (or, on the other hand, why we find some things totally unfunny). But I can't seem to find any graduate programs or journals relating to the theory of comedy. I think this would be a much easier Tootsie Pop to crack in the this-is-how-it-empirically-works-sort-of sense than music, if only we had a bunch of academic types thinking about it full-time.
If we had comedic theorists, we could perhaps get to the bottom of important questions-- such as the recurrent questions recently brought up once again by a heckler and dissatisfied customer at a Daniel Tosh standup show, someone who stated she found Dane Cook funny (honestly, such a stance will always baffle me), but found no such humor in jokes somehow relating to sexual violence. "Rape jokes aren't funny!", she saw fit to shout out mid-Tosh's set. Tosh responded, allegedly, with the following brutal heckler-shutdown attempt: "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl was, like, gang-raped right about now?"
Most of the audience seemed entertained by this response. The heckler, however, did not (and let's be very clear about this-- by any accepted definition of the term, she was a heckler). She went home and told her story through a first-person Tumblr post, the only such posting by an audience member present to express any displeasure re: the words Tosh may or may not have spoken on mic. An e-lynch mob quickly swarmed around her.
A full-blown eShitstorm rapidly ensued, largely on Twitter at first, then spreading outward to various big entertainment blogs and the comment sections therein.
All of a sudden, in the wake of the Tosh shitstorm, absolutely everyone is an armchair comedic theorist, never mind that the field (unfortunately!) doesn't currently exist. A full week has gone by, and you still can't walk two feet on the Internet without reading some new essay that is loosely related to the Tosh "affair."
Some of these armchair theorists agree with the heckler that rape jokes are "never funny." Some provide complex analyses of rape jokes told by other comedians or screenplay writers (of which there are countless examples), attempting to explain why those rape jokes are OK and Tosh's jokes were not.
Others still point to the protocols and traditions of standup comedy, saying that hecklers are among the worst examples of humanity and have volunteered themselves to be humiliated and insulted in the most brutal, base, swift, remorseless fashion possible... that nearly any words used in the shutdown of hecklers are fair to use, as long as the shutdown is somewhat artful and-- of course-- found funny by the non-heckling portion of the audience.
After all, a heckler is interrupting a show that others paid to see, trying to draw attention to themselves when they were never on the bill. And shutting hecklers down is definitely something of a standup-comedy-specific art form... one which aficionados of the genre point to as a clear determinant of a comic's personal style / voice and particular talents, actually.
Several comics I can think of have practically made their names by saying much more personally-directed things, at much greater lengths, to hecklers-- much to their audience's visible delight.
And then, of course, we have Michael Richards-- but his notorious, career-ending heckler-handling gaffe quite obviously failed the "artful and funny to the audience" test. There weren't dozens of professional comics coming to Richards' aid on Myspace / Facebook, etc., ca. 2006 (nor should there have been; there is absolutely no question that Richards went way past the line from comedy into unadulterated hate speech at both great length and maximum amplitude). But Tosh found himself in very supportive company, by and large, when it came to his Twitter-using professional peers this week.
If you've read any of what I've written this season, you know I consider myself a liberal and a progressive, and proudly so. Putting it broadly, I am pro-equality, anti-intolerance, anti-hate-violence, definitely anti-rape, doyyyy.
I'm also not a huge fan of Tosh. I find he relies on the same basic gimmick as Sarah Silverman: an innocent, cute-looking, more-than-mildly effeminate college boy whose physical appearance and coy presentation make his shock humor "work." It's frankly pretty cheap, and it probably won't sustain him once his boyish looks leave him.
Tosh does stuff on his show that makes me uncomfortable, particularly his racist gags. But he has a very healthy minority fanbase. Go figure, right? And I've personally heard just about as many women / self-described feminists come to Tosh's defense this week as I've heard loud-mouthed absolutist detractors.
It's understood, between the mildly-educated Tosh and his mildly-educated audience, that such gags are supposed to be funny because they're completely unacceptable and untenable, that laughing at such a gag does not mean you support or believe in what's just been said-- actually, it's almost entirely the opposite. It's called "cognitive dissonance." What little has been written on comedic theory over the centuries tends to point to said dissonance as one major possible source of humor.
And while I may not champion their brand of comedy, (usually) preferring stuff that is more subtle, more intellect- and wit-driven, I find there's actually a curious, perverse political correctness in what the likes of Tosh and Silverman do. They say utterly horrible things, we laugh at them saying utterly horrible things, knowing that they're utterly horrible-- thus affirming their utter horribleness, and our desire to be good people who actually despise those things.
We associate these things, these ideas, with bad people. There are definitely bad people out there who really believe this shit, and the gag always involves laughing at them.
As I've said, Tosh's frequently-occuring "racist" jokes have somehow earned him a visibly healthy minority fanbase-- yet I'm not aware of tons of threads praising his work among the despicable white supremacists over on stormfront.org, nor among the removed-from-the-KKK-in-name-only Tea Party crowd. That ought to tell the detractors something about what they are missing in all this.
Does laughing at a "wrong" rape joke mean that you think rape is OK, that you'll actually go out and commit a rape? Well, ask any present member of the audience who laughed at Tosh's heckler shutdown. Even if armed with a hundred-person supply of sodium pentathol, I doubt you'll find anyone who laughed because they hate women, or because actually wanted to witness the heckler being gang-raped, and/or thought it sounded like a great idea.
They laughed because they understood the Rules of Heckling. They laughed because they heard what Tosh was really saying underneath his over-the-top tossed-off comment: "You know, you're being a total dick here, and I have the mic. Shut up and let me do the show that everyone else, the ones who know the slightest thing about my routine and understand my schtick, paid to see."
I have much more to say on this issue, but my ongoing word count says that time's up. Constructive comments leading to rational discussions are most welcome.
porn_this_way got in touch with me, and had apparently read what I'd written before I'd removed it. The resulting fun back-and-forth, along with ongoing dumb discussion of the "current event" that was the focus of my original post in other online hangouts of mine, convinced me to try and rewrite the whole thing from scratch, this time keeping it much shorter. This is the result. Thanks, PTW (and do be sure to enjoy her own, much funnier entry on the topic).
No, I promise, this is not going to be yet another entry on music stuff. But one thing that bothers me a lot, as a guy who ostensibly works in music theory for his current living, is that my field in its present state is barely adequate in one important sense.
Folks have been interested in music theory for centuries, and there's a lot of past work and literature. We can tell you a lot about how music in various periods was constructed from a technical standpoint, often with an understanding that the composers themselves did not apparently possess. There are lots of different approaches to theory, and the approaches often differ by necessity from genre to genre under examination, with scholars coming up with semi-new approaches fairly frequently.
But one thing we're not even close to being able to explain is how music actually works on human beings. We can't explain why we like it. We can't explain individual tastes in music either. This bothers me a great deal. If I'm a music theorist, I should at least be able to understand, from a technical standpoint, why the whole world seems so very willing not only to buy music-- a product with no practical use whatsoever-- but, in general, to buy incredibly shitty music year after year.
Simultaneously, I love comedy. I particularly love so-called "black comedy," in the sense of dark, cynical, macabre, possibly outrageous and/or semi-bizarre stuff. Not everyone digs this kind of comedy. Some people think Dane Cook is hilarious, although I've yet to personally meet anyone who finds him funny. But he's obviously bringing in the paychecks, despite what seems to be universal derision from folks whose sense of humor I do understand.
It seems to me that there ought to be a scholarly field around comedic theory, which-- best I can tell-- does not really exist. Sure, from time to time, a philosopher or perhaps a sociologist of some kind has taken on this issue, but rarely in any meaningful or useful depth.
As it is in my field, we really have no idea why certain things make us laugh (or, on the other hand, why we find some things totally unfunny). But I can't seem to find any graduate programs or journals relating to the theory of comedy. I think this would be a much easier Tootsie Pop to crack in the this-is-how-it-empirically-works-sort-of sense than music, if only we had a bunch of academic types thinking about it full-time.
If we had comedic theorists, we could perhaps get to the bottom of important questions-- such as the recurrent questions recently brought up once again by a heckler and dissatisfied customer at a Daniel Tosh standup show, someone who stated she found Dane Cook funny (honestly, such a stance will always baffle me), but found no such humor in jokes somehow relating to sexual violence. "Rape jokes aren't funny!", she saw fit to shout out mid-Tosh's set. Tosh responded, allegedly, with the following brutal heckler-shutdown attempt: "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl was, like, gang-raped right about now?"
Most of the audience seemed entertained by this response. The heckler, however, did not (and let's be very clear about this-- by any accepted definition of the term, she was a heckler). She went home and told her story through a first-person Tumblr post, the only such posting by an audience member present to express any displeasure re: the words Tosh may or may not have spoken on mic. An e-lynch mob quickly swarmed around her.
A full-blown eShitstorm rapidly ensued, largely on Twitter at first, then spreading outward to various big entertainment blogs and the comment sections therein.
All of a sudden, in the wake of the Tosh shitstorm, absolutely everyone is an armchair comedic theorist, never mind that the field (unfortunately!) doesn't currently exist. A full week has gone by, and you still can't walk two feet on the Internet without reading some new essay that is loosely related to the Tosh "affair."
Some of these armchair theorists agree with the heckler that rape jokes are "never funny." Some provide complex analyses of rape jokes told by other comedians or screenplay writers (of which there are countless examples), attempting to explain why those rape jokes are OK and Tosh's jokes were not.
Others still point to the protocols and traditions of standup comedy, saying that hecklers are among the worst examples of humanity and have volunteered themselves to be humiliated and insulted in the most brutal, base, swift, remorseless fashion possible... that nearly any words used in the shutdown of hecklers are fair to use, as long as the shutdown is somewhat artful and-- of course-- found funny by the non-heckling portion of the audience.
After all, a heckler is interrupting a show that others paid to see, trying to draw attention to themselves when they were never on the bill. And shutting hecklers down is definitely something of a standup-comedy-specific art form... one which aficionados of the genre point to as a clear determinant of a comic's personal style / voice and particular talents, actually.
Several comics I can think of have practically made their names by saying much more personally-directed things, at much greater lengths, to hecklers-- much to their audience's visible delight.
And then, of course, we have Michael Richards-- but his notorious, career-ending heckler-handling gaffe quite obviously failed the "artful and funny to the audience" test. There weren't dozens of professional comics coming to Richards' aid on Myspace / Facebook, etc., ca. 2006 (nor should there have been; there is absolutely no question that Richards went way past the line from comedy into unadulterated hate speech at both great length and maximum amplitude). But Tosh found himself in very supportive company, by and large, when it came to his Twitter-using professional peers this week.
If you've read any of what I've written this season, you know I consider myself a liberal and a progressive, and proudly so. Putting it broadly, I am pro-equality, anti-intolerance, anti-hate-violence, definitely anti-rape, doyyyy.
I'm also not a huge fan of Tosh. I find he relies on the same basic gimmick as Sarah Silverman: an innocent, cute-looking, more-than-mildly effeminate college boy whose physical appearance and coy presentation make his shock humor "work." It's frankly pretty cheap, and it probably won't sustain him once his boyish looks leave him.
Tosh does stuff on his show that makes me uncomfortable, particularly his racist gags. But he has a very healthy minority fanbase. Go figure, right? And I've personally heard just about as many women / self-described feminists come to Tosh's defense this week as I've heard loud-mouthed absolutist detractors.
It's understood, between the mildly-educated Tosh and his mildly-educated audience, that such gags are supposed to be funny because they're completely unacceptable and untenable, that laughing at such a gag does not mean you support or believe in what's just been said-- actually, it's almost entirely the opposite. It's called "cognitive dissonance." What little has been written on comedic theory over the centuries tends to point to said dissonance as one major possible source of humor.
And while I may not champion their brand of comedy, (usually) preferring stuff that is more subtle, more intellect- and wit-driven, I find there's actually a curious, perverse political correctness in what the likes of Tosh and Silverman do. They say utterly horrible things, we laugh at them saying utterly horrible things, knowing that they're utterly horrible-- thus affirming their utter horribleness, and our desire to be good people who actually despise those things.
We associate these things, these ideas, with bad people. There are definitely bad people out there who really believe this shit, and the gag always involves laughing at them.
As I've said, Tosh's frequently-occuring "racist" jokes have somehow earned him a visibly healthy minority fanbase-- yet I'm not aware of tons of threads praising his work among the despicable white supremacists over on stormfront.org, nor among the removed-from-the-KKK-in-name-only Tea Party crowd. That ought to tell the detractors something about what they are missing in all this.
Does laughing at a "wrong" rape joke mean that you think rape is OK, that you'll actually go out and commit a rape? Well, ask any present member of the audience who laughed at Tosh's heckler shutdown. Even if armed with a hundred-person supply of sodium pentathol, I doubt you'll find anyone who laughed because they hate women, or because actually wanted to witness the heckler being gang-raped, and/or thought it sounded like a great idea.
They laughed because they understood the Rules of Heckling. They laughed because they heard what Tosh was really saying underneath his over-the-top tossed-off comment: "You know, you're being a total dick here, and I have the mic. Shut up and let me do the show that everyone else, the ones who know the slightest thing about my routine and understand my schtick, paid to see."
I have much more to say on this issue, but my ongoing word count says that time's up. Constructive comments leading to rational discussions are most welcome.