One of my imperfections that I have become aware of through marriage is my tendency to wisecrack at inopportune moments, especially during moments of vulnerable intimacy or awkward silences. And when I think I am funny, I'll repeat the wisecrack. I call this 'situational comedy' (although I realize that is confusing given the TV/Radio genre with the same name and probably should have settled on something more pretentious like 'fondness for the absurd'), and I sharply distinguish it from joking and punning. At some point, I decided that repeating the wisecrack -- a word that appeals to the skeptical philosopher in me -- would only enhance the joke; repetition is key to the gag. This tendency makes the awkwardness worse, of course.
In my defense, there is a skill involved in being funny, to adlib in the moment; it is, in fact, true improv unlike the genre that has the name, which is almost entirely scripted and a really skilled profession. I mention this not to suggest that I have any expertise in jokes or comedy. I am, in fact, terrible at telling actual jokes. And unlike, say, my teacher the late Ted Cohen (recall), who could be funny at will, I lack a theory of why things are funny, or not, when they are.
That I am bad at telling jokes is actually surprising because at one point, in my twenties, I hung out regularly with Lou Jacobi (a family friend--about that some other time more), who would take my to Museums on the Upper East Side. (There is a fascinating short video about Lou.) Lou and I mostly talked about the art we saw, and his showbiz stories, but at one point, we were walking near Lexington, he asked me if I wanted to know the secret of joke-telling. His eyes lit up as he leaned over to me with a conspiratorial glimmer, and I wondered if he was violating some guild-protocol, he whispered, 'always remember the punchline!' And started crackling.
There is, in fact, no easier way to remember the punchline if it is identical to the set-up. Norman Macdonald repeatedly asserted that the "perfect joke would be if the punchline and the set up were identical," or "almost identical." (I have heard him say different versions.) Macdonald, who died last week, loved this principle, and he used variants on it throughout his time at SNL (see below).
I sometimes wonder whether it's news to most philosophers that 'A = A' can be funny and even is the structure, or the form, of the perfect joke. (It probably was old hat to Wittgenstein.) Part of the joke of identity is, of course, that the second 'A' (the repetition) is not the original; it's a copy.
After Macdonald died, and in order to forget my frustration over my slow recovery, I binge-watched (and listened) to clips of Macdonald and other comedians discussing Macdonald's craft. They (the comedians) routinely describe him, even before he died, 'as the funniest man I know.' (No, never 'funniest person.') It was odd for me to see that in the days after he died, these very comedians had also binge-watched the same clips I had been binge-watching. Most of them ignored the perfect joke, and would speak about the Bob Saget roast, the moth joke, the ESPYS, the Courtney Thorne-Smith/carrottop mockery, and being fired for joking about OJ Simpson.
Macdonald has a bad reputation among contemporary moralists and increasingly became a red state hero. And it's true that Macdonald made a lot of fun of the Clintons, and over time became somewhat of a hater. But if you go back to the SNL days, nearly all of his jokes about them express his outrage over the fact that Clinton is a known, serial sexual harasser in plain sight and got away with it. (Something similar is on display in his repeated jokes about Michael Jackson's pedophilia.) His political comedy was moralistic.
I suspect Macdonald, who was incredibly well-read, later regretted that his initial fame was due to his political jokes because he came to deny that hating on others generated real humor. (For example, he loathed Alec Baldwin's Trump because there is no place for any fondness of Trump, but greatly admired Darrell Hammond's Trump.) Rather, in his interviews it's clear that while he dislikes confessional humor, he greatly admires those comics that can do jokes about ordinary life without showing their craft, especially Bob Hope, who could be very funny in virtue of extremely minor facial or posture changes despites his jokes being rather bad. (This is something late Macdonald clearly tried to emulate in his final Netflix show, being funny with bad jokes.)
In listening to the comedians talking about Macdonald, I realized that their world is not so different from professional philosophy. For, they have a strong norm against plagiarizing each other's jokes, although they allow some to do so as a form of (ahh) intertextual homage. (Macdonald was fond of this privilege, and used it not irregularly especially when roasting his friends in order to pay homage to Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield, and this, too, then also get remarked upon by the other comedians.)
As an aside, the moth joke was, I gather, apparently not Macdonald's, but a friend's (although I am sure it has a much longer prehistory). The joke itself is super-corny, and the set up has a rather classical structure of ascending woes, but because O'Brien interrupts a few times, Macdonald has to improvise. The brilliance of the moth joke is not the punchline, but the long-winded delivery of the set-up. This was, in fact, one of the reasons other comedians admire Macdonald because he could make the set up itself more hilarious than the punch-line. This kind of inversion is much harder to pull off than anti-humor. I just love listening and watching repeatedly to the set ups of Macdonald's Jacques de Gatineau joke, the polish joke, the professor of logic joke, and even the Andy Richter joke (which Andy Richter quite rightly did not find funny). Not to belabor the point, but this focus on the comic potential of the set-up, is itself a key to the borsht belt humor in some of the best sketches on Jacobi's You Don't Have to be Jewish (e.g., a 'Call from Long Island'; 'The Reading of the Will'; 'James Bondstein').
Also, I noticed that among comedians it is a completely legitimate argument to claim that the fact that Letterman asked Macdonald to be Letterman's final (comic) guest proves that Macdonald is really the funniest. It's a bit like the honor philosophers show each other at a Fest.
Let me wrap up: when I teach I often wisecrack to end awkward silences. The jokes are pretty bad, but the undergrads find my repetitions funny (I can demonstrate this with hundreds of student evals). What's neat about this is that what is objectively a personality defect -- the badly timed witticism that blocks intimacy with a loved one -- can be made functional in the classroom because it helps the students relax despite the fact that we're discussing very challenging and often politically polarizing material. It does so by marking off, as it were 'once upon a time,' the (cognitive) space in which we are super serious from the outside-world in which people come to blows over the same issues, but we pride ourselves on our detachment. Or, maybe, the students are just laughing at me.
*I recently
Hear, hear, Eric! Although I knew of Norm MacDonald from SNL, I only discovered his stand-up--and his genius--about a year ago. News of his death actually *affected* me, which doesn't typically happen with the passing of 'celebrities.'
Posted by: David Svolba | 10/05/2021 at 04:03 PM