Will Smith’s Hand in Ruining Comedy

If you’re like me, Daniel Radcliffe, and most of the world by now, you’re probably sick of hearing the names Will Smith and Chris Rock together. I get it, and I don’t blame you– like I said, the mention of those names makes me roll my eyes, and if one more person refers to “the slap heard ’round the world” I’m going to slap the sh*t out of THEM.

And yet, I am quite hypocritically writing an article about the very thing. I know I probably don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times, but on the off chance that your social media feeds are not also filled with a bunch of comedians, I thought I’d bring you the prevailing discourse among people who routinely get in front of crowds and say things that some people don’t like.

I got into stand up comedy in 2017 and have been doing it off and on ever since (catch me at Reykjavik Fringe this summer!). I’ve made many wonderful friends, and since the only thing comedians like better than telling jokes is philosophizing about Comedy, the implications of Smith attacking Rock is pretty much all any of us have bothered talking about. For once, we are all in violent agreement about something: Smith was out of f*cking line and set a dangerous precedence.

I don’t mean that comedians everywhere now need to fear for their safety every time they do a set; I don’t think anyone is going to come up and b*tch slap me if I tell them how much I hate their state (I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again). The issue is less about the physical attack itself and more about the emotional reaction of offense. A friend of mine said– well, tweeted– it best:

There’s no such thing as an offensive joke.

You can be offended by a joke but “offensive” is not a quality inherent in a joke independent of the observer.

— York Underwood (@YorkUnderwood) March 29, 2022

The purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. It’s cathartic, it’s important, and it requires an agreement among all participants– that is, the comedian and their audience– to enter a contextual setting that not only should operate independently from real life, it must.

I wrote about this phenomenon of stand up comedy when I was in college, and if I may be so pompous, I’d like to include an excerpt from a (very snobbishly intellectual paper) I wrote called “Laugh It Up: The Making of Transient Culture in Stand-Up Comedy:”*

Whether it is defined as transience or Dada, it is the temporally finite community-building inherent in stand up comedy that makes it unique. The culture comedy creates lasts as long as the performance itself and does not exist long enough to establish a shared heritage. While comedians are constantly engaged in a process of reflection, comparison, and analysis of ourselves and the people and objects around us, the results of this process—namely, the performance— creates a temporal community that is dispersed as soon as the performer steps off stage. This is, in part, why comedians can get away with saying things that would be considered wildly inappropriate in a normal day-to-day setting, and it is why negative responses to comedians’ jokes manifest themselves most profoundly outside the bounds of the performance culture [. . .]

While many audience members— most, even— seem to intuitively understand the
temporary nature of stand up performances, there are still those who seek to turn the transient into transcendent. [Comedian] diagnoses the phenomenon as overthinking comedy, saying, “They [audience members] don’t look at it just as a joke, they look at it as someone’s trying to make a statement” (ibid.).

*The course was called “Migration, Material Culture and Heritage in Contemporary Europe,” it was a one-week seminar at the end of my final semester, and I really just took the prompt as an excuse to talk to my friends about our shared hobby– like I said, the only thing comedians like better than telling jokes. . .

The point is, stand-up comedy only works if everyone involved agrees to call it what it is: comedy. Already in 2018 I was writing about jokes being taken out of context, post-performance outrage against comedians, and the overall problematic nature of calling jokes offensive. Back then, we were preoccupied with people reacting negatively AFTER a show happened, because no one lost their sh*t during a show. The angry social media rants the following day were bad enough, because it meant people were taking their own choice of being offended and placing the onus on the joke, and by extension, the comedian, for being offensive. All Smith did was shorten up the delay between the joke and the outrage.

This has been happening for years, and we’ve been lamenting it for just as long. What Will Smith did was a logical conclusion to an immense build-up of misdirected feelings and an emotional need for control from people who can’t understand that context informs meaning, let alone that sometimes comedians say things on stage that may not be completely true.

The tragedy of this inevitable ending was that it was a popular celebrity in a setting without consequences. Will Smith will go largely unpunished, he will lose no supporters, and people will defend him (and Jada Pinkett Smith) and denigrate Chris Rock.

And since I’ve mentioned her name, allow me to make a quick point about Pinkett Smith: I don’t have any problem with her taking offense to the joke. She was offended by it, which is her right, but, importantly, she did not try to put that back on the comedian– as far as we can ever know, she would’ve just rolled her eyes and carried on with her night. A+ audience behavior.

As I was saying (stop interrupting, RACHEL), Smith and everyone who supports his actions at the Oscars (whether explicitly or implicitly) have basically given the world a green light to blame comedians for telling a joke they didn’t like rather than owning the reaction themselves. The New York Times predictably published an op-ed in defense of thin skin:

Who is served by all this thick skin? Those who want to behave with impunity. If the targets of derision only had thicker skin, their aggressors could say or do as they please. If we all had the thickest of skins, no one would have to take responsibility for cruelties, big or small. It’s an alluring idea to some, I suppose.

Do I have to explain what’s wrong with that? Do I have to explain that people are going to say things that others don’t like, that laughter is a coping mechanism, that taking oneself too seriously robs one of 90% of the fun and laughter in their lives? Do I have to explain that you will never get through life happily or comfortably if you expect people to only say what you like to hear?

(If your answer is yes, go watch Thank God For Jokes by Mike Birbiglia, I’m pretty sure it’s still on Netflix.)

Naturally, there’s a through line from this phenomenon to leftist philosophy at large to people whose parents never told them, “You can’t control what other people do, you can only control how you react to them.” But that’s a blog for another day.

In the meantime, I’m going to laugh at some “offensive” jokes. I highly recommend it.