I know some comics with very offensive material, and when people react audibly, they think it’s good. You can be scared, upset or caught off guard and laugh. “The greater question is what makes you audibly react, and there are a million reasons,” she says. We’re sitting outside BKLYN Comedy Club in Williamsburg, where she’s just taken a tequila shot and done an eight-minute set to a sleepy but receptive crowd. She’s a 24-year-old comic, three years into the game. “Making people laugh is so complicated,” Ruth Allen tells me. Ruth Allen backstage at Gutter Bar, Brooklyn . . . And I’ve talked with many of the comics trying to make it, who are hustling across the city every night for a few minutes, here and there, of stage time. I’ve been roasted, mostly for my job (“Where’s the journalist? Can you cover my lawsuit against the New York City Subway?”). ![]() I’ve seen people joke about how their dying grandmother should kill Joe Biden, and what it means to be chronically suicidal. “It works for him.”) I’ve seen physical comedy, alt-comedy, political comedy, set-up/punchline, long confessional stories. (“It’s just his thing,” another comic tried to explain to me afterwards. I saw a man dressed as a giant pair of pants make jokes about finding a matching shirt. This year I’ve seen more comedians perform live than I can count. New York gave us Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers, Saturday Night Live. Modern standup was born in New York: the Marx Brothers brought it to Broadway in the 1920s, Lenny Bruce was routinely arrested on stage in the 1960s. To understand where America’s national sense of humour could go, I have spent the past months exploring the New York comedy scene - one of the country’s biggest, most diverse and most influential, and a historic proving ground for new ideas. Maybe instead of “Is cancel culture threatening comedy?” the question should be “What makes good comedy today?” I think we’re being distracted by the wrong question. Chappelle says his most controversial recent special, The Closer, is now the most-watched comedy special on Netflix, ever. He released it himself instead, and it’s been watched on YouTube more than 6.7mn times. Andrew Schulz, whose last special included anti-Asian jokes, promoted his newest special by saying he’d refused a streamer’s request to remove edgy jokes about abortion. In fact, the opposite is more common: when comics claim censorship, engagement spikes. Very few star comics have truly lost their platforms because of what they’ve said on stage. And when a vocal population gets offended, and the stars cry cancel culture, a futile loop repeats and repeats. All this puts it right in the crosshairs for people who think about public discourse. Comedy helps to frame issues we’re still making sense of. ![]() This all begs the question: what do we look to comedy for to begin with? Freud believed it helps us release the energy that represses our emotions around sexual desire and hostility it gets vented through laughter. In a July speech aired on Netflix, Chappelle called a group of high-school students protesting against him “instruments of oppression”. In the last two cases, LGBT+ activists and allies have protested, and the comics have doubled down. Ricky Gervais’ May Netflix special, SuperNature, hinges on jokes about trans people where their genitals are the punchline. Dave Chappelle, an icon of comedy, has been defending his right to make offensive jokes about the transgender community for years. ![]() The internet spent a relentless cycle on whether that was or was not messed up. In March, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars for insulting his wife Jada about her alopecia.
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