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make comedy great again
Thursday, June 22 2017
I drank kratom tea for much of the afternoon, which seemed to help me focus on my work[REDACTED].
This evening our friend Jeff E. and his girlfriend Alana had planned to go down to West Nyack to see the standup comedian Doug Stanhope. The plan had been to go with Paul J. (the guy who owns the church on the Rondout and who has since moved to western Massachusetts), but Paul was sick, so Jeff extended the invitation to Gretchen. Gretchen had liked a bit by Stanhope she'd seen on YouTube, but tonight's performance was terrible, with endless rape jokes that would've only been funny for people who like the simple idea of impoverished Indian call center employees named Jessica being gang-raped. With the rape jokes came an endless defense of the telling of rape jokes and the dismissal of anyone who would take offense. On top of all this was at least one joke that was supposed to get its humor from homosexuality somehow being a lesser evil than being Jewish. While Gretchen was having her terrible time, there was an extremely drunk Irish man only three feet away who was being massively entertained. I suppose it's easy for people from our bubble to take for granted the relative sophistication of contemporary humor in the places where we seek it. Meanwhile, there's a huge swath of America with simpler thought processes who find they've been left behind. They yearn for the good old days of Bob Hope (but with more obscenity and bigotry). Will no one make comedy great again? Apparently that's Doug Stanhope's role. It makes sense that if post-90s comedy, with its levels of irony and complexity, is leaving average Americans confused and unhappy in its wake, someone would rise to fill the niche of comedian who actually makes them laugh.
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