Everything is Funny

About seven years ago, I took a trip to Atlantic City. I know, I know, I don’t like me, either. It wasn’t a great trip. Bad enough I almost got killed in a cab on the way to the hotel.

Anyway, I was with one of my best friends, and one of his best friends, who I hadn’t met before. We decided to go to a comedy club. Now, I can appreciate good comedy, but I’m not one of these people who will go out of his way to go to a comedy club, because stand-up comedy is not universally good, and I was reared on a diet of George Carlin in middle school, so everything else just pales in comparison. But the comic there was great. He starts off by saying, “Atlantic City…creepy town, man…” This was around the time that about a dozen dead hookers were found in a ditch outside of town. So the guy launches into an entire routine of dead hooker jokes. For a half hour, non-stop dead hooker jokes, one after another. I was laughing so hard, my stomach hurt. One of the funniest things I have seen in my life.

So the lights come on, and we were on our way out of there, and my friend’s friend, who I had already pegged as kind of a stiff, yells, That’s not funny! He took offense to all the dead hooker jokes.

Everything is funny.

I think everything is funny. Domestic violence jokes are funny. Dead hooker jokes are funny. Hell, pedophilia jokes are funny. The raunchier, the better. But like I said, I grew up on George Carlin, and also Andrew Dice Clay, and growing up in the late 80s/early 90s meant that nothing was off limits when it came to comedy, or anything else. One of my favorite movies is Todd Solondz’ Happiness, which was rated NC-17, for good reason. Probably the most cringe-inducing movie ever made. It’s one of those movies that I’m not sure who you’d watch it with—certainly not on a first date. Or maybe you would watch it on a first date, as sort of a litmus test. In my view, nothing is off-limits. You should be able to say anything, to anybody, at any time.

One of my favorite jokes:

How do you get a nun pregnant?

…

…

…

You fuck her.

I actually wrote up a stand-up comedy set one time. I wrote it on a plane, on the notes section of my phone. I still have it kicking around. It was an entire routine about porn. And it’s funny. I was on a cross-country flight, and I rehearsed it on the way out, and I rehearsed it on the way back, and I got back to Myrtle Beach, ready to test-drive it on open mic night, but I looked up both comedy clubs in town and they both had a prohibition on X-rated material, this being a family vacation spot and all. So if I was going to perform this set, I’d have to drive to either Atlanta or Charlotte. I gave up; not worth the effort. I’ll throw in the fact that Myrtle Beach also has the absolute worst, shittiest music scene in the world, but that is a topic for another newsletter. I spend a lot of time going to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Jacksonville, or other places with some semblance of cultural enrichment. But I digress.

The routine that I wrote was cringe-inducing, for sure. But the best humor is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, because the best humor is supposed to be true. I think that is a quote from George Bernard Shaw: My way of joking is to tell the truth. And the truth is very complicated. The great thing about stand-up comedy is that it’s supposed to be a safe space to say these sorts of things, these things that everyone knows to be true, but nobody is willing to say out loud, for fear of being canceled, or whatever.

You can’t talk about comedy that pushes boundaries without talking about Dave Chappelle. Remember the Netflix incident from a few years back? Well, Dave Chappelle was uncancelable. I watched the episode in question, and it was less a comedy routine than a one-man show, but it was very good, and very poignant, towards the end. My conclusion after watching it: people really need to lighten up. I mean, that’s the whole point of Rule 62, right? Don’t take yourself so seriously? There are a lot of people in this country who take themselves so damn seriously. Nothing is funny. Everything is problematic. 2013-2023 ruined comedy, but thank goodness it is coming back. The cure for anything is too much of that thing.

I think it was Chris Hitchens who said this: offense is always taken, never given. I am un-offendable. I am a 9/11 survivor, and I have even gotten to the point where I think 9/11 jokes are funny. The people who police other people’s speech and thoughts are some of the most unselfconsciously mentally ill people in the world. They think that the world should conform to their worldview, rather than the other way around. I’ve always been someone to push boundaries. Less so, as I’ve gotten older, but I still like to tweak people. I’ve had a few people rage-quit my newsletters over the years. It always makes me smile. It was worth the $600 to get rid of someone who takes themselves that seriously. I don’t need people like that in my life. Take it from someone who writes newsletters for a living—it is good to shit on your subscribers sometimes. Toughens them up, and weeds out the weak ones. The original sin of the American Intellectual is his desire to be popular. Kevin Williamson said that, probably the best (and crankiest) political writer in history, next to Mencken. I think the worst thing that can be said about any writer is that they are inoffensive. Someone was giving me shit the other day about having only 10,000ish subscribers to this newsletter. Hey, if I wanted to have 100,000 subscribers, I am perfectly capable of writing AI clickbait stock market slop. I like to challenge people to think. I like to make them feel something. You can’t read All the Evil of This World and not feel something, even if it is revulsion. And I put the N-word in there for good measure, too.

Notice I made it this far in the essay without once saying the word woke. Not a big fan of that word, though it encapsulates a lot of what was going on from 2013-2023, with Robespierre sensitivity readers and content moderators. Imagine writing a short story and having some sensitivity reader redlining the shit out of it, saying, what if someone gets offended? Offended? Good. In my next short story compilation, whenever I get around to it, I have some pretty dark stuff lined up, including a story about a character with bulimia. Bulimia is funny (I think making yourself barf all the time is hilarious), but it can also be very poignant. That story needs to be written, for the very reason that everyone is afraid to tackle it. Well, you just tackle it with grace and dignity and honesty and empathy and humor. Is that so hard? It doesn’t have to be exploitative. This is a separate issue, but I think men can write women characters and I think women can write men characters and I think straight people can write gay characters and I think gay people can write straight characters and I think able-bodied people can write disabled characters and I think tall people can write dwarf characters. I don’t think it is exploitative in any way. I mean, in the old days…that’s what being a writer was like! You use your imagination. The literary world is fucked to the moon.

So I guess, in a sense, this is an anti-woke essay, and it is an argument for free speech, though I don’t consider myself to be an anti-woke crusader (there are some out there) and I don’t consider myself to be a free speech absolutist (there are some of those, too). I am an artist, and I want to produce the art that I want to produce. Look. We all self-edit. If we said what was on our minds all the time, we wouldn’t have many friends. But artistic spaces should be free from censorship—of any kind. Funny enough, it was the political right that was book-burning in the 80s and 90s (metaphorically speaking), the Robert Borks of the world. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Both are bad. Life is impolite, and we should be able to say impolite things, and have a laugh about it.