Vulnerable but not too vulnerable

I was watching a comedian a few weeks ago who did a lot of jokes about being alone, sexually frustrated and overweight and frequently, instead of a laugh, he got responses of 'awww'.  Sympathy instead of laughter.  This often happens with self deprecating humor.  Or if you are expose too much you can make people too uncomfortable to laugh.  There is a thin line between comedy and a tragic monologue as you'd expect to find in an Ibsen play.

This happened to me recently in trying out a joke for my new show.  I recalled a funny situation which occurred dating somebody else who had been through some childhood trauma.

At the point where I say to a woman in the audience 'don't worry, you can laugh', I had seen her covering her mouth and trying to stifle laughter.  She found it funny, but felt guilty for laughing.  It was too honest.  I was exposing too much.  Instead of laughter, I got sympathy.  Which is not to say I have not got laughs talking about childhood trauma, loneliness, self loathing, suicidal thoughts or despair before.  In truth, if I didn't talk about my vulnerabilities, I would not have an act.  It's just a matter of being VULNERABLE BUT NOT TOO VULNERABLE.

Sometimes just altering my performance is enough.  If I talk about something horrible in my past or a deep insecurity with a big smile on my face and a confident veneer, the indicator is, 'I'm totally ok with this, you can laugh'.  This is all very well if I am actually OK with it, but sometimes faking it is necessary.  This can backfire.  If you make a self deprecating joke about something you're still insecure about and the audience laughs because you're acting, you are helping them bully you.  I once told a friend to stop doing a certain joke about her weight, not because she wasn't getting a big laugh, I just saw that it was making her miserable to get that laugh. 

I think the best place to alter the joke is at the conceptual stage.  At times I will do a little factual alteration.  For instance if I tell a painful story about my relationship with my father, but make it an uncle, that distance makes the story feel more fictional.  With the 'minefield' joke above, in draft two I may try looking into triggers in conversation not in the bedroom, or come up with an absurd way to illustrate the point.

Case in point, recently I tried another joke about pain.  This one was more successful because I enveloped it in an absurd idea for a holiday.  

See.  Suicidal thoughts can be a punchline.

Rewriting an Offensive Joke

Last week I wrote a blog titled ‘rewriting a sexist joke’.  It was put to me by another comedian that I did not actually rewrite anything.  I rather, discarded one joke as too sexist and wrote another joke on the same theme.  Agreed. 

This week, I have found an example where I actually did some genuine, honest-to-Baal, 100% rewriting.  In writing my last show ‘Barely Legal’, one morning’s writing  yielded the following routine.

Now, the joke clearly worked. Big laugh and some applause (WE DON'T WANT NO FRICKIN' LAUGHS, WE WANT APPLAUSE BREAKS.) Even so, I was not happy with the joke. The final punchline felt gratuitous. I don’t think that any subject is inappropriate for comedy. I have brought up genocide, HIV orphans and torture in jokes before.  I have no issue with addressing domestic violence in a comedy set. Except, I did not actually address anything. It was just the punchline, the shocking twist in the tale.

A lot of comedians use a shocking twist in the tale to get a laugh. Lo and behold, it’s revealed, the woman who he was having sex with in the story… is 11. Lo and behold, it’s revealed, the no smoking sign… was hanging outside a building in Aushwitz. There’s nothing wrong with this method. It works. However it would not work that well for my persona because I do jokes ‘about something’. 

Let me explain. If I just wrote lots of one liners which were puns and word games to elicit laughter, throwing in a few offensive pull back and reveals would not be a problem. When people rage at the content of someone like Jimmy Carr’s jokes, I think they miss the point. His jokes are not endorsing any particular political viewpoint or lifestyle. They are word games and concept poems, so he can tell a joke about a rapist that is not really about rape.

I cannot do that. Because I do routines about racism, religion and family that actually analyse my experiences of them, I present myself not as a gagsmith toying with words and concepts, but rather, as a humorous social commentator. If I bring up rape, it’s really rape. If I bring up domestic abuse, it’s really domestic abuse.

However, the 'I used to do that' joke got a big laugh. And applause.

I tried to soften the joke. I changed the punchline to ‘he slept with her sister… I used to do that’. It did not work as well. ‘Punched her in the face’ was the only line which worked because, indeed, of the shock. And then one day, a few months later, I realized that the funniest element of the joke was not the shock. It was 1) My envy at watching a partner with another man and 2) The twist. I kept the same format and rhythm for the joke, but rewrote it by relocating it in the world of politics and coming up with a new twist. This is the new version.

It works better I think you'll agree.  

PS: The joke gets laughs in Europe, but in Africa, it brings down the house.

Rewriting a sexist joke.

When hanging out together, my comedian friends and I make jokes about everything.  Nothing is off limits; peacocks, rape, ethnic cleansing, blenders. Things that in any other context would be seen as horribly racist, sexist or psychotic, are OK. This is in private though. As soon as I get on stage, I believe I have a responsibility not just to be funny, but to carefully consider the implications of my humor. I therefore often come up with a premise when bantering with friends that can only be used on stage after rehabilitating the idea.

Here's an example.  On Monday, I had a chat with another comedian about gold diggers.  We were at Silver Springs Hotel in Kampala and we saw a rich older, overweight man with a stunning woman in her twenties.  He said she must be a gold digger, and I went on a rant about why gold diggers were necessary for society.  I said something like, 'That man only became wealthy so he could get gold digging women. Imagine he's a philanthropist who has built hospitals with some of his money, without gold diggers that hospital would never have been built. Gold digging saves lives. Fire would never have been invented if some cave man was not trying to impress a gold digging cave woman.'

This conversation made myself and the other comedian laugh so much that I later thought about using the idea on stage.  Unfortunately, the premise is highly sexist. It assumes that men are the source of all humanity's greatest achievements and women's only role is to to motivate them.  I would not want to spout such drivel on stage.  On the other hand, we were laughing so much.  I needed to REHABILITATE THE PREMISE and extract what was funny in it without the sexist backbone.

The underlying hilarity of the rant came from my earnest defense of Gold Digging.  Surely, I could find a less sexist approach of doing the same.  My solution - one which often works when I need to rehabilitate a premise - is I PUT MYSELF AND MY INSECURITIES INTO THE JOKE. Instead of the joke being 'this is how the world is' it became 'I'm so lonely and insecure that this is how I see the world'.  Instead of saying something horribly sexist about the world, I made the joke reveal something about my perspective.

At least I think I did.  You can judge for yourself.  Here is the current gold digging routine.