Same, same, but different
Comedy and the unchanging nature of humans
Bill Burr famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective) makes jokes about women. His jokes are often meant to call out women—he might add in a positive slant, but the jokes usually point out what could be considered negative traits of women. So why do I laugh when he makes these jokes? Because they contain, at minimum, a kernel of truth. I either see in myself the aspects of femaleness that he is calling out or I recognize them in women more generally. This is one of the beauties of comedy: it's humbling. Good comedians can get you to relax and laugh at yourself—if you let them.
Comedy also illuminates the timeless absurdities of humanity. If you are a student of comedy, there is one thing you will learn about humans: we don't change. Just read Aristophanes and you will understand what I mean. He was a Greek comic playwright who lived from approximately 445 bce to 375 bce, but the stories that he depicts could easily be set in contemporary America. A playwright could make a few tweaks to Aristophanes' plays, present them today, and guarantee some laughs.
The Acharnians takes on the subjects of war and trade. The women of Athens and surrounding areas go on a sex strike to stop the war in Lysistrata. And the Clouds takes jabs at high-minded intellectuals.
As someone who spends a lot of time with intellectuals and reading intellectual work, the Clouds, in particular, made me laugh. If Plato's stories of Socrates are accurate, Socrates was not a sophist, but Aristophanes depicts him as a stand-in for sophists and sophistry—those who claim to know things and charge for their teaching. The school depicted in the Clouds is a place where one can go to learn how to make arguments. Strepsiades, one of the main characters, wants to attend the school, or have his son attend, to learn how to argue his way out of debt—he wants to learn the "wrong" arguments.
"I want to be a quibbler! I want to split hairs! I want to be able to deflate my opponent with a pointed little sound-bite and bring arguments to undermine his!"
Just like with academics in universities today, this is how the public viewed intellectuals—at least, according to Aristophanes. They thought by going to a sophist, young people were learning how to argue for the good and the bad—the arguments were either "Right" or "Wrong." And that what students were learning was trivial and not applicable to life. Take this exchange between a student and Strepsiades:
"Student: Like to hear about another of Socrates' clever ideas?
Strepsiades: I beg you, yes, please tell me.
Student: Chaerephon of Sphettus once asked Socrates whether he was of the opinion that gnats produced their hum by way of the mouth or the rear end.
Strepsiades: So what was his opinion about th gnat?
Student: 'The intestinal passage of the gnat,' he said, 'is very narrow, and consequently the wind is forced to go straight through to the rear end. And then the arsehole, being an orifice forming the exit from this narrow passage, makes a noise owing to the force of this wind.'
Strepsiades: So a gnat's arseholse is like a trumpet. How gutterly marvellous! I can see that defending a lawsuit successfully is going to be dead easy for someone who has such precise knowledge of the guts of gnats."
This exchange made me smile. Why? Because it contains a kernel of truth. Although Strepsiades was not working class, exchanges like this are apparent today in the disconnect between those who do manual labor for a living and those who read, think, dialogue, and write for a living. The high-minded intellectuals seem totally out of touch with the lives of every day people. And what they discuss in university classrooms does not seem to apply to the "real world."
We all need to learn to laugh at ourselves and the absurdities of human nature. And comedy provides the perfect outlet to understand that all humans are flawed in some way. And that it's okay to be flawed—we're all working toward the best version of ourselves, and so is society. Aristophanes is not well-suited for the young, but introducing comedic text that are age-appropriate would be a great entry point to teach about human nature and how to reckon with our faults.
From the Web
Throwback, but still relevant:
THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke.
“These young people have decided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics. They want a world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’t rigged in favor of the powerful. And it’s their student-activities money, after all—they have every right to hire the exact type of entertainment that matches their beliefs. Still, there’s always a price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughts and ideas. Drive those ideas underground, especially the dark ones, and they fester.
Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a “mouth full of blood”—the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not as a critique of some vile notion but as an endorsement of it. It’s the essential peril of comedy, as performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, Amy Schumer understand all too well. But to enroll in college and discover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand-up comics who tell jokes in the student union—great care has been taken to expose you to only the narrowest range of approved social and political opinions: that’s the mouth full of blood right there.”