When Jokes Go Horribly Wrong
And The Sacred Art of Joking
Recently, Jimmy Carr told a bad joke. Was it good joke with a bad heart? Or did the fact that it was in poor taste and victimise a people group make it a bad joke?
People who don’t like a certain tasteless joke often say ‘The joke wasn’t even funny’, as if a really well-crafted joke would have somehow been okay. It would not.
So how does this work?
We need to get our heads around this because it’s happening all the time. Every few weeks, someone cracks a joke and then deeply regrets it. You might be a university professor, an author, a famous comedian or a politician in front of a hot microphone.
Everyone piles on. The mob grab their Twitchforks and light their torches. The hounds are released. The Inquisition sits. Did I say inquisition? I meant ‘show trial’.
Christians used to be the censorious ones, whipping up crowds to moral outrage. Some of the time this was justified. Mostly it was not.
But now Christians are wobbling because they see that sometimes a joke is mean or morally wrong – but also know that free speech laws protect freedom to proclaim the gospel and it’s social, moral and sexual implications, that some in turn wish to see inhibited.
No Free Speech in UK. Seriously.
Oh, I should have mentioned that there aren’t any free speech laws. In the UK, we don’t have a First Amendment. We don’t have any free speech guarantees. In fact, laws governing digital communications, at least, are already arbitrary and tyrannical.
But how can we find out? Shouldn’t someone write a book on this? Ideally a Christian with some theological understanding and insight, but who has also spent about 20 years in the comedy industry.
Well, whadduya know? Someone did a write that book. Yours truly. It’s called The Sacred Art of Joking and it’s about how jokes work, and how they go wrong, especially in the realm of religion. And it’s published by SPCK.
Here’s bit from the introduction:
The need to discuss issues surrounding religion, comedy and offence have never been more pressing. We live in a world in which the staff of Charlie Hebdo were brazenly shot dead in broad daylight for the production of satirical cartoons. At the same time, social media, rolling news and the need for compelling clickbait have all made that discussion even harder to conduct in a rational, constructive or good-humoured way.
Where’s your sense of humour?
We think, rightly, that having a sense of humour is incredibly important. We Brits especially pride ourselves on having a sense of humour. We consider it essential that someone can take a joke. Dating profiles often specify a GSOH (Good Sense of Humour). We are suspicious of politicians who seem to be overly serious – and are quick to give a free pass to ones who joke around. At weddings, we think it important to take the time to humiliate the bridegroom with a dirt-dishing best man’s speech. The groom has to just sit there and take it, while the rest of the room cringes.
This practice has morphed into the ‘celebrity roast’, a format popular on American television. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a version of that where the president is fair game, although Donald Trump was criticized for not attending the first Correspondents’ Dinner of his presidency. And yet Trump used humour a great deal on the campaign trail, much to the annoyance and outrage of his opponents.
People giving speeches at dull conferences love to start off with a joke. We like greetings cards with funny pictures and captions. We engage in practical jokes, hoaxes and April Fool’s Day antics. We think comedy is really important, and yet it can so easily go horribly, embarrassingly, toxically, career-endingly wrong, especially in the realm of religion.
And that, dear reader, is why you are holding this book in your hands. We need to think seriously about the issues surrounding comedy, religion and offence in a measured, informed and good-humoured way.
If we learn those lessons, maybe we can break the cycle of misconstrued jokes, media outrage, hysterical punditry, reactionary commentary and grovelling apologies.
But I doubt it.
In that intro, I mentioned Donald Trump. Remember him? I go back to him later in The Sacred Art of Joking where I write the following (just to give you a sense of the book that you are now planning to buy, right?):
Comedy New York style
In his book, Win Bigly,1 Scott Adams writes about Donald Trump’s ‘New York’ sense of humour and sees how easily it is misconstrued. For example, a joke Trump made about Senator John McCain was jaw-dropping for many people.
In McCain’s own run for president in 2008, a great deal was made of his military service and capture during the Vietnam war in 1967. He spent five years in a prison camp. In short, McCain was a war hero, as his recent obituaries made very clear.
McCain criticized Trump during his election campaign in 2016. Trump responded while attending a Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. (The three-times-married Trump attending a Family Leadership Summit in Iowa is already an amusingly incongruous situation but that’s not the joke.) He said of McCain, ‘He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.’ Wow.
Scott Adams, being brought up not far from New York, wrote that he recognized the joke as being in the ‘New York style’, where the comedy comes not from the joke itself but from its inappropriateness and extremity. There’s no doubt Trump’s comment was jaw-droppingly blunt and disrespectful. But that’s the joke. It’s hardly a presidential way of talking.
Candidates are also normally so risk averse, and so worried about causing any kind of offence to potential voters, that they seek to be as bland as possible in their speech. Trump was not shackled by this desire to play it safe. On the campaign trail, he was happy to offend and enrage people who would probably never vote for him anyway, and delight others in the process. It ensured he got all the press attention, and all the other Republican candidates found themselves starved of coverage.
This way of talking and joking, Adams argues, is completely alien to those on the West Coast of the USA, where people tend to be far more agreeable and concerned for each other’s feelings. Trump, as a New Yorker, is much more comfortable with conflict and controversy.
It is not for me, a Brit who’s only spent one week in Manhattan, to wholeheartedly agree with Adams, but it is clear that Trump was trying to be funny when he made the joke at McCain’s expense. One might say it’s a meta-joke, one step removed from the joke itself.
It’s catching on
This kind of comedy sounds obscure but it’s not unusual. You will see it in popular TV shows like Family Guy that often revel in the extremity of a joke. Family Guy is an animated show about the Griffin family from Rhode Island, not far from New York. It was created by Seth MacFarlane, who is from Kent, Connecticut, which is also not far from New York. Scott Adams is on to something.
MacFarlane was able to use the animated family sitcom setting, already well established by The Simpsons, and take it further. The show makes the jokes often very caustic and sometimes laboured for comic effect. The result is that they can be shocking, which would take us back to the surprise/shock idea in Part 1 (of this book). But the shock is the joke. The joke might not be the words themselves, but that they are being said in such an outlandish setting or in such a heavy-handed or repetitive way.
Sometimes, a joke which isn’t all that funny is laboured for a very long time. For example, there is a scene in which the characters take an emetic to make them vomit, which they then do for an uncomfortably long time. It’s repellent, but that’s the joke.
In another episode, there is a fight scene between Peter Griffin, one of the main characters, and a man dressed as a chicken that goes on and on and on, lasting nearly two minutes. The chicken man returns in future episodes with escalating scenes of absurd cartoon violence.
On another occasion, Peter takes an absurdly long time trying to throw a dead frog out of a window without touching it. In that case, the joke is that a fast-paced animated TV show should spend such a long time showing us something we would not normally see in such detail. It’s a meta-joke.
Getting it
The problem is that laughing at meta-jokes can place you in an extremely difficult position. It looks really bad. Let’s go back to the Trump joke about McCain. If you’d been there and laughed out loud, some might have turned to you and thought less of you. It would appear that you were enjoying Trump’s disrespect of a valiant war hero. In actual fact, you were laughing at the inappropriate extremity of Trump’s joke. But the laugh sounds the same. The offended McCain supporters might not have realized you were laughing at the crassness of Trump’s humour, rather than the heroism of a war veteran.
Laughing at meta-jokes can place you at risk of ostracism. It may cost you friends, or a job. Or land you in court. That’s where we are heading with the next chapter.
In the following chapters, I look back at the debacle of Jerry Springer the Opera, blasphemy laws (which no longer exist), Count Dankula’s Nazi-Saluting PugDog and The Book of Mormon musical. From that, you can figure out what to make of Jimmy Carr’s latest joke (and the context) and you’ll be ready for the next controversy the following week.
So why don’t you get yourself – and a friend – a copy of The Sacred Art of Joking? And talk about it together? And get The Gospel According To A Sitcom Writer while you’re there. That’s not about comedy, but is just funny. All of them are signed by me, the author if you follow this link. Buying directly from me helps me keep going so that eventually I’ll be able to afford to write another book.
You can but from me in person at some forthcoming gigs where I read extracts of my book, The Gospel According To A Sitcom Writer, and talk about why Jesus turned Water into Wine.
I’ll be in Hampstead on 24th March, and Derby on 26th March. Then Fowey in Cornwall on 31st March and Bristol on 1st April. (Booking details and links to follow. Then, it’s looking like there will be dates in Wimbledon, Balham, Exeter and Canterbury. To get updates on that, subscribe (for free) to this newsletter.
And here’s a taster of the show: