Movies, songs, and paintings come to their audiences fully formed. They are clean moments presented from the outstretched arms of their creators. Like Christmas gifts tied up in sweet, gentle bows, these works of art are laid at our feet. They are eager to be fully explored and understood. Time passes and we grow, but the presents never change. Stanley Kubrick can disown "Spartacus" as much as he wants, but I can still watch it and feel his energy within it. The artist is separate from the art, and any sense of authority vanishes when the work is out of their hands and into ours.
Stand-up comedy is a medium equal to these arts in merit yet opposite in form. It is a dialogue, and it won't fit into any box you try and place before it. Trust me, I've tried. When looking at traditional art, the comment you hear most is: "Wow, that's so beautiful." With stand-up comedy, the comment you hear most is: "Wow, that's so true." Often, the goal is to relate to their audience members and to try to resonate with the human experience. The most hack jokes are often about men and women or sex or race relations, because these are the things that everyone faces every day.
While the parasocial relationship and the sense of community are some of the most-loved aspects of stand-up comedy, we don’t just love Louis CK because he makes us laugh, we love him because he validates our experiences and emerged as the perfect voice for a post-9/11 America. Steve Martin did the same thing for the 60s, saying, “When I was in the smaller clubs, in ‘62 and ‘63, the world had been so political in very tough ways over the last ten years that I thought America was tired and it needed, wanted, to laugh at just silliness and fun again.”
These comedians still impact us now, but their impact fades when their era fades. The tragedy of comedy, so to speak, is its unfortunate tendency to date itself. Excluding comedy giants like Pryor or Carlin, stand-up comedy is fickle and comedians who were once supremely relatable and ubiquitous are often pushed aside for a new crop who better represent the issues of the day.
When I was in middle school, all my classmates loved Dane Cook. It wasn’t because he was cute or because he had a rebellious spirit, although those things certainly helped. The main appeal towards Dane was that he talked and sounded like us. He made jokes about Burger King and The Kool-Aid Man, and we, as 13-year-olds, completely ate it up. I’ll always remember giggling hysterically with all my friends talking about his story about breaking into his neighbor’s house yet stealing nothing, just for the fun of making him paranoid. Dane Cook has since become himself a punchline in the comedy community, just as his original fanbase grew up and developed different tastes, but that will never change how hard we once laughed at his impression of Oprah Winfrey. Despite the years, I’m sure everyone in my age group still knows all the words to the punchline of that routine.
In an art form that is often centered around community and a shared cultural language, it can’t help itself from becoming dated. Kliph Nesteroff, an acclaimed comedy historian, caused a stir by posing that Lenny Bruce isn’t funny anymore. He made this comment not without reasoning, for he had just witnessed a modern audience sit in silence during a forty-five minute showing of Bruce’s material. He almost expressed it as a question-- “What does it mean that Lenny Bruce isn’t funny?” It is through no fault of his own, just the passage of time. There's something poetic, actually, about Bruce’s particular breed of martyrdom. It reminds us how far we’ve come. If what was revolutionary in the ‘50s and ‘60s still vibrated in us with the same frequency, it would mean that we haven’t progressed enough. His breed of comedy is about pushing people, and a mark of it’s success is, in a sense, the moment it doesn’t need to push us anymore. Lenny Bruce was a martyr for free speech, having been arrested from stage over half a dozen times for the use of profanity. In 1964 he was taken to court for his subjective obscenities, and it quite literally drove him mad. He obsessed over the nuances of the case, devouring law books from cover to cover and endlessly going through the court transcripts. Two year later, overweight and out of control, Lenny Bruce was found dead at age forty of a morphine overdose. In 2003, nearly 40 years later, Bruce was pardoned for his conviction.
Success comes in tandem with the end. Like training wheels, the goal is to no longer need it. Lenny’s humor was of the heart, the soul, and the gut, and that’s timeless. His jokes were important and timely, but the spirit behind them lived on. You can see it cropping up in Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words a mere six years after Bruce’s death. The infamous routine wouldn’t have been possible without Bruce’s sacrifice. You saw it continue within Bill Hicks in the ‘80s and ‘90s as he highlighted the hypocrisy of our country, and again in the new millennium within Louis CK as he talks about the ugly side of parenting.
The problem with outgrowing comedy is that we will always need it. There will always be wrongs worth righting, and as long as there are people, there will be greed and imbalance. The comedians before us fought for something real and something honest, and that can never be lost. History, after all, has a tendency to come back and haunt us. We will continue making mistakes, and the best we can hope for is a good comedian to help us laugh at ourselves and the ridiculousness of our world.