While many comedians make their living telling heartfelt stories about themselves or extolling biting social or political critics, there is something to be said about comics who just tell jokes. Pure jokes. While some see it as pedestrian or old-fashioned, there is so much art to be found in a well-crafted joke. They can be absurdist and cerebral: “Building a treehouse is pretty cruel,” says Demetri Martin, “It’s like killing someone and making one of their friends hold it.” They can be playful: “There is one thing I would break up over,” says Steve Martin, “And that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that.” They can even be subtle and philosophical: “It's a small world,” says Steven Wright, “But I wouldn't want to have to paint it.” While I love the therapy that can come from an open-hearted comedian, I can’t help myself from adoring the pure simplicity of a well-crafted joke. The best of these jokes are able to mask the rough drafts, the failed attempts, and the mathematics necessary to make them pack a punch. Often just one word out of place can ruin the magic and the music of a perfect joke. As Yates writes of poets in Adam’s Curse, “A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
With the underlying mathematics involved, these jokes play like magic tricks. In the pledge of a magic trick, the magician starts shows the audience a seemingly ordinary object. The turn occurs when the magician makes his ordinary something do something extraordinary, and then the prestige is the final moment of triumph, when the trick is completed and the audience is, hopefully, astounded. A simple joke often follows the same structure. For example, the aristocrats joke, the most infamous street joke in comedy, is itself a bit of a magic trick. The pledge shows the family entering the talent agency and introducing themselves to the agent, the turn follows the unexpected, typically profane, description of the act, and the prestige is the moment when the agent asks for the name of the show and the family declares, “The Aristocrats!”
Despite their outward simplicity, these jokes often contain a fair amount of surrealism and philosophical abstractions, especially after the stylistic changes to the form that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The theory of humor seen time and time again with this type of material is the incongruity theory. First outlined by Aristotle and championed by Kant and Kierkegaard, this theory surmises that humor stems from the juxtaposition of two or more things that don’t necessarily go together. When see this type of humor often in misdirections and one liners. Consider this Rodney Dangerfield joke off his album No Respect: “I only get women because of who I am -- a rapist.” The punchline is a surprise and the setup misdirects us into thinking that he’s about to go in a direction direction. In many jokes such as this, part of the humor comes from how obvious yet surprising the punchline is. Incongruity humor is the most common form being used by joke-teller comedians. This style of humor also leads itself more easily to taking shape in neighboring forms of comedy, such as sketch or improvisation.
In the beginning of the 20th century, telling a string of jokes was the most popular and prolific style of comedy. While modern audiences often prefer some sort of deeper connection with their comedian, in the early days there wasn’t a huge demand for vulnerability. In vaudeville the premium was on laughs-per-minute, and these jokes, although basic in formula, can be hugely successful with an audience. The jokes were compact and easily slid into other comedians’ acts. What used to be business as usual became a very serious matter known as joke theft, and it is the easiest way to lose the respect of the comedy community. Also, comedians perform this style of comedy typically have personas so precise and distinctive that joke theft is not a huge threat. Steve Martin could never tell a Rodney Dangerfield joke, and Rodney Dangerfield could never tell a Steve Martin joke.
That Catskills-style of joke-telling, made famous by Jackie Mason, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, and their contemporaries, is the hallmark of these jokes. “I have enough money to last me the rest of my life,” says Mason. “Unless I buy something.” The style hit its apex a few decades later in the comedy of Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield’s 1980s Grammy-winning album No Respect was a triumph of pure jokes. He was the last great comedian from the old-world style to make a splash in stand-up comedy, and he remains one of the most influential and beloved comedians.
After Rodney, it was Steven Wright a few years later who brought this style into the evolving world of stand-up comedy. He redefined the possibilities of going on stage and telling a string of unrelated jokes. Older comedians in this style had larger-than life personas that helped the audience to understand their perspective and maintain their interest. From Henny’s violin to Rodney’s disheveled look and flop sweat, there was always an easy way into their world. They weren’t characters, but they were caricatures. Caricatures that made it easy for the audience to understand their world and their perspective, helping to link them to the comedian’s performance. These caricatures often had their fair share of mugging, catch-phrases, props, and other such gimmicks.
Steven Wright was the first comedian to give the audience nothing. He delivers his jokes in a monotone ramble, never directly looking at the audience and never ever smiling. While this became a schtick in its own way, his deadpan delivery made it necessary for the jokes to have to be strong enough to carry themselves. Sometimes they were traditional in format, for example “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.” While other times his jokes were more like ideas or concepts, like “You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time...”
Wright’s comedy is a precursor to many of the tenants of the alternative comedy wave in the 1990s. There was a huge backlash to the loud, pumped-up comedy of the 1980s, and the alt movement was in part about returning focus to the material and away from flashy presentations. “‘I’m just gonna go up on stage and kind of talk like a normal person and maybe look at my notepad or whatever,’ was a powerful way of saying, ‘What I’m saying is more important than the manner in which I’m saying it.’” Wright was all about his writing, which made space for the absurd, cerebral comedy to fill the room and have the spotlight.
The joke-teller comedian most popular in the 1990s and early 2000s is often regarded as the best of his breed. Before his premature death from a heroin overdose in in 2005, Mitch Hedberg had cultivated a massive and loyal following. His particular style, delivery, and specific persona is impossible to duplicate. Hedberg rarely looked at the audience, hiding behind his hair and tinted sunglasses. His jokes often felt like the ideas of a child. “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.” Often, his jokes don’t have punchlines per se, they are just ideas or concepts that challenge the listener to perceive things differently. “I don’t have a girlfriend.” He says, “I just know a girl who would get really mad if she heard me say that.”
Contemporary stand-up comedians who perform in this style of comedy include Morgan Murphy, Sam Morril, Dan Mintz, Demetri Martin, Myq Kaplan, Nick Thune, and many more. While some of them occasionally do longer bits or have other elements involved in their acts, they typically stick with jokes that are short and simplistic in form. While their forms are their same, their goals, styles, and philosophies are all drastically different. Many of these comedians began their careers as writers, and were using the stage as an opportunity to try out jokes there were trying to write for late-night television monologues.
The most fascinating psychologically and philosophically of these modern joke-tellers, in additional to be irretrievably funny, is Anthony Jeselnik. Dubbed The Dark Prince of Comedy, Jeselnik is a man without fear. His jokes are relatively simple and short, but his material covers everything taboo. “His jokes have the rhythm of a magic trick and the concision of a bubble-gum-pop lyric,” writes the New York Times. “I’ve spent weeks looking for my girlfriend’s killer,” Jeselnik says, “But no one will do it.” Jeselnik’s short, brutal jokes don’t always go over well with audiences, and he has even received death threats over some of his material. I’ll never forget when I first became obsessed with his work. I was still in high school, and I played one of his specials for my older brother. I was entranced by his ability to say they terrible things, yet have the audience not be able to help themselves, rolling with laughter at the most gruesome of crass jokes. I loved watching him wield his jokes like a weapon. I’d never seen anything like it. My brother, who is much more conservative than I am, didn’t make it through the first ten minutes. “Did you really think I’d like this?” He asked, earnestly.
Jeselnik certainly isn’t for everyone. He doesn’t necessarily believe the “plus time” part of the comedy equation, and will often make jokes the day of a tragedy. He’s even joked that he always knows when something terrible has happened because he’s get tons of messages saying, “Don’t do it.” His stage persona is incredibly dark, bordering on sociopathic, offset only but his meticulously calculated smiles every few minutes. “Yesterday I accidentally hit a little kid with my car.” He says, “It wasn’t serious … nobody saw me.” Anthony Jeselnik dares the audience not to laugh at him. “You can almost feel his audience cringe while it laughs,” writes Splitsider, “A little reluctant to give the guy any more encouragement, but yet unable to help itself.” It is clear that Jeselnik loves this push-and-pull from a crowd, and he even shot his most recent special in the politically correct town of San Francisco to maximize its effect. “I needed people to be a little upset,” he told an interviewer, “I wanted people to kind of be taken aback.”
Anthony Jeselnik was born in western Pennsylvania in 1978. He is the oldest in a Catholic family of five children, all only seven years. Jeselnik’s father was a attorney and his mother stayed at home with the children. He was raised in Upper St. Clair, an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh. “I had a happy childhood in a nice suburban area,” Jeselnik writes, “Pretty idyllic, upper middle class, and very, very white.”
Jeselnik was always fascinated with comedy. Not necessarily the humor, but the effect it had on the people around him. “I remember being a little kid and kinda noticing that when people laughed everything was okay.” says Jeselnik. From a young age he was fascinated by the things we weren’t supposed to talk about. Jeselnik learned quickly that humor was always the best ways to broach these topics. “I was always fascinated by forbidden things people didn’t want to talk about, like death. So [as a kid] I would make a joke about them. It made people so uncomfortable that they kind of turned on me. Teachers trying to stifle me made me crazy. I thought, ‘Well, when I’m 18, I’m going to prove I’m not some weird kid, that this is a valid way to think.’”
One day when he was in middle school, there was a student in his class who was moving to a less-affluent and considerably run-down neighborhood a few towns over. She was talking in class about her forthcoming move, not necessarily understanding the situation, when Jeselnik said, “Yeah, send us a postcard.” His classmates didn’t really laugh, but he made his teacher laugh. Normally such a cutting comment when get a student in trouble, but Anthony learned then that if you could make the teacher laugh, you can’t get into trouble. He began spending his time trying to make his jokes a little sharper and little smarter -- always trying to make his teachers laugh.
Jeselnik graduated from high school in 1997, and moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane University. He hadn’t visited the campus when he committed to attending, and his first time on campus was at the beginning of his freshman orientation. Anthony didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into, but he was fascinated by the school and captivated by the ethos of the New Orleans. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer like his father, but he had ambitions of writing the next great American novel. “I didn’t want to be a novelist,” He later joked, “I wanted to be a brilliant novelist.” Bret Easton Ellis was his favorite writer, and he carried his fascination with these darker themes into his writing.
Upon graduating, Anthony moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing for late-night television. “Trying to become a 22-year-old novelist seemed much more daunting than trying to become a 22-year-old comedian.” He wrote. “I could write books later on, but I wouldn’t be able to really get into comedy later on. I loved comedy and writing. I thought, ‘What if I could put the two together? It’d be more of a literary comedian.’ It just fell into place for me.” He worked his fair share of terrible jobs including being a manager at an Abercrombie and a security guard at a Borders Bookstore. He had just lost his job at Borders and nearly out of money, when he was able to arrange a meeting with a television executive. The executive was an old friend of his father’s, and Jeselnik went into the meeting hoping for a writing job. He didn’t walk away with a job, but he walked away with a piece of advice. You want to be a joke writer? Be a stand-up comedian.
Jeselnik began performing at local comedy clubs in Los Angeles, and actually took a six-week comedy class. His main influence in stand-up comedy was Jack Handey, whose short segment Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey appeared on Saturday Night Live from 1991-1998. Handey’s jokes were stray thoughts or ideas, what people would call today shower thoughts or high thoughts. The segment aired between commercials, and would feature a landscape background with scrolling text. He would recite thoughts such as “To me, it’s always a good idea to carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, ‘Hey, can you give me a hand?’ you can say, ‘Sorry, I’ve got these sacks.’” Jeselnik loved these succinct little thoughts and ideas, and he aspired to write comedy that ebbed and flowed like Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.
“If someone was ranting against the government or like complaining about their girlfriend I didn’t care,” He told an interviewer. When it came to comedy, he was always more interested in jokes than in stories. He was a huge fan of Steven Wright, and upon finding Mitch Hedberg he learned that there was a way to take from Wright’s format but still make it entirely your own. He saw jokes as little tiny puzzles, often starting with the subjects he wanted to be able to talk about, and then writing pages and pages of joke drafts in an attempt to find a way to make those difficult topics funny. Somewhere along the way, he forgot about writing and absolutely fell in love with stand-up comedy.
Jeselnik’s persona is extremely confident, even cocky, and he really struggled with evoking that when he was starting out. He was a green comic, and like all new comedians, he didn’t have much to be cocky about. But he knew that he needed that persona for the jokes to land properly. When he was first starting out he had one particularly rough night of bombing, and it was months before he was able to get himself back on stage. It was actually Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary Comedian that got Jeselnik back onstage. The film follows Seinfeld as he’s starting the write new material after an album, and it got Jeselnik back on his feet. In those early years, Jeselnik wrote jokes nonstop in an attempt to break out and move on from being an amateur comedian. He worked incredibly hard, and in the meantime he had to learn how to fake it. He had stated that he looked to musicians, not comedians, for how to carry himself with confidence onstage.
In 2009, Jeselnik’s career was beginning to find some traction. He filmed his Comedy Central presents, and he was offered a writing job at The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Although, predictably, many of his jokes just weren’t right for Fallon. “It seemed ridiculous that my persona would work for Fallon.” He later remarked. Even if his jokes were funny, they were often just too dark for Fallon’s bubbly persona. Jeselnik’s next break was a career move that made a little bit more sense. He was hired as a writer on the Comedy Central Roasts, and soon became a performer as well. The Roasts were huge in propelling his success and getting his unique style out there.
The following year, he released his first album, Shakespeare. Jeselnik’s comedy in Shakespeare, “Which is as arrogantly absurd as its titles suggests,” is made up largely of short 20-30 second jokes. Shakespeare was voted best album of the years by Punchline Magazine and reviewed a large amount of critical acclaim. His writing is clean and succinct, with each word in place. His audience is typically a mixture of laughter and winces.”One year in high school I ran for Class President, and I lost to a girl in a wheelchair.” He starts. “Now I'm not ashamed, I know she definitely got the sympathy vote, but that's just because I ran really negative campaign: ‘Vote for Anthony, his ideas have legs.’” Whether or not you find this funny, the joke changes drastically when he says the following line: “You should all be laughing at that joke, there’s no ramp here.” While the tag isn’t integral to the joke, it fills it out and often adds a new dimension or new perspective. The tag turns the audience’s reticence to laugh onto themselves. This is a good example of his work because despite the devilishness or plain cruelty in some of his material, you can often find these little touches of realism that show he’s trying to make people think critically about these topics and their social assumptions.
Part of the reason he’s able to get away with his material is due to the boundaries he establishes with his audience. “If you’re up there and you’re making jokes about like, the neighborhood you grew up in or you’re making fun of Starbucks, and all of a sudden you’re like ‘and rape’s okay!’ that’s when people get outraged because you’re trying to be their friend onstage. I’m never trying to be your friend … and I think people get that.”
In 2013, Jeselnik hosted a television show on Comedy Central called The Jeselnik Offensive. He pitched it to the executives as, “What if the devil had a talk show?” At The Jeselnik Offensive he was able to do the material he wanted to do, including some of the ideas that were too dark for Fallon. His showed started in 2013 and lasted for two seasons. The show featured a monologue, a panel, and a few recurring segments. One of these segments was called Sacred Cow, where he tries to take down a difficult topic. One episode featured Anthony telling jokes in a cancer cancer support group. “It started out awkward. But by the end, they were having a blast,” Recalls Jeselnik. “I think they were just grateful that I wasn’t talking down to them.” Because of how it sounds, he really had to fight Comedy Central to get it on air. The sketch ended up opens the first episode, and received largely positive reviews.
During the run of Jeselnik’s show, the Boston Marathon bombing occurred. As he does, Jeselnik make a joke the day of the tragedy. At this point in his career, he had carved out a niche for himself similar to the show South Park. He can get away with things that other people can’t, simply because he’s the guy that does it. That afternoon Jeselnik tweeted, “Guys, today there are just some lines that should not be crossed. Especially the finish line.” While many of his comedians friends urged him against it, he couldn’t help himself. Comedy Central was outraged, and threatened to take away his show if he didn’t delete the tweet. In a rare moment of capitulation, Jeselnik did what he was told. After two seasons, the show was cancelled.
Jeselnik released a second album entitled Caligula in 2013, and his latest, Thoughts and Prayers, came out just last year. While Jeselnik is strictly a joke-teller comedian, his most compelling material actually come from a moment when he deviates from his traditional style. Jeselnik took the last 20 minutes of his latest comedy special, Thoughts and Prayers, to tell a story. Anthony Jeselnik never talked about anything real on stage until his latest special. Everything he said before that point was made up. “It’s just wordplay,” He asserts, “People just fill in the blanks with their imagination and think it’s the fucking meanest thing you can say.” However, halfway through Thoughts and Prayers, Jeselnik stops telling jokes, hauls the momentum of the show, and tells the audience that while he has been just making jokes thus far, “Everything I’m about to tell you, from here until the end of the show, that’s all true.” Jeselnik then goes on to relay a sort of mission-statement to his crowd. He explains who he is, and why he does what he does. “I don’t tell dark jokes because I’m a comedian,” he says, “I’m a comedian because I tell dark jokes.”
Jeselnik tells the audience the story about the Boston Marathon tweet, along with a few other day-of jokes. One is from the day of the Aurora movie theater shooting, when he tweeted, “Other than that, how was the movie?” He tells the audience about what goes through his head on these days, and what it’s like to get all those responses, many of them being extremely unhappy upset. “People say, ‘Anthony, what’s funny about Aurora? What’s funny about the Boston Marathon? What’s funny about your grandmother’s funeral?’” His eyes narrow as he looks out at the audience, “Nothing.” He says, “Nothing is funny about those things. (pauses) That’s where I come in.”
In this moment, Jeselnik is both defending himself and asserting his position. He refuses to change his persona or water down his material, going on to talk about how he regrets deleting that tweet about the Boston Marathon bombing. He shares how it went against not only everything he believes as a comedian, but also the main reason he got into comedy, which is full creative control. He continues to discuss the greater idea of censorship before relaying heart of the story he wants to tell. “Maybe some of you have told a joke before where someone got mad at you for it,” he begins, “You guys ever tell a joke and then get death threats? Well I guess that’s what makes me me.”
Jeselnik then goes on to explain. Since he was young he has loved sharks, and he hates that so many sharks are killed each year by humans. When he was running his television show, he decided that the next time someone gets killed by a shark, he was going to throw a “Shark Party.”. A few weeks into his run, a man from New Zealand was killed by a Great White. Although the episode has since been all but destroyed since, Jeselnik taped and aired his shark part, with a song and dance number and a huge picture of the guy, “Which, admittedly, is where it all went wrong." The footage made its way to New Zealand, “Where they don’t know who I am ... they saw that and lost their minds.” Members of the man’s family and members of his local community were livid, and they began sending death threats to Jeselnik and to Comedy Central.
Here, Jeselnik walks a fine line between his persona and this new self that he is projecting for the purposes of this story. He explains why he isn’t worried about the threats:
“This might be hard for some of you to understand. I’ve said it several times tonight: Everyone is going to die. I know full well I am going to die. And most of us don’t get to choose how we check out. But, if I die because someone murders me over one of my jokes ... best case scenario. If someone murders me because of one of my jokes, I immediately become a legend. I’m a comedy god. The Mount Rushmore of comedy is me, four times. I say: come on, then.”
Jeselnik smiles his devilish smile, and stands firm in his claim. He commits fully to this idea of glorified martyrdom as the audience cheers and cheers. However, he quickly pulls the energy right back down by telling the audience the next part of the story. Now, not only is he getting death threats, but the New Zealanders have found out the address of his family back home in Pittsburgh, and they’ve started getting death threats too.
“It never crossed my mind that my family or my loved ones would ever pay the price, be caught in harm’s way, by something I’ve done or something I’ve joked about.” He admits. His tone becomes firm as he continues, speaking with more grit and authority than his audience has ever heard from him: “I would, honestly, I would cut my throat for my jokes. I would give my life for what I do. But if anyone and I mean this for a fact, if anyone ever hurt my family or killed someone I cared about because of a joke I’ve made … even better.”
With that last line, the screen goes to black and the audience explode in laughter and applause. By all accounts, Jeselnik’s sincerity about his identity and his goals is real, but he simply cannot help himself from twisting it all in the last minute, and throwing his truth back in the face of his enemies. For the first time he is willing to give so much of himself in terms of authenticity and vulnerability. Yet even in the face of personal threats, he is still himself, and he closes his sets the only way he knows how. With a joke.