Talking About Stereotypes in Comedy

Today's post is about stereotypes in comedy, and because it's posted on a blog, the stereotype would be that it's inflammatory, poorly written and filled with syntactic errors. Which it is 'hurr hurr harr harr'

So, basically I believe, to an extent, stereotypes are necessary in certain types of comedy, often simply as a shorthand for a large group of people that it would otherwise be impossible to address. At this point, the educated and cultured among us believe (as the twillight zone once taught me) 'people are the same all over'. There are good/bad, smart/stupid, friendly/mean personalities in every group, subculture and organisation you can name.

But when it comes to the basic storytelling structure, it's impossible to talk about a group of people without painting them all with one or several similar characteristics. This is so that you can set them up as the fall guy of the joke or the enemy that we're supposed to hate so that we can root for the hero.

A simple example of this could be a left wing comedian arguing and ultimately outsmarting or quipping against a conservative or right wing person/politician/figure of authority in a story they are telling. We ignore the fact that this person could be a fire-fighter or a mother or any number of wonderful respectable things as well because for the purpose of the story they need to be represented as evil.

Now, these days I like to think that many of us understand that it's wrong to group people together and to judge their character based on their belonging to that group in any real-life situation. What this means for comedy is that if you want to do offensive or prejudice based material to a multi-cultural world you have to do it with a sense of irony. Often the joke is about how stupid the character is to be a prejudiced. A good example of this is Cartman from Southpark - an openly racist and offensive character. But the inflammatory things he says are acceptable because it is all done under the knowledge that he is unintelligent and ignorant in comparison to Stan and Kyle. His racism is just an extension of his low intelligence, it's a classic idiot clown joke because he doesn't understand the society that he lives in and makes obvious logical fallacies based on prejudice.

But this is not always played out in the correct or safest way and it starts to raise questions about the birth of the joke and its origin. It can usually be easy to see when the origin of the joke was based on prejudice and the author then had to craft and manipulate until it became acceptable. I think I found a good example of this the other day on a comic strip I found online:

The comic strip from what I can tell comes from balderduck.com and this comic as well as the rest of the comics on the site are fairly generic and wouldn't look too out of place in the back of a daily newspaper. However, this one has one important difference that I believe marks out a different period of comedy for the modern day. Now, this strip is about male female stereotypes, the entire humour comes from the characters assuming that women can't park. Just a few years ago, this strip could have existed as it is without the need to add the caption 'stereotypes are bad'. At no point in the 2 panel strip does it imply that stereotypes are bad, the only thing the caption seems to add is to let us know that the author recognises that prejudice is a bad thing. To me it seems to reek of lazy 'ass covering'. The content itself is sexist, the caption might as well just read 'I'm not sexist, gender doesn't actually affect parking ability'.

This comic could potentially say a few things about stereotypes in comedy at the moment. Do we now, as an audience, need to be reassured that the author himself isn't prejudiced before we feel that we can enjoy a sexist joke? I think this removes all type of free thought or scope for different interpretations. An audience member should be allowed to come upon this joke and appreciate it for what it is, whether you agree that the stereotype is true or not. Or is it arguably a joke about stupidity? We're supposed to recognise that applying the assumed gender rules we live by to a cat would be ridiculous. That would align it with my Cartman paradigm and in doing so relieve it of any offensive undertones by my own argument. But my problem with it is that it seeks to leave us with a positive message even though the fact that stereotypes and prejudice are bad is something that everyone already knows. The caption adds absolutely nothing to the joke; it only serves to make us aware of the intent of the author in a very lazy way. In a painfully overly simplified way, it's like ending an episode of 'love thy neighbour' with the post script "don't be racist".

A joke is a joke and should be able to stand by itself without us having to know the intention of the author. This isn't the same as removing a joke from its context and in doing so accuse it of offensiveness like they often do in scandals or campaigns by the media. Offence is often a tool used to tell us things about a certain character like the ignorance of Cartman or the bitterness and nihilistic detachment of the stage persona of Jerry Sadowitz. What is said by the character is not the whole joke, the history of the character and the context at the time all go in to making the joke what it is. But with this comic, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the joke is there contained in the two panels and the caption (I even did some brief research to try find out whether it was part of a series or a recurring character that I was missing (it's not).

An ironic joke or script will carry the message it needs to without needing to tack it onto the end. This is why it is so satisfying to hear an author defend their work against those who misjudge it by pointing out the glaringly obvious subtext or satirical intent. If you write a joke that could be perceived as sexist, it undoubtedly will be, you just have to hope that the joke is well written enough that the intended audience will understand what you were trying to do (assuming that sexism wasn't your intention).

I almost certainly have more to say about this subject but at the moment I feel unable to articulate my argument with sufficient accuracy. When you start talking about offence in comedy it can very quickly become a huge discussion, but this has been a fairly untidy spiel sparked by the sight of that particular comic and I hope that you've found my tired over-analysis of the joke entertaining or at least interesting.

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This is actually a post that I wrote about a year ago somewhere else, but I re-read it recently, and thought it was still interesting and relavent, so I'm reusing it like a rich businessman would reuse a high class escort service [prostitution is bad].

We Were Awarded Some Funding

This week we found out that we've been awarded some funding by Lancaster University, to take our show up to Edinburgh. A wise investment for the fine artistic and cultural output of the university that we represent. This for me is some very exciting news, not just because it will go someway towards making this venture slightly less financially crippling for us, but also because it seems to me to give the whole project an air of legitimacy that I really appreciate. It feels almost as if we belong somewhere in the same vein as the Cambridge footlights or other famous university based comedy troupes, and our journey to Edinburgh this year could mark the start of a long tradition of Lancaster Comedy Society graduates taking a show to the festival; a legacy that I would be very proud of.

"I may not be the fastest, I may not be the best. But I was the first, and first is forever." Wise words of GM Flash

So now, thanks to the wonderful people at LUSU, or project has the official backing of the university. Not that this is by any means a blank check, in fact the regulations on how to acquire financial help with a project like this are quite complicated. Essentially, the system seems to be designed for sports teams to head to tournaments and competitions, so the funding for the arts has to go through a lot of the same hoops whether they're appropriate for the project or not. So we were graciously awarded funding for our entry into the programme, as well as for an A board that we will donate back to the comedy society once we're done, and some of the transport costs of getting there. The basic idea is that the university won't fund promotion, or living expenses (which makes sense seeing as these areas effectively have no price ceiling), so they're happy to pay for anything that can be reused, as well as entry fees and transport.

This extra help has really been a great asset to us, and hopefully will make it easier for future groups from Lancaster to take a show to the fringe in the future. In short, thanks LUSU, it really means a lot to us!

A Meeting of the Minds

So last weekend, upon noticing that the 1st of August (opening night) was drawing nearer and nearer, we finally set about the task of constructing the show. Ben has to travel to us from York in order for us to really set down to writing together, so our writing meetings are shamefully rare and brief. But once we get together, oh boy, you can be sure as sure can be that we get some serious writing done, as well as ample amounts of pissing around.

I go by a simple philosophy. When you remember a joke from the simpsons, tell people,

So we set ourself to a few basic tasks. We met hor half of Friday and all day Saturday. Friday was a difficult but successful day, because we realised that being apart for so long our ideas about the show had taken very different paths, some of it more theatrical, some more basic stand up ideas. Basically, we needed to decide on an overarching structure for the show itself, we had a title, and a few ideas, but now we needed to decide what the show itself should be. Myself, Ryan and Ben, are stand ups with a great backlog of infinitely hilarious material*, but we decided in order to give the show a fresh angle, and to stay true to our theme as closely as possible, it was important to write new material around the stimulus. But how do you get to writing an hour long show?

Well, we decided, if we have to teach the audience how to be awesome at everything, the first step is to define what it is we mean by 'everything'. So we forced some word association or general thinking about anything that anyone could want to learn to be great at, and we came up with a list, THE list, of about 139 different things that we could write about. Then we set to it, picking some topics at random and devoting 5 minutes to the task. Ideally from this, we'll be able to get a comprehensive list of over a hundred different jokes on nearly every subject anyone could hope to mention. The idea then being that at one point in the show, it would be possible to throw the question open to the audience 'what do you want to be awesome at?' and be prepared to answer any response with a well polished high impact bit of funny.

Okay, changing batteries right, you want to be awesome at 'changing batteries', I got this...

Thoroughly happy with our progress, we had some sandwiches, then retired for the day to meet again tomorrow. Saturday, however, got off to a less productive start, whereby we spent about 2 hours as soon as we got together just talking about video games that we all like. We all sort of had this feeling like we were being unproductive, but it was the siren call of procrastination that makes everything so appealing when you know you've got work to be doing.

Our main objective for the day was 'design a skeleton structure for the show', and 'put some meat on those bones'. Which, eventually, we did do reasonably successfully, with some different writing exercises as well as long creative thinking about how we want the journey of the show itself to proceed. All in all, it was a reasonably successful meeting for us all, if a little inefficient. And every time that we meet up, the energy that we generate helps the show to come along leaps and bounds at a time and that thought gives me a lot of hope for how the show itself will play out whilst we're up there together. With another writing meeting scheduled in for the weekend after next, a cowardly man would say we're running out of time, but us brave boys of WMD Comedy are more than up to the task of designing the raw hell out of this show.