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.

----

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].