Is It Rebellious Or Just Mean?
cruelty, curiosity and comedy
As a young man it seemed I liked the comedy I consumed to be as cruel as possible. Violence out of nowhere, characters using slurs, misogynistic bullies, racism. Hoo boy. I sought out the most mean spirited stand-up. I giggled at the most profane articles in National Lampoon. This was the mid-80s: Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Murphy’s most outrageous (read: homophobic) stuff. Even something that seems as silly as “Truly Tasteless Jokes” was irresistible to me.
Maybe it was just being young. You’re so sick of being told what to do by your family, your school and the expectations you imagine that you just want to fight back in any direction with any intensity. Or maybe I just was a mean kid!
MEANNESS felt like a virtue. I liked mean comedy and outrageous punk rock bands and maybe obnoxiousness in general. I couldn’t see that these things had deep cruelty in them along with the rebelliousness.
Cruelty In Improv
When I started doing improv in 1999, it felt like you could say anything in an improv scene. In both good and bad ways. From the words we used (profanities, slurs) to the way we performed (accents) to the topics we discussed (sex, race, violence) to the types of characters we played (racists, murderers, assaulters).
Sometimes we played these choices with intelligence and specificity and humor and a lot of times we didn’t. There was a certain joy in scenes that went too far. A sense of reckless abandon. But just as often, they were simply mean. I remember hearing people in the box office of UCB answer the phones and say “Our shows are all ages” and thinking “no they are NOT. That’s crazy.”
As time went on, the improv community — along with myself — have gotten more sensitive to how off-putting this play can be. Maybe because the community is slowly getting more diverse, there’s been more and more discussions about what is acceptable to portray and discuss in scenes. Accents started going away, as did cavalier depictions of sexual assault. Racism, homophobia, misogyny was called out and often not directly portrayed. Then casual gun violence in scenes got discouraged. In recent years, there’s been push back against fatphobia and body shaming.
I know all of these things still happen in scenes. But it’s far less, and there’s generally awareness somewhere — from the coach or some players or a theater’s code of conduct — that this stuff is not meant to be done lightly.
It’s good. We’re still learning how to talk about boundaries. How to decide what to forgive and what to ban.
Is There A Way To Be Rebellious?
I do miss the recklessness though. The feeling of going too far. Not the way we did it: I don’t miss the slurs or the cruelty. But crossing lines felt funny.
Maybe the key is knowing where your impulse comes from. When you cross a line to discuss a forbidden topic, is it meanness? Or is it curiosity?
There needs to be a place for some measure of going too far. Late shows. A warning about offensive material?
Sensitive topics should be treated with, well, sensitivity — they should not be ignored. There’s meanness in the world, so we can’t fully ignore that.
The most common thought about addressing sensitive topics is “don’t punch down.” Like, as long as the targets of your humor are the entities in power, you’re likely doing it right. And while I like how simple that is, it’s just a start. We can do better in terms of addressing sensitive topics. We need a way to have what amounts to conversations in our improv scenes. We need to express our characters’ fears, insecurities and yes, sometimes, their prejudices.
Having a diverse cast of performers — if you’re lucky enough to have that — makes it a little bit easier. If you have a variety of voices teaching other. And when I say variety I don’t mean just in terms of race and sexuality and gender but also class and age and background. Let them clash, teach other and adapt.
It’s too nuanced for me to express in broad rules. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want the meanness. I just don’t want to fully get rid of the danger either.
Plugs, Ongoing
High Functioning - Ian Roberts and I do an hour of improv EVERY SATURDAY 7pm at the UCB Annex. See this video for Ian and I showing you where the UCB Annex is.
Clubhouse Fridays - WGIS’ weekly improv show. Fridays 7pm at The Clubhouse. Free!
The World’s Greatest Improv School: The improv school I run with Jim Woods and Sarah Claspell. We’ve got classes online, in LA and even a few in NYC!
How to Be The Greatest Improviser On Earth - My improv book, available at Amazon. Kindle or print. It’s a hodge-podge of advice I wrote in 2016 about doing improv. If you’re broke and want a free PDF version just email me and I’ll send it over.
Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk About Comics - Comic book podcast, hosted by my brother Kevin and I. We are covering a little-known 1985 comic Watchmen (yes, THAT Watchmen). Subscribe for bonus episodes!
Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk About The Beatles - monthly deep dive on a little known indie band from Liverpool called The Beatles. Subscribe for access to back episodes!
This is a great thing to think about, especially for those of us who started in comedy in the 1990s, when there was a great deal of comedy that "went there." I guess where I netted out on this, was there were three reasons to delve into the language of cruelty, sexism, extreme profanity or bigotry, and they were as follows 1) they got attention, and raised the stakes. higher stakes= bigger laughs 2) There was a sense that you could use that language in the name of satire and 3) There was a perception that artists took risks.
Using those themes, at that time, WAS a real risk, it was a departure from the TV friendly pop culture landscape at the time. It sounds crazy now, but when I was a kid, I was genuinely SHOCKED to hear the word "fuck" on a Guns and Roses album. There wasn't an Internet that had democratized adult content yet.
Plus, to tread on that taboo ground, you'd make the audience nervous, and at least in the 1990s, there was a sense that if you were able to bring your message back to one of sanity, or make a larger satirical point, it almost felt like you'd done a magic trick, and audiences, at least back then, seemed to appreciate being taken out of their comfort zone, provided they were returned to it with the catharsis of a laugh, especially a knowing laugh, that the comedy was operating on a higher level. The idea with the satire angle, which was so seductive, and ( I saw that another commenter here mention Archie Bunker,) was that by personifying bad behavior, one could make it ridiculous, and completely devastate the source of the bigotry though mockery. There was a sense that a courageous humorist would lay it plain, show you what it was, say the words and shock you, but use that shock in the service of making a larger point. This is the Blazing Saddles/Steve Dallas/Slap Shot model, which I think many humorists delighted in, as it allowed them to raise the stakes, get attention, and feel bold, while doing it behind the moral armor of satire. But here's the thing- over time, in my experience, despite noble intentions, I found that this satirical trope didn't work as well as the humorists who employed it had hoped. It worked with people who already agreed with the ideas presented, but over and over and over again, the intended target just didn't get it, and certainly didn't feel chastened by it. Worse, they delighted in it. Bigots loved Archie Bunker, frat boys loved Steve Dallas, violent hockey players and sports fans adored Slap Shot, racist cops loved Cartman's "Respect Mah authority." Bigots love to bemoan the fact that "we couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" as though the point behind the racial slurs in that film were to show off about how we could delightfully say the N word and laugh about it, instead of using it to put a face on the deep rot of racism. Add the fact that humorists who came of age in the 1990s went on to employ these satirical tactics against George W Bush and Donald Trump, only to see their barbs appeal only to those who already agreed with them, and completely fail to change anyone's entrenched views.
Now, "idiots not getting it" is a cowardly reason to stop making satirical art or comedy, but I will say it makes it a hell of a lot riskier to do it in front of a live audience, particularly while improvising. Personally, it makes it lot harder for me to put an audience through something like that, if I'm not convinced that it also has the power to change minds, which increasingly, I'm not sure that it does. One of the reasons that Dave Chappelle famously walked off his show was this very balance- he felt like someone was giving him "the wrong kind of laugh." And ultimately, as thrilling as it was to "be bad", to use the language of hate to guide people to the light, if your satire not only isn't working, but worse, empowering the very target you intended to ridicule, than maybe you're not doing it as well as you thought you were. Maybe you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Really interesting, thanks Will,
I've been thinking a lot about this lately and some things are especially emphasised in the UK context. Social class is obviously the main way Brits enjoy dividing ourselves up. Unfortunately the creative industries in the UK are dominated by those with immense generational wealth privilege, privately educated, usually white & from South East England. While only 7% of UK population is went to a paid private school, they represent 60% of people working in the performing arts. They're the ones that can afford to train at a drama school, live and work in London without a well-paid job, bankrolled by parents while they build their creative career, or can afford to set up an improv business without risking destitution.
Working class, or even lower-middle-class (we have a thousand labels, keep up) performers are extremely rare and often forced out by financial need or feeling excluded. This makes for very homogenous leadership at improv theatres and lots of self-reinforced group think.
On the surface should be good for improvising right? Everyone on the same page. Well yes, except it excludes 93% of your potential audience and performers. It means performers are inevitably punching down in scenes. Those that recognise and want to avoid down are left with drawing from extremely narrow life experiences or cliched wordplay & leaning on sexual content - they grew up in comfort, went to university or drama school, then got by on a mix of paid and unpaid acting work or teaching improv. I've lost count of how many times a scene are set in auditions, are set in a generic white collar office setting or some tv parody world, regional accents are used as a joke in themselves or as a shorthand for being less intelligent. These haven't really gone away here - It's very dispiriting when you come from outside that clique. Even anecdotally this is visible: the two main London theatres are located in some of London's most disadvantaged/poor/non-white boroughs and yet are extraordinarily un-diverse on-stage.
Off stage, this manifests in gatekeeping, both intentional and unintentional misuses of power, high school level 'You can't sit here' bullying, resistance & hostility to hierarchy being challenged. More dangerously, leaders who fail to understand and accommodate the needs of those from different ethnic or social-economic backgrounds, with specific health conditions or any experience outside the echo chamber can and have caused real harm.
All the while those same leaders get confused by why audiences don't want to see their shows, why their 'art' isn't the most popular thing on earth, or cannot recognise that their inexperience running businesses is inseparable from the lack of adversity they've faced day-to-day in society. Interestingly while 60% of performing arts workers are from privileged backgrounds, they represent only 40% of industry award winners. It's almost as if their privilege outstrips their talent, but I couldn't possibly say.
All to say, inclusivity is the beginning and a process towards a more diverse community and simply better shows that audiences can connect with.
That's my take on why the story of most improv 'communities' start to collapse at a certain growth stage anyway. IS THAT TOO HEAVY? CAN WE NOT JUST FOCUS ON GROUP OPENINGS WITH EVERYONE PLAYING CHICKENS WITH BAGPIPES?