Bad jokes

Oh yeah, you know who’s been long overdue a challenge? The trans community. Oh they’ve had their guard down for too long if you ask me. — James Acaster

What’s this about?

First off, if you watch James Acaster’s 5 minutes on edgy comedians maybe you can skip the word salad below.

TL;DR: If you’re going to make jokes that involve a marginalised or oppressed group (where membership is not voluntary), do it thoughtfully. Try to understand how a member of that group will see your joke and try to understand whether your joke is going to make their day better or worse. If it’s going to make it worse, or you just couldn’t be bothered thinking about it, don’t complain about the consequences if you go ahead and tell the joke anyway.

At TCB we’ve had some incidents involving jokes that cross a line. I wanted to write down my own thinking on this, in the hope that it will help others to make their own decisions about jokes and to clarify how TCB makes decisions (although I’m not speaking for the club here).

First off, this is not a new problem. I recommend listening to Marc Maron’s interview with a historian of comedy on this topic. Acceptable speech and acceptable humour has always been changing and people have been complaining that “you can’t say anything anymore” for at least a century.

What is new is that it’s no longer TV-execs who get to decide. Now audiences through social media have huge influence, the “woke mob”, if you like. This has also made audiences in real life more vocal and more willing to complain.

Comedy clubs also need to get involved here. They put people on a stage in front of an audience. They have a responsibility to ensure that they are not making the world a shittier place in the process.

Offence is a red herring

I think talking about “offence” is counter-productive. People can be offended by anything. It’s almost a choice on their behalf. You can’t argue with them. You can’t tell them they’re not offended. If I offend you, I haven’t necessarily done anything bad. You might just have very different sensibilities.

I do material that would offend nationalists and xenophobes (of several countries). I am happy to offend them. I consider it a positive thing.

TCB’s policy about unacceptable jokes is offensive to some people!

This is why offence cannot be the basis of a policy for a club (it can factor into policies for specific shows). Anthony Jeselnik is a highly offensive comedian but people aren’t trying to cancel him like they’re trying to cancel Dave Chapelle.

Being offensive is not an ethical issue.

You can skip the rest of the “offence” stuff and go straight to “harm” if you want. I just want to say a few more things about offence while I’m at it. They’re not part of the bigger argument.

Context

We don’t want customers who’ve come for lighthearted fun getting an hour of dead-baby jokes. That is not a good way to build a customer base.

That said, people being offended is not a huge concern at TCB. For two reasons.

• we have shows that specialize in offensive material like Roast Battle and Your Hood’s a Joke. The audience want offensive material. Comics can get their fix by performing in these.
• at more general shows, comics read the room and choose how far to go without alienating the audience.

We don’t disallow offensive material but if you drop a massive load on the stage don’t be surprised if you receive some pointed advice. Not only have you done yourself no favours, the MC has to do the work to get the crowd back to a happy place before the bringing on the next act.

Doing it anyway

Some comics do material that is definitely offensive, myself included. I do material that might offend some people who I have no particular quarrel with, people who just have a lower tolerance for nastiness. I hope it’s mixed in with enough other good material that by the time I get there, they’ll let me do it or if it was too much, they can let it slide.

Offence can easily be forgiven if the joke is good enough. An offensive joke should be worth it. The perfect offensive joke is one where people laugh involuntarily and then cover their face in shame.

Causing offence is a practical matter. It has an impact

• your popularity as a comedian.
• who can be a happy audience member when you’re on stage.
• your bookability

but it’s rarely about crossing a line.

Harm is the problem

There are some jokes that cause harm to members of the audience or to groups in society. There are two key points that are frequently misunderstood.

• jokes can harm individuals and groups
• not all groups are equal

Causing harm is an ethical issue.

Why some groups are special

There are some groups you can’t leave. I was born in Ireland. So I’m a member of the “Irish” group. There’s nothing I can ever do to change that. Even if I gave up my citizenship, I would always be ethnically Irish. If someone made a joke about Irish people, it would be about me. The same goes for skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, disability, blood type (yes blood type, you should read a Japanese company’s code of conduct!) and many other factors. Some groups are not groups you are born into but once you join them you cannot leave, e.g. victims of assault.

There are some groups you can leave. It’s a choice to be a neo-Nazi or to stand on the road telling LGBTQ+ people that they’re going to hell. It’s also a choice to be a climate activist or a vegan. It might be hard to leave those groups but people do.

Religion is on the border line here. You can’t change what religion you were born or raised but you can change what religion you are now although this is easier said than done.

So when your joke involves a group of people, you should consider whether membership of that group is optional. If membership is not optional then you probably need to think about what impact your joke will have.

How do jokes harm?

Realistically, it’s very unlikely that any one of us will ever be in a position to do significant harm to any group of people. This is really about not being part of the problem, not adding fuel to the fire, not making things worse for people who are already oppressed, marginalized and struggling because of things they do not control.

It’s about the impact your words have on the people in the audience that night but it’s also about not giving oxygen to hate-speech. People are literally killed for being members of groups they did not choose to join and cannot leave.

If you are not a member of one of these groups you may not have thought much about this. I went through life as a straight, white male, in a 99%-white country, mostly not thinking about this stuff. It wasn’t until I joined a company with a very diverse and very vocal set of people from all kinds of marginalised groups that I started to understand it.

I am incredibly lucky that life never forced me to understand this stuff the hard way. I learned it by reading other people’s stories and their explanations of how seemingly harmless statements, policies or practices were actually causing harm in ways I had never thought of.

I wish I could recommend books on this topic. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Just to align with James Acaster’s bit and because some of the incidents at TCB have been about this, I will talk about trans-phobic jokes.

Realistically, nobody is going to go beat up a trans person because you made a trans-phobic joke. The problem is that the trans person in the audience, who has a legitimate fear that they may be beaten up for just walking down the street but who came out anyway, now has deal with trans-phobia instead of the night of comedy they planned.

It’s not about whether you are trans-phobic or not. I don’t think I’m trans-phobic but I’m sure I could thoughtlessly make a trans-phobic joke. If I was told I had done so, I hope I would accept the feedback.

This would not be someone telling me what I can or can’t say. This would be someone telling me the impact that my joke had on them or others and me deciding to avoid that impact in future.

But they do jokes like that

Sometimes gay comedians make jokes about gay people. Sometimes (always!) Japanese comedians make small-dick jokes.

I think of this a similar to self-deprecating humour. There is a tolerance for people making fun of themselves that extends to their own groups. It’s fine for me to get on stage and make jokes about my bad fashion sense or my thinning hair. Unless it’s a roast battle, it’s not OK for you to just attack me from the stage. The same applies to groups.

This might be OK, it might not. Really though, that is for other gay people or other Japanese people to decide. It does not give anyone else a pass to make the same jokes.

Why is it OK to attack straight, white men?

Personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea. Comedy-wise it’s lazy to rely on broad stereotypes (no offence intended Roast Battle). I also think it’s counter-productive in that it gives ammunition to the “anti-woke” narrative where straight, white men are the “real victims”, the only people left who can be attacked.

There are plenty of straight, white men who are struggling. However they almost certainly are not struggling because of their straight-white-manness. That’s why it gets a pass.

Straight, white men can mostly just shrug it off and enjoy the rest of the show. They’re not going to spend the rest of their night mentally composing a detailed refutal of the stereotype with an attached bibliography.

Cumulative harm

While no one comedian is likely to cause harm directly, at a comedy club, the effect of multiple comedians accumulates. Having an LGBTQ+ night is nothing if the LGBTQ+ community can’t go to your club any other night. If the club does not want to be X-phobic that can’t be a part-time policy.

Enforcing this policy consistently is hard. I hope this document can help people to understand the ideas behind it. They’re not complicated but they’re also not obvious.

Censorship

When someone asks you not do a joke for the reasons above, are you being censored? Yes, you are! If you got onstage and said “those people are different and shouldn’t be able to exist in society without being humiliated every now and then” you would also be censored but I don’t think you would be surprised.

I think the key issue is that people don’t understand that some jokes are just a different version of “those people are different and…”. It’s absolutely fine to do that to Nazis. They can stop being Nazis any time they want.

Wrap up

When a show-runner asks you not to do a particular joke they’re really asking you not to hurt a group that they want to protect. They are prioritizing that group’s welfare over your joke.

The above is my understanding of this issue. It’s “woke” in as much as being woke means trying to understand how you might be doing harm and choosing not to do it.

It’s not comprehensive. I haven’t said anything about making comedy from traumatic subjects. I have nothing useful to say there except that you should be very wary of attempting this. You are quite likely to get no laughs AND to upset people in the audience.

I think there’s also something to be said about character comedy, where it may be OK to say horrible things when portraying a character that the audience should disagree with. I love that Neil Hamburger was not allowed to do this joke on Fox News because it was “homophobic”. I think it’s only homophobic if you don’t understand that Neil Hamburger is the joke. In fairness to Fox News, they probably made the right call for their viewership.

I don’t think the stuff above is obvious. It’s not difficult to understand but I didn’t understand a lot of it for a large part of my life simply because I had no reason to (luckily I was nowhere near a stage).

I’m happy to discuss any part of this, in person or virtually.