Dave Chappelle

I have always been a fan of Dave Chappelle and his stand-up/television work. "Killing Them Softly" and "For What It's Worth" are, in my opinion, laugh out loud hilarious and able to produce the same response after repeated viewings. For example, I have heard that bit about kid's cartoons about fifteen times and when I watched it in class, I laughed about as hard as I did when I saw it for the first time.
Anyway, I tried to indentify why I found Chappelle so humorous. Yes, he does have good material and the subject matter and punchlines are hilarious. However, I think it is a little more than that. Eddie Murphy, when asked his secret to being funny, said that he was just born with the ability to tell a joke well and sound funny. I think the same is true for Dave Chappelle. A lot of this humor has to do with his voice and especially his "white person voice". Whenever Chappele imitates a white person, he always talks in a high-mannered, uptight and snooty tone and it makes the joke sound hilarious. I can understand why a black audience member would find it funny as it portrays a different race. However, I think that white people can find just as much humor in something like that. I don't find it offensive or degrading. I have met people that talk like that but I don't so I do not feel like I am really the target of any joke. What would happen if a white comedian tried to imitate a black person? I am sure that he or she would use a voice which sounds like at least a part of the racial population much like Chappelle uses a voice that sounds like a minority of the white population. A black viewer or listener would think "I know people that talk like that, not me, but I have heard it before". It may seem like a fair and equal comic trade-off but it does not work that way. The minority of a population is always able to poke as much fun at the majority but the majority is cruel if they jab at the minority. I am not quite sure how that works but I think it is fair.
In a democratic nation like America, the majority vote wins thus has the power. Therefore, whichever people are in the majority are most likely to control the power through numbers. (I am not saying white people are more powerful than the black race, or any other race for that matter, but simply that majority rules). Thus, just like I have mentioned before in such examples as presidential humor, there is a longstanding tradition of poking fun and making jokes at those in power. If the president came on TV and started ripping on the American public, surely it would not go over well. However, Letterman can go on TV every night and take shots at the government's expense. That is just how the humor flows. There is no vis-versa.
Therefore, to sum up, I think black people can make fun of white people but white people (for the most case, unless done very tastefully) cannot make fun of black people. And I am fine with that because I think it is all hilarious.

George Carlin, again.

On our second (or third?, maybe even fourth) viewing of George Carlin, I noticed many of the same things and even some new aspects to his humor.

I think a lot of Carlin's humor or appeal comes from the recitation which makes up a big part of his stand up routine. For example, in his "I'm a Modern Man" routine, there may not be a lot of jokes that are particularly laugh-out-loud hilarious. On the other hand, it is incredibly impressive that he not only wrote such a string of high-impact lines but also memorized and recited it well. I think it would be hard enough to memorize a comedian's routine of setups and punchlines not to mention such a dense and intricately worded speech as Carlin's. In fact, I think this applies to most of his stand up. Many of his bits, or rather speeches, seem as if they could be read by a man off of a sheet of paper at a lectern facing an audience. This is not only because of their length and basis on exact memorization but also because many of these speeches feel as if they are meant to lecture a crowd. Yes, they are for the purpose of humor as well but also to teach and harangue.

Also, it seems to fit into a common theme that Carlin, the anti-establishment/government/society comic would maybe tone it down a little bit as his career went on. I am not saying he cleaned up his act or made it cheerful and bright, but he did probably do less chaotic acts which resulted in arrests. Also, he played the conductor on the children's show "Shining Time Station" on PBS which is certainly not an venue for his "Seven Dirty Words" routine or anything or the sort. However, similarly raunchy comedians have been known to calm down as their careers progressed. Eddie Murphy, the man who came out in a red jumpsuit and dropped n-words and grabbed his crotch can now be seen in such family-fun movies like "Daddy Day Care" or "Doctor Dolittle". Steve Martin, the man whose routine used to involve spitting out his water onstage and mentioning drugs, etc. can now be seen in "The Pink Panther 2" and "Cheaper By The Dozen". Maybe humorists and comedians have some revelation as they age that they are maybe growing out of the profanities and crudeness and may need to refocus some of their material. Maybe it is because they have families. Maybe their priorities are rearranged. I will say though that for as old as Carlin was while remaining comedically active, his act didn't clean up all too much. At least not when compared to the aforementioned comics. So, in that sense, I guess he should be commended for keeping it relatively crude into old age.

Presidential Humor

As we read the Lyndon Johnson piece in class, I started to wonder about the entire concept of presidential humor. I think that it is only natural, at least in modern times, to make jokes at the expense of those in higher power. Since government is always the subject of scrutiny, it would only make sense that the head of the government would receive his fair share of flak. I am not sure if president jokes have extended back into the history of America, but they have certainly been a part of popular culture for the past fifty years (at least since Saturday Night Live has existed). 

It has been easy for comedians to find humor in the past few decades. They have had a president who resigned due to a criminal scandal, one who was impeached because of an extramarital "affair" and a cowboy with poor speaking skills. Humorists have probably been having a blast whenever any of those presidents spoke on national television. Also, it seems that recently, with criticism of George W. Bush, comedians have given off-handed comments about their personal political preferences (liberal in social and economic matters).

This makes it very difficult with the election of Barack Obama. First of all, he stands for many of the things and issues that several of these comedians criticized Bush for not having. Second, he is black. Can these comedians and late night hosts(who are mostly white, i.e. Leno, Conan, Letterman, Ferguson, Kimmel) come us with any sort of material to make their time-honored pokes at the president. He hasn't made many blunders yet, at least not compared to Bush, and any jokes about his race would be borderline offensive. I am sure it could be pulled off tastefully but I don't think many white comedians are willing to take the risk.

I do not know how to circumvent this "humor problem". My best advice would be for comedians to hammer down their best Obama impressions (Fred Armisen has already nailed an immaculate one on SNL). That would definitely provide laughs. Other than that, I guess this people are just going to have to wait for the president to screw up, for better or for worse.

Zora Neale Hurston/Paula Gunn Allen

I found Zora Neale Hurston's anecdotal passages in Redressing the Balance very interesting not because they were dealing with particularly enticing subjects but because they had an intriguing amount of ambiguity. "Turpentine Love" was simply a paragraph or two and left just enough information out that one becomes extremely interested in the motives and backgrounds of the characters and their behaviors. Also, the story of of Cai'lin required even further guessing by the reader. What was she doing with the axe? Did she kill her husband, his lover or both? Why did she become outraged at this point? Many of these questions are unanswered in the facts of the story and are left up to the reader. While this is an interesting way to read such stories, I ultimately do not find much redemption in their endings. Many people are different but I personally enjoy stories with factual substance instead of ambiguity. I especially think that this sort of ambiguous storytelling is difficult in terms of finding humor. The author has to be careful or else the humor may be lost. It would be like telling a joke with an unclear punchline. 

Paula Gunn Allen's poem was much more straight-forward in its delivery and objective. The most interesting part of her poem is that much of the humor was pivoted on a single word, "ruins", and the various interpretation of its meaning. Furthermore, I think that such a poem deals with the same "in-crowd/out-crowd" setup as many of the stand-ups we have viewed. Just like how black comedians are able to make racial humor/comments that white comedians cannot say, so do the Native Americans in this poem. Both the man and woman are presumably Native Americans and therefore both are able to find humor in the misinterpretation of "Indian ruins" at the end. However, the humor is not lost on those outside of the group. While a non-Native American would not be able to make the joke, I feel that they can still appreciate it.