The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy

Patrice A. Oppliger, Eric Shouse, Patrice A. Oppliger, Eric Shouse

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030372149
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Television

This book focuses on the "dark side" of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers' troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians' onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.

Part IDarkness from the Outside

© The Author(s) 2020

P. A. Oppliger, E. Shouse (eds.)The Dark Side of Stand-Up ComedyPalgrave Studies in Comedyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_1

Begin Abstract

Introduction: Come to The Dark Side

Eric Shouse¹ and Patrice A. Oppliger²

(1)

School of Communication, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

(2)

Department of Mass Communication, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Eric Shouse (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Patrice A. Oppliger

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

January 5, 2015: Dylan Avila was hosting a comedy show at a bar in a suburb of Seattle when a menacing-looking man, Steven James Baldwin, stepped forward from his hiding place backstage. The man raised an aluminum baseball bat and swung at Avila’s head. A moment later, the stage was covered in blood. Avila was hit twice in the skull, suffering a double concussion. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital where doctors performed emergency surgery, closing Avila’s wounds with 20 staples and inserting two titanium plates in his head. According to James Taylor, a fellow comedian who helped subdue the attacker, Baldwin “was swinging again. I mean, he had every intention of trying to kill him.” Fortunately for Avila, several onlookers, including Taylor, rushed the stage and tackled Baldwin in the nick of time. It appears the brutal attack was motivated by revenge. Avila had banned Baldwin from performing at his weekly open mic night after Baldwin signed in as “Jesus Christ” and put on a performance involving a Bible and sex toys that the owners of the venue felt was “obscene” (Hopperstad, 2015).

Three years later, Steven James Baldwin, the self-proclaimed “Anti-Christ of Comedy,”¹ is serving a ten-year prison sentence for assault with a deadly weapon. Meanwhile, Dylan Avila continues to deal with the long-term repercussions of his traumatic brain injury. The 39-year-old father of three who works as an advertising executive for Microsoft by day has struggled to put his life back together in the wake of the brutal attack. In the comedian’s own words, “I’m not physically the same . . . I crash hard every day . . . I’m more emotional now” (cited in Condran, 2018). Despite these obstacles, Avila has somehow managed to maintain his sense of humor. On January 6, 2018, the stand-up comic performed a one-man show at the Rendezvous Theater in Seattle about the night he was attacked. The show was called, “My Turn at Bat.”

As Dylan Avila’s experience reveals, stand-up comedy can be both the cause of a comedian’s distress and a means of coping with it. Since Norman Cousins first described using humor as a form of pain relief in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (1979), an enormous amount of research promoting the positive benefits of humor and laughter has been published. Notable titles include Allen Klein’s (1989), The Healing Power of Humor, Herbert M. Lefcourt’s (2001), Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly, and Paul McGhee’s (2010), Humor: The Lighter Path to Resilience and Health. For almost 40 years, now humor has been hyped by psychologists and others as a powerful source of healing and well-being. A large professional organization, the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, exists to champion the transformative power of “healthy humor.” Its members promote humor “as an antidote to (indeed, a panacea for) what ails us” (Lewis, 2006, p. 7), which suggests a strange paradox: If humor is so wonderful, why are most stand-up comics so damn miserable? (At least, that is the stereotype regularly promoted in the popular press, about which more shortly.)

The Incongruity of Tragicomedy

Mark Twain reportedly said, “humor is tragedy plus time,” a sentiment so popular that variations on the theme have been attributed to Steve Allen, Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce (Greengross, 2012; O’Toole, 2013). The expression, in slightly different forms, became a cliché because it so elegantly explains the alchemy of the comedian. The comedian mines pain and tragedy and conjures humor and laughter. This book is about the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy; we are intrigued by the idea that great comedy often comes from dark places.

To explore the dark side requires a willingness to live with incongruity and paradox. As Spitzberg and Cupach (1998) commented in The Dark Side of Close Relationships, “The study of the dark side often ends up blurring the distinction between good and evil or the bright and the dark of the human condition” (p. xvi). The metaphor of the dark side is especially fitting for conceptualizing stand-up comedy because humor depends upon a unique form of incongruity. As Paul McDonald (2010) noted, “Incongruity theories of humour suggest that incongruities are amusing only when they are in some way appropriate: they are funny when they can be reconciled on one level or another” (p. 31). Comedians experience darkness in their personal lives; some adopt dark personae; others develop stage acts that revolve around a variety of dark topics. However, at some point, those various forms of darkness must be reconciled with light and wit for humor to result. If not, there is only tragedy.

Unfortunately, the fundamental paradox underlying humor—that pain and tragedy often beget humor and laughter—has often been resolved rather simply in books and articles about stand-up comedians. In the popular press, comedians are regularly cast as maudlin characters who transform pain into laughter to avoid confronting the pain. Journalists and biographers find the myth of the troubled comedian virtually irresistible. “Read almost any interview with or biography of a contemporary comedian and you will detect,” suggests Andrew McConnell Stott (2010), “the inevitable questions that seek to understand why the subject is drawn to laughter, hoping to unearth some explanatory bullying, neglect, or the tragic death of a parent” (p. 322). And thanks to the ubiquity of these questions, anecdotal evidence abounds: Chevy Chase recalled waking up in the middle of the night to violent physical abuse and being locked in the bedroom closet for hours at a time as a form of punishment (Force, 2011). Russell Brand was molested by a tutor at seven, was bulimic by 14, and had left home and was abusing drugs by 16 (Force, 2011). Carol Burnett “lived in a household with two parents who suffered crippling alcoholism” (Francis, 2013). Chelsea Handler often felt ignored by her parents and wondered why they even had her (Handler, 2010, p. 20). A stranger in an alley slashed Tina Fey’s face when she was in kindergarten (Fey, 2011, p. 8). Sarah Silverman wet the bed—a condition she suffered from past her 16th birthday (2010, p. 16). Stephen Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers at age ten in an airplane crash. As a result, Colbert reported becoming socially withdrawn when the weight of the tragedy caught up with him during his college years (Force, 2011; Welch & Lovell, 2015).

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that vivid examples like the ones above tend to be far more influential in shaping our opinions than abstract information, even when that abstract information is more accurate (Goode, 2002; emphasis ours). Most of us, it seems, prefer a good story to statistical analysis even when that statistical analysis paints a more accurate picture of the world. This inclination is particularly troublesome in this case, as there is good reason to believe most comedians have relatively normal childhoods. In a study that compared the childhood experiences of 31 professional comedians and 400 undergraduate students, Greengross, Martin, and Miller (2012) found that the parents of professional comedians and the parents of university students were similar in terms of their level of care and protectiveness. Unfortunately, that study has received far less attention than stories about the difficult childhood experiences of popular comedians.

In a piece for the Huffpost, Mark Liebenow (2017) commented, “Behind the laughter of many of the comedians we love, there are tears. Their brilliance in being able to make us laugh is often rooted in anguish or unhappy childhoods.” The owner of the Laugh Factory comedy club, Joey Masada, echoed the sentiment, noting that, “Eighty percent of comedians come from a place of tragedy. They didn’t get enough love. They have to overcome their problems by making people laugh” (cited in McGraw & Warner, 2014). The story goes that the uniquely troubled childhoods of most comedians lead inevitably to adult dysfunction. As Nathan Rabin (2010) suggested in a commentary for The Wall Street Journal about Jay Leno’s writers, “Funny people drink too much. They squander their money. They use drugs. They’re prone to depression, insomnia and mental illness, to tumultuous relationships and serial divorces.” And we all know where that leads. Drug addiction and overdose (Lenny Bruce, Greg Giraldo, Mitch Hedberg, John Belushi, Chris Farley) and suicide (Freddie Prinze, Richard Jeni, Robin Williams) have both taken the lives of well-known comedians.

In the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide, Dana Gould wrote a piece for Rolling Stone. The stand-up comedian known for his work with The Simpson’s suggested, “being a comedian means knowing a lot of people who’ve committed suicide…. Five of my friends and fellow comedians have taken their own life. It’s shocking, but, sadly, not surprising” (Gould, 2014). Not surprising, according to Gould, because “the same brain that makes the good stuff makes the bad stuff.” Gould compared successful comedians to the likes of Darwin, Mozart, and Hemmingway, and argued that “it’s obvious to even the casual observer that our greatest minds were housed in brains that behaved very badly.” While that dubious claim obviously passed muster with the editors at Rolling Stone, the myth of the “mad genius” has been squarely criticized in the academic literature on the subject (e.g., Dietrich, 2014; Schlesinger, 2012). As Schlesinger (2012) argued, “The entire thesis of the highly-gifted mentally ill rests entirely on an unholy marriage of case reports and anecdotal storytelling” (p. 1). In other words, the idea that clinically depressed, drug-addicted, mentally unstable people have an edge in a competitive field like stand-up comedy is likely the product of little more than a hasty generalization fallacy.

But what if we are wrong? What if stand-up comedians are the unstable products of unhappy childhoods who drink and abuse drugs and are incapable of meaningful long-term relationships? What if the same brain that makes the good stuff does make the bad stuff? For the sake of argument, we will—as a thought experiment only—concede that comedians have uniquely dark minds. Having done so, we ask: How do generalizations about the dark minds of comedians inform us about Dylan Avila’s experience? Does it matter whether he had a happy childhood? Or whether he suffered from depression before he was almost beaten to death with a baseball bat?

Comedians experience darkness in different ways. For example, it is noteworthy that none of the victims of suicide or drug overdose mentioned previously were women. We are unaware of a single female stand-up who could rightly be called a celebrity who has overdo...