Between a Buffoon and a Bore: The Comedian as Orator
“It’s just a joke.” The insipid defense of every comedian who failed to raise a laugh and chose to find fault with their audience rather than with their material. It is the lazy man’s way of dismissing criticism and, in the case of paying clients, of perversely blaming the victim for professional incompetence. In recent years this form of scapegoating has devolved into a popular catch-all that helps absolve a multitude of sins — Political Correctness. If you don’t get the joke then clearly you are a bore unable to handle a little humor; an over sensitive social eunuch for whom a bit of ribald stimulation is unendurable.
But this is only ad hominem logic at its worst, even more so when it is considered that the term politically correct is, at the very least, a perverted invention of the political right to stifle debate or criticism; a fact that should alarm anyone who views comedians as the de-facto public intellectuals of our late-night talk show age. To censure a comedian for a poor joke is not commensurate with censoring free-speech, a point I will return to but first, it would be best to address the nature of comedy itself.
To criticize a comedian for the content of their act is usually deflected with accusations of over sensitivity. In more general terms we might call it boorishness on the part of the offended audience; a strategy that now has taken on a more political form of reaction in our highly partisan age.
It is certainly possible that any particular audience may be boorish in this respect. It is also possible that any joke, no matter how bland and inoffensive, will meet with at least a few laughs; what is often overlooked amidst the name-calling is that this is the comedian’s job, to find the means of comic persuasion. For indeed, it might be said that such an instinct is the very soul of comedy.
The comedian, and above all the stand-up comedian, is nothing less than an orator, or as it was known in antiquity a rhetor, someone trained in the skills of rhetoric. Every stand-up comedic performance is, in fact, a rhetorical exercise subject to the same rules of human psychology and performance that were grasped by the ancient Greeks over 2500 years ago, and codified in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. In fact, perhaps more than any other performing artist the stand-up comedian shares most in common with the ancient orators of antiquity, and no ancient orator would have believed it correct to blame their audience for their personal lack of skill.
In antiquity the orator’s aptitude and instinct at judging the circumstances in which an oration was delivered was known as the “rhetorical situation”, and ideally, with the term Kairos (today more suitably equated with the notion of comic timing) have both of them a strong resemblance to what familiarly is referred to by comedians as “reading the room”. That is, the skill expected of a professional orator to judge the temper of their audience and know instinctively what will and will not work with them. This is not an original observation as there are many studies making the connection between comedian and rhetor, but such a connection and its value for examining the comic’s claims of politically correct outrage, and thus the comedian’s absolution from culpability, have apparently gone unnoticed. But logically they cannot but be culpable if comedy is indeed a real profession. No one blames the patient when the surgeon makes a mistake, but that is precisely what the comic does defensively when they fail in their obligation to read the room.
Comedy is almost always contextual and that context is what the professional comedian must first consider upon entering any stage, not least of which perhaps when they are being paid. To fail at their task and then accuse their clients of violating their freedom of speech is, ironically, an attempt to take that same freedom from their employer when they expressed dissatisfaction with the employee’s performance. To follow this line of logic to its extreme we would be forced to conclude that there are no bad comedians, only bad audiences.
To be clear, I am not making a judgment about the nature of comedy itself. What is or is not funny is perhaps a value judgment not subject to objective rules, for as I said above comedy is almost always contextual. But it is the comedian’s professional obligation to understand that context. Even the most hateful or the most inoffensive of jokes have receptive audiences, the professional is tasked with the duty of sorting them out and it is not impossible, I would argue, to determine what will or will not be the case in advance of a given performance.
Lastly, although I have only lightly touched upon Aristotle and his Rhetoric, it is perhaps rather his Ethics that might best inform us as to the underlying motivations of the overly defensive comedian. In Book IV Aristotle goes into great detail as to the qualities of a sense of humor whose mean has reached excess, a mean being the balance between two extremes. When the individual seeks to raise a laugh at any cost, even at the expense of their dignity and that of others, such an individual becomes a buffoon. When the comedian has shamed himself by such excess it is perhaps more obvious why many professionals become excessively defensive and cry out against the over-sensitive sensibilities of their audiences.
Tact, Aristotle observes, is the word that best sums up that speaker who is more cautious and clever when attempting to amuse others in social intercourse; and the tactful person is the one who has found the mean between the buffoon and the bore. But this concept is by no means completely ignored in his Rhetoric where, under the term To Prepon in Book III, is most often rendered as “appropriateness”. Not at all surprising when it is considered that the speaker, in order to be persuasive, must always take into consideration the mores of their prospective audience in addition to the strength of their arguments, comedic or otherwise.
If then as I have described the comedian is as much a rhetorician as he is a performer, and by extension, a joke is as much an argument to persuade us something is funny than it is something funny in itself, like some objective fact, then perhaps we can understand the perception that too many modern comedians are thin-skinned, and the only joke is that they believe they have a right to call themselves comedians at all.
