Must Comedy Be A Finishing School For Bigotry?

Let’s talk about what made us cringe.

This week, Netflix streamed the Roast of Kevin Hart. Among its many ill-conceived jokes, drenched in body-shaming, misogyny towards black women and MAGA-esque punchlines, black folk resoundingly — and rightly, in my view — condemned a joke from comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe’s joke, as others have noted, appealed to the death of George Floyd in a way that wasn’t simply cringeworthy or smashing taboos, but that made light of the historical ecosystem of police violence and punishment dealt to black lives. All of this, mind you, was pitched to broad, mixed audiences as entertainment subject to the rules of roasts. While I’m not inherently against roasts, it was culturally obtuse, and at several points, rhetorically violent, dehumanizing affair. Comedians like Michael Che, for instance, have pointed out as much.

(Shane Gillis, host of Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart, Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Netflix)

While laughter can be a reactionary exercise, I don’t think the antidote is humorless, prudish ethics. I actually like stand-up comedy, in all its bawdiness. I enjoy well-crafted, ironic takes on what human embodiment in community feels like. I don’t mind hearing perspectives that differ from my own. But I refuse the idea that comedy, in the name of free speech, gets to dress up ridicule and contempt as harmless jokes. No thank you. Nah, a thousand times over.

As it turns out, comedy is in fact enjoying a bit of a renaissance. When I was growing up, my options were BET’s Comicview, HBO standup comedy special, sitcoms by folks like Monique and Martin, and the tail end of late night shows by Arsenio, though I was too young, sadly, to catch that show in its heyday. Today, comedy is everywhere: BET, Comedy Central, Peacock, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, YouTube, TikTok, social media skits, you name it.

So, comedy platforms have expanded. Access to it is higher than its ever been. We might also wonder: has the range of perspectives of comedy itself expanded? I think so. Comedians like Amanda Seales, Josh Johnson, Trevor Noah, to name a few, have each pushed the parameters of what is recognized as comedy, in terms of critical consciousness and liberationist humor in Seales’ case, standup sets in Johnson’s case, and redefining high-visibility humor on the largest platforms in Noah’s case. It would seem, then, that comedy can be more than slinging mud and insults and blaming a supposedly buttoned-up culture for refusing to chuckle at our own degradation. While I concede that multivalent takes of what is funny is indeed a thing, that acknowledgement cuts in multiple directions. One of those directions is the right of refusal for comedy that trivializes black suffering, avoids lampooning systems of power, and plays target practice with communities already undergoing incredibly hard, arguably fascist times.

My hope is that comedy doesn’t have to be a finishing school for bigotry in the midst of an already unjust sociopolitical environment. This hope, for me, is a theological one. I don’t quite know where laughter comes from. It just sort of irrupts inside of us, doesn’t it? That such ineffable laughter happens everywhere is an echo — and to those who believe, a kind of evidence — of God’s ubiquitous presence in creation. The Spirit who works through lament also inspires laughter, recognition of irony, the wry observation of survival and its contingency — despite a thousand absurdities assembled together and arrayed against the disinherited in every land.

I serve a laughing God as Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas puts it. In Resurrection Hope, Douglas argues that laughter is “a signal of transcendence recognizing the discrepancy of the present that was (is) the MAGA vision and the future that was (is) God’s vision where Black lives would matter”.

Laughter that brings discrepancy into view evokes what Dr. Douglas calls resurrection hope, a sacrament of determined, playful joy in a world that reinforces white supremacy while denying it exists.

I’m also reminded of Karl-Josef Kuschel’s Laughter: A Theological Reflection, a text I’ve been thumbing through over the years. Actually, it’s a quote of a quote, in that Kuschel invokes Harvey Cox’s Feast of Fools, which argues:

“Laughter is hope’s last weapon. Crowded on all sides with idiocy and ugliness, pushed to concede that the final apocalypse seems to be upon us, we seem nonetheless to nourish laughter as our only remaining defense”.

Laugh deeply. Laugh daily. Laugh with a lens of liberation. It’s the most pleasurable, most joy-filled spiritual discipline we have.