Update! Rupert Pupkin apologises

Hey De Niro, say it ain't so!

The former King of Comedy makes a perfectly good joke about the media-blight of minority-preparedness ("Are we ready for a gay bishop?" "Are we ready for an Asian NBA player?") and suddenly a bunch of globular, jowly white guys are acting like he just found the burial plots of their dearly beloved ancestors, unearthed them, and urinated into the empty holes while doing his very own De Niro impression.

His apology is somewhat politically-savvy, as De Niro tries to ensure that it is obvious his main concern is Michelle Obama.

"My remarks, although spoken with satirical jest, were not meant to offend or embarrass anyone -- especially the first lady," De Niro said in a statement.

I'm not sure what to make of a 'satirical jest', much less how one speaks with satirical jest, and we've dealt with the bizarre issue of intent before: a great joke suddenly hinges on some excavation of intent; but the three grotesqueries remain: the joke was not racist, and somehow a bunch of white guys are victims of ersatz racism; the Obamas will always bow to the moral authority of right wing demagogues; and, gosh, aren't these old white goats great defenders of their ladies' honour?

The Gingrich Who Stole Race

I'm done, I'm through, I've had it. Really, I give up. You know that really cute saying by Tom Lehrer about how awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger made satire obsolete? At a certain point, you just reach the end of your rope and you say, it's over. Lehrer continued to write satire, he continued to work in parody, he refused to give up; I, on the other hand, think there is no more point having any sort of conversation about comedy.

Newt Gingrich, a man sculpted by God from leftovers from Rush Limbaugh's right buttock, has demanded apologies for a joke Robert De Niro made at a fundraiser. Gingrich called the joke inexcusable; he wants President Obama to apologise. And you know what? Because the fundraiser was attended by Michelle Obama, and because the joke involved her, Michelle Obama's people . . . agreed, and called the joke 'inappropriate.' They caved in, they agreed with Gingrich, and they threw De Niro out of the back of a bus, so to speak.

That's the country, and that's this presidency, in a squirrel-gnawed nutshell.

Go Ninja GO

There are obviously two types of people in the world: those who love Die Antwoordt and readers of this blog. In the comments to my last post, there was some skepticism about my affection for Enter the Ninja, though the video is obviously the best thing to happen to popular music since, I don't know, Nirvana Live and Unplugged. One comment mentioned my earlier "fascination" with Tatu as if it is something I should be ashamed of. I have no regrets that I adored a melodramatic disco pop anthem sung by a pair of teenage Russian lesbians. Do you know what Heaven is? It's not a place where nothing ever happens. It's a place where the angels are teenage Russian lesbians serenading each other with melodramatic disco pop anthems.

Now, you might respond by saying that Tatu were "contrived", or that they weren't even lesbians. Darling, I don't go to pop music for the authenticity. I go for the magic. And Die Antwoordt is magical in a way that we barely recognise any more, so blind are we to the non-positivistic, cracked, empiricism-flaying world around us: it is the magic of myth, the modern myth of the word-hopping, body-crumping minstrel of fury, and the ancient myths of warriors and maidens; the mythical dimensions are explored, as I have been shown, far more prominently in Evil Boy; and I can't help but love the punk bitch-slap of Rich Bich, a faux-gilded gauntlet thrown down to ersatz modern myth-makers Lady G, Pink, and Beyonce, performed with the knowing smirk that they will look at the gauntlet and, like prim sorority sisters in a college comedy, turn on their heels and storm away with their noses in the air, superior and humiliated at once.

Another comment asked if this was some kind of joke? I don't know if the commentator meant my seat-bouncing, seat-wetting enthusiasm for Enter the Ninja or the song itself. What is so striking about Enter the Ninja and Die Antwoordt is that it does not matter. How peculiar is that? Under most circumstances, whether something is or is not a joke, whether something is or is not ironic, is of the utmost importance; it's usually crucial. But in this case, it does not matter at all. After all, one has every right to approach Die Antwoordt with a tremendous amount of suspicion. The Ninja, Die Antwoordt, also happens to be a satirist, a comic artist, indeed, something of a comic graphic artist; his work, which melds graffiti and Haring and Basquiat graces the backdrop to Enter the Ninja and YoLandi Vi$$er's clothing; and some of his more obvious comic-performance work here is deeply reminiscent of, ahem, this. So is it possible that Die Antwoord is another """performance"""? A sort of South African Larry the Cable Guy or a subsaharan Ben Elton mashed up with Eminem? Baron Cohen meets Kid Rock? The amazing thing is, it does not matter.

The friend who first forwarded me the link to this video did so without providing any context: I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing. But as we discussed it afterwards, it became apparent how similarly it affected us. Die Antwoord is unapologetic; there is no caveat, no asterisk; and still it courses through convention with all the commitment of myth (for myths are often full of the familiar, the rote, the obvious; it is only recently that we have become shamed and flushed and embarrassed by myths for being so unironic); it is no wonder they seem "primeval" or, as my friend put it, engaged in "paleolithic dionysian celebration" (you can see why I have so few friends; with friends who say shit like that you don't have time for other people). Die Antwoord is shameless, unapologetic. Comedy is always tussling with apology; one of the reasons why apology is such a problem for comedians is that their art, however brazen and bold, is already asterisked with a tiny apology (it might be called the fool's license; it might come in the form of the "just kidding" excuse where joking and kidding are already exculpatory, shedding responsibility, keyed to apology); in this case, any apology is like a magician explaining his tricks.

If it turns out that Die Antwoordt is a """performance"" - of course it's a performance - it's a next level performance; if the Ninja is a persona - of course it's a persona - I have no problems with that; and remember: an apology is a revocation. If it turns out that this was intended comically - there would still be no revocation. The paper-thin, papier-mache mask of authenticity has been stripped away, leaving us with much more impressive, intrusive, unsettling, and exhilarating masks, faces, grimaces, expressions.

A small addendum, of two points, related to faces. The video has spawned one new work of video art. And, one of the memorable performers in the video for Enter the Ninja is the South African painter and DJ, Leon Botha, who frequently opened for Die Antwoordt; he died just over a month ago of complications related to the condition progeria.

Brief Hiatus

This blog will be on a brief hiatus for about a week, as it is going on holiday. I, however, am not. I'll be at work. But the blog has packed its bags, left a mound of dry food beside a trough of water for the dog, and is heading off in the early light, quite possibly to a salacious destiny with ping-pong-flinging pole-dancers, hookah-smoking criminal masterminds, and all-night binges of late Roger Moore Bond films. I can't say I envy it, but I'm sure that when it returns it will have plenty to say about the relationship of comedy to the worst attributes of humanity; and perhaps, one can hope, some passing asides about comedy's relationship with the scant whispers of humanity's better attributes?

Say It Ain't So?

I am upset and annoyed and fundamentally frustrated about the news that the comedian Tracey Morgan made crudely homophobic jokes/statements on June 3rd at a Nashville stand-up gig. Why am I so upset, annoyed and fundamentally frustrated? Because the news didn't come out until late Friday afternoon! That's the one time in the week I don't blog! It's when I get to sit back and, like a grown-up Huckleberry Finn with a straw in his mouth and his toes dangling in the Mississippi, I muse. I reminisce over the past week, hearkening back to some of the highlights. Hotness Delusion Syndrome. Berlusconi. Weiner. Smurfs. Cabbies. (There's got to be a theme there, right?) But no, my free time has been disrupted by essential privatemattersandpublicthings material.

So, Tracey Morgan "apologizes for a homophobic rant".

Here's the apology.

Friday morning, Morgan did issue an apology. The actor and comedian said in a statement to CNN, “I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville. I’m not a hateful person and don’t condone any kind of violence against others. While I am an equal opportunity jokester, and my friends know what is in my heart, even in a comedy club this clearly went too far and was not funny in any context.”

Some of this sound familiar? Do you remember the Republican Party official who said she wasn't being racist because the racist intent wasn't in her heart? Jimmy Carr contrasting his personal life to his role as comedian in his apology? I can't remember whether I've written about the "equal opportunity" excuse on this blog or on some bathroom wall somewhere, but I know I've written about it before. Morgan's comment is basically post-joke apology boilerplate, but there are three odd little things about it. First, one can't help but notice that he seems to imply that his fans and the gay and lesbian community are two distinct entities. The second thing one can't help but notice is that he does not construct his "equal opportunity" and "you know what's in my heart" excuses as complete statements, but as caveats to the concession itself. They become part of the confession, as an appeal for mitigation rather than exculpation. It's an interesting little twist, because those two excuses are usually meant to deny responsibility for the joke; he is taking responsibility for what he said. The third thing one notices is that he is not using the comic context as an excuse; he even doubles-down, evoking not only the comic context but also the comedy club, and saying that in neither the metaphysical space nor the physical space were his comments funny.

So, what else do we know?

Apparently, Morgan has a history of being homophobic? (Doesn't history have a history of being homophobic?) According to Margaret Hartman, he's been saying being gay is a choice for years, which, I don't know? Is that echoed in his own apology when he talks about his "choice of words"? Truth Wins Out, an excellent organisation, has posted a demand that Morgan respond to allegations of an anti-Gay tirade and, in a move that will somehow definitely be included in an as-yet-unwritten 30 Rock episode, demands that Tina Fey also respond to these allegations. And will I go to hell for saying the entire Truth Wins Out press release sounds like it was written by one of the finickier characters in a Tony Kushner play?

Oh dear. Greetings from Hell! Anyway, so what did Morgan say? I don't know! What is described by Truth Wins Out is very unappealing, but general descriptions of a great many comic routines would be very unappealing. One of the interesting things is this:

Eyewitness Kevin Rogers, who attended with his partner and a friend, gives a firsthand account which describes how Morgan’s entire demeanor changed as he allegedly claimed that being gay is a choice, that homosexuality is something that kids learn from the media, and that gay youth victims of bullying are simply “whining.” Furthermore, he allegedly said that if his son was gay and “whined” about being a bullying victim, he would kill him, using words that will not be repeated here. Morgan is also said to have called upon President Obama to “man up” and stop speaking out for LGBT kids

Did you notice the line about his demeanour? We're being told something here. You know what it is, right? Comic performances are all about voice, characterisation, and tone: they steer us into a division, a split between the person on stage and the persona on stage, introducing an ambiguity that can itself be subsequently crafted and directed and steered with all the genius and invention of Picasso holding a paintbrush or Joyce squinting at his typewriter. The implication here is that Morgan's demeanour changed because the two became one, the persona became the person, like someone who was in a trance awakening back into his own body; and so what he subsequently said was not part of a persona, but Morgan's own opinions.

And as for the things he said? It doesn't sound pleasant (although some part of me definitely thinks there is ample comic potential in telling Obama to "man up" and stop speaking out for LGBT kids - it could be ironic; it could be parodic; it could be misguided; it could, in fact, be the type of complete perversion of thought that we so love in Tracey Jordan, Tracey Morgan's 30 Rock alter-ego). There's one thing we can be fairly sure of: if Grizz and Dot-Com were there, they'd have been shaking their heads sadly.

Prelapsarians

Choreographed by the media over several days is the slowly pirouetting story about an elected official in the Republican Party's Orange County Central Committee who has given the game away. She sent out an e-mail showing a family of three - mother, father, baby - with chimpanzee faces superimposed over the mother and father, and Obama's face superimposed over the baby. The tagline to the image is "Now you know why no birth certificate." A beautifully-written editorial in the L.A. Times nails her for her weak-kneed apology and, without being heavy-handed but without pulling any punches, makes an unimpeachable case for the racism of that particular "joke", and impugns the entire "Birther" movement for its racism.

The original Associated Press article about the event is much more weasley. They lead off with Republican condemnation of the joke, as though the integrity and anti-Racism of the Republican Party is the backbone of the story. Two sentences involve the NAACP, in which the NAACP "demanded" and is making "demands", petulantly and boorishly. And they address the Birther claim as though it is based on a conflict over the facts:

Some voters have maintained since the latest presidential election that Obama is ineligible to hold the nation's highest elected office because, they say, he was actually born in Kenya, his father's homeland. Obama's mother was an American citizen.

Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama's citizenship, and his Hawaiian birth certificate has been made public. Courts have rebuffed lawsuits challenging Obama's eligibility.

Yes, the Birther claims are presented as subjective and in a carefully vague manner ("some voters", "maintained", "they say") and the article throws in some opposing facts ("have repeatedly confirmed", "has been made public"), but this all only serves to sustain the lie: that the birth certificate, Obama's citizenship, and his legitimacy is an issue of constitutionality and interpretation of the facts. It's about racism.

Of course, because this involves a joke, the offending party apologises for the joke and denies anything underlying it:

"I feel that it was inappropriate and I offended people," Davenport said outside her suburban ranch-style home. "I think it's only racist when the intent in my heart is to make it that way, and that was not the intent in my heart."

(Isn't it odd that "suburban ranch-style home" sounds so specific, and yet it conjures up no image in my mind of what the home looks like? Or is that just me? But isn't there something paradoxical about "surburban" and "ranch-style"? I don't know, whatever.)

What I love about Davenport's disavowal of racism is where she locates it "in my heart". This is code, dog-whistling, and frank pandering to the Christians: Jesus is the philosopher of the heart; the heart is where one finds peace. And, at the same time, in the same way, it is a rejection of Freud and modernity. If that sounds a little drastic . . . well, it should. She's describing her prelapsarian self, where intent is located in the heart, hearkening back to a time prior to Eve plucking the apple from the tree of knowledge, when intent shifted from the heart to the brain. It's an image of innocence and sincerity, childish and earnest.

Playing on the same tropes of innocence and sincerity, Scott Moxley knuckles down and faces her in her own living room, where he discovers "One on one, there is nothing frightening about Davenport." Such a sweet, grandmotherly figure with her tchotchkes and her piano. The moral of his interview is that even though he is sure Davenport really doesn't understand the issue, she has apologised, which is a massive step forward for the jackbooted corporatist racists of the Orange County Republicans. Of course, when you read her apology (see, here, at the bottom), you see a sinister, twisted sense of victimhood and innocence masking venomous little snaps and spits, and, as Moxley notes, a complete failure to understand or take responsibility for her racism. She lies, of course, when she says

I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth.

as if anything about the joke can be understood "simply" (ah, that homely simplicity of the good-hearted straight-shooter), especially insofar as the image says anything about the "character" of Obama or his "origin of birth". But how much more racist can she be? How can she possibly stumble deeper into the codes of racism? Didn't Martin Luther King say something about not judging people by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character: and here, in this photo of chimps, she sees Obama's, ahem, character? And what about that contrived phrase, "his origin of birth"? How convoluted is that? It's not an accident though: it is a loud echo, of course, of the On the Origin of Species. Because the entire premise of her joke is a longstanding eugenicist, racist trope about evolution: we don't believe in evolution, except as it pertains to black people and simians. (I'm not feeling lonely as I make this assertion: Scott Moxley winks at this in his reporting, and his most recent piece is titled Marilyn Davenport: The Evolution of a Scandal; evolution and debates about evolution are popping up in the comments sections of articles about this story).

It's Good Friday today, and somebody's dying, yet again, for our sins.

Trojan Horses

I want to thank an alert reader thrice: once for notifying me of a superb topic for today's post; second, for doing so via a web-site I will now closely follow; and third for prefacing the heads-up by saying that this issue is "complex": when I first read the article in question, I did not think it was complex at all, but after thinking about it for a moment, I agree completely with the reader.

The web-site is http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com. The authors of the web-site dutifully post all the published retractions in the scientific literature. How can I describe what they do? Maybe it's like watching an episode of COPS where all the scenes of police officers in sunglasses driving their squad cars and mumbling about how much they love their job are cut out and you're just left with the scenes of perps getting flung across the hood of the squad car or plucked from a chicken wire fence they're trying to scale, while semi-clad neighbours either hurl abuse at the shamed perp or at the police? I've never seen COPS, so maybe I'm wrong; maybe it's like a short video montage consisting only of the fight scenes in the Rocky films? Or really, it's like this.

In any case, they reported today on a retraction of an editorial in Surgery News, written by Lazar Greenfield, the editor-in-chief of Surgery News, the President-Elect of the American College of Surgeons, and the inventor of the Greenfield Filter. I implore you to read at the very least the editorial by Dr Greenfield, quoted in full in the retractionwatch post - and to read the article as well.

One of the legends of St. Valentine says that he was a priest arrested by Roman Emperor Claudius II for secretly performing marriages. Claudius wanted to enlarge his army and believed that married men did not make good soldiers, rather like Halsted’s feelings about surgical residents. But Valentine’s Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.

[SNIP]

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you’d be surprised by new findings. It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Dr Greenfield muses about biological bases for romance, the physiology of attraction, desire, romantic attachment, and an odd psychosocial finding related to unprotected sex. He ended it with something that might be a joke.

I say "might be", because the alert reader notifying me about this topic pointed out that Greenfield's final line cuts both ways: were it not for the slightly flamboyant prose, it could simply be a conclusion to what has been argued; but the slightly flamboyant prose uses some of the hallmarks of wit and joking (connection of the incongruous, the creative imagery that condenses an argument into a scene played out for amusing effect). The alert reader keenly points out that if the line is read as a "serious point", retraction and resignation are hardly in order; but making a sick or offensive joke - if it is read as a joke - can justify retraction and resignation.

There's something wonderfully odd about this observation. If we are to treat the line as a "serious" conclusion written lightly, then it is, in scientific terms, a premature ejaculation, or, in less scientific terms, a misleading conclusion drawn from what is clearly very limited, preliminary and problematic study; therefore, remembering what we just said about when retraction and resignation would be in order: in a scientific journal, making a (serious) point that is fundamentally bad science would not be a sackable offence; making a facetious point that gives the reader a wink about the quality of the science and treats it as a subject for comedy is a sackable offence. How about that for some weird ambiguity stemming from the questionable use of comedy?

Now, let's think about the line for a minute. Chocolate, semen, Valetine's Day, husbands and wives. Surely these are the keywords for the next Will Ferrell movie. The good members of retractionwatch do a fine job of putting the line into editorial context. The editorial comes from an organisation's newspaper: these newspapers are big money-makers for the publisher, full of advertisements and job offers; most of the articles are updates on medical issues written by science journalists, interviews with and profiles of prominent people in the field, ethics columns, reports from advocacy groups and policy updates, letters about the poor quality of today's trainees because they've lost the art of medicine and don't live their lives in hospitals: in short, it's guild journalism. Greenfield could expect a little authorial leeway: he wasn't writing an editorial in a peer-reviewed, medline-indexed journal; he was writing for colleagues, in a newspaper that, if it's lucky, will quickly get recycled and, if not, will end up lining some rich surgeon's cat's litterbox. Should there be more editorial oversight? Who is ultimately responsible? Well, read retractionwatch's views and decide for yourself; but I would really highlight that the overall stakes for this newspaper's credibility are pretty low and Greenfield could expect in general to have an audience more forgiving of flights of fancy than when they open their copies of Circulation or The Journal of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery.

But there are some other issues.

Is the furore about such a line a signal of American discomfort with sex? Yes. No question about it. When it comes to sex, the United States is a country that has its head up its ass - and not in a good way. Last year, Bristol Palin made about as much money as a surgeon by working for a group that tries to dissuade teen pregnancy - I hope the inconsistencies and ironies, of which there are multiple, speak for themselves.

Now, let's get to the good stuff.

Is the line sexist? On one level, I am deeply unimpressed by the claims of misogyny made in the comments, and which presumably (?) underlie the decision to retract. Somewhat primed when I read the article, I expected to find myself uncomfortable with the last line for some slippage of overt sexism.

Those of us who have sat through beaming old fogeys giving speeches reminiscing about the past, making what they think are kind statements about gender relations and about how far women have come, cracking a few jokes that would have been out-of-date if they came out in black-and-white, know the wince. It's no fun. You want to be on their side, you know they're trying, but they just . . . don't . . . quite . . . get it. And when they make that sexist statement, you wince.

This didn't make me wince. In fact, the overt claim that there might be something physiologically beneficial in sperm and suggesting that women might get something positive from men for a change seems more than just harmless: it suggests reparation, repair, a real gift. And joking about this overt claim seems to be a way of taking the claim with a grain of salt while playing with it as something pleasant, something to enjoy. Insisting that male-female relations are always antagonistic, that the suggestion of beneficience or benefit is just another act of violence, that male sexuality is wholly selfish strikes me as prudish and malevolent.

On the other hand, let's think about this another way. It's terribly unfair on men to play a game of gender politics where if a man says something risqué about women he is necessarily being misogynistic, and the past 30 years have seen countless examples of men being chastised or otherwise marginalised for this; it's also terribly unfair on women that the past 30,000 years of gender politics have seen women treated as chattel, sexual objects, stripped of rights and dignity, and - you get the picture, right?

Let's be more specific. A man makes something that resembles a "wife joke"; the actual joke may not be horribly pejorative, but he's working in a genre that is burdened by a history of consistent, constant, mean-spirited vitriol directed against emancipation and dignity.

Dr Greenfield learned that it isn't only arsonists who get burned when they play with fire; and, by the way, if you're caught playing with fire, you've got to expect some people to think you're an arsonist.

Is the joke anti-gay? As I read the editorial, I wondered if anybody would get queasy about the issue of queerness, and someone in the comments did:

I agree that it’s the science more than the sex that is problematic, but the science does seem heterosexist. If this hypothesis were true, we’d expect to see very low rates of depression among gay men who have regular unprotected sex. Yet this does not appear to be the case.

Okay, so if you study men having intercourse with women, you're heterosexist? Heteronormativity is not just a misguided assumption that heterosexuality is normative; it's a practice of exclusion, of rendering people invisible, of ignoring them, or refusing to hear them. But I see no evidence that the decision to pick a population (men and women having sex with one another) is necessarily heterosexist, any more than a decision to pick a population that is mostly white is necessarily racist. It might be, but let's be careful about our assumptions, right? And I rather think a citation would be warranted for "this does not appear to be the case".

That having been said, the final line about a "deeper bond" forming when men innoculate women with a jet of anti-depressant love-juice does seem to forget, if only for a moment, in an article that started off with the non-heteronormative, inclusive term "significant others", that surely the exact same "deeper bond" can form between men. But what about the mention of the vagina as "richly vascularized" (which just happens to be my go-to description of vaginas)? You can take this two ways ("that's what she said"): you can see it as an explanation for how these psychotropic chemicals will escape the vagina and make their way to the brain (which is not a heterosexist assumption), or as a pre-emptive strike against the mouth and rump as equivalent receptacles - but then either is a very, very hazy claim. Remember, if you want somebody to absorb a drug like a benzodiazepene quickly, you can smear it in their mouth or insert per rectum. Perhaps a follow-up study should be a comparison between gargling ejaculate and come-enemas (or as I like to call them, cumemas)?

If you review the comments on retractionwatch, there are plenty of opinions about whether the line is funny or not, sexist or not, whether somebody should resign over it; there are some really excellent comments, and more than a few that just deserve eye-rolls, particularly when it comes to the question of how to read scientific articles (skilled readers of the scientific literature often spot weaknesses in the research; foolish readers of the scientific literature also often spot weaknesses in the research, but they don't understand how that research is being used and read and interpreted - they tend to think that everything is being treated as pure gospel truth, instead of being considered, contemplated, and contextualised: a musing editorial can refer to various findings without constantly tugging at the reader's elbow to explain how weak those findings are, because the editorialist trusts the readers to understand that this is musing, about weak findings).

Over the past few posts, we've dealt with the question of apologies and the issue of sick jokes. Should Greenfield have resigned and/or apologised; should the article be retracted; is it a joke at all, and how does it being comic effect how we make sense of what he's saying? I leave it to you to decide.

And now, if you'll excuse me, my cats are looking a bit down . . .

Carr Stereo

As I was saying . . . Here’s Carr’s statement again:

I’ve got nothing but respect for the young men and women who put their lives on the line for this country. I’ve visited the military hospital in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and the rehabilitation centre in Headley Court on many occasions to meet seriously injured young men. I will continue to support them in any way I can. My thoughts are with the servicemen and their families, especially on Remembrance Sunday. I’m sorry if anyone was offended but that’s the kind of comedy I do. If a silly joke draws attention to the plight of these servicemen then so much the better. My intention was only to make people laugh.

Carr begins his self-negating apology with an explanation of who he is: a man who has actually gone out of his way to meet with wounded soldiers and to entertain them and cheer them, a man whose support for them has been to offer a different type of lip service: he probably made them laugh (and I suspect few would think that those laughs were trivial, unimportant or inconsequential). The language he uses is respectful, it is sincere and earnest, and he makes uses a common, somber political platitude about one’s thoughts being with the suffering (even if one’s fingers are twitching across an X-box console and one’s eyes are glazed); the argument is rational, conventional, gilded with good intent. And then he moves to comedy, and his arguments skew into divisions, contradicting one another. Reverence and pieties for victimhood followed by split arguments and contradictions. It is an interesting pattern, and a familiar one.

The overall impression one might have is that he’s saying, Look, I’m really a good bloke; when I’m doing my stint as a comedian, then I might say things that aren’t okay. The person is not the same as the comedian, and they are responsible to different moral authorities. Bill Hicks put it rather differently: “I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.”

In an interview with the Guardian after the kerfluffle, we read the following:

Is there any subject he wouldn't touch? "No is the short answer," he says after a moment's hesitation, "if it was funny enough. If you come up with a joke about something that's uncomfortable to talk about – abortion, there's a good example – it's not a difficult moral decision not to do the joke if it isn't that funny. But if you come up with a joke about abortion and you tell it to your friend, and your friend goes, 'Oh my God, you can't say that on stage – but that is fucking wicked,' then suddenly morals go out of the window and you go, 'We're definitely doing that.'"

It’s quite quaint applying a moral threshold argument to comedy, weighing funniness against morality as though they can be understood separately. Part of what makes so many jokes funny is precisely that they are so wicked; vaulting moral thresholds is well within the nature of comedy, of course, but it’s not as though moral thresholds are there only as a barrier: vaulting them is the athletic accomplishment, the acrobatic choreography of comedy.

The disavowal of responsibility can take a number of forms. There’s the Comedian’s Two Bodies (the bloke in the pub vs the person on stage; the man who entertains the troops vs the stand-up under the spotlight); comedy’s two moralities (we can shed light on serious subjects in a way that nobody else can vs it’s just a bloody joke for a laugh; morality as something that gives comedic is transgressive frisson vs morality as something that can be tossed out the window if the joke is good enough). Then there's comedic form.

"I do a lot of jokes about rape," he admits, "but it's not a discourse on rape. I do jokes to get laughs. I happen to think the construct of '99% of women kiss with their eyes closed, which is why it's so difficult to identify a rapist' is funny. It's not really about the act of a serious sexual assault. You have to go out of your way to take offence over, 'I bought a rape alarm because I kept on forgetting when to rape people.'"

Yes, it’s the construct that is funny. No, it’s not really about about the act of a serious sexual assault, it’s about . . . clever constructs that get laughs? Comedy is splayed away from its content as a clever form, a style that can be admired, appreciation of logical twists and maneouvres.

I don't really object to any of this. Comedy is already a duet with itself, it's stereo with Kanye West and Katy Perry coming in one ear, and T.S. Eliot reading a poem in the other; comedy is not so much parasitic on the serious (which is why in the comments to the previous post, I was not so concerned about withdrawing some of my over-egged claims which dealt with the relationship of the comedic comment and the expression of the serious) as symbiotic with its Other, whatever that Other might be at the moment. When the Other is "rape" or "these servicemen amputees", we can't pretend that the comic symbiote can survive without it, but then disavowal is perforce inscribed into comedy, which is constituted already by its Other, for which it bears no responsibility; and you can't formally apologise for something if you are disavowing responsibility for it.

("I'm sorry it was an accident" - the chorus of toddlerhood.)

Does that answer any questions?

Carr Crash

So, over the past few days, rather than dealing with the case of G-Lo, we turned to someone who is actually funny?

Here is Jimmy Carr’s line again:

Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.

You know what hit the fan after this. Conservative politicians, right-wing editors, moralizing journalists—they hit the fan. Mocking wounded soldiers, no respect for the lads, this man’s career must come to an end.

Now, here’s Carr’s apology in full (or at least in as full a form as I could find online; maybe he prattled on for ages, but from the articles quoting variants of this mea culpa, here is the longest):

I’ve got nothing but respect for the young men and women who put their lives on the line for this country. I’ve visited the military hospital in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and the rehabilitation centre in Headley Court on many occasions to meet seriously injured young men. I will continue to support them in any way I can. My thoughts are with the servicemen and their families, especially on Remembrance Sunday. I’m sorry if anyone was offended but that’s the kind of comedy I do. If a silly joke draws attention to the plight of these servicemen then so much the better. My intention was only to make people laugh.

It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?

The apology itself is self-negating: he says sorry for something and then says that he’s done it, is doing it, and will continue to do it. I’m sorry, but that’s what I do. I’m sorry if anybody is missing their jewels, but that’s the kind of robber I am. I’m sorry if anybody lost their life, but that’s the kind of murderer I am. And you might have noticed that he wriggles a slippery little "if" in, even though the media shitstorm revolved around finding those people who were offended, or whose offence was stoked by prying journalists, and whose offence is sacrosanct (which is why conniving twats like to stand in the holy wafting vapours of sacred victimhood so we don’t smell the sour sweat emanating from their greedy bodies). The apology isn’t; it doesn’t really exist.

There are other traps here. Listen closely. “My intention was only to make people laugh.” Only. As if making people laugh is insignificant, trivial, and harmless, all the more so because the joke was silly—like the kind of jokes you get on children’s television shows where fat blob-like creatures put their hats on their bottoms or sit on a flowerpot and go “ooeee.” And in the very sentence when he dismisses the joke as “silly”, he indicates something, something very serious, something not-so-silly. It hardly went unnoticed that his joke was a rare mention of amputees in the public: is the media coverage of the consequences of war as anaemic and censored in the UK as in the US? I would assume so. The joke is not silly at all, of course; it’s about young men and women whose bodies have been violently, irrevocably, awfully mutilated, and Carr knows it. In fact, he may well be saying that only in his purportedly silly joke is the subject broached at all. The silly and the only double back as lethally critical of the media that is hounding him for a joke.

Carr is having it both ways: he’s saying he’s sorry, but that he’s not going to stop; he’s dismissing his comedy as trivial, unimportant, just a few laughs, while quietly noting that his joke is anything but trivial, that it speaks about the consequences of war; and all the while, as he dismisses his comedy, he’s pointing out that in his comedy he’s saying something that almost nobody else is: young men and women are getting their limbs torn off in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But then surely this is one of the exciting quagmires of comedy, isn’t it? That it can do all these things at once. It’s a sort of apology, but one that will not revoke itself, even as it disavows itself; it’s facile, puerile, silly, and so easily dismissed, while it speaks of evil and murder and war and mutilation when nobody else will.

We will go on with this again tomorrow. I promise.

Comedy means never having to say you're sorry

In my penultimate post I made a promise I didn’t keep: I said I would explain why George Lopez should not have apologised for his piggie jokes about Kirstie Alley. I began to construct an argument making this case, and then abruptly turned my back on it and walked off with the casual insouciance of a preacher exiting a massage parlour with bloody fingers and a slight limp.

It is tempting to apologise for not keeping this promise, especially after Sven’s outburst in the comments section. Why do we apologise for not keeping promises? Steven astutely pointed out that George Lopez “accepting” a kidney from his wife implies a transaction, in which Lopez contracts to, say, keep his side of the deal, like, say, not divorcing her once her kidney is no longer filtering her blood and is now filtering his. A promise is a kind of contractual obligation, based not on legal technicalities but on honour and the conventional balustrades of a social relationship: trust, the enduring significance of words, the value of intent. An apology for a broken promise is an attempt to restore those social virtues. I can acknowledge my failure and humble myself in a dignified manner; my words do have enduring meaning; my intentions are good.

So what is the problem with a comedian apologizing?

Let’s clear one hurdle: if a comedian, in the course of his or her daily life, runs over your dog, pukes in your lap, steps on your foot, stabs you with jake shears, or lets one rip in the elevator, an apology is in order (although if I were in an elevator with Steve Martin and he let one rip, I’d take the hit and apologise. Even if it was only the two of us.) I’m not saying that a comedian qua human being has carte blanche to go through life without saying sorry; I will say that a comedian qua comedian has carte blanche to go through life without saying sorry.

So perhaps this might be rephrased: what is the problem with a comedian apologizing for a joke, a gag, a routine, a caricature, a comic reference, an act of comedy?

Okay, there’s another hurdle. I suppose that if a comedian makes nobody in the audience laugh, he or she might consider apologising for failing to deliver a chuckle, for being unable to incite even a bemused glance across the table at one’s dinner date. At least on the surface it makes some sense: an audience pays money to be amused, the entertainer fails to amuse, an apology of sorts might be in order. This doesn’t quite stymie our concerns: jokes, gags, routines fail; a killer joke one night leaves the comedian dead the next. Furthermore, comic performances of all sorts involve the audience as part of the context: the audience is not a passive crowd of innocents being strafed by funny thought-bullets; the audience is prompting and provoking, reacting and responding, the individuals in the audience incriminating themselves with laughter. The failure of a joke is not entirely the responsibility of the comedian.

And please note, therefore, that we have already discovered two things through these caveats: the comedian is not responsible, which is not to say the person is not responsible; the failure of a joke is not entirely the responsibility of the comedian. Do these statements remind you of anything? Do they remind you of some questions? (Here's a hint: Does it matter who tells the joke? What is it to be funny?) In any case, we'll go on, but we'll refine the issue further: what is the problem with a comedian apologizing for a joke, a gag, a routine, a caricature, a comic reference, an act of comedy, if it offends somebody?

Let’s face it: when comedians are called on to apologise, or feel the urge to apologise, it’s usually for offending people, right?

But what if the social promise you are making is to offend? How can you "misjudge" offence if this is what you have promised to do? How can you say you have no malicious intent if you intend to offend? Whenever comedians get in trouble, we get to hear the yawn chorus chirping about how funny comedians used to be; how their jokes were as gentle as a newborn lamb's lips and as sweet as a Yorkshire ewe's milk after a feast of sugarsnap peas; how you’d have been proud to bring your mum to see them, and now the only place anybody respectable can take their mothers is to a gay bar. Of course, this is all phony nostalgia. Obviously, not every comedian makes scatological, racist, misogynist jokes in public; but one doesn't have to be a Freudian or Bakhtinian or Shakespearean to be aware of the fool's license, of comedy's transgressive powers, of how the illicit is conventionally packaged in comedy: all of which mean that someone, somewhere will take offence.

We'll pursue this further with a gag by one of the funniest, most brilliant comedians presumed alive :

Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.

Here's a snippet of his subsequent apology:

. . . I’m sorry if anyone was offended but that’s the kind of comedy I do. . .

Jimmy Carr, as we will see over the next few days, gets caught in a number of (instructive) traps. But if an apology means I can acknowledge my failure and humble myself in a dignified manner; my words do have an enduring meaning; my intentions are good, how can this be consistent with comedy: a proud celebration of the loss of dignity, playfulness at the expense of conceits of enduring meaning, and where intentions are always ambiguous at best and at worst, far worse? How can one be sorry for causing offence is that is what one does?

All Apologies, Cont.

In my last post, I described the sorry tale of George Lopez's comedic encounter with Kirstie Alley, in which the jester made fun of the actress by calling her a pig three different ways during a commentary on her performance on Dancing with the Stars. She then played him like a cheap guitar. She made him dance and huff and puff and buy her flowers while she sat on the twitter-sidelines landing cruel tweet-jabs to his soft spots.

The New York Daily News, which deserves none of the respect it doesn't get, ran a poll in their story about this celebrity huff-fest. Let me see if I can copy it here:

Lopez vs. Alley

What do you think of George Lopez's comments about Kirstie Alley?

	If it walks like a pig and talks like a pig...
	He's a comedian. It was just a joke that he didn't really mean.
	They were rude and unnecessary.
	I don't know.

So, let's just run through the options.

"If it walks like a pig and talks like a pig..." it's . . . George Lopez? No, no, no. I see. Okay. Let's play along. This option is presumably for people who think Kirstie Alley is actually a pig.

"He's a comedian. It was just a joke that he didn't really mean." I'm coming back to this one.

"They were rude and unnecessary." Right, very interesting idea. As opposed to jokes that aren't rude and are necessary?

You don't have to know anything about online polls to know that you don't have to know anything to answer them. But giving people an option of "I don't know" in a poll of this nature is just cruel.

Obviously, this poll was not designed and implemented by geniuses. It switches from a singular to a plural tally, and, weirdly, all four options can be equally true. I answered the poll (I won't say which button I pushed) in order to see the results. Approximately 70% of respondents committed themselves to the belief that the joke was "rude and unnecessary". 25% were under the impression that George Lopez is a comedian. 4% thought Kirstie Alley was a pig. And 1% had expended the energy to click on a button that would signify to the entire world that they just did not know where they stood on the whole George Lopez-Kirstie Alley conflict. We'll call them "independents."

Three things we know: 1) Because this poll does not give us crude data about answers, we are unable to draw scientific conclusions; 2) This poll is written by dolts for dolts; 3) Everybody answering this poll is wrong.

Okay, so this poll was probably not written by dolts for dolts; it was probably written by some flustered, stoned intern between blow-jobs, who had to come up with something for the online edition or else the editor was going to give him another blow-job. We know some other things as well: we know that online polls are enticing fluff to make the whole experience seem interactive; we know that they're so pseudoscientific they make regular pseudoscience look sophisticated and empirical.

But there's something interesting in flaws. We're offered a pair of opponents right at the outset, "Lopez vs Alley". But this ain't a fair match. In the first option, a woman is turned into an "it" and a pig, and we're given the ellipsis of insinuation; in the second option, the man remains a "he" and is granted a profession, all of which is delivered in not one but two crisp sentences. This ain't a level playing field.

And what about that second option? "He is a comedian. It was just a joke that he really didn't mean." I wonder if the three parts of this defence ring any bells?

Does it matter who tells the joke? "He is a comedian."

What is the role of ambiguity in comedy? "He doesn't really mean it."

What is it to be funny? "It's just a joke."

At the end of the last post I promised I would explain why I didn't think George Lopez should apologize. But I've become bored with the story, so I'm going to deal with comedians and apologies with another example. That'll be the next post.