by: Jordan Walker

“Laughter is your spirit being brought forth from you lips and leaving you,” according to Russ Green, a stand-up comedian who performs regularly in Washington, D.C. The foundation of stand-up comedy is truth. As any comedian will tell you, you cannot deny a laugh, or the lack thereof. However, when the universal standard for the truth is being challenged, divided, and questioned every day on every major news network and by everyone with access to a public platform, stand-up comedy’s role as a commentator on the absurd is not as simple as it used to be. While there is a growing number of comedians who believe it is their responsibility to be social justice warriors, there is also a faction of comedians who are satirizing this new wave of “activism” in comedy.

To understand this new age of comedy, I asked several stand-up comedians to share their approaches to telling political jokes in the current political climate, and their experiences of how their field is changing in light of increasing political tension that is felt both on the stage and in the audience. Many of these comedians are reaching a fork-in-the-road in which they either address political issues head-on in their acts or attempt to avoid the subject all together.

Audiences may connect over a level of frustration toward the government, but what comedians are struggling with now is how to gauge a room of nuanced irritations and provide a release without offending their audiences. Sean Joyce, the founder of DC Underground Comedy, believes that political jokes “are only funny if they’re right.” He noted that since Trump has been in office, politics are generally less fun to talk about for comedians, but he seemed unsure about this, because in the same breath, he recognized that comedy is and always will be a release for these tensions. “There is a new level of frustration with the government,” Sean noted, “and audiences connect to this frustration.”

In late summer 2018, I attended an Underground Comedy open mic-night in the dingy dive-bar-esque basement of Big Hunt in Washington, D.C.  At 11:30 pm on a Friday night, a typical audience is a room packed full of flannel shirts, cheap beer, and people rolling in downstairs to have a few drinks before a night of bar-hopping on Connecticut Avenue, which runs through the heart of downtown D.C. That evening in the basement, or “Hell’s Kitchen,” a white male comedian in his late 20’s got on stage, and millennials filled the room. The comic on stage was the third or fourth to perform, and after about 8 minutes into his relatively safe act, he made a joke about religion, homosexuality, and Judgement Day. He got quite a few laughs. What really made the joke funny was when he turned around to face the Hell’s Kitchen logo painted on the wall behind him, a cartoon of a smirking red devil. He then looked to the audience, and asked with a side smile and a shrug, “Where do you go from Jesus?” There was a group of young women in the back, one of whom had fallen off of her seat a few minutes into the show, drink still in hand. As the comic opened his mouth to transition to the next joke, a voice from the group in the back of the room answered his rhetorical question: “TRUMP IS WRONG,” and her friend followed up with “He suckssss.” The crowd grew silent and the air thick. The mood of the entire room changed in an instant with all eyes on the amateur comedian. After a few seconds of awkward silence, the comedian imitated the voice from the darkness in the back, and in fake exasperation, yelled back, “What if he was wroooooong?! That’ll fix it.” Everyone laughed and clapped. The Trump joke worked, but only because it was in response to a heckler. In the long moment before the comedian on stage responded, the audience’s impatient expectation for his engagement was palpable. What is happening in the audiences of comedy shows is a desire to talk about politics without talking about politics. In other words, a joke about Trump, if successful, is the ultimate release. However, the gravity of the blow of a failed political joke in the current climate is a risk a lot of comedians would rather avoid than attempt at all. Every comedian I talked to suggested that no one wants to hear “Trump jokes” because they have either heard about him all day, or the very name “Trump” is too much of a trigger word for anyone to wait around for the punchline. There are more ways to bomb a political joke than there ever were.

The founder of the DC Comedy Writers Group, Comedian Wayne Manigo, talked about his experience in helping aspiring local comedians refine their jokes during comedy workshops that the group hosts every Monday night. The DC Comedy Writers Club is in its 7th year in D.C. Manigo’s audience is typically the “35 and older crowd.” He said that performing at different venues taught him a lot about connecting to his audience and being able to adapt to different crowds on the spot. He also emphasized that one of the key components of the DC Comedy Writers Group, which is structured as a workshop, is to encourage people to “uncensor” themselves, after which he also noted, “Trump jokes are not funny.” He explained that comedy is an escape and reflects the need to laugh at that part of the news, but the comedian must understand how to have a connection with the audience first.

“Once they understand your point of view, it is a path for the rest of the show.” Manigo later recalled that he had heard one Trump joke that went well at the DC Improv. The comedian he was watching had announced to the audience that he was going to blame Trump for everything–  if he buys a sandwich and the cheese is missing, it is Trump’s fault, and so on. Manigo recalls that this joke won the audience over– a joke that really wasn’t about Trump at all.

According to Brittany Carney, a stand-up comedian in her 20s who has performed in D.C. and New York City, addressing politics on stage has become consistently more difficult for her. “After he [Trump] won,” Carney explained, “There was a big push for comedians to talk about it, then people got sick of it. There is a big community of comedians who are “taking on that progressive voice; punching up and taking on the aggressor.”

Carney said,“People assume I am a woke comedian.” She explained that she must tread lightly when choosing how she wants to approach comedy in the current political climate. Carney noted that she feels and receives pressure to incorporate her identity into her material. She also gets a lot of requests to perform at LGBTQ shows that have a punch-up angle on political comedy.

“Comedy is getting harder because we are changing our language to be more inclusive,” Carney noted. She too, has noticed a shift in her audience with some of her “riskier” jokes. Since Trump was elected, she has been more moderate with her jokes because of a heightened sensitivity and overall feeling of exhaustion toward political material. This feeling is evident in the audience’s reaction. She gave an example of a “risky” joke she had been working on about her experience hooking up with a white guy from Texas and a comment he made afterwards, comparing himself to Thomas Jefferson. The self-deprecating joke, which had gotten a few laughs a year or two ago, had been told again shortly after the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and the DC audience did not respond positively at all. Carney, who seemed frustrated with the silence that followed, noted, “I am literally a black woman and can tell this joke, but a room full of black people were silenced.” She felt that in that moment, something very interesting and organic had happened that she hadn’t experienced before: “They don’t feel like I have a license to talk about this. I didn’t play my blackness or my nerdiness enough for it to be funny. I am proud of these jokes because of who I am, but I didn’t hook them enough. They didn’t trust me yet.”

Carney raised an important point about comedy in 2018; that in an increasingly tense political climate in which the audience can’t trust the media, comedians are experiencing a juxtaposition in which their audiences are both hyper-critical of the nuances of the news, and at the same time, expecting comedians to challenge it.

“There is a faction of comedians who are making fun of comedians who use comedy as a social justice warrior platform,” Carney noted about the other side of the comedy spectrum. She referenced Michael Che, the Saturday Night Live comedian who, in an Instagram story criticized Netflix specials that favor political correctness over humor. He was referring to comedians like Hannah Gadsby who employ tragedy in their comedy, which he dubbed as “anti-comedy comedy.” Carney then mused, “Is comedy still comedy if it is being used as an explicit platform?”

Carney also talked about Inside Amy Schumer, which Amy Schumer described in a recent interview with Oprah as her “secret feminist idea.” Schumer explained that people get really turned off by feminism in comedy because nobody wants to feel like they are learning something. One of Amy’s fans described watching the show as “putting shaved carrots into brownies.”

Carney said she has witnessed a lot of “carrot-in-a-brownie” moments this summer at comedy shows in downtown D.C., but she felt that the audience had become increasingly aware of the comic’s intent. This happens when the joke steps out of the realm of human absurdity that provokes laughter in the first place, and slips into the realm of activism. Some view activist comedy as less believable.

“If you really want to know how someone feels about race or gender equality, take them to a comedy show and watch what they laugh at, or more importantly, what they don’t laugh at,” says Russ Green, who started performing stand-up comedy in D.C. 7 years ago. We are, in some ways, relying on comedy to spark the most authentic version of a conversation about politics and American culture, because we can’t have one in a real setting.The key to comedy is knowing when to end the conversation. While comedians may be rightfully angry about the news, there are craftier ways of using a public platform to challenge it. Green refers to comedy as “an awkward dinner party,” where serious subjects like religion, race and gender equality are easier to contextualize around a joke. The inherent and natural honesty in a laugh, or lack thereof, can say more than an attempt at a conversation.

Jack Coleman, the co-founder of Capital Laughs, recalled how comedy prompted a dialogue between his mom and him on their living room couch. As she smoked a cigarette, they watched a segment of The Daily Show that made fun of something that the then-President George Bush had said on national television. Coleman, who grew up in Alabama, usually avoids talking about politics with his mom who is conservative than he is. Coleman remembered that at the time, Jon Stewart was essentially making fun of a Republican-backed president and his policies, but both he and his mom were laughing together. Coleman mimicked her leaning back on their sofa, drawing a smoke cloud as she puffed on a cigarette, and mid-laugh saying to him, “Why do you believe this stuff?” Coleman joked that there was a “hypocrisy and an empathy to her laughing at the joke in the first place,” but he recognized that jokes expose that hypocrisy in a non-threatening way. Although The Daily Show isn’t going to break down any significant walls, it did, for a few moments, create a space in which two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum cackled at the absurdity of the reality of American politics.

Russ Green believes that audiences are becoming more aware of the realities that people are facing, and of people being considered “other.” The history of social norms in comedy, much like American history itself, has been decided by the people who have been running the show since it started.  Comedians including Seinfeld, John Cleese, Joe Rogan, Daniel Lawrence Whitney, and countless others have criticized political correctness for policing what they are allowed to say on public platforms. We are seeing a lot more diversity in comedy and in the way that it is performed. “People go to comedy shows to escape. It is cathartic to hear an issue that you are struggling with, and it opens members of the audiences up to issues that other people identify with, that they were not expecting to hear,” Green explained. When more stand-up comedians are coming from more diverse backgrounds, they are able to change the language of comedy altogether.

Stand-up comedy, in its beautiful ability to separate us from the bubbles we live in, allows us to undress, sit in the dark, and be okay with feeling uncomfortable while we laugh at the spectacle on stage. Comedy in 2018 is the awkward dinner party in which both the speaker and the listener; the jester and the audience can sit on either end of the table and listen to the arbitrary truth out of a desire to laugh, whether we realize there are carrots on the dessert menu or not.

Comedy is changing, but it could go one of two ways. On one hand, comedians could stick with the status quo and blatantly reveal through activist comedy what they believe is wrong with the political and social climate in America. On the other hand, comedians are uniquely poised to raise those controversial questions but resist the urge to answer them. That challenge is left to the audience. The power of comedy is that it brings questions to the table. In the words of Russ Green, “why do we not question things?”

Smiley face photo courtesy of: Devin Avery

Laugh sign photo courtesy of: Tim Mossholder

Main photo courtesy of: Bruno Cervera

Coffee cups photo courtesy of: Nathan Dumlao

Jordan Walker lives in Washington, D.C. She is a freelance writer and a paralegal for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Unit of the Department of Justice. She is a member of the United Nations Association-National Capital Area (UNA-NCA). Her essay, “The Black Pearl,” was awarded first place in the Cadigan Prizes for Young Writers in 2017. Walker graduated from Bucknell University with a B.A. in Political Science and English. In her free time, she enjoys training for marathons, playing volleyball and finding the hidden, not-on-Yelp culinary treasures of D.C. To learn more about her work, please visit: Jordanmargaret.com