Laughter, the Best Panacea.

So I’ve been listening to stand-up comedy a lot lately, and I’ve also been pretty miserable. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

This is not to dis stand-up, or not entirely. There are few modern pleasures more keen than Jimmy Pardo’s Never Not Funny podcast. And I’m truly grateful to have been introduced to the jokes, timing, and general presence of comics like Eugene Mirman, Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, and Zach Galifianakis (as well as renewing my appreciation for Mitch Hedberg, Jim Gaffigan, and Brian Regan). And Chris Rock and Lewis Black are superb truth-tellers in their fields. (Race/show business and politics/show business, respectively.) But you’ll notice, if you pay much attention to the comedy scene, that my favorites are almost relentlessly safe. They’re apolitical, they don’t talk much about religion (or at least not in such a way as to offend the religious), they don’t spend much time talking about the details of sexual behavior, their humor is more personal and/or surreal than critical of society. (Though let me say that Mirman, Birbiglia, etc. are still miles above a goon like Conan O’Brien — undoubtedly an inspiration to them — whose puppyish adoration of celebrity keeps him from ever being able to have a personality, let alone a point of view.)

I’ve listened to a lot of other comics, though, and heard more about sex (and with more deadening vulgarity) than can possibly be healthy, more fake racism than is probably warranted by the state of society, more shock-factor violence than I care to allow into my mind.

It’s always depressing to make such a confession; I’d much rather be considered hip and cool and able to take a joke than to take my place in the monolithic herd of Religious America, the sworn enemy of all that is hip and cool and funny (according to the self-proclaimed hip and cool and funny, anyway). I had a similar struggle when I had to sell Bob Fingerman’s Beg the Question graphic novel, not because I hated it, but because it had too much graphic sexual content and declared open war against certain deeply-held beliefs of mine. Not in a “I won’t have this trash in my house” sense, but in a regretful “I don’t seem to get enough Truth/Beauty/Goodness out of it to make it worth the effort” sense. Bob Fingerman’s one of the great cartoonists of our time, and one with a distinctive authorial voice (you have no idea how rare that is in comics). But I got rid of his masterwork not because I disagree with his publisher and the critics that it’s one of the great, most deadly accurate (and gut-bustingly funny) graphic novels of the Nineties; but because that’s not enough.

Not for me, anyway. I’ve only started to realize that being “into comics” in the general McCloudian sense doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about great comics, any more than the fact that I love books means I have to read every great novel. Sometimes my interests will lead me to a great novel, but more often they’ll lead away, into the unknown wilds, where criticism is unknown or has never made a dent in the lush undergrowth. My rule of thumb has become, “would I be interested if it was a novel, or a film?” If not, then the comic goes back on the shelf.

The same is true of the other kind of comic, the stand-up kind. I have broad tastes in comedy, in that almost anything will make me laugh, but very little tolerance for most modern comedy the second time around. (C. S. Lewis used to say that he didn’t consider himself to have really read a book until he’d read it two or three times. That’s a damn fine rule to live by in all the arts.) When I spend more time in fantasy argument with a comedian about the philosophical assumptions behind his nihilistic, derisive act than in laughing at his suitably extreme conclusions, it’s time hit ‘Y’ when the pop-up box asks Are you sure you want to remove the folder and move all its contents to the Recycle Bin?

Okay. So that’s out of my system. July looks like it’s going to be an intense month for Stuff Coming Out That I Want to Read/See/Listen To. I’ll try to keep you posted.