Notes on "Woke Comedy"
The locus of comedy for a long time has been offense— from tragedy to blasphemy— requiring an emotional distance. Find something uncomfortable, make people uncomfortable with it. Then, make people draw unexpected insight. Repeat. In recent years, the pendulum has swung to another ethical extreme: Many people are looking for insight but are also expecting to be soothed in their pursuit of it— not made uncomfortable. This is the case with Dear White People, a satire stylized after Spike Lee films like Do the Right Thing and School Daze about black students at a PWI; Hari Kondabolu’s work; MTV’s Decoded; and many other comedy projects by an array of hilarious people. Comedian Phoebe Robinson calls it Good Points humor— as in “ahhhh, good point!”— and I’ve been referring to it as woke comedy since 2016.
Woke comedy can feel treacly and gratuitously identitarian. As a genre, it mobilizes identity against offense and comedians who don’t bend to its expectations are often its victims because sometimes it’s not as simple as “punching up” versus “punching down.” There are exceptions to the rule: The Chappelle Show, Mad TV and In Living Color, to name a few. These shows don’t necessarily pass any woke litmus, but at one point they epitomized racial and political awareness in comedy, despite and, perhaps, because they were shows steeped in their fair share of problematic and regressive depictions.
A lot of the best comedy is about human messiness, tackling the darkness in us and subverting it. When done in an explicitly woke way, you risk condescending and moralizing to your audience or enabling humorlessness. The Trump campaign was successful at least partly because the rhetoric of political correctness is so easy to parry with when so many seemingly benign situations invoke it unpleasantly enough for a lot of people to want to push wholesale in the opposite direction. When the pendulum swings once again, "woke" comedians who lack nuance may eventually create a revitalized market for “punching down” comedy because on some level the way people see it is that comedy is supposed to feel like an indulgence and a vice. One could argue that it is already underway with both the alt-right’s meme production or the disruptive crudeness of many Instagram comedians.
If a new grammar of comedy is to be developed, one of the challenges for woke comedy then is to actually feel subversive and edgy. How does it do that when the language of comedy has hitherto been authored by journeys into taboo? How does it do that when it has moral guideposts? I think it absolutely can, and many comedians are already successfully proving that. 555, a show starring the eccentric duo John Early and Kate Berlant, is an example of comedy somewhere in the gray area between offensive and woke. In the 5-part Vimeo series, Early and Berlant play with the quirky subtleties of identity, whether its class difference or the social construction of disability. Donald Glover’s Atlanta is another great example of comedy that is developing a new grammar: black identity is at the crux in unsettling and nuanced ways but not in a banal identity politics/explicitly woke way.