To a young person in 2018, a Steve Martin comedy album from the late-1970s is likely perplexing. Martin’s most riotous bits merely involved him firing off catch phrases—audiences howled with laughter as he blurted lines like “excuuuuuuuuse me!” and “I’m a wild and crazy guy!” His signature prop was a magic shop-style arrow through the head. He would often coax audiences into hysterics simply by shifting into a silly voice or wildly flailing his arms and feet.
In a vacuum, a young person may wonder how any of that is actually funny. But the key to understanding any national phenomenon is to understand its context. While his act was impossibly silly, Martin knew exactly what he was doing. By the mid-1970s, he felt America’s fatigue with the caustic, left-wing political comedy of the Vietnam Era and sensed comedy lovers wanted something new.
“The political scene was exhausting,” Martin writes about the early 1970s in his memoir, Born Standing Up. He notes that in the late-1960s, with the ubiquity of political comics like George Carlin and the Smothers Brothers, “Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture.”
“And many people, including me, were alienated from government … Change was imminent.”
Martin sought to be that change, dropping the political content from his act and stitching together an act of avant garde absurdism. “To politics I was saying, ‘I’ll get along without you very well. It’s time to be funny,’” Martin writes. “Overnight, I was no longer at the tail end of an old movement but at the front end of a new one.”
The transformation wasn’t immediately successful—he produced a number of cringeworthy television appearances, such as one bit where he attempted to tell jokes to an audience of dogs on The Tonight Show. But by the end of the decade, Martin was America’s most recognizable entertainer, moving millions of records and selling out shows in 20,000-seat arenas.
Martin’s era-specific act is a reminder that huge cultural shifts don’t happen on their own: They are part of a chain of events that occurs both before and after. For instance, historian H.W. Brands, who has written biographies about both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, once told me that Reagan could not have happened without Roosevelt; the excesses of the New Deal led to an eventual backlash captained by the conservative savior.
Similarly, while the Donald Trump presidency may be an anomaly in American history, Trump was elected as a reaction to a cultural shift that had been evolving years before the 2016 election. Citizens who supported his candidacy saw political correctness taking over college campuses, racial unrest in America’s cities, and a loss of control over their own destinies. They chose a dramatic course correction in casting their ballots for Trump.
Putting events in context explains much of the inexplicable in American history, especially in the world of entertainment. In the early-1990s, grunge music became a way for America to wash away the excesses of the late-1980s hair band fad. By the mid-1990s, having tired of the stream of Seattle-based gloominess defining music, the public lurched back to Britney Spears and boy bands.
This boomerang effect happens time and again in American comedy, too. The original political correctness era on college campuses in the late-1980s sparked a resistance that included coarse comedy from vulgarians like Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison. Soon, Adam Sandler’s dopey films reigned supreme at the box office, signifying a proud middle finger to cultural elites.
America seems to be on the back end of a similar cultural wave in 2018. Comedy fans are intimately familiar by now with the humorous beats and rhythms of the liberals sitting behind an “anchor desk” grouching about Donald Trump. They’ve seen the “stupid Republican” video clips that cut back to the host making a face expressing disgust. They’ve heard the hosts use comedic metaphors enhanced with absurdist graphics. They’ve seen the earnest “field reporters” saying insensitive things supposedly believed by conservatives, and the joke is—get this—they don’t actually mean what they say!
Not only is the satirical news blueprint stale, the comedy itself on these shows has become lazy and uninspired. Shows like Jon Oliver’s Last Week Tonight and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal have all but ditched any guise of speaking truth to power, relying instead on microwaved progressive applause lines. Memorably, Bee recently roiled conservatives by calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c–t.” Yet the primary news to emerge from Bee’s transgression was not her use of the vulgarity, it was essentially that she had retired from doing actual comedy.
What Jon Stewart’s acolytes seemingly don’t understand is that people laugh the hardest when they’re laughing at something they shouldn’t find hilarious. The best comedy challenges conventions, not reinforces them. Shows like Stephen Colbert’s Late Show simply serve up comfort and predictability for those afraid of having holes poked in their ideology.
This monolithic dedication to liberalism in humor has now spawned a new genre of stand-up comedy, in which the performer doesn’t attempt to be funny, a brand of entertainment about as pointless as alcohol-free scotch. In Hannah Gadsby’s recent stand-up special “Nanette,” Gadsby talks in detail about her life as a queer woman and shares stories of being raped. Saturday Night Live co-head writer Michael Che has criticized this new brand of anti-comedy as “stand-up tragedy,” adding that “you still need a punchline … can’t just walkout and say, ‘the holocaust. good night.’”
Soon, the days of left-wing hectoring will burn out and give way to something more provocative and profound. Big-name comedians are already challenging liberal dogma and earning praise for doing so: Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix specials have addressed transgender pronouns and the #MeToo movement; Chris Rock’s most recent concert condemns pornography, explains why some kids need bullying, and mocks the idea of telling kids in his daughters’ school they can be anything they want. “Maybe four of them can be anything they want to be,” he jokes. “But the other 2,000 better learn how to weld.”
Chappelle and Rock, of course, are established comedians with rabid followings. It will be more exciting to see what creative direction the younger members of the upcoming backlash will take. Will they be as silly as Steve Martin making balloon animals? Let’s hope so. Will they be puzzling and inventive? We should demand it.
Most importantly, they should keep giving voice to the things we all think but can’t say out loud. As cultural mores push us one way, comedians should push us back.
Presumably, one day, this backlash will fade and itself face its own backlash. And then, 40 years later, we will all look back in amazement that we spent a decade paying large sums of money for white liberals to harangue us on a nightly basis.
