this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Conan O'Brien had an interview I think with Taylor Tomlinson where they talked about this topic.
Their conclusion was that comics that complain about it being harder to do comedy are just lazy.
It's always been hard. Even if it's true that there are less topics that you can touch, it means that you have to dig deeper in the well you can. It's your job as a comic to do that hard work, not the audience's job to laugh at your shit joke.
Conan has been doing comedy his whole life and talks about jokes that do great one night and jokes that bomb the next. Comics need to learn to read the room and adjust their jokes accordingly.
I agree but I do sympathize with one part of it. Things that were widely considered funny a few years ago are not today. I do think it's unfair to hold people in the past to the standards of today, but people love digging up old footage and bludgeoning people with it.
If a comic makes a joke and it bombs, maybe it's not funny. Maybe they used it with the wrong audience. Reading the culture and the room and choosing wisely is part of the job, like you say. But if it bombs 5 years later on Twitter, maybe it should have just been left in the past with the context it belonged in and not dug up and resurrected for clicks.
Plenty of people had the courage to call out injustice before it was popular. Mark Twain is a famous counterexample to "everyone was racist in the 1800s." Being an ignorant sheep is a valid defense for bigotry, but it's the lowest possible form of defense.
I'm not saying, "Hey, it's fine" I'm saying that people and cultures change, and should be allowed to change. Never before have people been so unable to escape their past. Yeah, occasionally you get a Bernie Sanders who seems to nail it right off. But most people have some skeletons or some shit they'd be embarrassed about if it were dug up and went viral.
When you dig up the past and hit people with it, you discourage progress. People are more likely to dig in their heels, knowing that the opinions they have today they'll have to answer for tomorrow.
I would argue that the axiom "consider the feelings of others" is pretty universal and timeless. Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir coined the imperative "do that which maximizes freedom for others" in 1947. Kant debuted his categorical imperative in 1785. These are not new ideas. You are acting like this is some arbitrary ethic which changes at random, when in reality the ideas of "don't be a dick" and "make society inclusive" is at minimum, centuries old.
At minimum, everyone always has the out of "I was wrong and now I understand." It is here that people like Seinfeld and Rowling really fuck it up.
people really love to forget that the american union army literally fought a war against slavery, The Battle Hymn of the Repbublic was written by an abolishionist and was inspired by John Brown's Body, a song about a man who was so furiously anti-slavery that he refused an insanity plea because that would lessen his anti-slavery message.
Like man, how many people nowadays are going to war specifically on the grounds of ending injustices like slavery? People of the past were unquestioningly capable of considering the rights of others and recognizing that exploitation do indeed be bad.
Man, Conan on Hot Ones was nuts! The guy will do anything for a laugh.