Stephanie Grant

3rd Hour

Mr. Jennings

3/30/12

Stand-up on Center Stage

When I was about 13, I stumbled upon Dane Cook’s comedy special Vicious Circle, and from there, I developed an all-consuming obsession with stand-up. No feeling can ever match the endorphin-releasing laughter that comes from watching a truly funny comic. You name a comedian that frequents Comedy Central, and I probably have watched one of his specials. From Brian Regan’s clean humor and Dana Carvey’s impressions, to Demetri Martin’s songs and Jeff Dunham’s puppets, I know my comedy.

As a child, I used to steal jokes. Not for any malicious reasons, but rather, to make people laugh. What always confused me was how a joke that had cracked me up had a tendency not to land when I retold it. I thought maybe my style was off, but came to realize that the problem lay elsewhere; comedy is serious.

That probably sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Stand-up comics have this unique environment where people get to laugh without being judged. It’s much easier for a comedian to tell a joke about something offensive, say, the Holocaust, than it is to just blurt it out at the lunch table. Comedians get this superpower that the rest of us mere mortals don’t; they get to say highly offensive things without offending anyone.

I figured this out when I started watching political comics, like Bill Maher and Lewis Black, who criticized society and America more than I had ever heard. I began to note that comedy often had a serious undertone, and began to find it in other specials, from racial undertones in D.L. Hughley’s routines to the championing of drugs in Mitch Hedburg’s specials. Comedy made me laugh, but it also had stronger implications than just that; it began to make me think.

Regardless of my epiphany, I continued to avoid older specials for quite some time, because I thought that I would be unable to connect with past events.But after hearing my dad, my brother, and my current favorite comedian Bo Burnham talk about George Carlin, I logged onto Netflix and started watching him; needless to say, I now understand why he is known as one of the stand-up comedians.

Carlin is not just funny: he’s offensive, highly intelligent, skeptical, and satirical. He once said “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately” (Carlin), and that attitude shines through brilliantly in his acts. Carlin attacks the United States, religion, and the many materialistic and dim-witted people that he comes across, and he never holds back. He often uses vulgar language or unpleasant ideas to shock the audience into laughing. In his act, he says things like “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity” (Carlin). Where else in society could someone drop a bomb like that and have laughter be the only response? Carlin intentionally makes the audience address the issues that they may try to ignore. Religion, one of the most personal subjects there is, happens to be one of his favorite things to attack:

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time.But he loves you(Carlin).

Carlin isn’t just some angry old man though; he’s truly brilliant. Behind his highly sarcastic delivery is a scathing message about how ridiculous we are as a society. He makes fun of our preference for euphemisms over the harsh truth, making fun of the way we talk about death: “People say things like ‘You know I lost my father.’ Eh, he’ll turn up” (Carlin). He also makes fun of what people say at funerals: “‘Listen, if there’s anything I can do, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.’ What are you gonna do, a resurrection?” (Carlin). He refers to language as “a tool for concealing the truth” (Carlin).

His fundamental truths and harshest criticisms shine through in his comedy. Carlin says that he loves the United States but he also realizes that the fanaticism toward it is just ridiculous: “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it” (Carlin). But he doesn’t stop with just Americans; he also critiques humans in general, saying that “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little” (Carlin). He promotes skepticism, “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept” (Carlin), but is also willing to admit that “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist” (Carlin). Carlin’s cynical criticism is balanced with comedy and an underlying hope for humanity; his idea that the priorities of the average person are misguided is the one thing that binds him closest with Oscar Wilde.

The overarching theme of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is that the way in which we take life seriously is misguided. In one of the most important quotes of the book, Jack says “Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense” (Wilde 19), to which Algernon replies “Nobody ever does” (Wilde 19). This is the fundamental theory behind all of the happenings in the play; everything is nonsensical. All of the characters take life much too seriously, from Cecily’s obsession with love to Lady Bracknell’s desire to gain social standing. Both obsessions were silly to Wilde because most everything was to him. The issues that he makes important to his characters seem very unimportant to the readers, which is one of his classic inversions (Cohen).

The comedic phrasing of the play inspires laughter, as does the ludicrous natures of all of its starring characters. Some jokes had me in stitches because of their parallels to modern jokes. Wilde relies on more intelligent humor, such as puns and inversions, to help make his audience laugh, but the inversions especially serve another purpose: to critique Victorian society. Wilde is also sure to make fun of the lengths at which people will go to in order to maintain superficial matters, such as image. There is also quite a bit of comedy held in the absurdity of the situation that Wilde creates as a whole; after all, it is very unlikely that Miss. Prism could confuse a baby with a book, and yet, she did. Many of his inversions hold a more serious subtext, that subtext being, paradoxically, that life isn’t all too serious.

The parallels between Wilde’s play and modern stand-up are clear; they trick the audience into laughing and then manage to find a way in which to make the audience think. Carlin’s comedy definitely resides more on the offensive side of the fence and is a definitive call for societal change, while Wilde’s play seems to be more of a light-hearted view about the current condition of society, and the ridiculousness of life in general. Regardless, they are able to twine the serious with the funny in order to create some sort of hybrid, and for that, they should be commended. Life has changed since Wilde and Carlin were alive but one thing hasn’t and never will; the power of comedy.

Works Cited

Cohen, Philip. "Wilde's Attack on Seriousness."Readings on The Importance of Being Earnest. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2001. 125-131. Print.

Wilde, Oscar.The Importance of Being Earnest. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1988. Print.

*Mr. Jennings,

I don’t know how to cite a comedy special so when the inner citations say “Carlin,” they’re in reference to his comedy special It’s Bad for Ya.