LC#6: Tragedy + Time
What happens to comedy when you are in an eternal present.
I will be honest: I was about to skip this edition of the newsletter, or at least postpone it by a week. I got a lot of stuff to work on these days, and keeping up with publishing decent content every couple weeks is not easy. Then shit happened, and thoughts came. This time I’m writing about one of the most famous axioms of comedy: its chronologic distance from tragedy, or lack thereof. More specifically, I am writing about how desperately early late shows have been in recent times, as hyper-mediated history rolls out under our feet. Scroll down for it.
Family Guy is definitely not the wokest cartoon out there, but this one is spot on.
The above is bleak-funny, so for balance here’s an inexplicable yet heart-warmingly silly comedy special some Russian people shot for NYE. It’s entirely in Italian and it sounds great.
It’s not quite clear who said it first, but one of the most repeated statements about comedy is that it equals “tragedy + time”. Another famous quote, and a pertinent one in this case, is Horace Walpole’s: “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” This dichotomy between thinking and feeling may be far-fetched, but if we combine these two nuggets we can all agree comedy is at least predicated on some kind of critical distance, be it the healing of a wound or the privilege of posterity.
Maybe this is why late shows are conveniently tucked in before bedtime, rather than in the morning: having things put in perspective by some wise-ass comedian just before nodding off lets us sleep better at night.
The clip above is from Politically Incorrect, a show Bill Maher used to have on a very mainstream channel on American television. Less than a week after 9/11, Maher said the terrorists who took down the twin towers may be called anything, except cowards: in fact, the real cowards were the Americans, historically bombing shit from afar. Predictably, Maher’s show got cancelled. It is significant this happened after the event that more than any other in our lifetime confirmed history was not over - not even with globalisation, the Internet, and syndicated sit-coms with subtitles. But not all events are the same, not all histories are the same.
In this respect, Michael Che brilliantly comments on white forgetfulness in the face of black oppression, comparing it to the “never forget” imperative that followed 9/11: White America gets impatient when black people complain about slavery, yet won’t let go of those two buildings. Che’s response? “All Buildings Matter”. In a way, 9/11 disqualified another common statement among comedians: the often interrogative “too soon?”, pronounced right after an insensitive joke. When it comes to America and the symbol of its upward spirit, comedic distance is denied and time stretches into an eternal present.
And here we are, or here we were. Like 2001, 2020 also demonstrated how time and history are still unpredictable, and yet kept us all suspended. Quite ironically, the lucky ones were at home, watching comedians literally trying to kill time, live podcast to live podcast. Trapped in a collective Groundhog Day, we nervously laughed at Facebook statuses that kept highlighting how excruciatingly eternal 2020 was (so much so that I almost typed “is”). In lieu of life moving on, the streaming platforms we depended on more than ever started to kill 2020 as soon as they could: Netflix had Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones do a Death to 2020 special, while Amazon showcased a more subtle, all-female farewell to our old lifestyles. And what about late show hosts? John Oliver went as far as to make 2020 explode, at least allegorically.
Just a few days into 2021, history strikes again. Refusing to abandon the news cycle, Trump continues to do exactly the things that we kind of knew he would, except we were too busy laughing at his poor attempts at overturning the elections legally. Social media platforms finally seem to catch up with 2021 and put a lid on his communicative overflow, but it’s way too late: people have died in what - time will tell - will go down in history as either a grotesque attempt at a coup or the beginning of something sinister we haven’t seen (all) the margins of yet. Having to do their job, the late shows keep grappling with this alligator present with the same ironically bad dad puns, their hosts appearing entirely too literal and sincere (feeling a lot, to be sure) as they condemn and debunk. Despite the title, Jimmy Kimmel’s “Treason Finale” segment above opens with earnest bewilderment: he narrates the events, comments the tweets, does the things he does without any emphasis or room for a comedic run-up. The word “finale”, it’s clear, is wishful thinking. This very morning, Colbert already recaps 2021 as “the week that felt like a year”, starting his monologue by wondering what day it is. The punchline collapses into the setup.
If it is true those who risked and lost their lives for this half-assed coup attempt emerged out of a social media uchronia, emboldened by Telegram memes as they surfed the Covid waves, the gap is evident: televisual late shows like Colbert, Myers and Kimmel will forever be too early at the scene, too dumbfounded to respond comedically to the perpetual tragedy unfolding on our feeds. The historical dimension that Trump has ripped open (“It’s a revolution!”) is so densely hyper-mediated and detached from the timeline of American democracy that no comedy is possible for them.
Gabriele De Seta writes about the common depiction of China as “the future” as the symptom of a “denial of coevalness” - that is, a refusal to admit we’re sharing the same time. If the unfolding histories of China, Africa, and the Middle East have been relegated to othering fantasies, patronised through Orientalism and ultimately negated the status of “present”, the Trump-fueled QAnon revolution - which cultivates it own epic, its own icons - has somehow managed to break into the assumed eternity of the “old” normal. It was there all along, of course, but - our future being on hold - the horror vacui for what’s to come has been replaced by the disbelief for what is now the “new” normal. There’s no hosting this show.