Cleaning Up the Act

What is comedy, really?  Making fun of situations or people, or irony and coincidence that tickle us.  It is that mystical something that causes a laugh reflex in those of us with a sense of humor (by which I exclude the left, whose adherents appear generally not to have one).

Verbal comedy is not any different, of course; the same things that make us laugh when we see something funny are involved when we hear a joke.  The difference is that verbal comedy is sensitive to an additional attribute -- timing.  Setting the listener up by capitalizing on his thought process as he hears what you are speaking, that is an art form.

Of course, among the best at setting up the audience is the brilliant comedian and long-time star of his own '90s television show, Jerry Seinfeld.  You're of course familiar with the eponymous show itself, with its misfit cast of characters and plot lines that would often come together strangely at the end of an episode (just recall the marine biologist/whale/golf ball one as the epitome).

Seinfeld himself started, of course, as a stand-up comic in the 1970s, and developed his talent grinding through the comedy-club life as many in the profession do.  He would write down jokes or lines as he thought of them, on a pad that, over time, has become an encyclopedia of hand-written comedy.

But I actually digress.

I mention Jerry Seinfeld because I happen to watch his recent one-hour special done, perhaps, for Netflix but I'm not sure and don't care.  I heard that it had been done and we brought it up to watch over the weekend.

It was certainly funny; Jerry Seinfeld, especially after 40 years in the business, is a very funny guy with great material and excellent delivery.  But about five minutes into it (it is generally an autobiographical tale), it became apparent that there was something different -- not different from Seinfeld's usual material, but different from most of the current crop of comedians. 

Now I do not swear, period.  I "swore off" profanity when I had children, so that they would not hear me use words that I regard as the province of those who can't come up with something better to say.  My kids are in their 30s and 40s now, and I still say "heck" and "darn."  Drives my Best Girl nuts -- "But they're in the Bible", she will say.

At any rate, what struck me right away was that Seinfeld was being funny by leveraging the situation, the characters, the irony, all without being profane.  With the exception of a  "heck" or "darn" (that weren't actually "heck" and "darn", of course), there was no profanity, no sexual or bodily-function attempts at humor, not even how big the bathroom was in his minuscule first apartment as a comic.

I found it incredibly satisfying that I could be made to laugh without having to be embarrassed at who else might be in the room, and whether I was reacting a little too overtly (or two puritanically) to excessive profane words or uncomfortable situations.  When the show was over, that was pretty much the first thing that occurred to us.  We had laughed comfortably for an hour.

Most days we need that.  But I can't turn on, well, almost any of the current crop of comedians.  They mostly make me crawl in my seat, because it seems like they can't really tell a joke without a barrage of F-words.  And it feels like they're using those words for shock value, not to advance the humor.  After all, the words themselves aren't funny; they're more often used in anger.  And anger is not funny.

So I wanted to thank Jerry Seinfeld here, and for the ages of the Internet, for reminding us that we are allowed, even in 2017, to laugh comfortably.  You can be funny and not profane.  You can be funny and not stay in the gutter.  You can be funny and totally avoid politics (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as 2016 taught us).

I suspect that most of us agree.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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