By: Ben
Johnson
I’m
a white guy. I like to think of myself as a funny white guy, even. I’ve been
run through the ensemble comedy-training mill at the Second City and iO comedy
theaters in Chicago. I had a good run at these places. I went on a couple of
cruise ships with Second City. I got to see Europe on somebody else’s dime, and
list my occupation as “professional comedian” on a 1040. I performed at iO in
one way or another for six or seven years. I was an ensemble member at
ComedySportz Chicago, where I got the chance to visit and perform for, and be met
by near total indifference in, such exotic locales as Port Huron, Michigan and
Granville, Ohio. I did pretty well for myself. And then I stopped.
There
are a lot of reasons why I quit performing at these places. Most of them are
personal. A lot of them had to do with my own proprietary blend of alcoholism
and existential dread and unacceptable behavior. In more cases than I probably
even know, I burned bridges. As I rounded the curve into my 30’s, I found
myself miserable and lonely, in a dark place, and doing improv and comedy at
these theaters was not helping me be a person I liked. So I stepped away, and
that helped me. Not because the theaters are bad, but because I was bad in them.
I
mention all of this only to point out that I am an unreliable narrator in this
story. Anything I say about comedy should be taken with a grain of road-grade
salt. It’s not that I’m bitter, I just formed my opinions on a lot of this
stuff while laboring through an extended adolescence in an alcoholic stupor.
Any observations I’ve made on the subject of comedy theaters tend to come from
a place of desperate denial of personal culpability. So I might go too far.
That’s just my way.
So.
Comedy fans have probably heard about the recent uproar over
finding a black female cast member for SNL. Lorne Michaels just hired Sasheer Zamata
after a months long controversy resulted in an intensive talent search. I’m not
familiar with her work but I’m sure she’s qualified for the job. I wish her the
best on the show, as I also wish the best for all the other talented ladies
also under consideration who for whatever reason (probably “fit” more than
talent) didn’t get the gig.
In
the broil leading up to this hire there have been discussions of diversity in
comedy which have pointed a finger at the
developmental theaters
with varying degrees of accuracy. The cast of Saturday Night Live tends not to
be particularly diverse. But the group of performers and students at the
country’s more prestigious developmental ensemble comedy theaters is also not
particularly ethnically diverse. The two appear to be related. I think we can
all agree on these premises, and if you can’t do that without hurt feelings,
slap a “but they’re trying, honestly, they’re really all trying so hard, and
nobody is a bad person here” qualifier on it if it makes you feel better.
I
think it’s fairly acceptable to posit that if the developmental theaters amount
to a years-long unpaid (or underpaid) apprenticeship in comedy, it should
follow that enrollment would favor those who are most equipped to live a
temporary low-income lifestyle while pursuing a career which offers a
statistically small opportunity for sustained financial stability. I’d be
interested to see a full-scale demographic study of comedy theater students and
performers which takes income, age, marital and family status, family
background, and education into account, in addition to ethnicity. I’m sure such
a study would find more trends at these places than just whiteness.
Based
purely on conjecture of the qualities most likely to sustain somebody through
years of comedy learning, and having spent my own time at these places and seen
how they operate, I have a few educated guesses about the extended demographic
makeup of the average comedy incubator performer/student. I’d surmise that the
numbers would skew even more young than they skew white. I’d guess that singles
would vastly outnumber married people, and the average number of dependents per
household would be very low. I’d expect that a majority of performers are
college-educated and come from upper-middle class backgrounds in areas where
the average household income is above average and the per capita rates of
teenage pregnancy, crime, imprisonment, and poverty are below national
averages. I’d imagine that a common denominator in the demographics of the
performers at these places is a lack of fiduciary responsibility to the
wellbeing of others in their families, extended families, and communities.
These people would tend to be all sorts of things other than just white.
Straight, probably. Native English-speakers, probably.
None
of this ensures privilege or precludes diversity. There are people of all
ethnicities who are educated, childless,
native-English speaking, straight, 20-something singles from relatively small nuclear
families and upper-middle class backgrounds.
There are just more white people than any other kind in at least four of the
nine characteristics of that group. There are also plenty of (great—remember,
you’re all great, and you should all keep doing what you’re doing) comedy
performers and students at these theaters who are not college educated, or
childless, or native-English speaking, or straight, or 20-something, or single,
or from a small family, or from an upper-middle class background. I’m just
talking averages and dealing in the broad generalities of statistics. Made up
ones at that. There are no value judgments. Yet. But it would sure seem like
some of the self-selection happening within the demography of these
institutions predisposes participants to being white, and not just white, but a
particular kind of white. I’d love to be proven wrong on this. I don’t think I
would be.
I
don’t have any actual data on the socio-economic background of comedy theater
students and performers. Somebody who cares more than I do would have to go get
it. All I have for data is about ten years of using my eyeballs and mouthballs
(like eyeballs but for talking to people). I don’t really care if I’m right
about the specifics so long as we can agree on the underlying premise that
there are economic reasons behind everything, even something as inconsequential
as how come there aren’t many black people performing unfunny improv at some
shitty storefront theater that Lorne Michaels visits once a year.
Most
areas of demographic exclusion at these comedy-training houses do not seem to
matter. There is no lobby for more representation of America’s working class
middle-aged married people with three kids among the up-and-coming comedians on
the Saturday Night Live cast. Maybe there should be, but their absence is not
viewed as an injustice. It’s Saturday Night Live. It’s supposed to be comprised
of young, hip, urban people. We just kind of accept that. SNL doesn’t have to
be all things to all people, but when none of the young, hip, urban people in
its cast are young, hip, urban black females, that’s a glaring omission. Maybe
it’s not as far as SNL is concerned, though. Maybe SNL, like pretty much all TV
shows, is a white show. By and for white people, plus whoever else happens to
like it. I’m not saying this is a good thing. I’m saying maybe it is a thing.
Looking
at the performers and the students at these comedy theaters is only one part of
the equation. Saying “people on SNL are white because the performers at the
comedy theaters that train people for SNL are also white” doesn’t tell us
anything. Why are they white? What benefit is it to the comedy theaters, or to
SNL, to have their performers be so overwhelmingly white (in addition to
educated, and young, and probably also good looking and all those other
things)? Oh. Wait. The “good looking” joke tipped me off. It’s the audience.
The
performers are white because the audience is white. The audience is white
because the performers are white. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg debate. If you
understand evolution, the answer is egg. There was an egg, a non-chicken other
thing egg, and out of that other thing egg sprang a first mutant bird thing
which later we called a chicken. Eventually other mutant chicken bird things
showed up, and they did well, so a “chicken” became a thing. But the egg was
first. Definitely egg. The audience is the egg. Somebody had a show and then
the audience was the egg and then the show cracked open and there was a mutant,
and it evolves from there.
The
preferred audience for any form of entertainment business concern, because
we’re talking about probability here, is the portion of people in America who
are most likely to spend $36.50 a ticket to see a Second City show, or pay for
the things advertised during commercials in the SNL broadcast, or just in
general have disposable income they use for
entertainment. And those people, demographically, tend to be white,
as surely as the type of people who would want to perform at a comedy theater
tend to also be white, and as surely as people with money tend to be white. I’m
not saying white people are the only people with money, or that white people
are the only people who spend their money on entertainment, or even that having
more money than other people is good. I’m dealing in generalities because
that’s what statistics and probabilities are about. Based on those
generalities, the most probable method of economic success in comedy involves
entertaining the portion of the population most likely to spend money on
entertainment, and those people are white.
So,
chicken or the egg, comedy practitioners who want to insure the greatest
likelihood of financial success for themselves are going to, over time, tailor
their performances towards upper middle class white people. This means that developmental
“feeder” places such as Second City, iO, UCB, Groundlings, etc., are also
looking to capture the white upper middle class entertainment dollar. They
accomplish this in different ways, as they all have different business models,
but they all combine some amount of “come here and study and learn to be funny
in the same place as other successful comedians did previously” and “come here
and see a show where tomorrow’s successful comedians are currently performing.”
The narrative of these theaters is of emergence and success, and that
ascendancy tends (again, tends) to
follow a white upper middle class-friendly rubric. These places might as well
say “learn how to make upper middle class white people laugh, and/or if you’re
an upper middle class white person, come here and see the people who are going
to be making you laugh in the future.”
These
theaters, as businesses, have evolved into something like a chitlin circuit for
the white upper middle class. Because they do not pay their performers (or do
not pay them terribly well compared to, say, a nurse or a school bus driver) in
an industry which offers no guarantee of future employment or advancement, the
comedy on their stages is performed by mostly white upper middle class
unattached young people. And if the theater wants to give itself the best
chance to succeed in attracting top talent to learn a version of the craft of
comedy which is most obviously tied to future earnings, its audience will also
mostly be comprised of white upper middle class people. The theaters will
position themselves in white upper middle class areas, and market themselves
primarily through white upper middle class media outlets. They will pursue
synergistic partnerships with other white upper middle class businesses, and
seek ever greater white upper middle class exposure. They will do so not
because they are expressly advocating racial exclusion, but simply because
they’re trying to stay afloat and make a buck, and the white upper middle class
people are where the entertainment consumer money is concentrated. In theory.
Practices may vary at these places. (They don’t).
So
it would seem to make a lot of sense that the style of comedy that is
learned and practiced at these places is predominantly white upper middle
class-style comedy. An apprenticeship at these places offers the opportunity to
performers of all colors and backgrounds to learn what amounts to rich white person
comedy. These theaters are labs in which white upper middle class mores are
espoused and lampooned and bent and expanded and parsed and milked for comedic
value. From every angle. All the time. These places, and the young, cheap talent
they hope to attract, have been chasing that white person entertainment budget
dollar for so long that the concepts and directives learned from such a chase
have insinuated themselves into institutionalized cultural values of what is
and is not funny.
There
are definitely exceptions. But if you threw a dart, blindfolded, at the
schedule at one of these places, you would be unlikely to hit a show where a
group of predominantly non-whites perform for an audience of predominantly
non-whites. You might hit the "hey look, it's all the black people
show" eventually if somebody gave you about a hundred darts, but even then
you'd get no assurances about the audience's racial makeup. That's a shame,
because the comedy that comes from these places would be infinitely enriched by
any performers who aren't currently figuring out the difference between funny
and not funny by doing lame jokes about Tinder hookups by and for an army of
white 23 year old recent liberal arts B.A. graduates. Unfortunately, these
places have no real incentive to change. As long as they can put Keegan-Michael
Key and Jordan Peele on their promotional materials, they're already as diverse
as they'll ever need to be.
So
for now and in the forseeable future, these places are going to teach people
how to do white upper middle class comedy. There is nothing inherently wrong
with this, by the way. Other viewpoints would be great, but knowing what you
know and making it work is okay. The teachers and peer groups at these places,
through their combined experiences, do know an awful lot about how to do white
upper middle class comedy. And they do share this immense knowledge with less
experienced performers, and there is value in that information exchange. Nobody
can teach anybody how to be their own exact individual perfect kind of funny,
but there are some shortcuts that can speed up the development process, such as
“Don’t force an audience to watch you shove a stick of butter up your ass
unless you’ve really REALLY earned it” (not an actual quote of anybody). And
some of these shortcuts into white upper middle class comedy offer occasional
fleeting and precious glimpses into universal human truths, because even white
upper middle class people are humans. AND, most importantly, these places
attract other talented people with whom you can try to figure this stuff out.
These
places are not comedy Nazis. They're just functioning in the unjust world we
all live in, trying to stay afloat, and entertaining white upper middle class
people is the most surefire way to do that. But because of various and
systematic and unfair economic imperatives already discussed, any
student/performer at these places is going to be learning an institutionalized,
white upper middle class version of ethnic comedy, and nobody should delude
themselves about that.
The
bigger problem than the lack of diversity at these places is in the way these theaters
tend to call their own developed style of comedy just “comedy” instead of
"white comedy." And they have to seem confident in their knowledge of
“comedy.” This springs from financial necessity, since nobody would pay money
to take a comedy class from an overt racist or somebody who tells you right off
the bat that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
To further
explore semantics: you hear the words “black” or “female” or “Latino” or
“alternative” or “queer,” or tellingly, “blue collar” to modify “comedian,” but
you never hear somebody described as an “upper middle class” or “white” or
“straight” or “male” comedian. Upper middle class straight white dude comedians
are just “comedians.” Their comedy ethnicity and gender and sexuality and
socioeconomic status is normative. This is not necessarily the result of
conscious exclusion on the part of a few comedy theaters. It’s an issue as
complicated and as insidiously unconscious as any facet of predominant culture
in a global society which siphons its resources overwhelmingly and with brutal
efficiency to the relatively rich, relatively white, and relatively male among
us. Rich white dudes get what they want, and if the poor or blacks or Latinos
don’t think 30 Rock or Arrested Development is funny because they’re
not in the target demo, too bad. I’m sure there are other places who will
pander to your sensibilities. The biggest institutions with the most money to
spend on talent are interested in pandering to the people who have the most
money. Learn that and you’ll have a chance to succeed in showbiz. Kid. (Chomps
on cigar).
Of
course I’m being reductive. It’s reductive to say that black people don’t think
Arrested Development is funny. I’m
sure plenty of black people think that show is funny. I know this: white people
definitely think it’s funny. What’s not to like about it? The people who are on
it are white people, and they’re always saying funny white people things. Get
it: this one guy has casually decided to always ride a Segway, one of those
dorky wheeled things that retail for $8,000. Classic hilarity. Ah ha ha. I
think we can all relate to how silly and frivolous that would be.
You
know, comedy. Regular comedy. The kind of thing regular people like, with
regular people elements such as erudite wordplay and ceaseless depictions of
consequence-free consumerism. Maybe if you want to say it’s different than
other kinds of comedy, you could call it “smart” comedy. For smart people. Not
those idiots rooting around in the muck at the bottom of the economic food
chain, too dumb to pump the system for a law degree. You know, “smart” comedy.
Excuse
the hyperbole. I’m trying to make a point. There is no such thing as “regular”
comedy, is my point. There are styles of comedy which multiple people learn and
practice, and one very VERY prevalent style is white upper middle class comedy.
That’s actually okay. White upper middle class people can laugh. They’re not
necessarily bad people. I’m one of them. I don’t want to have to think of
myself as a bad person just because my life has been way easier than most
people’s. If your life was as easy as mine, you’d probably still find ways to
think it’s hard. I’m going to die at the end of it. That’s not fun to know. I
know my life is easier than other people, and that makes me feel bad because I
know I haven’t really earned it. I don’t think I should also have to feel like
an asshole for laughing when Dwight Schrute says something weird which appeals
to my background as an upper middle class white guy. Laughter tends to be a
good thing. It tends to put people in a better mood, so they can be on the
planet without acting like uptight douchebags.
Anyway,
Saturday Night Live just hired a black woman who is, presumably, conversant in
white upper middle class comedy. That’s good. Even if the only thing she ever
does on the show is caricatures of black female characters whose sole purpose
in context is to reference their relative blackness and femaleness, that’s
better than the portrayal of a world wholly uninhabited by such characters. White
upper middle class people need to be taught and reminded that their world
includes people whose reality is not white or upper middle class. The hope is,
on average, that even a white upper middle class-styled entertainment landscape
with more Sasheer Zamatas in it will skew our culture away from rich white
dudes in line at Starbucks who apparently think it’s okay to be a total dick to
a black woman. That would be great. Those guys are the worst.
What would be even more good was if black women, or
Filipinos, or transgendered auto mechanics were as economically empowered as
white upper middle class dudes, and if that empowerment trickled into genuine,
recognizable, unique and sustainable cultural institutions which would foster
individualized discoveries of universal human truth, and their resultant work
would reach across all demographic groups to help us all better understand
ourselves as one people on one planet. But we’d fuck that up too, probably.
Instead we can just call white comedy what it is, and not get too wrapped up in
insisting that white comedy tropes are the most effective ones, or that white
comedy institutions are necessarily the only or best places for individual
comedians to learn and hone their craft. And we can maybe spend a lot less time
giving a shit about what’s happening with white-ass whitey white white 40 year
old establishment comedy factory SNL and more time all doing our own thing and trying
to make it work. That would be good for all of us.
