A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to This Issue: Comedy and Life Narratives

Abstract

This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.

Keywords:

• auto/biography
• comedy
• humor
• life narrative
• testimony
• trauma

In 2018, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby sparked a global sensation with Nanette, a live show, then a Netflix comedy special, in which she “quit comedy” because she recognized and refused to perpetuate the harms that self-deprecatory humor and the transformation of trauma into jokes had been inflicting on her and other marginalized people. What Gadsby offered instead were “stories,” including the very unfunny true endings to personal experiences that for years in her shows she had presented in incomplete versions—“half stories”—as funny anecdotes. Refusing to conform to comic expectations that “tension” be released through punch lines that evoke laughter, Gadsby spoke of traumatic events, including rape, a violent beating, and internalized homophobia, to a silent audience, telling them, “This tension is yours. I am not helping you anymore.” In the structure and content of this performance, Gadsby co-opted the comedy stage for personal testimony and, in the process, foregrounded the close relationship of contemporary comedy and life narrative. Nanette’s affective power—as both comedy and testimony—was generated by the show’s veracity: Gadsby was (now) telling the truth, her own truth. It was stand-up as auto/biographical act.

While neither Gadsby’s critiques of comedy nor her insertion of testimony are actually new in comedy, as film and media scholar Danielle Seid (in this issue) and comic historians including Oliver Double document, the runaway success of Nanette did spotlight the increasing popularity of what Judy Carter calls “personal comedy”—comedy acts that are explicitly auto/biographical and, consequentially, often “light on jokes but heavy on personal stories, often involving identity or discrimination.”¹ As Mary Luckhurst argues, Nanette “captured the zeitgeist for personal stories.”² At the same time, comedians continue to produce traditional memoirs, with Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime (2016) standing out for its rejection of the celebrity Künstlerroman arc typically adopted by other comedians—for example, Tina Fey in Bossypants (2011)—and for its often hilarious representations of personal and national trauma during and after apartheid in South Africa, a narrative Nick Tembo examines in this issue. A text that is both very funny and very serious, Born a Crime, like Nanette, introduced a life and history that were unfamiliar to many readers, who only knew Noah as host of The Daily Show. Comedian Joe Wong’s memoir Not This Shit Again!, published as an e-book in 2020, “when anti-Asian racism had reached a crescendo during the coronavirus outbreak,” similarly intersects comedy and auto/biography in a memoir that addresses serious issues.³ In Noah’s and Wong’s memoirs, as in Gadsby’s work, comedy and|as life narrative opens a space for unexpected testimony, for amplifying subjects and experiences from the margins.

The overlap of trauma and humor is also not new, as reflected in the truism, tenuously attributed to comedian Steve Allen, that “comedy equals tragedy plus time,” and in David Sedaris’s assurance to students in his “Storytelling and Humor” masterclass that “everything is funny eventually.”⁴ Influential American comedian Richard Pryor made a career from content that addressed his personal experiences of trauma, racism, and poverty, and embedded scathing social commentary from marginalized perspectives.⁵ Comedian and scholar Joanne Gilbert, writing in 1997 about her experiences doing stand-up in the 1980s, recalled that she “was told several times by Comedy Club owners that I had too happy a childhood to be a stand-up comic” and that “not foregrounding the trendy, angst-driven humor that characterized the acts of so many of my comedic colleagues” was a professional liability. “I was being told,” she noted, “that I was not performing enough autobiography.”⁶ In the present cultural moment, the combination of auto/biography, comedy, and pain seems to be particularly “fitting,” in Lloyd Bitzer’s terms—particularly suited as a response to a socio-historical and rhetorical situation in which deep social divisions along lines of race, gender, immigration status, and political affiliation are compounded by planet-wide crises.⁷ In his 2021 Netflix special Inside, which he produced in his home during the COVID-19 pandemic, American comic Bo Burnham captures this sense of impending doom in his parodic song “Comedy”:

The world is changing

The planet’s heating up

What the fuck is going on?

…

The people rising in the streets

The war, the drought.

In the face of such genuinely terrifying events, Burnham wonders, “Is comedy over? … Should I be joking at a time like this?” Ultimately, he concludes, with self-reflexive irony, that he has a lot to offer:

The world needs direction from a white guy like me (Bingo!)

Who is healing the world with comedy

That’s it!⁸

On stage, page, and screen, authors are producing texts that productively merge and push the boundaries of both comedy and auto|biography, making us laugh even though—often—it hurts.

This special issue focuses on the particular fit of auto|biography and comedy for texts and subjects in both traditional comedy settings (such as stand-up performances and comedy specials) and print (such as memoir), and what is produced through the intersection of these modes. Thinking about auto|biography and comedy, auto|biography as comedy, and auto|biographical comedy, we hope to extend and bring into conversation similar work happening in fields including comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies, and consider what auto|biography brings to comedy, what affordances comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative. Comedy imposes its particular generic expectations and rhetorical moves, which necessarily shape the life narratives that performers produce, and thinking of comedy acts as auto|biography provides opportunities for seeing again the flexibility and capaciousness of both comedy and auto/biography. How do comics make meaning of their own and others’ experiences in representing them (arguably, the purpose of auto|biography) while at the same time making people laugh (the purpose, less arguably, of comedy)? In some aspects, the humor imperative can seem to put auto/biography and comedy not just in tension but at odds. Underscoring the point Gadsby drives home in Nanette, Luckhurst argues that “stand-up mitigates against the telling of real stories because real endings, more often than not, do not align with what I shall call the laughter principle.”⁹ As British comedian Billy Connolly observes, “life doesn’t have punchlines.”¹⁰

While Connolly may be right, that life does not have punch lines, significant events that transpired as we edited this special issue have highlighted again the ways that comedy and life intersect, sometimes violently. Most influential is the now infamous “slap” incident from the 2022 Academy Awards show, when Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock after Rock’s off-script crack about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia. This incident spurred reflection and|or outrage in the comedy community and popular media about the limits of comedy—in particular, comedy that is personal—and renewed discussion of the power dynamics between the performer and the object of a joke. “Comic Lives” arrives at a moment when the cultural climate around comedy appears to be shifting toward a heightened recognition of the potential harms Gadsby exposed in Nanette, and subsequently detailed in her 2022 memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation. Our contributors, coming from life-narrative perspectives, have anticipated these questions as extensions of those we have been asking for decades in this field about the personal, rhetorical, and political stakes of representing oneself and others.

The essays collected in this special issue focus on how comic autobiographers attempt to give their lives punch lines (or to withhold them), the degree to which they succeed, and the ethical and political consequences of their success. Our contributors address questions about the intersection of auto/biography and comedy that go to the heart of key concerns in life-writing studies—in particular, the challenges of representing trauma and the testimonial uses of personal stories. Although our call for papers for this issue did not emphasize comedy’s capacity to transmute traumatic experiences into comedic auto/biographical acts, all the submissions we ultimately selected deal with this topic from different angles and in connection with a range of examples. In this introduction, we take up this shared focus, along with other common threads we see running through the contributions, to present auto/biographical comedy in its various forms, from stand-up performances to podcasts and print memoirs, as a productive occasion for reflecting on the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches we apply in auto|biography studies.

Performing Subjects: “I”s on the Stage

In this special issue, we are interested in the performance of life in comedy settings, in texts that extend the traditional persona of the comic—for example, the “I” of observational humor, a kind of generic speaking subject—to promise alignment of the performer and the persona in the same ways that other forms of life narrative do. Comedy is, by and large, a commentary on life, with anecdotes and jokes based on things that happened to someone or things someone observed. In auto|biographical comedy, performers present themselves as that experiencing or observing someone.

A significant aspect of any comedian’s act is the crafting of their persona, the staged personality through which they build a relationship with their audience. Sarah Balkin notes that “constructing performer identity for and with an audience is foundational to stand-up comedy.”¹¹ While “whatever the medium—stage, screen, audio or social media—persona construction is understood to be for the purposes of a public performance and is strategically staged,” it is essential that the persona comes across as authentic.¹² Double argues that “truth is a vital concept in most modern stand-up comedy because of the idea that it is about authentic self-expression,” so “there’s often an assumption that whatever the person onstage says about his or her life is more or less true.”¹³ In other words, comedy relies on a version of Philippe Lejeune’s pact, the performance of an “I” who—at least for the sake of the comic performance—is the same as the “I” who is speaking.

Many comedians play with this expectation, blurring or—more recently—removing the line between person and persona. Balkin captures the consensus that “it is now the fashion and audience expectation for the gap between the performer’s branded public self and their stage persona to be as narrow as possible and for offstage and onstage selves to be intricately blurred into one.”¹⁴ While these comic performances, like all forms of narrative representation, necessarily entail acts of selection, organization, and even fictionalizing, they similarly employ evidentiary methods to signal that their accounts are, at the very least, auto/biographically true. Double outlines what he calls the “authenticating strategies,” including staging, the use of props, and various forms of documentation, which he and others engage to “convince [audiences] that the experiences I described had actually happened—even when it had not happened in exactly the way I described.”¹⁵ Hasan Minhaj’s comedy special, Homecoming King, for example, slickly incorporates the types of documentary evidence—photographs, screenshots from social media, and text exchanges—we might find in other life-narrative settings to backstop the account he is delivering. Although this evidence is certainly at least partially doctored—changing the name of the woman who scorned him, for example—it grounds Minhaj’s performance in the real, just as his use of place-names, details, polyvocality, and other strategies does.

Notably, Minhaj’s Homecoming King is an example of a stand-up show that sets out not only to entertain, to create moments of shared laughter based on mutual recognition—the primary purpose of comedy—but also, we would argue, to testify to Minhaj’s particular lived experience as the son of immigrants to the US, growing up brown in post-9|11 America. In this and other explicitly auto/biographical performances, the stakes may be higher: accuracy and authenticity matter because it is not “just jokes” but the representation of events and an identity for audiences who are both intimately familiar with the encounters with racism he describes and may never have faced such bigotry—or may in fact have been agents of it. Minhaj represents one example of “the increasing number of stand-ups who regard a high degree of autobiographical honesty and directness as crucial in the creation of their comic persona and the enactment of their personal politics.”¹⁶ The “fit” of auto/biographical comedy as political resonates with the comics our contributors examine in this issue, as they, like Minhaj, speak at once to their own pain and the systemic injustices that caused it, and likely reach a wider pool of listeners who might tune in for testimony in other forms. As Gadsby explains about her intentions for Nanette, “I wanted that show to have an audience, and a broad audience, and if that meant I had to trick people by calling it ‘comedy,’ that’s technically a joke.”¹⁷ Pranking an audience expecting comedy by instead delivering scathing social indictments and auto/biographical testimony—though, presumably, not by the time Nanette was filmed, when the show’s content would be well known—is one strategy that the essays in “Comic Lives” consider for how comedy and auto/biography intersect.

Like Minhaj and Gadsby, the contemporary comedians our contributors analyze draw on a tradition of auto/biographical and testimonial comedy that critiques oppressive ideologies. The career of African American comedian Marsha Warfield, whose work Jalylah Burrell examines in a recent essay in Women’s Studies Quarterly, illustrates how another comedian from a marginalized group worked against the confined and stereotyped acts expected of her as a Black woman in comedy. Burrell analyzes how Warfield’s stand-up comedy in the 1970s and 1980s at once distanced itself from her earlier participation in minstrelsy and intersected with the evolution of Black feminism during those decades. Unlike other Black women comedians at the time, such as Whoopie Goldberg and Alice Arthur, who opted to perform as characters or to do impressions, Warfield employed “monologues designed to reveal both the inner workings of her mind and how the American comedic tradition fixes Black women as stock characters and subjects of scorn.”¹⁸ Countering this tradition, Warfield insisted on being herself onstage rather than playing a stereotyped role. In her observational comedy, Burrell notes, Warfield “dispensed with the, ‘Did you ever notice?’ template, and replaced it with I-statements and observations,” a choice in keeping with “her deviation from performance paths that require the suppression of any part of her identity.”¹⁹ In attending to Warfield’s contribution to the evolution of comic forms that address the lived experience of marginalized communities, Burrell reminds us, as does Seid in her interview in this issue, that now prominent comedians like Gadsby and Minhaj stand in a long line of earlier performers who pushed back against discrimination and whose legacies deserve recognition.

The space—and reach—that comedy affords testimony and resistance presents a significant opportunity for marginalized subjects to be heard in spaces and from subject positions they may not otherwise be afforded. Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo’s work, like Warfield’s, leverages the public platform that comedy provides to intervene in mainstream media narratives and present resistant stories or representations. Founding members of the Indigenous comedy troupe The 1491s, Red Corn and Harjo made the short film Smiling Indians—a four-minute montage featuring images of “smiling Indians”—because, Red Corn explains, he wanted to speak back to “all these sad Indian movies” and counter entrenched stereotypes of “the super serious Native American” who “never laughed, never joked, never smiled.”²⁰ American comedian Gary Gulman similarly mounts a direct challenge to normative and harmful dominant narratives in his 2019 special The Great Depresh, in which he chronicles his lifelong experiences of depression, culminating in his 2017 hospitalization and his life-changing treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. This treatment, Gulman deadpans, “has a very bad branding problem,” due in no small part to the massive and terrifying cultural imprint of the “most disturbing scene in the most disturbing movie,” the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.²¹ Taking the stage—first live, then in the special—to provide a different, and very funny, narrative of depression and electroconvulsive therapy, Gulman offers important correctives not only about mental illness and psychiatric treatments, but also about how such experiences are represented, and by whom. The identity of the performers and the comic framework they adopt here are of course key to leveraging the counterhegemonic potential of comedy—the value of the comic for making meaning of those experiences without demeaning them. This alignment can also signal a pushback from subjects who are often cast in the public eye in the role of victim or silenced minority: the subaltern can not only speak, they can also crack wise.

The political and resistant dimension of auto|biographical comedy is conspicuous in the craft of many of the comedians our contributors examine. The American comedian Maria Bamford, whose career Shannon Herbert examines in her essay, puts her experience of chronic mental illness front and center in her performances, pillorying misinformed and degrading perceptions of people with such conditions and decrying the limitations of access to affordable and competent care. Tembo’s reading of Noah’s memoir Born a Crime situates Noah’s humorous account of his childhood in the fractious political environment of post-apartheid South Africa, where the residual antagonisms fostered by a racist regime frustrate the aspiration to become a “Rainbow Nation.” In her interview in this issue, Seid offers a rich array of examples of queer|trans and Black comics for whom the work of comedy is “about survival.” Focusing on the pedagogical potential of auto|biographical comedy, Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas share insights they gained from their students’ responses to the Australian humorist Rosie Waterland’s podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, which served as a springboard for class discussions on the limitations of the social welfare system in Australia, as well as the ethics of relational life narratives depicting childhood trauma. Jacqui Dickin analyzes Vietnamese Australian comic Anh Do’s stand-up performances and his memoir The Happiest Refugee to show how Do endeavors—not always successfully—to use self-deprecating humor and his catchphrase “What a great country!” to appeal to the self-satisfaction of largely white Australian audiences while at the same time calling out the discrimination against immigrants in Australia and lambasting the model-minority narrative, both of which, for Do, hit close to home. In his lively autoethnographic essay, Michael Yi reflects on his own use of self-deprecating humor to deal with the racism he encountered after immigrating to Canada from China. Yi considers the work of a number of Asian American comedians, actors, and artists, including Joe Wong, to think through the power dynamics of being the object or the subject of a joke, especially for those whose cultural power may already be precarious. His conclusion adds up the personal and collective costs of making oneself the butt of a joke.

By exposing the contradictions, exclusions, hypocrisies, and violence of prevailing norms of selfhood and the institutions that perpetuate them, performers and writers like Bamford, Noah, Do, Waterland, and Yi pursue a sometimes hidden, sometimes overt counterhegemonic agenda. They highjack the conventions of comedy to enact stealth testimony, for which the auto|biographical element is essential. As G. Thomas Couser argues in his inventory of life writing’s various forms, “[t]estimony differs as a subgenre in that it is not distinguished so much by the relation between the narrating I and the narrated I as by the relation between the I and the world. In testimony, the emphasis is on the I as an eye, a witness, of some injustice that the narrative seeks to put on record, if not redress.”²² To have any impact, testimony requires an audience; the individual subjects of testimony have to bring the wrongs they have witnessed and endured to other people’s (open) eyes and ears. As we note above, turning accounts of lived experience into comedy is already challenging, but the difficulties are compounded when the comedian seeks to bear witness to trauma in front of an audience who have come, and have usually paid, to be entertained. This “desire for comedy,” Lauren Berlant points out, is what distinguishes these performances from “melodramas and tragedies.”²³ In his reading of Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians, Terry Eagleton outlines the arduous task of making trauma funny: “The point is not to disown the pain, but to allow it to resonate through one’s discourse, dredging the comedy up from a depth of affliction or anxiety, rage or humiliation so as to invest it with the authority of experience. In articulating the unspeakable, in a sense more exacting than coming up with insults or obscenities, it must transcend the trauma in question without simply negating it, an exercise that demands both courage and truthfulness.”²⁴

Tembo, in his contribution to this issue, engages the term traumedy to describe what he sees Noah doing in Born a Crime, where Noah couches traumatic experiences in defiantly comedic terms, not to diminish but to enhance his account of the trauma’s impact on him and his communities. Double, himself a practicing comedian, has grappled directly with the rhetorical complexity of this process. “If we accept that empathy and laughter are incompatible,” he observes, “then the comedian is faced with a practical problem. How can he or she recall traumatic experiences without arousing an empathetic response in the audience which will short-circuit the possibility of laughter?”²⁵ Like Double, who developed a comedy routine based on a traumatic injury, the comedians represented in the essays in this issue have faced such a dilemma, and our contributors explore their strategies for working through it—or working with it—to represent their experiences of trauma to a public primed for laughter.

Who’s Laughing Now?

Auto/biographical comedy, like all forms of published and performed life narrative, operates at the intersection of the private and public spheres. Scholarship in auto|biography studies has long been interested in the public function of life narratives, focusing on their capacity to shape collective identities and attitudes, for better or for worse. In her analysis of the memoir boom in the US, for example, Julie Rak concludes that memoir “is one of the genres of writing that is about the movement from private to public … and it is taken up within other debates about the meaning of individual experiences in the public realm.”²⁶ The essays in “Comic Lives” engage the question of how comedians use memoirs, and auto/biographical comedy in other forms, to shift what those collective meanings—and the collectives themselves—might be, examining the rhetorical and performative strategies they use in their efforts to change public narratives. Given the essential role of audiences in comedy, the contributors to this issue take up questions of reception and response to personal comedy, noting, as Cardell and Douglas foreground in the title of their essay, how such content (deliberately) challenges expectations in ways that can raise the question, “Is it okay to laugh?” Auto/biographical comedy—and in particular what we might call testimonial auto/biographical comedy—can make laughter seem inappropriate, even as it may be invited or expected in the rhetorical setting. Who gets to tell what kinds of jokes? Who gets to laugh at them? As Seid asks in this issue: Who gets to have a career in comedy, and which voices will be heard? Should we laugh, as Bamford asks us to, at her frightening experiences with undiagnosed bipolar disorder? Should we laugh at Noah’s apparently gleeful enjoyment of the privileges his lighter skin bestowed on him in his Black family and community? In situations like these, what does our laughter—or our failure or reluctance to laugh—tell us about ourselves?

This unsettling experience of questioning our right to laugh reflects the canny capacity of comedy to address multiple audiences simultaneously, with jokes landing differently for different demographics. Some audience members will identify directly with the material as reflecting their identities or lives, while others in the room, with those others often representing traditionally dominant powers, may miss the humor, although they still may find the performance itself worth laughing at. Double calls this strategy “dividing the audience,” with the comedian speaking implicitly or explicitly to and about different “pockets” in the room.²⁷ Gadsby’s direct address to “the men in the room” in Nanette is one example of this technique, but we can also think of strategies such as Minhaj’s linguistic shifts between English, Hindi, and Urdu, notably beginning with lines in Hindi or Urdu to draw laughs from certain parts of the crowd before he translates the content for a second round of laughter from those who do not understand those languages. As Tembo explores in this issue, Noah similarly performs linguistic shifts that enable him to move across linguistic and cultural spaces in ways that destabilize hierarchies of belonging. In a live setting, such translanguaging challenges expectations about who comprises “the audience” and deftly creates insiders and outsiders even while maintaining, though sometimes inconsistently, a shared experience of laughter.

Shifting among languages is one of the comic strategies employed by performers from marginalized groups to create community through common experience and shared identity. Comic historian Kliph Nesteroff notes the practice of Indigenous comic duo James and Ernie, who do half their set in English and the other half in Navajo.²⁸ Double recounts the practice of Borscht Belt acts, who gave the “set-up of the joke in English, and the punchline in Yiddish.” The effect, in these cases, is that “those who understood the joke … feel a sense of belonging, exclusivity, and collusion.”²⁹ Such comics can similarly destabilize assumptions about a shared, “universal” experience, the grounds for observational humor, in which the “audience is expected to laugh in recognition as the comedian points out minor absurdities or annoyances of daily life.”³⁰ While this comic move is, as David Gillota comments, ostensibly “politically neutral and potentially relatable to everybody,” those assumptions about what is relatable, shared, and funny most often reflect “mainstream,” dominant groups—not only “middle to upper class” audiences, as Gillota argues, but other privileged groups as well.³¹ In The Great Depresh, for example, Gulman powerfully alters the terrain of what is assumed as normative experience by taking as common ground the perspective and experiences of the depressed. In a bit about the telltale signs of depression, Gulman moves back and forth from “you” to “we” to “I,” with these pronouns imagining—or perhaps creating—a shared realm. “I don’t need to go into your bathroom,” he notes. “I know that the new roll of toilet paper is resting on the empty spool. It’s the only household chore we can do whilst sitting on the toilet.” He brings the observation back to himself as speaking subject for the punch line: “and I’m thinking, ‘Pfft, not today.’”³² Through its delivery and content, this joke is likely funny to all listeners, but importantly, it will be both “understood” and “relatable”—the foundations of observational humor—to others who have been or are depressed, who now see their otherwise often taboo or silenced “normal” move from the margins to the main stage.

The comedians studied by our contributors similarly often take as their shared ground experiences that do not reflect dominant norms. In the refashioning of their (nonnormative) lives for comedy, and in particular in the address and invitation to members of others in those groups not just to laugh but also to recognize those experiences as shared (though not necessarily “universal”), we see the capacity of auto/biographical comedy to advance counternarratives. Herbert’s analysis of Bamford’s deliberately failed joke about veteran suicide captures this kind of oppositional observational humor, in which Bamford creates a joke that presumes a shared understanding of absurdities which are not, she knows, actually acknowledged as absurd, and underscores the very real, very unfunny consequences of that lack of recognition. Do’s repetition of the line “What a great country!” throughout his routines, Dickin argues, leverages ambiguity to offer some members of his audience a soothing affirmation of national pride, while others catch its irony. Although both groups laugh, only some are “in on the joke.”

As Cardell and Douglas describe in their students’ hesitation to laugh at jokes by Indigenous comics—jokes that target white Australians—and as Yi explores in his consideration of self-deprecating humor, when we laugh, at least in public, we are signaling our position in the ideological framework within which the joke is expected to land, marking our place in the community the comedian is hailing through the punch line. By the same token, our failure, or even refusal, to laugh also locates us; while we may be inclined to attribute the failure to the comedian rather than to ourselves, our sense of boredom or insult tells us, however vaguely, that we are on the outside—especially when others around us are laughing their heads off. Berlant notes that “the person who doesn’t get the joke becomes the joke”—a dynamic that emerges in Waterford’s dialogic comic podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, which Cardell and Douglas discuss in this issue.³³ In their introduction to the 2017 issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note that “[w]hat we find comedic (or just funny) is sensitive to changing contexts. It is sensitive because the funny is always tripping over the not funny, sometimes appearing identical to it.”³⁴ As Herbert points out, Bamford is aware of the heterogeneity of her audience and addresses it directly, acknowledging that some people will find her humor not only unfunny but also triggering, and she leaves the door open for those who wish to leave. Likewise, Do recognizes that some in his audience may be laughing for, from Do’s perspective, the wrong reasons. As a mode of public discourse addressed to audiences who are rarely homogeneous, comedy, especially comedy that employs counternarrative strategies, illuminates the jostling of counterpublics within the “general public.” Michael Warner views our subjective consumption of information in all its forms as constitutive of our membership in any particular public, insofar as “[o]ur willingness to process a passing appeal determines which publics we belong to and performs their extension.”³⁵ Referring specifically to our response to comedy’s appeal, Berlant and Ngai put the point succinctly: “Comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us.’”³⁶

All of the essays in this issue highlight this inherently social aspect of comedy. Warner notes that, in our everyday lives, we frequently turn to humor to orient ourselves—and to signal our position to others—within the constant, highly variegated stream of public discourse and mass cultural productions. We want to prove that we are in on the joke, or attuned to the irony, or properly scornful, lest our taste or intelligence come into question, although, as Cardell and Douglas note, in some settings, such as a classroom, the decision about whether or not to laugh can be fraught and revelatory. For Warner, the prevalence of this quotidian use of humor “suggests that, as with all joking, there is a lively current of unease powering the wit.”³⁷ Our unease intensifies when we confront public discourses and cultural productions that position us as outsiders because, as Warner explains, “to be normal (in the ‘mainstream’) is to have anxiety about the counterpublics that define themselves through performances so distinctively embodied that one cannot lasso them back into general circulation without risking the humiliating exposure of inauthenticity.”³⁸ Such tensions ground the social actions of political satire, as James E. Caron notes, including its creation of a “comic public sphere” that “exists in a parodic relationship to the public sphere; it imitates the public sphere with a comic difference, and not necessarily as a mocking counterpoint. Its satiric speech acts critique the body politic and social over issues that involve fluctuating values and current civic events and current social fashions.”³⁹ If humor can facilitate a kind of social orienteering, providing a means of finding our footing within always fluctuating public discourses, we might think of testimonial auto|biographical comedy as a kind of ad hoc social engineering—Gillian Whitlock’s “soft weapons” in another form.⁴⁰ Like the memoirs that Rak examines in Boom!, humor offers an alternative to Habermasian communicative reason, intervening in dominant public discourses and cultivating social bonds by appealing to the affective affiliations that Berlant associates with intimate publics.⁴¹

Comedy can—at least in theory—accomplish such work even when the jokes do not land. Berlant and Ngai suggest that the ambivalence or disappointment we sometimes feel in response to comic performances might push us toward critical self-reflection: “Comedy’s frequent failure to induce the pleasure that magnetizes us to it not only incites the policing of intimate others but also reveals philosophical and personal uncertainty about the implications of aesthetic judgment.”⁴² Yet, as Berlant and Ngai go on to explain, the reaction is more often either to ascribe the failure wholly to the comedy itself or to feel “an aggrieved sense of having been denied laughter or having had one’s pleasures disrespected or devalued,” a response that “also explains some of the rage at feminism and other forms of subaltern political correctness that get into the wheelhouse of people’s pleasures and spontaneity.”⁴³ This last point has particularly serious implications for performers of testimonial auto|biographical comedy, who themselves, rather than simply their jokes, run the risk of becoming the object of such rage. Yi, in his autoethnographic analysis of the harmful effects of self-deprecatory humor, assesses the options open to audiences—or, outside of formal comedy, to bystanders—when they encounter comic content that is not only unfunny, but also builds on and perpetuates attitudes that denigrate marginalized peoples. Drawing on Michael Billig’s concept of “unlaughter,” Yi explores the consequences of opting out of the laughter, a move that risks social exclusion for being a “spoilsport” but also directly challenges not only the comic but also those who have aligned with the comic through their laughter. This challenge can be successful, Yi argues, when it tips the balance of power and “stops the laughter,” refusing the expectation that “we all” think something is funny.

Bearing witness to injustices through life narrative, as Leigh Gilmore has shown with regard to women’s accounts of sexual violence, can set the witnesses themselves up for judgment.⁴⁴ When comedians offer audiences their experiences of marginalization and trauma as an occasion for laughter, whether onstage or in print, they stand in the dock. To deflect, if not defuse, the negative judgments they expect may be directed at them, some comedians undertake the high-wire act of self-deprecating humor. Gadsby’s rejection of self-deprecation as complicity in her humiliation reflects broader conversations among scholars and practitioners about this strategy in particular, as Dickin and Yi each explore in their contributions to this issue. While “self-deprecating humour may register one’s subservience as part of strategy for surmounting it,” as Eagleton remarks in Humour, it can also misfire, reaffirming an audience’s prejudicial attitudes and reinforcing the conditions of subservience.⁴⁵ Yi’s autoethnography, which includes an account of his attempts to make fun of himself to counter an English-language tutor’s anti-Asian slurs, is keenly aware of the personal and collective perils of this comedic strategy.

Should We Be Joking at a Time Like This?

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the things—and certainly the most dramatic—that happened on the way to this issue, which got its start as a session at the Modern Language Association convention in January 2020. Although certainly not funny, the pandemic did give us another angle on the intersection of the comedic and the personal as we watched comedians like Samantha Bee, Steven Colbert, and Trevor Noah shift the broadcasts of their popular television shows into their private homes and yards, and this intimate setting became another marker of the alignment between performer and persona. These shows also illustrated comedy’s capacity to address the collective trauma induced by the pandemic while it unfolded, directly grappling with the question that Berlant poses: “What’s left when comedy leaves the comedy room?”⁴⁶ Moreover, the shift to home broadcasting stripped these shows of their “live” quality, through which the performers typically cultivate a connection with the studio audience, although they developed new strategies to recreate those dynamics—for example, capturing the laughter of Colbert’s wife (and camera operator) or Noah’s use of multiple cameras and personas to heckle himself. In this regard, comedians in lockdown became more like the writers of print memoirs, who must hold the attention of distributed audiences they cannot see and whose laughter they cannot hear. Promoting Not This Shit Again! on Facebook, Wong looks on the bright side of his pivot to an e-book: “It’s a lot cheaper than a comedy show ticket and it’s got jokes, personal stories and some lessons learned.”⁴⁷

In 2020–2021, Burnham wrote, performed, and recorded Inside, a comedy special|documentary|simulated live-cast of his life in pandemic lockdown that takes the performed intimacy adopted by television talk-show comedians to an extreme. Filmed without a crew, with an increasingly unkempt Burnham talking directly to the camera, Inside strategically positions the viewer as an audience of one (isolated like Burnham) while still capturing a larger shared experience—the embodiment of COVID-19 slogans about being “alone together.” Through monologue and comic songs targeting the grotesque profiteering of Jeffrey Bezos, reproducing the banal absurdities of FaceTime and sexting as substitutes for human interaction, and reflecting on what a white male comedian might contribute to the public good, Burnham creates pandemic-era observational humor, in which the observer is quite necessarily at a distance from what they see, as well as from an audience with whom they might relate. As Burnham puts it, “It’s just me and my camera and you and your screen.” At the same time, he speaks openly about his own experiences with mental health issues, including the career-crippling onstage panic attacks that, ironically (he notes), finally lifted in January 2020. “I was pining for the world,” he states, and it was “time to re-enter.” But, he concludes, “a funny thing happened.”⁴⁸ A recorded laugh track simulates audience response, with its obvious simulation both providing and denying the punch line’s release of tension.

As we write in autumn 2021, we are still awaiting that release. We want to acknowledge and thank our contributors for working through the really challenging, really neither fun nor funny circumstances in which they produced the fine scholarship that comprises “Comic Lives.” Writing and working from Vancouver, on the traditional, ancestral, unceded, and occupied territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ|Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xÊ·məθkÊ·əy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations, and from the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī, in the moku of Kona, on the mokupuni of Oʻahu, in the paeʻāina of Hawaiʻi, we acknowledge the original inhabitants and traditional caretakers of these lands, and the ways that the pandemic has intersected with the ongoing legacies of colonialism to affect Indigenous peoples disproportionately. Laurie would like to thank her students, whose responses to the comedy specials she had them examine (and suggestions for others she should watch) lit the spark for this issue; Lex and Greg for (relentlessly) insisting she watch Burnham’s Inside; and Doug for being such a stellar “straight man” in the everyday comedy act of our lives. John thanks Aaron Kiilau and Abraham Kim, doctoral students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, for inspiring Zoom conversations about comedy and satire while “Comic Lives” was coming together, along with his partner Laura for equally inspiring conversations at the dinner table. We also applaud the patience of our families while we watched comedy shows “for work” and disrupted the fragile peace of working from home with our (scholarly) laughter. Finally, we thank our global community of colleagues in auto|biography studies, whose research and conversations have shaped and enriched our understanding of the work of auto|biography in the world. We look forward to the time when, once again, two—or more—scholars can walk into a bar …

University of British Columbia

University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes

1 Carter, Stand-Up Comedy, qtd. in Double, Getting the Joke, 6; Gillota, “Beyond Liveness,” 52.

2 Luckhurst, “Hannah Gadsby,” 54.

3 Wong, Not This Shit Again! 6.

4 Double, “Tragedy Plus Time,” 146; Sedaris, “Introduction.”

5 Double, “Tragedy Plus Time,” 148; Michael, “American Muslims,” 131.

6 Gilbert, “Performing Marginality,” 317.

7 Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” 10.

8 Burnham, Bo Burnham.

9 Luckhurst, “Hannah Gadsby,” 62.

10 Connolly, Too Old to Die Young, qtd. in Double, Getting the Joke, 161.

11 Balkin, “The Killjoy Comedian,” 82.

12 Luckhurst, “Hannah Gadsby,” 54.

13 Double, Getting the Joke, 160.

14 Luckhurst, “Hannah Gadsby,” 55.

15 Double, “Tragedy Plus Time,” 149.

16 Luckhurst, “Hannah Gadsby,” 60.

17 Gadsby, Douglas.

18 Burrell, “‘We Always Somebody Else,’” 189.

19 Burrell, “‘We Always Somebody Else,’” 190, 191.

20 Nesteroff, We Had a Little, 16, 17.

21 Gulman, Gary Gulman.

22 Couser, Memoir, 41.

23 Berlant, “Humorlessness,” 309.

24 Eagleton, Humour, 141.

25 Double, “Tragedy Plus Time,” 151.

26 Rak, Boom! 212.

27 Double, Getting the Joke, 254.

28 Nesteroff, We Had a Little, 206–208.

29 Double, Getting the Joke, 225.

30 Gillota, “Beyond Liveness,” 54.

31 Gillota, “Beyond Liveness,” 56.

32 Gulman, Gary Gulman.

33 Berlant, “Humorlessness,” 306.

34 Berlant and Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” 234.

35 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 89.

36 Berlant and Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” 235.

37 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 103.

38 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 103.

39 Caron, Satire, 58.

40 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 6.

41 Rak, Boom! 213; Berlant, “Humorlessness,” 319.

42 Berlant and Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” 240.

43 Berlant and Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” 240, 241.

44 Gilmore, Tainted Witness.

45 Eagleton, Humour, 60.

46 Berlant, “Humorlessness,” 336.

47 Wong, “Since.”

48 Burnham, Bo Burnham.