Comedy During Tragedy

The last line of the previous post was going to read: “As far as I can tell, all’s well in America.” But it just didn’t seem right. Sure enough, shortly after the blissful day I described in the last installment, our country suffered its worst school shooting to date.

People are quick to point out the relationship between comedy and tragedy, but in practice it’s much more complex than the old formula. When we’re up in front of college students and the crowd jumps when fireworks go off a mile away, like they did tonight, you realize that there’s not even a grain of gallows humor in what has just happened.

Our approach to sensitivity is as varied as our venue list. Sometimes it comes down to a quick decision made moments before going on stage, sometimes we add lib to correct content in sensitive environments, and sometimes we spend whole van rides arguing over which vaginal synonyms objectify women and which are just funny. (“Box” and “hoo-ha,” respectively.)

We live in an age of masters like the brains behind The Daily Show and The Onion. There have been masters in the past, like Chaplin taking on Hitler, but their less complex times did not require the finesse and nuance of, say, Jon Stewart tackling Bush regarding September 11th. Bernadine Dorhn, famous for blowing up buildings as ringleader of the Weather Underground, once told me that she thinks The Onion is a powerful tool for social change. From bombs to editorials by Area Man.

Ideally, when something like Virginia Tech happens, every citizen takes a good, hard look at their own actions. How can you prevent things like this from happening, and when they do, what can you do to help? What you can you do as a student, lawyer, parent, or in our case, comedian? Our approach is twofold.

First, reach out to any audience members who don’t look like they’re part of a community. These people frequently find their way to our shows and stay longer than anyone else, and we don’t leave until they do. Second, watch what you say up there.

We always want to push, but there’s no value in making an audience feel bad in a way that is unproductive or paralyzing. So for the time being we’ve snipped out any and all references to guns or violence, and I’m making more of an effort to reach out to loners, especially at colleges.

When I look what we’re doing and how it fits into the scheme of things at this point in time, I figure the best we can do is to give people a night off from the darkness.

-A.K.