Comedy and Culture Wars: Why Laughter is the Antidote to Polarisation
A conversation with comedian Fin Taylor
My book ‘The Bigger Picture’ is going strong with 4.7 stars on Amazon and is currently on promotion in some countries. I also have a new article out in The Third Wave called ‘What Comes After the Psychedelic Renaissance?’ and you can check out Fin Taylor’s brilliant comedy on his Instagram and YouTube.
There is a paradox at the heart of modern life: some things must never be spoken, but no one should be silenced. We live in an age where the boundaries of acceptable speech are ever-shifting and wildly polarised. Cancel culture may have peaked, but the free speech debate rages on topics as diverse as gender, immigration and Covid.
The political right fears progressive control of the media and tech companies, while many progressives are terrified of a rise in fascism and misinformation, pushing for greater control of the cultural narrative to avoid a perceived catastrophe.
It’s all very tense and very serious. We’re at each other's throats, unwilling to back down until the other side backs down first. It seems dire, but when someone’s stuck in a mess of their own making, and convinced they have nothing to do with it, sometimes you can’t help but laugh. It’s an urge that can take us somewhere unexpected, because learning to laugh at ourselves might be the best way out of our cultural tangles.
As a life-long comedy fan, I’ve always felt that humour is the most powerful way to shift polarisation, challenge authority and face cultural shadows. But in an age of predatory algorithms and the outrage economy, can comedy really save us?
To try and answer that question, I had a conversation with comedian Fin Taylor. Taylor has been performing stand-up full time for the last fifteen years, and recently hit a new level of online success with his show Fin vs The Internet.
Taylor plays an out of touch character who interviews internet influencers, forcing them to engage with politically incorrect statements and absurd riddles. The tension and humour come, in Taylor’s words, “from the fact that these people have personal brands that I'm in danger of ruining with every joke.” It’s outrageous, hilarious and strangely subversive.
We talked about the art of stand-up, censorship, and recent changes in cultural sensibilities. I also delve into the history of comedy, the cognitive science of humour, and why laughter can help us move into new cultural territory.
But before all that, I want to tell you a joke.
Ich Bin Ein Berliner
East Berlin, 1983. An American journalist is working on a story about life under communist rule. He spends his days bumming around in cafes and bars, trying to talk to the locals when they have their guard down. One day he sees a young woman walking through the park. He strikes up a conversation and asks, “So, what’s life really like under communism?” She glances at the people around her and says loudly “It’s wonderful! A utopia!’ and walks away as fast as she can.
The journalist feels deflated. It’s the same answer he got from the usher at the cinema. And the students in the bar. No matter who he asks, he hears that same answer, sees that same desperate fear in their eyes. This city has eyes and ears everywhere.
The journalist feels a prickle in his back. He turns to see a man on a bench staring straight at him. The man folds his paper and walks over. “I am Jens. You would like a true answer to your question?” The journalist feels a rush of excitement and says yes, he would. Jens turns to go and the journalist follows. They walk through the city for a long time, and Jen’s eyes dart around restlessly.
They board a tram and the journalist asks where they’re going but Jens just shakes his head and presses a finger to his lips. They get off at the last stop. Jens leads them to a battered car parked outside the station. The journalist hesitates. This could be the last car he ever gets into, or it might be the biggest scoop of his life. He forces down his fear. As he gets in, he feels more alive than he has in years.
They drive until buildings give way to fields. Jens glances at the rearview mirror and licks his lips nervously. The journalist fidgets with the pen in his pocket. They pull onto a dirt road and drive another five minutes before Jens finally pulls over and lights a cigarette.
When the journalist speaks, his voice is strained.
”What’s life really like under communism?’
Jens takes one last look down the road. His shoulders drop and he relaxes. When he turns, the journalist sees truth in his eyes.
“I actually love it.”
You Can’t Say Anything These Days
This joke was doing the rounds in the 1980’s, and it’s not as much ‘funny ha-ha’ as it is a wink at self-censorship, and the absurd double-binds it puts us in. In recent years, we’ve seen what looks like an increased sensitivity and fear of being offended throughout society, especially in response to TV shows, books and comedy. We exist within a hazy cultural pressure not to express the ‘wrong view’, which makes having a divisive opinion a fraught affair, and self-censorship seem like the safest option.
However, censoring some of what we say in public is innately human, and often sensible. What’s different today than it was in 1980’s is, of course, the internet. Our technology can make it seem as though we live in a particularly sensitive time, and in some ways we do. However, people have been trying to censor art and comedy since the first person cracked a joke.
In his new book Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, Kliph Nesteroff looks at the last 200 years of comedy to reveal that much of what we call ‘cancel culture’ is something that’s been around for a long time, and which has evolved alongside our technology, from the stage and radio to TV and the internet.
As Fin Taylor straddles both the stand-up scene and the ever-shifting world of online sensibilities, the first thing I asked him about was the idea that modern comedy has been neutered by over-sensitive audiences.
“I get slightly exasperated whenever this sort of debate comes up because it is entirely manufactured,” he explained. “It’s a result of a distorting effect, mainly of Twitter. Whenever this argument is made, it's always amazing that none of the people making it spend time in comedy clubs. If you go to Comedy Store, Top Secret, Up The Creek, any major comedy clubs in the UK, people are saying wild shit, and they're getting away with it because it's funny enough. That's always been the rule.
But there is this interesting phenomenon, because of Twitter, where you can make 380 people laugh, but that joke sets off one person’s particular thing. They then tweet to their 100,000 followers about how X-Comedian is making light of this thing.
Their followers, who are geographically dispersed, then spread that. Then newspaper organizations go ‘right, there's a huge sensitivity, we can't joke about this thing anymore. And it's like, whoa, let's go back to who was in the room, what happened in the room, 99.9% of people laughed at the joke. So there’s this weird kind of distortion happening where a news organization can print something that is real to one person, but not the majority of people that were in the room… From my point of view, this debate always takes place in this airy space up above the actual reality of people in comedy clubs.”
As Nesteroff points out in Outrageous, people were offended by comedy in the past as well, but with one key difference:
“For most of the twentieth century, hostile grievances were published as letters to the editor in newspapers, magazines, and TV Guide. The complaints were often irrational and outrageous. They were also moderated and filtered by a newspaper editor. In those days, perhaps one out of every one hundred complaints would be published and the rest discarded. But today, social media has removed the editor from the equation and every hostile expression is published automatically. It gives the impression that people are more irrational, humorless, and overly sensitive than in the past.”
So what, if anything, do today’s keyboard warriors share with the letter writers of the past? This is where things get complicated. To many, the person standing up and demanding something be taken off the air, or for someone to be canceled, seems like a prude with control issues. I usually have very little time for them. However, there are moments throughout history when this stance has been entirely justified.
As Nesteroff points out, comedy in the US began with minstrel shows, where white comedians would put on blackface and satirise slaves. This carried on in some form for decades, and in the late 1920’s, one of the most popular shows on the radio was Amos ‘n’ Andy, in which two white comedians played heavily caricatured Black taxi drivers (plagiarising the bit from two Black comedians they’d seen perform). Black activist groups were rightly angry about the depiction, and The Pittsburgh Courier ran a campaign to have the show removed, arguing.
“What is the damage done? It is almost everywhere to be met where white people encounter Negroes … On the streets, in the banks, in the business places … Negro help is often referred to as Amos or Andy. Negroes are being put down.”
In the first month of the campaign, they managed to send 100,000 letters, and the NAACP gathered 740,000 signatures on a petition which they presented to NBC. They never got a reply, and Amos ‘n’ Andy remained on the air until the 1960’s.
Years before this, Vaudeville comedians had been under fire for lampooning Irish and Italian immigrants, who eventually had enough of it for the same reasons as Black Americans - it had a tangible impact on their opportunities in life and how they were perceived by institutions.
Are these examples of censorship, or something else? As Adam Gopnik points out in his article What Do We Want from Comedy, it’s important to distinguish between censorship and censoriousness. Censorship happens when the state prevents discussion or expression, for example by shutting down a theater or arresting comedians.
To be censorious is to be highly critical and disapproving of something. And despite our best intentions, we’re all censorious in the right situations. As Taylor put it, “we all have ‘a thing’. We all have something that we can't laugh about because it's too serious to us. More and more that's about identity. It used to be just about experience, but everyone's got something. You can't reach 35 and not have the thing that's fucked you over.”
Liberal democracies rarely censor artistic expression, but in the social media age, censoriousness has even more power than it did in the past. For some on the political left, successful campaigns to end discriminatory jokes in the past add weight to the argument that to police comedy today is to be on the right side of history. Looking back through time, it is understandable. However, the way culture perceives oppression today is different to how it was viewed in the past, and this difference is important.
The Evolution of Bigotry
To see why, look no further than this quote from a 1987 gig by one of the most popular comedians of his day, Andrew Dice Clay.
“I don’t see too many fags in Philly… in Brooklyn we don’t have any gay people. They’re all dead. All we got is a big sign that says ‘Welcome to Brooklyn, 4th largest city in America’ with this dead fag hanging off the pole….They’re not from this planet, let’s face it. They’re from Fagotron, come on! And they’re always on parade, they march up and down the street with T shirts and flags: ‘I want money for AIDS disease’. Beautiful, I want money for a new fuckin’ car, I ain’t marching up and down the street, get a job butt-slammer!”
Clay was very controversial, and very popular. He claimed he was playing a character and that his jokes shouldn’t be taken at face value. Activist groups and a lot of the general public despised him, and many comedians also took issue with his act. As George Carlin told Larry King in 1990,
“The thing that I find unusual, and, y’know, it’s not a criticism so much, but his targets are underdogs. And comedy traditionally has picked on people in power, people who abuse their power … Women and gays and immigrants, are kind of, to my way of thinking, underdogs … I think his core audience are young white males who are threatened by these groups…”
Most modern audiences wouldn’t find Clay’s act funny and the backlash against it is understandable. It’s overt, aggressive and nasty, punching down instead of up. As such, it’s easy to point out as discriminatory.
This is why it serves as such a useful example of what has changed over the last four decades. In the 1980’s, social justice activism was defined by the fight against overt discrimination, but today much of the focus is on calling out covert discrimination. The identity of the speaker is paramount, not the joke itself. Every gesture, every comment, every joke is deconstructed to find where the power and oppression is hiding.
Covert bigotry absolutely exists in society and needs to be surfaced and confronted. However, it is far murkier, contradictory and context-dependent than overt discrimination, and requires more nuance than a keyboard activist on X/Twiter. Because it is covert, it can never be fully seen or defined, and this creates the kind of atmosphere where, like the secret police in East Berlin, it is ever-present in our minds. It is also a vehicle through which people can seek their own power under the guise of helping the oppressed.
When we listen to stand-up like Andrew Dice Clay’s, and compare it to the case of Amélie Wen Zhao’s debut fantasy novel being pulled because of Twitter activists falsely claiming that it was racist, it’s easy to see that they’re not the same thing.
People in liberal democracies don’t live in an environment like communist Berlin, but we do live with a pervasive uncertainty about what is acceptable. However, the cultural landscape has changed over the last few years, and for Taylor, one reason cancel culture is on the decline “is that Twitter's influence has waned. We've moved away from text and it's all about video now. It can still happen, but I think it's much less of a kind of feeding frenzy because Twitter is basically designed for arguments.”
It’s also become less appealing to younger generations. In some ways, this has freed up comedy to be more inventive and daring. This might be great for comedy fans like me, but does it matter for the world at large? Can more daring comedy actually lead to cultural change?
Laughter Will Save Us
To answer that, we need to look more deeply at why we laugh, and what’s happening when we do. There are many theories about humour, but one of the most compelling is that we laugh because of something called ‘frame-shifting’. We start out with a particular frame on the world, a way we’re seeing reality, but a joke can suddenly shift us to a new possibility. For example, “Everyone had so much fun diving from the tree into the swimming pool we decided to put in a little water.” Our frame for jumping into a pool always includes water, and the joke comes from the reveal that the frame we held was wrong, which makes the new one surprising and absurd.
Comedy can be a way to cut through our existing certainties about the world and offer us new possibilities. It’s direct, fun and effective. As Communications scholar L. David Richies argues, “Humor and irony often serve core communicative purposes in subtle and multifaceted ways that place them, alongside metaphor and metonymy, at or near the center of our theoretical attention.” Humour is particularly powerful because it stands out in our minds in a way that other things don’t.
Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke argues that ‘breaking-frame’ is essential for overcoming the kind of cognitive biases that keep us trapped in false certainties and polarised political positions. As he points out, a core aspect of being human is that the very thing that makes us intelligent - our ability to determine what’s relevant from everything calling for our attention - also makes us prone to self deception. Practices like meditation and inquiry can help us decrease this self-deception helping us take a step back from what we think we know - ‘looking to’ our frame instead of ‘looking through it’. By doing this we can break our old certainties and choose new perspectives more in tune with reality.
Research suggests that humour does something similar, and as such we can see comedy as an art form with the potential to give us a clearer view on the world. That doesn’t mean the jokes themselves lead us to insight, though they may. It means the process of engaging with humour and its unique cognitive effects can lead to greater cognitive flexibility, making us more open-minded and flexible in way that applies to other areas of our lives. In short, humour loosens us up.
Comedy is particularly fascinating because of how it does this; as Gopnik points out, it’s the only art form, aside from pornography, in which success is tied to a physical response. Laughter is incredibly powerful, and there’s a large body of research that suggests laughter plays a key role in social bonding. In a study by Sophie Scott et al, The Social Life of Laughter, the researchers point out that laughter also plays an important role in how we regulate our emotions with one another. They point to two kinds of laughter - evoked and voluntary. Voluntary laughter is a kind of social glue that is also very effective at reducing social tension, whereas evoked laughter (for example at a comedy gig) might be deeply wired into us as a way to signal ‘I want to keep playing’. A growing body of research links play as an essential component in keeping our minds flexible, creative, and in group bonding. When we laugh at a comedy gig together, we’re involved in a unique kind of group play that can break our rigid frames.
But to make someone laugh, you can’t just say ‘your frame is broken’ - you have to invite them to play their way to a new perspective. It has to be performed with skill and finesse. Above all, it has to be funny.
As Taylor put it:
“it's always been the case that if you're talking about a subject that is loaded, you have to justify it, it has to be funny enough. There's a lot of comics now that are trying to basically spice up weak stuff by using the culture war like seasoning… They'll spend the first minute of the joke talking about how “there's no way you can say what I'm about to say”. And if you don't like what I've just said, you're an idiot.
Whereas I'll just say it and trust that if it's funny enough, it'll work. Just fucking say it.
Just say the thing. Like, what are you afraid of? Just do the work so that you can get the thing to work without having to preface it … You’ve got to trust that an audience is there to laugh and they know that context and that, you know, give them that credit.”
As Taylor is alluding to, context is everything in comedy. Ultimately, frame-shifting is a rapid change from one context to another that can liberate our minds. Conversely, online outrage cycles are often driven by people taking jokes out of context, or as Dave Chappelle has lamented, not even bothering to watch the act they’re so angry about.
In his book Games: Agency as Art, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that every art form is a way in which we explore a sense or an aspect of being human. Painting is about sight, music about sound, and games are how we play with agency in that we get to ‘be someone else’ for a while.
Comedy is the art of playing with context. This is vital, because it can pull us out of what I call ‘context absolutism’. A lot of our cultural tensions are driven by this cognitive bias, in which we believe that a single ideology is true all the time. It’s a fallacy because inn any social issue or political situation, there are multiple overlapping contexts, and as Nora Bateson has argued, information changes as it moves across these contexts.
Truth is real, but it is ever-evolving and contextual. Context absolutism is the process of claiming that an idea, belief or theory - for example social justice theory or evangelical Christianity - is true across every single context. All art, but comedy in particular, has the power to pull us out of these cognitive biases and shake, or even break, our absolutist biases. But that isn’t something we can do by ourselves.
Comedy as Ritual
Comedy is, at its heart, a social activity. It also has a ritualistic element to it, one that has echoes of countless other ritualistic activities that create communitas, what Roger Walsh defines as ‘a sense of shared concern, contribution, and humanity’ that we can access through group practices and rituals. Communitas always involves human contact and embodiment. It is essential for a healthy society, and one reason football stadiums and churches exist
When I asked Taylor about the in-person, embodied aspects of stand-up, he shared:
“When I was a kid watching comedians I thought ’Oh, this is the safe space where you get to say all the outrageous stuff because we all agree, there's a societal agreement that ‘this isn’t what we really do out there [in day to day life].
I think that's why comedy clubs look like they do. They're dark, they're underground, your phone doesn't work there. You're trying to mentally escape real life. It's this weird sort of ether where none of the normal rules of social etiquette apply. And that's why a gig is always better if the audience aren't well lit and they don't see each other and they're in the dark, and why there's always that thing of a man wanting to laugh at the joke, but he looks at his girlfriend and he can't, because it doesn’t work if you’re too aware.
The whole reason the comedy club looks like it does is because they're trying to make you lose awareness. You can just laugh like you forget that you are a member of a functioning civil society for an hour … since whatever date, society has sort of adhered to some set of rules. There needs to be these little pockets of dark space where the rules are stretched and bent, but it's agreed that that's not real.”
The Shadows We Share
So we sit together in the dark and laugh at what we won’t look at in the light. Comedy is a form of collective shadow work, a ritual expression that invites us to dance between contexts, break our frames and play with new ones. Its power lies in the twisty, unexpected way it does this. You don’t see the punchline coming, and that’s why it’s funny. Neither do you expect that by laughing together in the darkness you are processing unresolved material in the collective unconscious, transmuting it through your shared vibration into something expansive and joyful, if only for a brief moment.
It is in those brief moments where we can find the inspiration that can lift us out of the culture wars. In a post-truth world increasingly defined by the ethereal whims of our online lives, only embodied ritual can break through and open us up to what’s real again. Laughing together, and letting the hum of it take us to the edge of our collective assumptions, may be the most subversive act we can engage in.
Humor is basically admitting you’re only human in your perspective.
What if what we call God is the eternal frame-breaker? What if He is the one who is constantly shifting our perspective at the precise moment when we are sure we have gotten it right? I believe in the God Who created free will, and there is a free will step in humor: when someone shifts your frame, you can respond in anger and lash back, or you can respond with humility, swiftly admit you’re wrong, and laugh. It takes unconscious humility to laugh. That’s one of the reasons why humor and humility – and dirt – share the same root word. Acknowledging that despite your divine spark, you are made of dirt, might ultimately be the source of both humility and humor.