Review of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" by Lou Perez
Politics is downstream of culture, as Breitbart said, and few artists are as involved in culture day to day as comedians. Their very livelihood depends on them meeting rooms full of complete strangers in strange cities and correctly gauging the zeitgeist’s pulse at that time and place.
As comedian Lou Perez observes in his book, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: on the Death and Rebirth of Comedy (2022), when mainstream Saturday Night Live in 2016 produced a humorless skit to lament Donald Trump's election, culture was in for a bumpy ride. Even after the “correct” candidate won in 2020, that ride is far from over.
When the world sorely needed some humor in the wake of government’s lockdowns robbing us of social and economic safety nets, certain cultural influences wanted to carp about whether unseen voice actors had skin colors close enough to the cartoons they were voicing. Comedy troupes cared less about being funny and more about whether their comedians were “representative enough” to entertain the public. Instead of taking jokes on their merits, the social peanut gallery began to evaluate jokes depending on whether their teller was “punching up or punching down” on the target in terms of the hierarchy of historical oppression.
Perez’s "That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore" takes on several other cultural polemics like transgenderism, “left cover” in journalism, and immigration, but what I personally love about this work is its glimpse into the life of a professional comedian. On stage we only see the polished result of “jokecraft” without realizing that behind the laughter is a fair amount of tears when the same material a few tweaks rawer, bombs on another room. This book impressed on me the admirable fact that comedy is a lifelong journey in which comedians are always honing their “voice” in the jokes they tell. Hopefully this book will improve our society as the audience so that we care less about the comedian's intersectionality and more about the jokes themselves.
Originally published via Facebook on December 3rd, 2022.
