Can We Take a Joke? is a piercing inquiry into the tug-of-war between freedom of speech and off-color standup comedy. Ted Balaker’s brief but pithy documentary pushes past the partisan caricatures—aggrieved neckbeards on one side, flush in their unchecked privilege; humorless lefty church ladies on the other, insulated by liberal arts curricula from real world woes—and discovers a knotty, fascinating history of democracy, satire and individual rights in the Western world. Compelling cases abound across the spectrum as a wealth of contemporary thinkers debate the ethics of comedy and free speech liberties passionately but in good faith, blessedly free of the usual moral certainties.
Gotcha! In actuality, Can We Take a Joke?, the movie equivalent of your uncle’s “PC police” rant, isn’t really interested in any of that. It’s unequivocally convinced that no, we can’t take a joke, that this is a recent development and, as a result, our Republic is deeply imperiled. It celebrates willful offensiveness as itself a celebration of democratic principles and considers any compromise a grave indignity. The opening credits set the tone: over bogusly grainy footage of Jimmy Kimmel, Jonah Hill, Giuliana Rancic, and Don Imus eating crow after very public slips of the tongue, a no-name indie band whines the refrain, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
There’s something deeply nostalgic here that only adds to the avuncular tone. Balaker’s film longs for a world before public apologies and the regular “outrage” that prompts them. The assembled talking heads, a mix of standup comics and free speech advocates, are conspicuously middle-aged and the specter of Lenny Bruce is summoned at length to lend their cause a martyr. From the late ‘50s through the late ‘60s, Bruce pushed Borscht belt-style blue comedy into uncharted territory of both vulgarity and social critique. To give polite society the vapors was a political act, according to Bruce, and when multiple obscenity arrests and an eventual conviction drove him to an opiate overdose in 1966, he became a patron saint for the decade’s surging counterculture.
Considering it was largely on college campuses where this counterculture thrived, Balaker looks to their modern day counterparts with renewed anguish. How could the sites of the last generation’s civil libertarian groundswell have given way to a wave of restrictive speech codes? What would Mario Savio say about safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions? This being about comedy, Can We Take a Joke? focuses on two case studies of the hostility towards its practice at American universities in particular: playwright Chris Lee’s staging of the satirical Passion: The Musical at Washington State University and stand-up comic Sal Rodriguez’s controversial routines at Reed College.
The film’s portrayal of Rodriguez is revealing. As Balaker tells it, Rodriguez, a Mexican-American raised in South Central Los Angeles, joined the racially diverse, openly profane program at the Reed College Comedy Club with the intention of needling Reed’s overwhelmingly White, reputedly hypersensitive student body. When Rodriguez goes on an extended abusive rant one night after an irate heckler interferes with his performance, he’s framed as simply “losing his patience” with someone who overstepped her bounds. What the film doesn’t show is what led to these paroxysms. By multiple accounts, part of Rodriguez’s shtick was to lambaste his audience when they appeared insufficiently provoked by his transgressions. “You should be fucking outraged and you’re fucking sitting here like a bunch of little bitches,” he’s quoted as saying one night in the Reed College Quest. Far from derailing him, the heckler was giving him exactly what he had asked for.
He was, in other words, a self-styled provocateur, as was Bruce and as are Gilbert Gottfried and Lisa Lampanelli, featured prominently among the film’s interviewees. Whatever you might say about either’s bona fides as a certifiably funny person, they incontrovertibly exist in ecosystems to which offended parties make necessary contributions. Consider shock jock con man Milo Yiannopoulos, whose “Dangerous Faggot” college tour actively courts its own banishment to prove its point that college students are too easily offended: if not for annoyed left-liberals, his shtick would cease to be.
Can We Take a Joke? doesn’t touch Milo and steers clear of the back-and-forth over rape jokes its interviewee Jim Norton, among others, has engaged in, likely because neither makes a terrific case for free speech’s urgency. Instead the film argues that activating stereotypes, slinging slurs and other forms of offensiveness-qua-offensiveness can be therapeutic. (This is more convincing when Karith Foster discusses teaching college students how to use racist, sexist and homophobia against itself in comedy, less so when the “Queen of Mean” Lampinelli vamps for her loyal fans.) Echoing Bruce, Balaker suggests that putting touchy words into play dulls their power, making it a necessary part of social progress. “Social justice warriors,” which the film studiously avoids calling its targets no matter how much it clearly wants to, obstruct this progress for a superficial sense of righteousness, according to Norton, which has only intensified with the rise of social media.
Listen, there are real critiques to be made along these lines. Colleges that put sanctions on speech deemed to do “harm”—a de rigeur metric with endless pliability—can and do trespass on First Amendment rights of their students. Like the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, whose president Greg Lukianoff also speaks in the film, sues administrators like those at Washington State, who provided instructions to the students who disrupted Lee’s play (and went off script to threaten his cast members). It seems awfully dissonant to continue taking college campuses for granted as microcosms of American democracy if comedy performance, an artistic medium with often complex codes of irony, is curtailed by appeals to institutional authority. It’s also a sad reflection of the narrowed horizons of political action that these appeals, whether by empowering the already bloated college administrative class or getting relative nobodies like Justine Sacco fired for inopportune Tweets, pass muster as making a real difference.
But Can We Take a Joke? fails to persuade because it refuses to engage any of its imagined opponents in good faith. (The cheap After Effects editing doesn’t help either.) Not a single voice is heard from the other side except in archival footage or social media screencaps; all the better for narrator Christina Pazsitsky to sneer at them as pampered petty tyrants. The film depends upon a stereotype of credulous prudes that may as often be true as it is offset by people like Rodriguez’s heckler, who, contrary to what Balaker suggests, knew exactly what he was up to and seemed to know she was falling into his trap but had simply lost her patience with his tireless mission to piss everyone off. No doubt that many in her shoes genuinely don’t value the art of joke-telling and only would begrudgingly allow for its existence if it ran afoul of her taste. But even they don’t always seek out extralegal censorship. Everything up until that point is just criticism.
This, really, is the more damning omission on Balaker’s, and your uncle’s, part. Calling attention to comedy’s capacity for hurt is often more attentive than the laissez-faire position to comedy’s mechanics: who it targets, what it says, how it says it, and on whose behalf. There’s a lot more that can be said about why the discourse of standup comedy and Twitter jokes draws a lot more ire than narrative TV and film comedy, which circulates racist and sexist tropes just as vigorously, and is just as much of a (white) boy’s club, the belabored diversity of the film’s talking heads notwithstanding. The focus on standup likely has something to do with the medium itself and how it positions audiences vis-à-vis performers, but this sort of analysis is outside Balaker’s scope.
If a lot of this criticism has blind spots, so too does the compulsion to reduce the inability to find something funny to an anti-democratic moral defect. Indeed, Can We Take a Joke?‘s defensive posture suggests a subpar insult comic unwilling to admit he might just not be very funny. The freedom to point that out is just one of the many inconvenient features of the right to free speech.
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