if the body keeps score, there needs to be a mercy rule

or a half-time or time-outs, SOMETHING

mamoudou n’diaye

Apr 18, 2024

quotes from the week

“he not even a dick, he the whole sporting goods”
“revenge? nah nigga ‘prevenge’ — let’s get in there early”
“become ungovernable, like a middle school classroom”
“inside all of me are two wolves and they both need to be put down”
“non-sequiturs are the powerhouse of the neurodivergent cell”
“some days, i’m the david attenborough of watching Americans learn there is more world than just these 50 states”
“all of these bitches are my sons” queen elizabeth, probably
“come on, eileen.” “pardon, come on who???”
if the body keeps score, how many points is a bbl, just curious
“don’t step to me acting silly — imma knock you clean out those clown shoes”
“we need to add dr. king to the marvel cinematic universe — we’ve got enough to have dr. king in the multiverse of injustice”
what if kendrick puts pusha t and rihanna on the response track

every comedian waits for a call on this phone

🎶 just gimme the light🎶

i had a conversation with a comic – someone i know to be pretty progressive but nothing to write to karl marx about. she was on about being scared to make mistakes or say risky things online or onstage; she confessed that it felt limiting and i wholeheartedly agree. making mistakes and adjusting is literally the entirety of stand up. she is solidly gen z, raised in the generation of anything you say on twitter, tiktok, or your close friends will be used against you in a court of public opinion, a fox news outrage piece, or a buzzfeed listicle written by ai.

the digital ig reel comedy club doesn’t hit the same as being in actual rooms – bombing in the algo not the same as bombing at the apollo. so i sat with it – what’s this pressure? where does it come from? how do i use comedy ?

i’m a writer – i love scene work, multiple perspectives, interpolating and remixing other work and lived experiences. that’s how i see it, as a dj chopping up scenes for maximum entertainment value. with my friends, i use it help smooth over rough moments, keep the vibe alive, and to create a weird space of understanding where my most mentally well-adjusted people can have a blast and my most terminally online mentally ill recovering deviants can trade the last dopamine molecule back and forth.

but that’s me. i don’t feel the pressure my friend did because i’m not on stage that much anymore (and solidly in my 30s) but she’s right. comedy has transformed intertwined with social advocacy and holding together the divide in a culture war in the last 20 years and maybe it’s time to do a little untangling…

comedy, amongst other things, can be used as a tool to combat injustice – i genuinely believe this. however, is it a hammer? is it a screwdriver? is it a black+decker 20V max cordless drill bcd 702C1? is it a bill maher? all of these are technically and historically tools but we gotta get specific.

how should we collectively use comedy?

monocultural messaging

how i see it? comedians should be one thing: funny. and that funniness needs to come from a place of levity (keeping the room rolling), clarity (strong premises, specific yet relatable executions), and punching up (at power, institutions, systems of oppression from the dmv lady to the healthcare system). yes, it’s subjective but objectively comedy is a collective social release where we all look at reality and do the “get a load of this” or “cuckoo” hand signs because of our shared experiences. this might be a hard pill to swallow but we ain’t all living in the same reality

the monocultural monolith that media had on how we see each other is fading. we all have our own digital breakrooms, subjective and niche tastes, algorithms, opinions passed as facts — almost nothing is “four quadrant” anymore – might be why hollywood loves a reboot, trying to bring back the good old days (you can only reheat leftovers so many times tho, more on that another day).

that monolithic monoculture was built on years of american indoctrination into what a family looked like, what drugs would do to your brain, and what was good and what was bad – clearly maaaaad bias and stereotypying there that did damage to many communities that didn’t exist within the consumer framework that hollywood always operates in – white cis hetero “middle class” people. if you know you know. what’s funny to that demo is considered funny to to everyone and…no – anyone who’s survived improv can attest to that, i’m sure… (mad at me for not watching sex and the city but they don’t watch insecure, gtfoh).

marginalized people are getting their lick back tho, don’t sleep; more women, people of color, immigrants, queer, gnc, and trans people are getting the mic to do their jokey jokes and that’s lovely. what’s hard? this “transition” of america (and to a large extent hollywood) into accepting that reality that other worlds exist outside of the limited monocultural framework we’ve been steeped in exposes just how little americans – of all races, creeds, ages, sexualities, religions, and tax brackets – know about each other.

that’s why every immigrant gotta go up there and introduce their whole country to the audience (no middle school geography budget and history? forget about it), that pansexuals can fuck pots too (no sex ed and the gay panic of the 1980s till….now), and feel like they gotta put on for their race (which they don’t, but americans don’t learn on their own very well). we’re putting eyes on people who were left out of chatting their own shit and the culture is shifting (some people don’t like that too much)

newer marginalized voices punching up is powerful and reclamatory — it’s an opportunity to learn and unlearn things about the world we were brought up in as an audience. while this can be exciting, it can also feel like teaching, driving for moral arguments and educational bits to be passed off as jokes which led to the “clapter” epidemic (basically *laughing in an NPR*). i’ve lived it, i’ve been it, and since tried to find ways to divide those parts of my brain.

to me, comedians shouldn’t be moral arbiters, president of the united states, or held to higher standards than politicians who actually are doing the damage we all live through. comedians, by and large, are professional silly people, hooters and hollerers, validation addicts, and are crafting a niche talent to turn pain into pleasure. this being said, there are exactly 7 comedians i would trust with small children or heavy machinery (and only four who i trust with both).

most comedians are just some person with enough confidence and thick skin to weather the brutal conditions of being considered unfunny once and swearing to get back at them on stage every day thereafter. okay, that’s the movie joker…i had a point…

we can’t all be jon stewart

america is como se dice more politically polarized than ever and i draw a direct line to my awareness of this divide really growing during the infamous crossfire episode where jon stewart, america’s jewish uncle, ate up tucker “brother bean pie” carlson and other dude (who i think was erased from existence, no way to disprove this).

“partisan hackery…” it rang through my ears when i looked up the clip again because jon, as usual, was right. the whole conceit of ceasfire was to have two people with ideological differences sit and play dogmatic tennis with one another, to (unrealistically) find common ground — that was 2004.

20 years, later the partisan hackery levels find new upper limits every day and it’s not just relegated to tv screens anymore. it’s in our pockets, on our socials, in our group chats – it forms all of our social behavior, political and social affiliations becoming badges of honor (a lot of them from The Voices Told Me University).

i feel like we lost the plot with jon stewart. let me be clear, that’s my dog – so many of my formative memories in political education came from sitting with my father and watching jon stewart with him at 11:00 and then colbert at 11:30 – i could laugh with my pops and felt like i was learning something, like schoolhouse on the rocks (or something, i don’t drink). i was genuinely happy to see him back at the desk…but what does he do?

jon says it how it is, talks the talk, walks the walk, and the comedy and hollywood establishment cemented him as a voice of reason, a messiah of decency, a sense-ei. he motivated a generation of people to make the personal political and make their voices heard through comedy. all of these mfs are his sons – he gave us colbert, sam bee, jon oliver, klepper, and so many others who got chances to speak their piece.

he held a rally in dc, he fought for bassem youssef to get to the united states, he rides hard for 9/11 victims getting the care they are owed, etc – not for nothing, jon might be the perfect comedian where his onstage and offstage political actions line up and, even without a prompter, we watch him pack up all of these two-faced politicians and say it like it is…but that’s all he can do. and that’s all he can do with millions of dollars, millions of supporters, a whole writer’s room, and being backed up by corporate heavyweights (who also censor him if he gets too much…on the right side of history).

we are not all jon stewart. in a world where the walls always feel like they’re closing in, there’s no need to put that particular pressure on the art form or the comic. your stand-up set, your content, what you want to write about, etc does not need to contain the sum of all human knowledge and inclusivity – all we ask is to be entertained. your regular wingding comic just has themselves, their phone, a streak of narcissistic confidence, and train fare and that’s it. it’s their job up on the stewart level to be more polished but as hungry comics, we gotta get messy, make mistakes, and have fun. okay, that’s ms. frizzle now, the fuck is wrong with me today-

bring back expertise, i beg of you

what do you bring to a fix a series of interlocking, interconnected, inextricable oppressive forces, events, and political policies that locally and globally make every single day a living hell for most and an all-you-can finesse buffet for a few? a comic??? be fucking for real.

comedy is simply the mockingbird in the coal mine; sure, comedy's gonna mock you (i don’t know if this is true about mockingbirds, no way to learn more, unfortch) but comedy alone is not going to get us out of the mine.

i'm not saying that comedy is useless, i love a heehee and a haha – shit, i’ve been known to sneak a snicker and grab a guffaw from time to time. i just think that you also shouldn't bring comedy to a gunfight if that's all you got in the chamber. there's a very good reason that if somebody's having a heart attack no one yells “is there a comedian on the plane” we don’t need dl hughley at a time like this (no hate dl, this is stream of consciousness).

after 2016, everyone and their mama had a comedy show that raised vague awareness for [insert thing we should be mad about here] and the comics booked did not one joke about the topic, just their regular set and left with a drink ticket and this idea that they made a difference. this extended into projects i was attached to, panels i was on, etc — comedians was doing what comedians are programmed to do, get some mf stage time and, shit, I didn’t blame them.

i do not say any of this to shame people but where’s the intentionality? where did the money go? did the awareness reach the people in need? we all want to do our part (especially after trump won) but what did it do but moralize and then vaporize? are we reinforcing a dynamic that makes a marginalized person a spokesperson for their whole community? are we now partisan hacks who are circlejerking morals and messaging instead of jokes?

a comic can be a wonderful communicator but they gotta marinate in the subject longer than a single email with promise of pay. a lot of talk about direct action coming from the world of artists who attack an issue obliquely.

changing with the times

comedy is charming and disarming, it’s medicine in the applesauce, it is trust exercise between an audience and a performer – it’s natural to use this persuasive art form to support public opinion and dissent. that’s why it’s a hard pill to swallow when chappelle’s cadence and comedy makes us all laugh but it makes transphobes laugh harder – it feels like the audience is being charmed into bigotry.

that’s the effect of the fading monoculture meeting the multicultural moment, a lack of exposure to different communities by the audience (and to an extent the comic), and individual responsibility for comics to also get off their own dicks and remember that freedom of speech ain’t freedom from consequences and you can’t be both the self-proclaimed proletarian people’s champ and an inaccessible millionaire. talking some talk but not walking the walk makes the integrity look real shaky.

the responsibility to me is two-fold:

comics who want to be heroes need to learn to live up to all of it or accept that they aren’t scholars
audiences have more choices now than ever in humor – if it ain’t for you, talk your shit, then find your people

reject the hackery, divest from these people, help people in your communities divest as well, and invest in the voices you actually want to hear and laugh at. remember, comedy (any art really) is a trial and error space — if we really truly want anything to get better, we gotta accept we’re going to fumble our way to it — that goes for abolition, healing journeys, building better systems, etc

and most importantly, listen to experts again – people forget the c block of the daily show is jon or trevor or whoever is hosting now talking to a real expert about their expertise. not them taking on every fact as if them seeming like a good person depended on it.

niggas wanna laugh, chortle, a giggle (damn, english got mad words for laughter). comedy is a salve not a solve. i know this intimately because i used my platform to speak about police violence, mental health initiatives, queer safety, climate change, immigrant justice – i’m literally the black kid on a brochure for my actual college (shameful, no shape up days) and have been in the past for YALL (which is a wonderful experience, chock full of comics who are mastering their civic comedic voices) — it’s easy to get lost in the posturing and the posting and forget to have a blast while doing it.

back to the toolbox

so what tool is comedy? a flashlight. when it shines, you either see everything wrong or nothing but it matters what it’s being shined at. comedy is very useful when used strategically but still just a flashlight, shining down on personal takes on personal gripes or up at injustices in a way that points out how ridiculous some of these crumbling institutions are. comics are nothing more than little kids holding a flashlight into the engine of civilization while more qualified people actually do the work to either fix problems or more realistically upcharge all of us for shit we didn’t ask for. there’s a potential symbiosis for sure, one that we’re all in the process of figuring out.

i’m not saying don’t stand up for something, or put your people on, or don’t be political — in fact, fuck you if you don’t. i’m just saying (to both comics and audiences) some people are in positions where they are forklift-certified, ceasefire-certified, and academically certified — real readers and stuff. comics simply shine the light – some lights dimmer than others, and that’s okay, baby, I love a dumb joke. all that matters is we’re shining the light in a way that helps, not hurts. and if you wanna be certified, get certified.

whether we’re being the light, creating it, or using it to illuminate something or someone, comedy doesn’t need to be this cultural third rail. comedy is our collective social coping mechanism right now – as it should be. but let’s not put so much pressure on it as if it was the source or salvation – a light.

and maybe, if done right, that comedic light will reflect our collective humanity at eye level with one another and not from a moral ivory tower or from the depths of our moral decay.

these are just a few of my takes, always learning and growing — love to hear yours in the comments!

there are too many comics for me to name that I feel hit this sweet spot between saying something and saying something dumb but a solid rolodex of these people can be found at https://yesandlaughterlab.com/community/

proper shout out to a few stand-up faves: yedoye travis, roy wood jr, kenice mobley, rufat agayev, pedro salinas, sima sephiri, jay jurden, ahamed weinberg, mohanad elsheiky, electra telesford, ify nwadiwe, niles abston, sydnee washington, petey d’abreu, langston kerman, joyelle nicole johnson, jes tom, joey clift, wilfred padua, joey dardano, will miles, gabe gonzalez, murf meyer, woody fu, nataly aukar, lorena russi, angel yau, and like 20 more that will come to my mind later and i’ll feel bad about forgetting.