The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy

By Patrice A. Oppliger

This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030372149

Book preview

Part IDarkness from the Outside

© The Author(s) 2020

P. A. Oppliger, E. Shouse (eds.)The Dark Side of Stand-Up ComedyPalgrave Studies in Comedyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_1

Introduction: Come to The Dark Side

Eric Shouse¹   and Patrice A. Oppliger²  

(1)

School of Communication, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

(2)

Department of Mass Communication, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Eric Shouse (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Patrice A. Oppliger

Email: [e-mail]

January 5, 2015: Dylan Avila was hosting a comedy show at a bar in a suburb of Seattle when a menacing-looking man, Steven James Baldwin, stepped forward from his hiding place backstage. The man raised an aluminum baseball bat and swung at Avila’s head. A moment later, the stage was covered in blood. Avila was hit twice in the skull, suffering a double concussion. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital where doctors performed emergency surgery, closing Avila’s wounds with 20 staples and inserting two titanium plates in his head. According to James Taylor, a fellow comedian who helped subdue the attacker, Baldwin was swinging again. I mean, he had every intention of trying to kill him. Fortunately for Avila, several onlookers, including Taylor, rushed the stage and tackled Baldwin in the nick of time. It appears the brutal attack was motivated by revenge. Avila had banned Baldwin from performing at his weekly open mic night after Baldwin signed in as Jesus Christ and put on a performance involving a Bible and sex toys that the owners of the venue felt was obscene (Hopperstad, 2015).

Three years later, Steven James Baldwin, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ of Comedy,¹ is serving a ten-year prison sentence for assault with a deadly weapon. Meanwhile, Dylan Avila continues to deal with the long-term repercussions of his traumatic brain injury. The 39-year-old father of three who works as an advertising executive for Microsoft by day has struggled to put his life back together in the wake of the brutal attack. In the comedian’s own words, I’m not physically the same . . . I crash hard every day . . . I’m more emotional now (cited in Condran, 2018). Despite these obstacles, Avila has somehow managed to maintain his sense of humor. On January 6, 2018, the stand-up comic performed a one-man show at the Rendezvous Theater in Seattle about the night he was attacked. The show was called, My Turn at Bat.

As Dylan Avila’s experience reveals, stand-up comedy can be both the cause of a comedian’s distress and a means of coping with it. Since Norman Cousins first described using humor as a form of pain relief in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (1979), an enormous amount of research promoting the positive benefits of humor and laughter has been published. Notable titles include Allen Klein’s (1989), The Healing Power of Humor, Herbert M. Lefcourt’s (2001), Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly, and Paul McGhee’s (2010), Humor: The Lighter Path to Resilience and Health. For almost 40 years, now humor has been hyped by psychologists and others as a powerful source of healing and well-being. A large professional organization, the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, exists to champion the transformative power of healthy humor. Its members promote humor as an antidote to (indeed, a panacea for) what ails us (Lewis, 2006, p. 7), which suggests a strange paradox: If humor is so wonderful, why are most stand-up comics so damn miserable? (At least, that is the stereotype regularly promoted in the popular press, about which more shortly.)

The Incongruity of Tragicomedy

Mark Twain reportedly said, humor is tragedy plus time, a sentiment so popular that variations on the theme have been attributed to Steve Allen, Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce (Greengross, 2012; O’Toole, 2013). The expression, in slightly different forms, became a cliché because it so elegantly explains the alchemy of the comedian. The comedian mines pain and tragedy and conjures humor and laughter. This book is about the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy; we are intrigued by the idea that great comedy often comes from dark places.

To explore the dark side requires a willingness to live with incongruity and paradox. As Spitzberg and Cupach (1998) commented in The Dark Side of Close Relationships, The study of the dark side often ends up blurring the distinction between good and evil or the bright and the dark of the human condition (p. xvi). The metaphor of the dark side is especially fitting for conceptualizing stand-up comedy because humor depends upon a unique form of incongruity. As Paul McDonald (2010) noted, Incongruity theories of humour suggest that incongruities are amusing only when they are in some way appropriate: they are funny when they can be reconciled on one level or another (p. 31). Comedians experience darkness in their personal lives; some adopt dark personae; others develop stage acts that revolve around a variety of dark topics. However, at some point, those various forms of darkness must be reconciled with light and wit for humor to result. If not, there is only tragedy.

Unfortunately, the fundamental paradox underlying humor—that pain and tragedy often beget humor and laughter—has often been resolved rather simply in books and articles about stand-up comedians. In the popular press, comedians are regularly cast as maudlin characters who transform pain into laughter to avoid confronting the pain. Journalists and biographers find the myth of the troubled comedian virtually irresistible. Read almost any interview with or biography of a contemporary comedian and you will detect, suggests Andrew McConnell Stott (2010), the inevitable questions that seek to understand why the subject is drawn to laughter, hoping to unearth some explanatory bullying, neglect, or the tragic death of a parent (p. 322). And thanks to the ubiquity of these questions, anecdotal evidence abounds: Chevy Chase recalled waking up in the middle of the night to violent physical abuse and being locked in the bedroom closet for hours at a time as a form of punishment (Force, 2011). Russell Brand was molested by a tutor at seven, was bulimic by 14, and had left home and was abusing drugs by 16 (Force, 2011). Carol Burnett lived in a household with two parents who suffered crippling alcoholism (Francis, 2013). Chelsea Handler often felt ignored by her parents and wondered why they even had her (Handler, 2010, p. 20). A stranger in an alley slashed Tina Fey’s face when she was in kindergarten (Fey, 2011, p. 8). Sarah Silverman wet the bed—a condition she suffered from past her 16th birthday (2010, p. 16). Stephen Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers at age ten in an airplane crash. As a result, Colbert reported becoming socially withdrawn when the weight of the tragedy caught up with him during his college years (Force, 2011; Welch & Lovell, 2015).

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that vivid examples like the ones above tend to be far more influential in shaping our opinions than abstract information, even when that abstract information is more accurate (Goode, 2002; emphasis ours). Most of us, it seems, prefer a good story to statistical analysis even when that statistical analysis paints a more accurate picture of the world. This inclination is particularly troublesome in this case, as there is good reason to believe most comedians have relatively normal childhoods. In a study that compared the childhood experiences of 31 professional comedians and 400 undergraduate students, Greengross, Martin, and Miller (2012) found that the parents of professional comedians and the parents of university students were similar in terms of their level of care and protectiveness. Unfortunately, that study has received far less attention than stories about the difficult childhood experiences of popular comedians.

In a piece for the Huffpost, Mark Liebenow (2017) commented, Behind the laughter of many of the comedians we love, there are tears. Their brilliance in being able to make us laugh is often rooted in anguish or unhappy childhoods. The owner of the Laugh Factory comedy club, Joey Masada, echoed the sentiment, noting that, Eighty percent of comedians come from a place of tragedy. They didn’t get enough love. They have to overcome their problems by making people laugh (cited in McGraw & Warner, 2014). The story goes that the uniquely troubled childhoods of most comedians lead inevitably to adult dysfunction. As Nathan Rabin (2010) suggested in a commentary for The Wall Street Journal about Jay Leno’s writers, Funny people drink too much. They squander their money. They use drugs. They’re prone to depression, insomnia and mental illness, to tumultuous relationships and serial divorces. And we all know where that leads. Drug addiction and overdose (Lenny Bruce, Greg Giraldo, Mitch Hedberg, John Belushi, Chris Farley) and suicide (Freddie Prinze, Richard Jeni, Robin Williams) have both taken the lives of well-known comedians.

In the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide, Dana Gould wrote a piece for Rolling Stone. The stand-up comedian known for his work with The Simpson’s suggested, being a comedian means knowing a lot of people who’ve committed suicide…. Five of my friends and fellow comedians have taken their own life. It’s shocking, but, sadly, not surprising (Gould, 2014). Not surprising, according to Gould, because the same brain that makes the good stuff makes the bad stuff. Gould compared successful comedians to the likes of Darwin, Mozart, and Hemmingway, and argued that it’s obvious to even the casual observer that our greatest minds were housed in brains that behaved very badly. While that dubious claim obviously passed muster with the editors at Rolling Stone, the myth of the mad genius has been squarely criticized in the academic literature on the subject (e.g., Dietrich, 2014; Schlesinger, 2012). As Schlesinger (2012) argued, The entire thesis of the highly-gifted mentally ill rests entirely on an unholy marriage of case reports and anecdotal storytelling (p. 1). In other words, the idea that clinically depressed, drug-addicted, mentally unstable people have an edge in a competitive field like stand-up comedy is likely the product of little more than a hasty generalization fallacy.

But what if we are wrong? What if stand-up comedians are the unstable products of unhappy childhoods who drink and abuse drugs and are incapable of meaningful long-term relationships? What if the same brain that makes the good stuff does make the bad stuff? For the sake of argument, we will—as a thought experiment only—concede that comedians have uniquely dark minds. Having done so, we ask: How do generalizations about the dark minds of comedians inform us about Dylan Avila’s experience? Does it matter whether he had a happy childhood? Or whether he suffered from depression before he was almost beaten to death with a baseball bat?

Comedians experience darkness in different ways. For example, it is noteworthy that none of the victims of suicide or drug overdose mentioned previously were women. We are unaware of a single female stand-up who could rightly be called a celebrity who has overdosed or committed suicide. While female celebrities are not immune to these forms of darkness—Margaux Hemmingway and Marilyn Monroe committed suicide and Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, and Amy Winehouse all succumbed to drug overdose—the most successful women in stand-up comedy have somehow avoided this fate. In addition, there seems to be a different set of cultural expectations for how female comedians handle darkness. Most male comedians select between two extremes. Either they hide their problems and suffer in silence, or they treat suffering as a competition, joking about the extremity of their hardships. Female comedians, on the other hand, typically foster empathy and seek to find common ground rather than trying to one-up one another.

In Ruby Wax’s 2010 stand-up show Losing It, she shares her experience of clinical depression. She also gave a TED Talk (2012), where she described being institutionalized when she had a breakdown at her young daughter’s sporting event. She goes on to educate the audience about mental illness. Juliette Burton is a stand-up comedian who addresses her mental health issues on stage (acute body dysmorphia, various eating disorders, depression, and anxiety). Burton (2013) stated, I want to be open about all my experiences to challenge the wider perception of mental health problems. I want to be a part of this much-needed dialogue. Maria Bamford has parlayed her bipolar and depression diagnosis into a successful Netflix show, Lady Dynamite. She leans into her tribulations rather than denying or exploiting them. In the first episode, she discloses to her manager that she is on heavy meds after spending six months in a psych ward. She tells him she is going to be less ambitious because she desires balance in her life.

Although women have created compelling comedy about their struggles with mental health, not every tragedy that befalls our comedians, women or men, is a product of their minds. Far too little attention has been afforded to the darkness comedians experience because of the actions of others or the vicissitudes of fate. Take, for example, the almost unbelievable variety of ways darkness entered and altered the life and art of Tig Notaro.

The Dark Sides of Tig Notaro (and Louis C.K)

On August 3, 2012, Tig Notaro opened her stand-up set with the following words: Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi. How are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer (Notaro, 2013).

Louis C.K., who was there that evening, tweeted, In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo. C.K. eventually convinced Notaro to release the recording as an album on his website. It earned her a Grammy nomination. As Notaro later commented in her autobiography, Before the album came out, I was a relatively successful comedian, but I was not a household name. Within hours after the album came out, I was in the spotlight with incoming offers for press and work on a level I’d never had (2016, p. 146). Notaro’s 30-minute audio recording went on to sell more copies on his website than Louis C.K.’s own HBO special (Notaro, 2016, p. 147).

The success of Notaro’s album can partially be attributed to a fascinating loser-wins logic that underlies many of the darker forms of humor, and the genre of stand-up comedy especially. As licensed social critics, comics have always been ‘defective’ in some way, according to Joanne Gilbert (2004), whether physically deformed and kept as favored ‘pets’ in the courts of old or simply as members of disenfranchised groups in contemporary culture, the more marginal the performer, the greater the comic ‘capital’ available to him or her (p. 24). The best contemporary stand-ups capitalize on their marginality by oscillating between displays of mastery and vulnerability (c.f., Limon, 2000). Stand-up comedy persists as an art form despite the overwhelming amount of humorous material that can be consumed at home because it carries a degree of risk that is exciting to witness first hand. Audiences enjoy watching stand-ups walk the tight rope. They especially like it when a comedian like Notaro begins to fall, but then somehow miraculously catches herself at the last instant. There are moments in Notaro’s performance at Largo where the pain overwhelmed certain members of her audience:

On the recording, you can hear audience members taking the news [of the numerous tragedies that befell her in a period of fewer than four months] badly—one of them sounds like a wounded puppy—and each time, Notaro reacts to their reactions. Are you going to be O.K.? she asks one woman. At one point, Notaro apologizes: I really don’t mean to bum you guys out…. What if I just transitioned right now into just silly jokes? No, an audience member insists. This is fucking amazing. (Marantz, 2012)

In the hands of a lesser performer, someone without the experience to react to the reactions and transform the stunned gasps and awkward silences into laughter, Notaro’s set might simply have been tragic. After all, her autobiographical comedy material consisted almost entirely of a litany of tragedies.

In a period of fewer than four months, Notaro was diagnosed with a potentially deadly disease. C-diff is an overgrowth of the Clostridium difficile bacteria, which attack the intestinal lining, and it can kill you (Notaro, 2016, p. 55). While she was just out of the hospital, and still in a great deal of pain, Notaro received news that her mother had fallen and was brain dead. I had lost so much weight my pants were falling off; I had diarrhea every ten minutes; and now I was choosing what to wear to my mother’s funeral while she was still alive (Notaro, 2016, p. 64). She watched as her mother was taken off life support and was with her when she died. Shortly after, Notaro and her girlfriend broke up. Then, she was diagnosed with Stage 2, bilateral breast cancer. Finally, in a period of nine days, motivated by the thought that it would likely be her last performance, Notaro transformed these tragic experiences into the stand-up set at Largo that became the album Live. (The title is a dark joke.) "I named the album Live, as in the verb that means to keep not dying, in part because of the material, but also because I enjoyed the idea of correcting people whenever they pronounced it wrong" (Notaro, 2016, p. 145).

As improbable as it sounds, there was more darkness to come—this time in the form of betrayal. During an appearance on Saturday Night Live on April 8, 2017, Louis C.K. appeared in a sketch that plagiarized Notaro’s short film, Clown Service. Notaro told The Hollywood Reporter, "It has been impossible for me to ignore the cacophony of voices reaching out personally and publicly about the potential plagiarizing of my film Clown Service…. While I don’t know how [it] … happened, I did find it extremely disappointing" (cited in Stanhope, 2017). Then the accusations about C.K.’s sexual misconduct began to surface. The person who had helped to put Notaro in the national spotlight, and who was listed as an Executive Producer during the first two seasons of her television show One Mississippi , finally admitted to having coerced numerous women into watching him masturbate. His public confession came shortly after The New York Times ran a story chronicling the allegations of five different women (Itzkoff, 2017).

Notaro’s (2016) biography included some dark childhood memories. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Her mother drank heavily and was unreliable. Her stepfather was emotionally unavailable. As we read these facts we were reminded of Jerry Seinfeld, who when asked whether comedians were uniquely depressed quipped, There are [also] a lot of unhappy people driving bread trucks, but when it’s a comedian people find it very poignant (cited in Nachman, 2003, p. 36)—Notaro’s backstory provides a poor explanation for her remarkable ability to transform pain, loss, and betrayal into popular entertainment. The comedian’s childhood experiences are only one chapter, and certainly not the most important, in the dark side of her life and art. To understand the different shades of darkness experienced by comedians like Dylan Avila and Tig Notaro requires a map that covers terrain beyond whatever psychological peccadilloes they may or may not share as fellow comedians.

The History of Dark Comedy: From Whence the Darkness Comes

Despite the amount of scholarly interest in the subject, the concept of dark humor has remained relatively ill-defined. The research literature doesn’t [even] draw a clear distinction between sick humor and black humor, with numerous scholars commenting on the intersections between sick and black humor as well as gallows humor (Beerman, 2014, p. 692). Different writers use the term to mean humour which is variously grotesque, gallows, macabre, sick, pornographic, scatological, cosmic, ironic, satirical, absurd or any combination of these (O’Neil, 1983, p. 145). In one sense, dark humor can be traced back to the beginning of recorded time—to the ribald insults and profane acts performed each year to resurrect the ancient god Baal. The Phoenician god would be buried each year (in the form of an idol), only to overcome death and be awakened by a variety of profane acts. In those ceremonies, taboos of speech and decorum were broken and death itself was mocked, as also happened in the Roman Saturnalia festivals, and in the medieval Feasts of Fools that followed this broad cultural pattern (Bakhtin, 1984; Legman, 2006). Although some scholars object to such a long view of the subject (e.g., Schulz, 1973), others have detected dark humor in the nervous laughter elicited by Aristophanes, Juvenal, Petronius, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais, de Sade, Swift, and Voltaire (Pratt, 1993, p. xxi).

In the modern era, the surrealist poet and artist Andre Breton was the first to edit a compilation of dark humor in 1940 entitled, Anthologie de l’humour noir. In the preface to the 1966 edition of that text, Breton claimed he coined the term humour noir [black humour], which he argued did not exist prior (cited in O’Neil, 1983, p. 149). That compilation included a wide range of authors including the Marquis de Sade, Poe, Lewis Carrol, Nietzsche, and Kafka. This sort of literary black humor shares an obvious family resemblance with the dark side of stand-up comedy. However, as opposed to American black humorists of 1960s such as Barth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon—writers who are universally agreed to be comic writers, funny, mirth-provoking—many of the authors in Breton’s collection tend to evoke horror rather than mirth (O’Neil, 1983, p. 151). Therefore, while it is possible to find traces of the dark side of contemporary of stand-up comedy in rituals, literature, and performances going back to antiquity, we would locate the genesis of the dark side of American stand-up comedy much more recently.

Two cultural shifts occurred in the 1960s that enabled stand-up comics in the United States to develop a performative dark side. The first was the shift from impersonal joke-telling to performances that depended upon the specifics of performers’ daily lives off stage (Daube, 2012, p. 60). The second was a nihilistic sensibility that helped to spawn a variety of forms of dark humor in both literature and stand-up comedy. The combination of these shifts ensured that American humor would never be the same and helped make possible many of the darker forms of stand-up comedy that audiences enjoy today.

A new style of stand-up comedy became popular in the 1960s that was far more personal and improvisational than was typical of comedy in the vaudeville era. More than any other comic, Mort Sahl (b. 1927) pioneered this new style of entertainment:

When Sahl premiered in December of 1953 at the San Francisco nightclub the hungry i, his casual dress and conversational style signaled a sharp break from the traditional tuxedoed nightclub comedian. Donning a sweater, Sahl consciously evoked the guise of a graduate student from neighboring Berkeley. The conspicuous newspaper tucked under his arm indicated an intent to occupy the audience with news of the day, and he embraced a colloquial tone more suited to that of a family seated around the kitchen table than that of a professional entertainer and his middle class audience…. This allowed for a closer relationship with the audience…. (Daube, 2012, p. 60)

This more intimate form of address resulted in a shift away from the transposable joke telling of vaudevillian comics, whose material could be delivered by any comedian with the requisite technical skill, to humor contingent on the revelations of the comic’s stream of thought (Daube, 2012, p. 61). According to Woody Allen, Mort Sahl:

Changed the face of an art form…. He was such a skillful performer—so skillful, that nobody thought he was performing, exactly. They thought it was just a guy talking to you…. Everything about him was different. The way he dressed. The way he spoke. His vocabulary. The rhythm of jokes. It didn’t have the same old straight-line, punch-line . . . that old fashioned rhythm. . . all the things that everybody was truly interested in . . . we weren’t really interested in the comic’s mother-in-law, or his inability to find a parking space. We were interested in what Mort Sahl was talking about. You know, the variables of women’s moods, and artistic things, and politics, and the flourishing of psychotherapy at the time. He was just dazzling. (Allen, 2016)

Over time this expressive, personal mode of delivery became the predominant form of stand-up comedy in nightclubs and on television. As Joan Rivers proposed, "Audiences nowadays want to know their comedian. Can you please tell me one thing about Bob Hope? If you only listened to his material, would you know the man? His comedy is another America, an America that is not coming back" (cited in Nachman, 2003, p. 22; emphasis original). After Viet Nam and Watergate, Americans were less interested in well-crafted jokes told by professional showmen. They wanted comedians who would speak to them like human beings, and above all else, they appreciated anyone who had the guts to tell them the truth.

Although Mort Sahl denied being a sick comedian, his informal style of address and pointed social commentary opened the door for properly sick acts like Lenny Bruce. In fact, Hamlin Hill (1968) suggested that the black humorist’s vision was best summed up by Bruce’s comment: Everything is rotten—mother is rotten, God is rotten, the flag is rotten (p. 59). Lenny Bruce, more than any other stage comedian of his era, helped to shape a nihilistic truth-telling at any cost sensibility that continues to influence stand-up comedy today. The sick/black humor that could be found in a strain of American stand-up comedy and literature in the 1960s was unique because, unlike previous forms of satire, it displayed an obvious indifference to ‘reform’ (Hill, 1968, p. 62).

The cry of the black humorists was for honesty rather than change, reform, or perfectibility (Hill, 1968, p. 64). As Lenny Bruce himself put it, "Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is . . . and what should be is a fantasy" (1963/1996, p. 123, emphasis original). American black humorists of the 1960s, whether they were stand-ups like Lenny Bruce and Jonathan Winters, or writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, shared a desire to speak the truth about the cruel absurdities of the modern world—and nothing but the truth (with no extraneous moralizing). As Pratt (1993) suggested:

Although critics have been unable to reach a definitive consensus as to what black humor literature is, two points of agreement stand out: Black humor involves the humorous treatment of what is grotesque, morbid, or terrifying. And while it bitterly ridicules institutions, value systems, and traditions, black humor offers neither explicit nor implicit proposals for improving, reforming, or changing the painful realities on which it focuses. (p. xix)

The shift in stand-up comedy to a more personal style, along with the appreciation among at least some American audiences in the 1960s for this brand of dark, truth-telling comedy, enabled the eventual emergence of a new style of stand-up. Comedians were no longer seen by the public as professional clowns or actors playing roles. They became people like us, with one important distinction—their desire and willingness to boldly speak the truth regardless of the consequences.

The appearance that stand-up comics are telling us the truth is often heightened by their informal style of address. By peppering their speech with obscenity, comedians make us feel they are speaking to us ‘from the heart’ (Seizer, 2011, p. 214). They relate intimate details of their personal lives. As a result, we come to know our comedians. Or, at least, we feel as though we know them. One of the dark sides of stand-up comedy is that in many instances we do not. Comedian Ted Alexandro made this point brilliantly in a recent set at the Comedy Cellar. Referencing the scandals surrounding Bill Cosby and Louis C.K., Alexandro (2018) asked:

Why can’t we just go back to the golden age of comedy? Why can’t we put it behind us? Just return to the golden age? Let Bill go back to being Doctor Huxtable, a gynecologist with access to vaginas and drugs. They say criminals leave clues. I just thought it was a fun family show. I had no idea…. Why can’t we just let Louie go back to writing jokes about how men are the greatest threat to the safety of women? But he doesn’t just write jokes. He walks the walk.

The stakes of this performance were raised, as the previous night Louis C.K. had performed on the very same stage. It was C.K.’s first stand-up set since acknowledging the allegations about his sexual misconduct almost a year prior.

The first irony of Ted Alexandro’s material is that we obviously cannot return to a golden age of innocence. Virtually everyone is aware by now that the Bill Cosby and the Louis C.K. we thought we knew were contrived. Cosby, the lovable family man, and C.K., the guy who struggled despite his demons to respect women, were stage personae. The second and more interesting irony is that Alexandro’s performance relied upon the same tropes (a likable persona and the appearance of genuine truth-telling self-disclosure) that Bill Cosby and Louis C.K. once used to deceive their many fans.

At the end of Alexandro’s six-minute opening bit about Louis C.K. and sexual assault, he said, Alright let’s do that shift. I said what I needed to say for tonight. Maybe some jokes would be nice. Not that these aren’t, but, you know, this is what I walk around thinking all day. And now you’re going to see my comedy act. It was a brilliant piece of rhetoric. The lines got huge laughs by releasing the tension Alexandro built during his six-minute rant about sexual assault. In addition, those same lines promoted an image of himself as a fearless, off-the-cuff, truth-teller (a proper heir to Saint Lenny Bruce). Alexandro’s material felt honest, and wonderful, and revelatory . . . in the same way Bill Cosby and Louis C.K.’s comedy once felt (although for somewhat different reasons).

Stand-up comedy is a medium built on performers using their private lives to craft highly individual personas (Daube, 2012, p. 75). Its intimate mode of first-person address encourages audience members to feel as though they know the person on stage (Horton & Wohl, 1956). In addition to being intrigued by the incongruity of tragedy and comedy, many of the chapters in this volume also address incongruities of persona. The chapters in the second half of the book are especially significant in this regard because fame transforms an audience’s relationship to a comedian and thus shifts the sorts of darkness comedians are likely to experience. As the audience increasingly knows the stand-up comedian through cumulative reputation, the more ‘performance’ aspects of the persona can be dropped, and the potential disjuncture between on- and offstage personality becomes lessened (Brodie, 2014, p. 128). As a result, the dark sides of well-known comedians and lesser-known comedians tend to be quite different. Well-known comedians can express ideas onstage that either are not said specifically for laughter or, if they fail to elicit laughter because they have transgressed in some manner, are not retracted (Brodie, 2014, p. 128). A celebrity comedian’s renowned and well-honed comic persona gives him or her the freedom to delve into darker topics that might cause an audience to turn on someone working his or her way up the ranks. We have divided the chapters in this book to reflect this reality. In the first half of the book, scholars explore the dark sides of celebrity comedians including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Craig Ferguson, Mike Ward, Jim Gaffigan, and Bill Cosby, and Maria Bamford. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and original and likable comic personae.

It’s Not All in Their Heads: The Dark Sides of Stand-Up Comedy

Comedy is a slippery fish, especially dark comedy. The same incident, one that seems comic, looked at from a slightly different angle, can seem horrifying (and of course vice-versa) (Weinstein, 1971, p. 66). Since the 1960s, American comedians have mined personal and collective tragedies, refining those tragedies through artifice and persona into popular entertainment. Unfortunately, one of the fundamental incongruities of stand-up—the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy—has often been resolved rather inelegantly in popular accounts of the lives and work of stand-up comics. Rather than investigate what makes each comedian unique and thinking critically about the different dark sides of stand-up, darkness has often been conceptualized as coming from a single place: Inside the dark minds of stand-up comedians (Dessau, 2012). From this perspective, no matter how much joy comedy brings, stand-up is ultimately tragic because it gives voice to pitiably tragic characters. Rather than resolve the paradox of tragedy and comedy in favor of tragedy, the contributors to this volume take a different approach. Each chapter, in its own way, wrestles with the incongruities of light and dark as they shade the personal lives, personae, and stage acts of stand-up comedians.

In the introduction to The Dark Side of Close Relationships, Spitzberg and Cupach (1998) outlined seven forms of darkness commonly found in interpersonal relationships. These forms of darkness provide a broad topography of the dark side of human relations in general (p. xv). Spitzberg and Cupach’s map of darkness, drawn based upon interdisciplinary research in the social sciences (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998, 2007), is especially useful for conceptualizing the lives and work of stand-up comics who experience the same forms of darkness in their personal lives as other folks, and whose professional lives consist of forming parasocial relationships with audiences (see Horton & Wohl, 1956).

The first of Spitzberg and Cupach’s seven darkness includes the dysfunctional, distorted, distressing, and destructive aspects of human action . . . [which] systematically diminish one’s own (or another’s) ability to function (1998, p. xiv). This darkness includes alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, and, in its most extreme form, suicide (themes addressed in chapters Person, Persona, and Act:​ The Dark and Light Sides of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams, I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die: George Carlin’s Comedic Catharsis, Addiction, Abjection, and Humor:​ Craig Ferguson’s Confessional Stand-Up, An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy:​ How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness, and Stand-Up Comedy and Mental Health:​ Critiquing the Troubled Stand-Up Stereotype, of this volume). The second darkness is comprised of awkward, rude, and disruptive behaviors that violate social norms (p. xiv). This darkness includes heckling, and in extreme cases, physical violence and other deviant and criminal behaviors (see chapters Comedy in the Era of #MeToo:​ Masking and Unmasking Sexual Misconduct in Stand-Up Comedy and Shit Talking and Ass Kicking:​ Heckling, Physical Violence and Realistic Death Threats in Stand-Up Comedy). The third darkness is concerned with exploitation of the innocent (p. xiv). This darkness encompasses cases where comedians were maltreated as children and/or exploited as adults (see chapters Between Goofball and Rebel:​ Steve Martin’s Disney-Styled Comedy, Shit Talking and Ass Kicking:​ Heckling, Physical Violence and Realistic Death Threats in Stand-Up Comedy, and The Ballad of Drunky McCreepster). The fourth darkness is comprised of those aspects of our lives that remain unfulfilled or unappreciated (p. xiv). This darkness includes well-known comedians who achieve fame and fortune but remain unfulfilled in their personal lives. It also includes the far greater number of comedians who risk their physical and mental health in the pursuit of unfulfilled dreams (see chapters Person, Persona, and Act:​ The Dark and Light Sides of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams, An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy:​ How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness, The Ethics of Rape Jokes, and "Picking