Comedy specials

When I was coming up with my original list of movies to watch, I saw that Robert Townsend had directed Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987). I had seen the clip about Bill Cosby criticizing Eddie Murphy for using bad language of course, but I had really not watched any comedy since they quit having the standup spotlight on VH-1. That felt like a gap.

After some looking at my options, I ended up also watching Richard Pryor... Here and Now (1983, directed by Richard Pryor), The Original Kings of Comedy (2000, directed by Spike Lee), and The Original Latin Kings of Comedy (2002, directed by Jeb Brien).

(Jeb Brien is really more of a music video guy, but you shouldn't need a lot of direction for a comedy special. I did like the "Low Rider" segment, but see, that was kind of music video-ish.)

I didn't laugh nearly as much as I'd hoped to. 

Of course, comedy is often very contemporary, and may not age well, except that I know bits that have, from a few different comics. I would still be laughing at old Bill Cosby records if he hadn't ruined that by being a rapist. 

Well, that might relate.

That's not saying that all of the comics are terrible people, either, but they weren't always punching up, at least; lots of homophobia. 

Some of it was really sad. When Eddie Murphy was talking about breaking his engagement because of being unable to trust that he wasn't being used, and the people wanting to pick fights now that he's famous... sometimes I cringed for him and sometimes I just felt really sorry for him.

I think I could really enjoy listening to Bernie Mac now if he were still alive and doing comedy. That makes me sad in a different way.

As it was, my favorite moment was with Richard Pryor. People in the audience were handing him different objects to riff on, and someone handed him a live hermit crab. Pryor did talk to the creature, imagining its thoughts, but he also made sure to have someone put it somewhere safe, remembering that it was a living creature. There was a tenderness that touched me.

Putting all of them together made me wonder if there was really a good place for comedy, with all the self-loathing it seemed to thrive on.Maybe that is not the best way to get our entertainment.

Except, even though there are a lot of things I can't find funny, I laugh all the time. I have done comedy sets here and there, and it was only really self-loathing once. People still laughed, a lot, but people laughed when it wasn't coming out of terrible pain too. I know that it's possible, but the trend often seems to be comics who may have too much self-hatred or too little integrity or some combination that makes it impossible for them to condemn serial sexual predators.

I might still be wondering about it, but I finally started that free Netfllix trial. That's how I watched The Social Dilemma, and that's how I watched Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018, directed by Madelaine Parry and Jon Olb).

Wow.

I remember reading about how it was the future of comedy, but also that it announced Gadsby's retirement. Yes, I remember the obligatory jokes about how could it then be the future, like it couldn't possibly mean that other comics would move in that direction. 

I don't know if they will, but they should.

If you haven't seen it - and reading about it is no reason not to - apparently a lot of Gadsby's previous humor was based on her coming out, and being a lesbian and mining the humor from that. She did still talk about that, and worked in her art history background really well, but she gave a fuller picture, with things she had previously kept hidden. The story about a man starting to beat her up because he thought she was a man hitting on his woman, then realized his error and apologized because he didn't hit women... there is humor to that, though it is humor with an ugly side. But there's more.

Keeping it a joke meant not telling the rest of that story, where he beat her up anyway because she was a lesbian, and not very feminine, so hitting was okay. 

There were a lot of stories and a lot of laughs, but there was also raw emotion, and a realization that she had frozen her trauma to be able to get laughs from it, and the reason she needed to leave comedy was to heal.

That was powerful on its own, but while I was finding it, I saw another special. I wondered what her previous shows were like, for comparison, so I planned to watch it.

It wasn't previous.

Hannah Gadsby: Douglas (2020, directed by Madeleine Parry)

It was new, and it was funnier. 

It was still meaningful. It still made good use of the art history background. It was still personal as she went over getting a late autism diagnosis and some of the misconstrued evidence along the way. 

Masterful job of managing audience expectations.

And also, for all the fun we could have listening, I bet it was more fun for her too. 

It's not that her past pain didn't inform her art, but she didn't have to drag around the extra baggage of unhealed wounds. 

Who knew?

If that's not the future of comedy it should be.