Science Proves Louis C.K. is right!

Posted on November 26, 2013 by postroad | Comments Off

New studies show the “equality bias” in kids turns out to be a lot like a famous Louis CK joke about kids and toys

—The comedian Louis C.K. has a routine in which he talks about his daughter’s understanding of fairness. He begins, “My five-year-old, the other day, one of her toys broke, and she demanded that I break her sister’s toy to make it fair.” This would make the sisters equal but the joke here is that something here doesn’t feel right: “And I did. I was like crying. And I look at her. She’s got this creepy smile on her face.”
—Other intuitions about fairness are simpler. Imagine you have two toys and two children, and you give both toys to one child. If the other child is old enough to speak, she will object. She might say “That’s not fair!” and she’d be correct. An even split would maximize the overall happiness of the children — give each child one toy and they’re both happy; divide them unevenly, and the child who gets nothing is miserable, her sadness outweighing the extra pleasure of the child who gets two. But more to the point, it’s just wrong to establish an inequity when you don’t have to.

Things quickly get more complicated. Questions about equality and fairness are among the most pressing moral issues in the real world. For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Is it fair for the most productive people to possess more than everyone else, so long as they had equal opportunities to start with? Is it fair for a government to take money from the rich to give to the poor — and does the answer change if the goal of such redistribution is not to help the poor in a tangible sense, but just to make people more equal, as in Louis C.K.’s story of breaking his other daughter’s toy?

The psychologist William Damon, in a series of influential studies in the 1970s, used interviews to explore what children think about fairness. He found that they focus on equality of outcome, and ignore other considerations. As an illustration, consider this snippet from one of his studies (children are being asked about an uneven division of pennies).

Experimenter: Do you think anyone should get more than anyone else?

Anita (7 years, 4 months): No, because it’s not fair. Somebody has thirty-five cents and somebody has one penny. That’s not fair.

Experimenter: Clara said she made more things than everybody else and she should get more money.

Anita: No. She shouldn’t because it’s not fair for her to get more money, like a dollar, and they get only about one cent.

Experimenter: Should she get a little more?

Anita: No. People should get the same amount of money because it’s not fair.

You see the same equality bias in younger children. The psychologists Kristina Olson and Elizabeth Spelke asked 3-year-olds to help a doll allocate resources (such as stickers and candy bars) between two characters who were said to be related to the doll in different ways: sometimes they were a sibling and a friend to the doll; at other times, a sibling and a stranger, or a friend and a stranger. Olson and Spelke found that when the 3-year-olds received an even number of resources to distribute, they almost always wanted the doll to give the same amount to the two characters, regardless of who they were.

The equality bias is strong. Olson and another researcher, Alex Shaw, told children between the ages of 6 and 8 a story about “Mark” and “Dan,” who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers: “I don’t know how many erasers to give them; can you help me with that? Great. You get to decide how many erasers Mark and Dan will get. We have these five erasers. We have one for Mark, one for Dan, one for Mark, and one for Dan. Uh oh! We have one left over.”

When researchers asked “Should I give [the leftover eraser] to Dan or should I throw it away?” the children almost always wanted to throw it away. The same finding held when researchers emphasized that neither kid would know about the extra eraser, so there could be no gloating or envy. Even here, the children wanted equality so much that they would destroy something in order to achieve it.

I wonder if adults would do the same. Imagine being given five 100 dollar bills, to be placed into two envelopes, with each envelope to be sent to a different person. There’s no way to make things equal, but, still, would you really put the fifth bill into a shredder? The children in the Shaw and Olson studies seem to care about equality a little bit too much, and one might wonder if this single-minded focus is due to their experiences outside of the home. After all, the preschools and daycare centers where American psychologists get most of their subjects are typically institutions in which norms of equality are constantly beaten into children’s heads; these are communities where every child gets a prize and everyone is above average.

This sort of experience probably has some influence. But there are a series of recent studies showing that an equality bias emerges long before school and day care have a chance to shape children’s preferences.

In one of these studies, the psychologists Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian showed 10- and 16-month-olds puppet shows in which a lion and a bear each distributed two multicolor disks to a donkey and a cow. The lion (or the bear, on alternate trials) would give each animal one disk and the bear (or the lion) would give one animal two disks and the other nothing. The children were then shown the lion and the bear and asked, “Which one is the good one? Please show me the good one.” The 10-month-olds chose randomly, but the 16-month-olds preferred the fair divider.

The psychologists Marco Schmidt and Jessica Sommerville did a similar study with 15-month-olds, using actual people instead of toy animals, but again showing a fair division and an unfair division. They found that the 15-month-olds looked longer at the unfair division, suggesting that they found it surprising. (A control study ruled out the explanation that toddlers just look longer at asymmetric displays.)

Other research suggests that children can sometimes override their focus on equality. In an experiment by psychologists Stephanie Sloane, Renee Baillargeon and David Premack, 19-month-olds observed as two individuals playing with toys were told by a third party to start cleaning up. When both individuals cleaned up, the toddlers expected the experimenter to later reward them equally, looking longer if she didn’t. But when one character did all the work, and the other was a slacker who continued to play, babies looked longer when the experimenter rewarded both characters, presumably because they didn’t expect equal reward for unequal effort.

Also, when given an uneven number of resources to distribute, children are smart about what to do with the extra resources. As mentioned above, 6- to 8-year-olds would rather toss away a fifth eraser than have an unequal division between two characters who cleaned a room. But if you just add one sentence ― ”Dan did more work than Mark” — almost all children change their answers. Instead of throwing away the eraser, they want to hand it over to Dan. Remember also the experiment where children got to distribute resources through a doll and, when there was an even number of resources, tended to distribute them equally. The same researchers found that if there is an odd number of resources and children weren’t given the option of throwing one away, 3-year-olds would have the doll give more to siblings and friends than to strangers; give more to someone who had previously given the doll something than someone who hadn’t; and give more to someone who was generous to a third person than to someone who wasn’t.

Young children don’t know everything. Some experiments that I’ve done with the psychologists Koleen McKrink and Laurie Santos find that older children and adults think about relative generosity in terms of proportion — an individual with three items who gives away two is “nicer” than someone with ten items who gives away three — while young children focus only on the absolute amount. And other studies find that our understanding of the factors that can justify inequality — such as luck, effort and skill — develop even through adolescence.

What we do see at all ages, though, is an overall bias toward equality. Children expect equality, prefer those who divide resources equally, and are strongly biased to divide resources equally themselves. This fits well with a certain picture of human nature, which is that we are born with some sort of fairness instinct; we are natural-born egalitarians. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”

Excerpted from “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil,” published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. Copyright © 2013 by Paul Bloom. Reprinted with permission.
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by Paul BloomExcerpted from “JUST BABIES: The Origins of Good and Evil”

The Looney Bin Is Back From The Dead

We just found out through some rigorous research (googled them!) that the Looney Bin Comedy Club has been relocated to 215 No. St. Francis in the Old Town District of Wichita. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until sometime in January of 2014 for the grand re-opening! The Bin has been closed since May of this year and we were deathly afraid we had lost Wichita's one and only comedy club (with a weekly open mic night to boot) as a victim of the still horrible economy! Welcome back guys and gals, we have missed you terribly!  

From Uncle Rick

What Starts with F and ends with K

Posted on September 6, 2013 by postroad | Comments Off

> A first-grade teacher, Ms Brooks, was having trouble with one of her students. The teacher asked, “Harry, what’s your problem?”

> Harry answered, “I’m too smart for the 1st grade. My sister is in the 3rd grade and I’m smarter than she is! I think I should be in the 3rd grade too!”
>
> Ms. Brooks had enough. She took Harry to the principal’s office.
>
> While Harry waited in the outer office, the teacher explained to the principal what the situation was. The principal told Ms. Brooks he would give the boy a test. If he failed to answer any of his questions he was to go back to the 1st grade and behave. She agreed.
>
> Harry was brought in and the conditions were explained to him and he agreed to take the test.
>>
> Principal: “What is 3 x 3?”
>
> Harry: “9.”
>
>> Principal: “What is 6 x 6?”
>
>> Harry: “36.”
>
> And so it went with every question the principal thought a 3rd grader should know.
>
> The principal looks at Ms. Brooks and tells her, “I think Harry can go to the 3rdgrade.”
>>
> Ms. Brooks says to the principal, “Let me ask him some questions.”
>
> The principal and Harry both agreed.
>
>> Ms. Brooks asks, “What does a cow have four of that I have only two of?”
>
>> Harry, after a moment: “Legs.”
>>
> Ms Brooks: “What is in your pants that you have but I do not have?”
>>
> The principal wondered why would she ask such a question!
>>
> Harry replied: “Pockets.”
>>
> Ms. Brooks: “What does a dog do that a man steps into?”
>
>> Harry: “Pants.”
>
>> The principal sat forward with his mouth hanging open.
>
> Ms. Brooks: “What goes in hard and pink then comes out soft and sticky?”
>
> The principal’s eyes opened really wide and before he could stop the answer, Harry replied, “Bubble gum.”
>
>> Ms. Brooks: “What does a man do standing up, a woman does sitting down and a dog does on three legs?”
>
> Harry: “Shake hands.”
>
> The principal was trembling.
>
>> Ms. Brooks: “What word starts with an ‘F’ and ends in ‘K’ that means a lot of heat and excitement?”
>
> Harry: “Firetruck.”
>
> The principal breathed a sigh of relief and told the
> teacher, “Put Harry in the fifth-grade, I got the last six questions wrong… ”
>
>

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July 15, 2013

Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America

By DAN KOIS

When Jack Handey sold his first jokes to Steve Allen in 1977, Allen sent him a letter offering him $100 and telling him his name sounded like a product, not a person. “Say homemakers, take a look at the new Jack Handey,” Allen wrote. “Just the thing for slicing, dicing, mopping, slopping, stamping, primping. . . . ”

The longtime “Simpsons” writer Ian Maxtone-Graham, who worked with Handey at “Saturday Night Live,” recalled that everyone he told about Handey asked if that was a fake name. “I wonder why that is,” Maxtone-Graham said. “I guess because it sounds like, if your car breaks down, you should have a Jack Handey.”

“I hope your article can clear up all the confusion,” Senator Al Franken told me when I contacted him. “Jack Handey is a real person, and he wrote all the ‘Deep Thoughts.’ Not me.”

Jack Handey is a solidly built man of 64 with a swoop of graying hair; when he smiles, his teeth are blindingly white. We were sitting around the island in Handey’s Santa Fe kitchen as his wife, Marta, made huevos rancheros for breakfast. Jack and Marta have been together for 36 years. I asked if he helped out around the kitchen, and he said, “I can cook Cheerios.”

“You can cook a hard-boiled egg!” Marta said brightly.

“I’m getting pretty good at that,” he agreed.

Handey is best known as the writer and performer of “Deep Thoughts,” a series of quasi-philosophical cracked aphorisms that ran on “Saturday Night Live” from 1991 to 1998. The license plate on Handey’s car is DPTHOTS; on the wall of the garage is mounted the plate he purchased initially but never used: DEEPTHT. That’s because the day Handey was screwing it on, Marta’s brother asked, “Why does your license plate say ‘Deep Throat’?”

The four “Deep Thoughts” books hogged bookstore checkout counters for much of the 1990s and sold, in total, about a million copies. Now he has written a novel, his first, titled “The Stench of Honolulu,” available this month. The narrator is a narcissistic borderline sociopath, and the novel’s fictional Honolulu is a smelly hellhole full of ooga-booga natives right out of a 1930s cartoon. Handey is familiar with the real Hawaii; he recounted a memorable trip the couple took to Kauai, in which a beautiful day of snorkeling ended at nightfall with hundreds of cockroaches emerging from every corner of their rental house and swarming over everything they owned. (Handey joked about being nervous that, once the book comes out, he won’t ever be allowed to go back.) The novel also functions as a kind of thought exercise. The exercise is: What if the “Deep Thoughts” guy was a character in a book?

Maria Semple, a writer for “S.N.L.” and “Arrested Development” and the author of the novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” spent a long time on the phone with me trying to explain what it is about Handey’s comedy that makes him different from almost anyone else writing comedy today. “In the rewrite room,” she finally said, “we used to say, ‘It smells like a joke.’ That’s the scourge of comedy these days. It smells like a joke, but there’s no actual joke there. I’m not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone’s laughing, and then you shake it out and you realize, ‘There’s no joke there!’ ” But in Handey’s novel, she said, “I don’t think four lines go by without a killer joke. These are real jokes, man. They don’t just smell like jokes.”

This idea — the notion of real jokes and the existence of pure comedy — came up again and again when I asked other writers about Handey. It seemed as if to them Handey is not just writing jokes but trying to achieve some kind of Platonic ideal of the joke form. “There is purity to his comedy,” Semple said. “His references are all grandmas and Martians and cowboys. It’s so completely free from topical references and pop culture that I feel like everyone who’s gonna make a Honey Boo Boo joke should do some penance and read Jack Handey.”

“For a lot of us, he was our favorite writer, and the one we were most in awe of,” said James Downey, who wrote for “S.N.L.” “When I was head writer there, my policy was just to let him do his thing and to make sure that nothing got in the way of him creating.”

“He was the purest writer,” Franken said. “It was pure humor, it wasn’t topical at all. It was Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”

The humorist Ian Frazier, a friend of Handey’s, told me, “I see Jack as in the tradition of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. He writes jokes that just keep on going. They’re not gonna crash and burn because they’re about Don Johnson, and people forget who Don Johnson was. Jokes are by their nature perishable. If you can write a timeless joke, that’s an incredible thing.”

Handey’s novel continues that quest for the timeless joke. Its paragraph-by-paragraph structure will be familiar to anyone who purchased one of those “Deep Thoughts” books. “The Stench of Honolulu” consists of setup-punch-line bits, each just slightly more off-kilter than you might expect. It’s both extremely funny and, at times, strikingly old-fashioned — to the point that often when I read a joke, rather than laughing, I’d think, I can imagine a time when I would have laughed at this joke. But then there were times I laughed so hard that the person sitting next to me at the pool asked if I was O.K. I told her I was reading a book by Jack Handey. She recognized the name, but said she didn’t realize he was a real person.

One challenge in writing about Handey is that his outward persona is very low-key — aggressively low-key, you might say. “I met Jack when we shared an office at ‘The New Show,’ ” the “Simpsons” writer George Meyer wrote to me. “From his flipped-out writing, I pictured a wild-eyed comedy dervish, muttering and slobbering like the Tasmanian Devil. Instead I found a kind, placid fly fisherman.”

When I visited him in New Mexico, Handey was never less than friendly, but he made a point of telling me how uncomfortable he feels performing in interview scenarios. “I’m not that funny on my feet,” he said. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever tell jokes. They’re just not the pithy one-liners he’s famous for. The most I laughed in our interview was as he explained how he and Frazier once bewildered a fishing guide with an hourlong riff in which they pretended to be registered sex offenders. Handey slipped easily into the riff: “Some of these other so-called sex offenders aren’t even registered. They don’t even have papers! They don’t put the work into it.”

Handey was born in San Antonio; his father, an officer in the Marines, moved the family around quite a bit before they settled in El Paso, where Jack went to high school and college. He lucked out of the Vietnam draft, and his father didn’t pressure him to serve — “You’re not going,” his father sternly told him — and in 1972 he got a job as a newspaper reporter in Santa Fe, where he lived next door to an up-and-coming comedian named Steve Martin. “He’d come over and play his banjo,” Handey said, “and we got to know each other.” Several years later, Handey sent Martin some material, and Martin hired him to help write his “Wild and Crazy Guy” TV special in Los Angeles. Marta, who met Handey in high school in El Paso, moved with him, because she had faith in his comedic talents. “The only reason people bought our high-school paper was to read his hilarious humor column,” she told me. The column was called “Witty Words to Whittle By.”

In 1983, Martin recommended Handey to Lorne Michaels, who hired him to write for “The New Show,” moving him from Los Angeles to New York. “The New Show” didn’t last, but when Michaels took back “Saturday Night Live,” following the Dick Ebersol interregnum of 1981-1985, he sought out Handey again. Handey worked on the show for the next decade, writing the kinds of sketches that nobody else on the staff could write.

The archetypal Jack Handey sketch is about Frankenstein, or flying saucers, or a cat who, for some reason, can drive a car. “Little-boy stuff,” Handey explained. He often worked alone on his sketches rather than team up with other writers, and he liked to work from his and Marta’s Chelsea apartment, so he would show up each week to Wednesday read-throughs with these fully formed, immaculate sketches that would freak everyone out. Franken recalled a sketch called “Giant Businessman,” about an actual giant (played by Phil Hartman) who calls the cops on the loud party next door, then is terrified when the neighbor threatens him. At the read-through, Franken laughed so long and hard at the sketch’s final beat — in which the giant asked the F.B.I., sincerely, if he might join the witness protection program — that he had to excuse himself from the crowded room because his laughter was interrupting the next sketch.

Handey’s sketches often appeared in the final minutes of the show, in the position Maria Semple called “Cast for Good Nights” — because it ran while the stage manager was announcing, “We need the cast for good nights!” “I owned that 12:45 slot,” Handey told me proudly. According to Maxtone-Graham, that spot was where the producers put “the really funny sketches that were too cerebral to get belly laughs.” For Handey’s fellow writers, “those late-in-the-show Jack Handeyesque sketches were sort of the treat you can’t wait for.”

Everyone I talked to who worked at “S.N.L.” had a favorite Jack Handey sketch, and many of those favorites are amazing-sounding sketches that never even made it to air. Maxtone-Graham raved about an opening Handey wrote in which the show’s host, Jerry Seinfeld, was to stand with the cast pretending that they’re delivering the good nights, thanking all the incredible guest stars who showed up that night. “ ‘Thank you so much to Madonna for showing up, and the president!’ It’s as if you missed the world’s greatest episode.” George Meyer recounted a sketch that Handey wrote with Christine Zander about two dollmakers who imagine what it would be like if their creations magically came to life. “That very night,” Meyer recalled, “two dolls begin to stir, then they dance an enchanted pas de deux. The dollmakers awaken to this wondrous scene, only to scream in terror and smash the dolls to bits with mallets. I don’t think the piece made it to air, but I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.”

“People cried laughing at that sketch at the table read,” Zander remembered. “It must’ve been a total bomb at the dress rehearsal. It happened to all of us, but it often happened to Jack. Sometimes his stuff was just so smart and clever it could go right over a regular audience’s head.”

Handey enjoys “pontificating about comedy,” but he doesn’t have a grand theory of why his jokes work. He rarely wrote sketches about current events, he said, because “it feels so throwaway. I’m sure there were great jokes that were very timely to 1878, but nobody wants to read ’em now.”

I asked him about “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” one of my all-time favorite “S.N.L.” sketches, in which Phil Hartman played Keerok, a caveman who fell in an icy crevasse, then was thawed out by scientists and went to law school. The central joke is simple and perfect: Keerok claims that the modern world frightens him, then cynically uses the sympathy engendered to win cases. “That was one that Lorne never really got,” Handey said. “He’d say at the party, ‘You know, I heard people actually liked that!’

“A lot of comedy is going the extra step,” Handey continued. “An unfrozen caveman was funny — but that’s not enough.” Later, he e-mailed me a sheet of sketch ideas he typed up in 1991. The sketch seemed to be a combination of two ideas: “Too Many Frozen Cavemen,” in which a surplus of frozen Neanderthals drive scientists crazy, and “Swamp Bastard,” about a Swamp Thing-like creature who keeps stealing everyone’s girlfriends. “I guess my brain put these things in a blender,” he wrote, “and out came Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”

He would work as many as 90 hours a week at “Saturday Night Live,” inevitably becoming so burned out that he’d retreat to Santa Fe for the summer, vowing never to return. But then they’d offer him a nice raise, and he’d say, Well, O.K. I asked him if he ever clashed with other writers, and he said, “One time I really got in Al Franken’s face. I shouldn’t say why. Can it be off the record?” He went on to tell a story about a confrontation so nonconfrontational that I eventually said, “Good news, Jack, that story was so boring that I’m not going to ask you to put it on the record.” Marta and Jack then began reminiscing about Franken. “I’m sure he’s a fine senator,” Handey said finally. “But he’s such a great comedy writer, it’s almost like . . . Mark Twain deciding to be a florist.”

Handey initially had a great deal of difficulty persuading the show’s producers to run “Deep Thoughts,” which he previously published in National Lampoon and in George Meyer’s legendary comedy magazine Army Man. “They were reluctant to give a writer something with his name on it, you know?” Handey said. “The ironic thing, of course, is that people still think Jack Handey is a made-up name.” He submitted the jokes to a read-through, where “Lorne gets his big basket of popcorn, and he reads the stage directions, and then the actors would read the parts.” Joan Cusack read the Deep Thoughts, and, Handey recalled, response was so-so. Still, he kept lobbying for the spot to make the show. “I would go through Jim Downey, and he would take it to Lorne. ” The answer was always the same: “No.” (“Lorne wasn’t as big a fan of them as I was,” Downey remembered.)

“I guess eventually they sort of felt like, let’s throw him this bone,” Handey said. “Deep Thoughts” made its debut on Jan. 19, 1991, in an episode hosted by Sting. It was this gem: “To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.”

“Deep Thoughts” wound up being the perfect distillation of Handey’s comedic temperament. He was no longer constrained by the format of the sketch — he was free to create koans, tiny polished gems of comedy. Like: “If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’ ”

“There’s a high attrition rate,” he said. “For each one that works, I throw away 10. I find that easier than rewriting. I’d rather just scrap it and start over. That’s why the novel was so hard — I really had to rewrite things over and over.” He seems truly unconcerned with the novel’s commercial fate; a friend offered to throw him a book party, but, Handey said, “July is not the most pleasant time to be in New York.” He doesn’t like touring or doing radio. “It all goes back to my innate laziness. Some people get out there and sell and do readings. God bless ’em.” On some level, he sort-of-joked, he feels as if the world should be grateful he even finished the damn thing: “C’mon, I wrote it! I have to sell it too? What, do I have to pulp the remainders next year?”

Handey doesn’t watch “Saturday Night Live” that much anymore. (“It’s on so late.”) He asked what current comedy I liked; when I named Patton Oswalt, Key & Peele and Amy Schumer, they were all news to him. The comedy genius who was the idol of all his “S.N.L.” co-workers is now safely a couple of thousand of miles away from New York, living with his wife, his biggest fan, his first reader, to whom he dedicates even the silliest of books. And he’s still quietly pursuing that one pure joke.

I asked if there’s any joke of his that stands out as his favorite.

“Brevity is a big factor for me in a stand-alone joke. To get a laugh with the fewest number of words possible. Which is why ‘Take my wife, please’ is such a great joke. The closest I’ve ever come is probably ‘The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.’ ”

I also asked if there was one Deep Thought he’d never been able to make work — the Great White Whale of Deep Thoughts. He told me one that he said only ever made him and Marta laugh.

“See the fox running through the snow. Then he’s attacked by his mortal enemy: the fox. Fox on fox. Man, what a sight.”

Then he and Marta both cracked up.

Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate. He last wrote for the magazine about karaoke in Portland, Ore.
Editor: Adam Sternbergh

Where's The New Loony Bin?

Many of us in the Wichita Metro Area are wondering when or even if the new Loony Bin Comedy Club is going to open up. I am on their e-mail list but have seen NOTHING? Is live stand-up comedy dead in River City? Inquiring minds want to know. We have a lot of great comedians coming to Wichita and areas close to River City including The Bob and Tom Comedy Tour as well as Bill Burr at The Orpheum Theater and Jeff Dunham at First Council Casino in Newkirk, Oklahoma. I will post more on those very soon! I want our Loony Bin back now!

Fri, Jun 14

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A CLOSED LETTER TO MYSELF ABOUT THIEVERY, HECKLING AND RAPE JOKES

@ 12:00 AM

1. Thievery “Develop a little self-righteousness.  A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!” -- Glen Bateman, in Stephen King’s The Stand
It’s not the thievery.  It’s the goddamned theorizing.
When I started doing comedy – back in 1988 – I did a joke one night, at an unpaid open mike, that killed.  It killed.  I wasn’t used to having anything in my set, in those first few months of shows, get any response from an audience other than a hard blink and an impatient sigh. 
There’s a dopamine rush, for a comedian, when you cobble a thought out of thin air, when you arrange words not as a sentence but suddenly, as a joke.  A for-real, plucked-from-your-skull joke.  Something you created which, when you reach the part you want the audience to laugh at?  And then…holy shit!  They actually laugh?  That’s the spike in the vein that sets the compass for your life.
Well, I’d gotten a taste.  I wanted more. 
The only problem was, it wasn’t my joke.
In those early days, not only did I perform as many sets as I could get, I watched as much comedy as I could find.  The same way a writer has to both write, but also read.  Huge bites of both, if they want to hone their voice.  I’m sure this is the same in any creative field.
There was a lot of comedy to watch in the late 80’s.  Too much, really.  Endless cable shows, microphones in front of brick walls, geometric backgrounds, bland curtains.  But for me, a suburban kid who had limited access to the city and thus limited access to other comedians to watch and learn from?  The Basic Cable Jester Parade was boot camp, college and conservatory, all at the same time. 
And, in watching the endless procession of amazing comedians on TV at that time, as well as working a day job and going out at night to do sets, I lived on three hours sleep a day – about eighteen hours, total, per week.  And you combine that sleep deprivation with my consuming ambition, plus the fact that the few waking hours I had at home were spent chomping down all of the televised stand-up I could hunt down? 
Well, I stole a joke.  Not consciously.  I heard something I found hilarious, mis-remembered it as an inspiration of my own, and then said it onstage.  And got big laughs.
Here it is:  “Whenever I’m sitting on a bus, and someone asks me if the seat next to me is free, I have an answer that guarantees no one will want that seat.  I look up and smile and say, ‘No one but…The Lord.”
Huge laugh on that one.  Pow!  Bigger than anything else in my set at the time, that’s for sure.
I came off stage and Blaine Capatch, a comedian friend of mine who’s a never-miss machine gun in terms of quantity and quality when it comes to jokes, took me aside and said, “That’s a Carol Leifer joke, man.”
It hit me just as soon as he’d said it.  He was right.  It was a Carol Leifer joke.  Pretty much word-for-word.  I’d seen her do it on A&E’s Evening at the Improv one night and then, during a Diet Coke and Cup o’ Noodles lunch at the law firm I was clerking at, I jotted it down in my notebook as if I’d written it.  And then went up onstage and killed with it.  At two in the morning, for probably 17 people and no money.  But what the fuck did I care at that point?  All I was chasing, as an open miker, was the rush – and, I was hoping, paid work.  Regularly killing during my sets would lead to that work, wouldn’t it?
In the exact moment after I’d realized that what Blaine said was true, that I’d cribbed a laugh from someone else’s creativity and inspiration, my ego kicked in.  And, I mean, my real ego.  Not ego’s sociopathic cousin, hubris, which would have made me defensive, aggressive and ultimately rationalize the theft.  No, the good kind of ego, the kind that wanted success and fame and praise on my own merits, no matter how long it took. 
I said, “Oh shit, you’re right.  I didn’t even realize I was doing that.  Goddamit…”
“Eh.  You do it all the time when you’re starting out.  Everyone does.  You can’t avoid it.  Just don’t make it a habit,” said Blaine, and headed back into the showroom to watch someone destroy, probably, with a rap song about farting.  It was the 80’s.
Now, let’s zoom ahead 15 years later.  I was recording my first album at The 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia.  It was a boozy, swooping 2 ½ hour show that I edited down to 89 minutes for the album release.  I had a lot of fun doing it.  I performed it in front of the kind of dream crowd that’s not only excited for your polished, crafted routines, but also the unexpected blind alleys of thought, the in-the-moment stage notions that die gorgeously from their own heat, and the jokes that are funnier for being audacious and suggestive rather than structured, logical and clear. 
Within that 140 minutes were a couple of jokes I had just started working on, but had no real ending (and, to be honest, no middle, either).  One of them was about microwaveable Hot Pockets.  All I really had was the idea that the word “Hot Pockets” was phonetically perfect to be said by a fat person.  It got a solid laugh and, as I leapt from that premise’s unfinished scaffolding onto the supremely appointed edifice of an actual joke I’d bothered to finish, I made a note in my head to not put the Hot Pockets on the finished album, but to save the concept to develop for the next one. 
After the show, at a house party with some friends and the recording crew, someone pointed out to me that Jim Gaffigan had a bit about Hot Pockets, and that it was amazing.
I said, “Yeah, but, uh, I mean, it’s parallel thought on my part.  I haven’t heard his take…”
My friend said, “Oh, I know.  I’m just saying, it’s something he’s kind of famous for.  You should give it a listen.  I know there are a lot of people out there who don’t know how comedy works who’ll think you maybe lifted it.  You know how people are.”
I went online later that night and listened to Jim’s Hot Pockets bit.  It’s amazing.  One of those perfectly realized, no-meat-left-on-the-bone-of-the-idea jokes that also so perfectly captures the personality and intelligence of the teller that it becomes a part of how you think of them.  Martin Scorsese and Rolling Stones songs in films.  Salvador Dali and melting watches, desert landscapes.  Carson McCullers and that specific kind of insanity that festers in the Southern heat and haze.  You can tread into these territories, play with these symbols if you want to.  But you’ll just end up being compared to someone else – someone who blazed the trail you’re clumsily walking.
My ego, again.  This was my first album.  I didn’t want to be compared.  To anyone or anything.  Not even a comedian as amazing as Jim Gaffigan.  Just like the 19 year-old version of me, who’d wielded a joke that wasn’t his at an open mike and crushed with it, I wanted any success or fame I had coming to be my own.  To be built on a bedrock of my own creativity and risk. 
You can still hear the unfinished Hot Pockets joke, by the way, on the uncut version of that album.  It’s probably on YouTube.  No need to spend your money on it.  It’s a pallid, boneless reminder that not all parallel thought is equal.  In fact, it rarely is. 
Know what else is rare?  Especially in my profession?  People outside of my profession who know the difference.
Okay, now I have to tell you one more quick story before I bring this back around to my original gripe.  About how it’s not the thievery, it’s the theorizing.  Ready?
Okay, so now it’s a few years after Blaine pointed out to me that the “empty seat on the bus joke” I’d done at the open mike belonged to Carol Leifer.  Early 90’s.  Blaine and I are working professionals now, emceeing shows around the D.C. and Baltimore area.  Whereas I, at this point, had barely enough original material to actually do 15 minutes, Blaine had that amount many times over.  In fact, he had enough material to do more than an hour at the point.  He just didn’t have the name or draw, yet, to headline.
And another young comedian we both knew – who had started featuring, which meant doing 30 minute sets after the emcee but before the headliner – started stealing Blaine’s material.  Not a joke here or a line there.  Huge, sprawling chunks of Blaine’s act, which ballooned the material he had from about ten minutes to more than half an hour.  And he used it to feature – to make more money, to have an easier time in front of an audience that had been warmed up by an emcee like me or Blaine, to get even more gigs.  He made no attempt to hide what he was doing and, if I remember correctly, even did some of it right in front of Blaine at a show in Baltimore. 
Blaine, ever more Zen than me, even at that young age, politely confronted the comedian and asked him to stop.  “That’s my stuff, man.  Could you not do it, please?”
The other comedian wasn’t angry or defensive.  He was, incredibly, confused.
“But I’m starting to get feature sets.  I don’t have 30 minutes of material.  You’ve got more than 30 minutes.  And you’re not getting feature sets.”  The young comedian explained this Blaine like he was explaining the concept of the Tooth Fairy to a 3 year-old.
Blaine said, “But you’re only getting those feature sets because of my material.  You wouldn’t have enough to fill a half hour unless you stole from me.”
“Yeah, I know,” explained the comedian, patiently.  “You ain’t out there working to get feature sets.  You’re just writing all this material and then just doing emcee sets.  You ain’t featuring full-time like me, so I need that material.  You’re not using it featuring.”
So there you go.  Blaine got to watch his work benefit someone else – someone dumber, and less creative but, fatally, more ambitious and shameless than him.  I’d love to tell you that the other club owners stopped hiring the thief but…nope.  He made people laugh while the audience bought drinks and mozzarella sticks.  Most comedy club owners back then – and a few, still, now – are in the Food and Beverage Industry, not the Creativity and Honor Industry.  Most audiences cleave to the former as well. What could Blaine and I do, still at the dawn of our careers?  Two emcees struggling to find an audience and get work?  We had zero power to stop anyone stealing anything.  We just had to write more, work harder, out-create the little fucker.
Don’t worry – this story has a happy ending.  Blaine and I eventually moved west.  So did the thief.  But when it came time for him to make the transition to television, to movies, to big-time fame and success?  He had nothing.  And, without going into details, he flamed out, rather spectacularly, on national television.  Like, spectacularly.  It was gorgeous for Blaine and I to watch.  By that point we’d built solid careers for ourselves and when Kid Thief’s career hit the killing floor?  It drained away through the sluice gate.  I’ve never heard from him since.  Kelly Oxford wrote something, during this latest joke thief debacle, about how the stealers and joke-thieves can often get themselves through the highest doors only to find, when they’re at the top and people want to hear their ideas…they’ve got nothing.  Kill floor.  Sluice gate.  Oblivion.  I don’t need to name names here.  We’ve seen it happen.  It’ll happen again.   It’s always fun when it does.
So why the wordy preamble, all of these seemingly random examples from my past?  I didn’t even mention the ones I’ve gone up against recently – the Bland Midwestern Actor who performed huge chunks of my act – plus Dave Attell’s, Louie CK’s and Todd Barry’s (and, when confronted, claimed to have written all of those jokes for us) or the Columbia Valedictorian who, in his graduation speech, passed of a joke of mine – a verbatim personal anecdote – as if it happened to him.  Or, of course, the latest in my Rogue’s Gallery or Lameness, the Sticky-Fingered Youth Pastor of Twitter?  The God-loving, Commandment-slinging sky pilot who “just wanted to make people laugh” – and wanted to so badly that he flat-out slapped his name on other people’s Tweets and sent them out as his own?  He didn’t even steal a joke from me – just from all of my friends, most of them up-and-coming talents writing jokes on Twitter, trying to make a name for themselves and build a career – only without the followers and thus without the juice to initially bring him down.  And then, well…  The endorphin rush.  That feeling, the same one I had when I unwittingly used Carol Leifer’s joke.  His rush came from the execution, not the creation.  And like the truly talentless, he had to keep it going.  Bigger and bigger highs.  Deeper, dangerous doses.  And so he lifted from Rob Delaney, April Richardson and, most idiotically of all, Kelly Oxford. 
Boom.  Busted.
Oh well.  He got a book deal out of it.  And paid speaking engagements at, ironically, religious conferences that I’m certain hold the 7^th or 8^th Commandment (depending on which book of The Bible you’re reading) in high regard.  The people whose work he lifted, which brought him the followers which led to the book deal and speaking engagements?  Too bad, shitbirds.  Maybe if you’d accepted Christ.
And so I went after him, right?  Just like The Actor and The Valedictorian.  I mean, if you’ve read this far, you’ve obviously surmised that the memory of when I chose, against all sensations to the contrary, to not steal material to further my career, has made me hyper-sensitive and mega-revolted and super-judgemental of those who do.  Add to that the memory of when I was so powerless, back there in Baltimore, watching that little goblin bum-rush his way to success on my friend’s inspiration and labor, and unable to do anything about it, has metastasized into an abiding resentment, a core-of-the-sun rage that I now indulge to overkill extremes.  I mean, it’s so obvious, isn’t it?
Nice analysis.
And dead wrong. 
The Actor, the Valedictorian, and now The Pastor were never my targets.  They were never my focus, never my concern, and didn’t merit a single calorie of heat.  I agree with Kelly – if any of these grubworms had temporarily crawled out of the darkness of their own uselessness, even on the backs of other people’s work?  They’d have been blinded by the expectations that sustained creation puts on the truly talented.  Indifference and failure was – and still is – waiting for them.  They’re not the problem.
All I care about is the profession I work in.  Stand-up comedy.  I also care about the continued, false perception the bulk of the general public has about stand-up comedy. And what I care about, most of all, is the maddening false perceptions that other people in the creative arts have about stand-up:
Comedians don’t write their own jokes.  They all steal.  All great artists steal.  You can’t copyright jokes.  It doesn’t matter who writes a joke, just who tells it the best.  Don’t musicians play other musicians’ songs?  There are only so many subjects to make jokes about, anyway.  I’ve seen, like, five different comedians do jokes about airplanes – isn’t that stealing, too?
Most people are not funny.  Doesn’t mean they’re bad people, or dumb, or unperceptive or even uncreative.  Just like most people can’t play violin, or play professional-level basketball, or perform brain surgery, or a million other vocational, technical, aesthetic or creative pursuits.  Everyone is created unequal. 
But for some reason, everyone wants to be funny.  And feels like they have a right to be funny. 
But being funny is like any other talent – some people are born with it, and then, through diligence and hard work and a lot of mistakes, they strengthen that talent. 
But some people aren’t born with it.  Just like some people (me, for example) aren’t born with the capacity to make music, or the height and reflexes for basketball, or the smarts to map the human mind and repair it.  I’m cool knowing all of those limitations about myself.
I’m even cool knowing my limitations within comedy.   I think, after nearly 25 years pursuing my craft, that I’ve become very very good at this.  But I’ll never be as good as Jim Gaffigan, or Louie CK or Paul F. Tompkins or Maria Bamford or Brian Regan.  Never reach the plangent brilliance of a Richard Pryor or the surreal mastery of a Steve Martin.  I’m okay with that.  I still get to be creative – on my own terms, and purely on my own work.
But why is it – and this only seems to apply to comedy – that some people so deeply resent those that can write jokes, can invent new perceptions of the world that actually make people laugh?  Resent them so much that they have to denigrate the entire profession, just so they can feel better about themselves?  Do they really think they’re less of a person if they can’t make up a joke, or be funny in the moment?  Why is it so crucial to them?  Is it because all of us, at some point of darkness or confusion or existential despair, were amazed at how absurd a thing as a simple joke suddenly lit the way, or warmed the cold, or made the sheer, horrific insanity that sometimes comes with being alive suddenly, completely, miraculously manageable? 
Those people – the public and, sadly, a lot of journalists – those people were my target, in all of my seemingly “unmeasured responses” to thievery.  Because I can’t stop joke thieves.  They’re always going to be there.
But what I can hopefully stop – or, at least, change for the better – is the public (and media’s) response to joke thieves, by hammering away at this same, exhausting refrain every time I see some thumb-sucking “think piece” by a writer who should fucking know better, cyber-quacking away about “cover songs” and “vaudeville” and a million other euphemisms and deflections away from the simple fact that an uncreative person took a creative person’s work, signed their name to it, and passed it off as their own for their personal glorification, monetary benefit and career advancement.  There’s no wiggle room there.  Even the thieves know that, better than the dullards who are rationalizing and defending them. 
The Actor knew what he was doing.  He wasn’t the problem.  It was the commenters under the NyMag.com piece about me calling him out, keeping alive the meme of, “I thought all comedians steal their stuff.” 
The Valedictorian knew what he was doing.  He also wasn’t the problem.  It was the commenters under the New York Times article about his thievery of my work, asserting that he wasn’t deserving of this harsh scrutiny, because he was a Columbia grad and that some silly “joke teller” should be honored to have his work used in a valedictorian speech. 
The Pastor, especially, knew what he was doing, because he’d done it for years, and people politely confronted him on Twitter, privately, and he mewled and shrugged his shoulders and deleted the Tweets he’d stolen and continued stealing more.  Even he wasn’t the problem.  It was the endless shit-slog of bloggers, Twitter commenters, Facebook essayists and probably a thousand other people who smugly shrugged their shoulders and didn’t even bother to add a pixel of ignorance to the whole affair.  Those people were my target.  Because those are the same kind of assholes who make it possible for thieves and hacks to thrive, sometimes all the way into stadium gigs, sitcom deals and movie careers, in my profession.
So I want to change as many minds as I can.  Educate as many people about where I’m coming from when I flip the berserker switch on hyenas like The Actor, The Valedictorian and The Pastor.  I’ll probably have to do it again.  And again.  And again.  I’m okay with it.
And I’m okay with something else I’ve come to terms with, and I only did so during this last incident.  You ready for my big epiphany?
I’m never going to win this fight.  There’s always going to be a portion of the population – maybe a majority, even – who think that The Actor, The Valedictorian and The Pastor did nothing wrong.  That comedians really do get their jokes out of books.  That anyone can be funny.
And that’s okay.  There are almost 7 billion people on this soggy marble.  I don’t need all of them on my side.  The fans who unfollowed me on Twitter after I shut down The Pastor – just like the ones who unfollow me when I rage against the NRA, and gay marriage opponents and FOX News? I don’t want them as fans.  As carefully as I’ve curated and cultivated my career, I’m now doing the same with my audience.  Universality was never my goal as a comedian.  Longevity and creativity are.
I’m a comedian.  I get to care about this stuff.

2. Heckling Hecklers are not critics.  Critics have to submit their work to editors, have to sign their name to their opinions, often have to face those they criticize.  Sometimes, if they live long enough, they have to cringe when their opinions don’t stand the test of time better than the work they initially critiqued.  Even Roger Ebert admitted, in his superlative Great Movies essays, to being wrong in his initial assessment of some of the movies he was writing about.  Of not seeing the neo-Realist miracle of The Killer of Sheep because it didn’t have enough story for him.  And, ironically enough, not recognizing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as the masterpiece it was because it was too entertaining.  Is there anything more mature – more manly – that flat-out saying, “Wow, I was wrong”?  Gavin McInnes pointed that out to me, and despite agreeing with him on, essentially, nothing, I agree with that sentiment.  Keep it in mind, by the way.  It’s going to come up later.

Heckling, like joke stealing, is wildly misunderstood. Both by the general public and, as I discovered to my disgust when two writers in The Chicago Tribune wrote an asinine, pro-heckling space-filler article in January of this year, to creative professionals who should know better.  The ignorance about hecklers is pungent and simple, and goes like this: 

Comedians love hecklers. They make a show memorable. A lot of comedians get their best material from hecklers. 

No.  No and no and no and no and no.  Hecklers don’t make a show memorable.  They prevent a show from being a fucking show.  Comedians do not love hecklers.  They love doing the original material they wrote and connecting with an entire audience, not verbally sparring with one cretin while the rest of the audience whoops and screams, disconnecting from the comedian and re-wiring itself as a hate-fueled crowd-beast.  And most comedians, including me, can barely remember a heckler.  We go into automatic pilot shutting them down – not because we’re so brilliant and quick, it’s because we’ve dealt with hecklers so many fucking times that we can do it in our sleep.  And why do we have to deal with hecklers so many times?  Because of all the stupid, misinformed rationalizations I’ve listed above.
Heckling and joke stealing do have a common ancestor, and it’s the creative resentment I talked about earlier. 
I was in San Francisco earlier this year, doing one of Doug Benson’s Movie Interruption shows at The Castro Theatre.  Doug screened the first Twilight movie, and me, along with Doug and Michael Ian Black, Greg Behrendt and Zach Galifianakis, sat in the front row with microphones, commenting on the movie.  Heckled it, technically, but not in a way that stopped the movie or pissed off anyone who came, since they knew that was the show to begin with, and had already seen Twilight, or didn’t care either way.  (I just had a slight shudder, thinking of the commenters who are going to point out, “But isn’t this also heckling?” but you know what?  Fuck ‘em.  Just like with joke thievery, I don’t need to convince or enlighten the majority).
Anyway, there we all were, firing jokes at the screen, in the ample silences during the “stare porn” passages of Twilight.  All of those guys have fast-twitch idea-to-joke nerves, and the whole show was going great guns.
Someone over my right shoulder, a few rows back, began leaning towards us and shouting things.  I couldn’t make out what he was saying – I almost immediately tuned him out, to be honest – but I was dimly aware that someone wanted to be a part of the show, wanted to scream his way into the spectacle, wanted attention.  People around him began shushing him, which made him louder, which brought down an usher who, amazingly, got the guy to be quiet.
The movie ended and the audience applauded and we all got up and started walking out, up the aisle with the crowd.  We shook hands and said hello and everyone was very nice. 
Except for the kid who’d been screaming at us.  The Shouter.  He got in my face and blocked my way up the aisle.
“Didn’t you hear the stuff I was yelling?  You ignored me the whole time!”
I said, “I didn’t hear it.”
“Yes you did.”
His friend pulled him away.  “Dude, let’s go.  Be cool.”
He and his friend started walking up the aisle away from me.  His friend gave me a, “Sorry about that" look over his shoulder.  I shrugged. 
Then the friend leaned into the Shouter, said, “Man, why’d you keep screaming at those guys?”
The Shouter said, “There’s no way they were just making jokes up that fast.  I had to say something.”
I’ve never heard a more poignant rationalizing of heckling in my life, and I doubt I ever will. 
I’m a comedian.  I get to be fascinated with this stuff.

3. Rape Jokes In 1992 I was in the San Francisco International Comedy Competition.  Out of a field of 40 competitors, I think I came in 38.  Maybe. 
One of the comedians I competed against was named Vince Champ.  Handsome, friendly, 100% clean material.  He would gently – but not in a shrill or scolding way – chide some of the other comedians about their “blue” language, or “angry” subject material, or general, dark demeanor.  But nice to hang out with.  Polite.
Later that same year Vince won Star Search.  $100,000 grand prize.  A career launched.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
He’s now sitting in prison in Nebraska, serving a 55 to 70 year sentence for a string of rapes he committed at college campuses where he toured as a comedian.  College bookers loved him because his material was squeaky-clean and non-controversial.  I guess the Star Search producers agreed.
Vince is one example – there are others, believe me – where some of the friendliest, most harmless-seeming, and non-offensive comedians carry around some pretty horrific mental plumbing.  The comedians I’ve known who joke about rape – and genocide, racism, serial killers, drug addiction and everything else in the Dark Subjects Suitcase – tend to be, internally and in action, anti-violence, anti-bigotry, and decidedly anti-rape.  It’s their way – at least, it’s definitely my way – of dealing with the fact that all of this shittiness exists in the world.  It’s one of the ways I try to reduce the power and horror those subjects hold for me.  And since I’ve been a comedian longer than any of the people who blogged or wrote essays or argued about this, I was secure in thinking my point of view was right.  That “rape culture” was an illusion, that the examples of comedians telling “rape jokes” in which the victim was the punchline were exceptions that proved the rule.  I’ve never wanted to rape anyone.  No one I know has ever expressed a desire to rape anyone.  My viewpoint must be right.  Right?
I had that same knee-jerk reaction when the whole Daniel Tosh incident went down.  Again, only looking at it from my experience.  And my experience, as a comedian, made me instantly defend him.  I still do, up to a point.  Here’s why: he was at an open mike.  Trying out a new joke.  A joke about rape.  A horrible subject but, like with all horrible subjects, the first thing a comedian will subconsciously think is, “Does a funny approach exist with which to approach this topic?”  He tried, and it didn’t go well.  I’ve done the same thing, with all sorts of topics.  Can I examine something that horrifies me and reduce the horror of it with humor?  It’s a foolish reflex and all comedians have it. 
And, again, it was at an open mike.  Which created another knee-jerk reaction in me.  Open mikes are where, as a comedian, you’re supposed to be allowed to fuck up.  Like a flight simulator where you can create the sensation of spiking the nose of the plane into the tarmac without killing anyone (or yourself).  Open mikes are crucial for any working comedian who wants to keep developing new material, stretching what he or she does, and keeping themselves from burrowing into a creative rut.
Even Daniel admitted, in his apology, that the joke wasn’t going well, that when the girl interrupted him (well, heckled, really) he reacted badly.  The same way I reacted badly when an audience member started taping one of my newer, more nebulous bits with her camera phone a few months earlier.  Daniel’s bad reaction I don’t defend.  His attempting to find humor in the subject of rape – again, a horrifying reality that, like other horrifying realities, can sometimes be attacked with humor?  I defend that.  Still defend.  Will always defend. 
What it came down to, for me, was this: let a comedian get to the end of his joke.  If it’s not funny then?  Fine.  Blast away.  In person, on the internet, anywhere.  It’s an open mike.  Comedians can take it.  We bomb all the time.  We go too far all the time.  It’s in our nature.
And don’t interrupt a comedian during the set-up.  A lot of times, a set-up is deliberately meant to shock, to reverse your normal valences, to kick you a few points off your axis.  If you heard the beginning of Lenny Bruce’s joke where he blurts out, “How many niggers do we have here tonight?”, and then stood up and motherfucked him into silence and stormed out?  You’d be correct – based solely on what you saw and heard – that Lenny was a virulent racist.  But if you rode the shockwave, and listened until the end of the bit, you’d see he was attacking something – racism – that he found abhorrent and was, in fact, so horrified by it that he was willing to risk alienating an audience to make his point. 
So that’s how I saw the whole “rape joke” controversy.  And, again, my view was based on my experience as a comedian.  25 years experience, you know?  This was about censorship, and the limits of comedy, and the freedom to create and fuck up while you hone what you create. 
But remember what I was talking about, in the first two sections of this?  In the “Thievery” section and then the “Heckling” section?  About how people only bring their own perceptions and experiences to bear when reacting to something?  And, since they’re speaking honestly from their experience, they truly think they’re correct?  Dismissive, even?  See if any of these sound familiar:
There’s no “evidence” of a “rape culture” in this country.  I’ve never wanted to rape anyone, so why am I being lumped in as the enemy?  If these bloggers and feminists make “rape jokes” taboo, or “rape” as a subject off-limits no matter what the approach, then it’ll just lead to more censorship.  
They sure sound familiar to me because I, at various points, was saying them.  Either out loud, or to myself, or to other comedian and non-comedian friends when we would argue about this.  I had my viewpoint, and it was based on solid experience, and it…was…fucking…wrong.
Let’s go backwards through those bullshit conclusions, shall we?  First off: no one is trying to make rape, as a subject, off-limits.  No one is talking about censorship.  In this past week of re-reading the blogs, going through the comment threads, and re-scrolling the Twitter arguments, I haven’t once found a single statement, feminist or otherwise, saying that rape shouldn’t be joked under any circumstance, regardless of context.  Not one example of this.
In fact, every viewpoint I’ve read on this, especially from feminists, is simply asking to kick upward, to think twice about who is the target of the punchline, and make sure it isn’t the victim.
Why, after all of my years of striving to write original material (and, at times, becoming annoyingly self-righteous about it) and struggling find new viewpoints or untried approaches to any subject, did I suddenly balk and protest when an articulate, intelligent and, at times, angry contingent of people were asking my to apply the same principles to the subject of rape?  Any edgy or taboo subject can become just as hackneyed as an acceptable or non-controversial one if the exact same approach is made every time.  But I wasn’t willing to hear that.
And let’s go back even further.  I’ve never wanted to rape anyone.  Never had the impulse.  So why was I feeling like I was being lumped in with those who were, or who took a cavalier attitude about rape, or even made rape jokes to begin with?  Why did I feel some massive, undeserved sense of injustice about my place in this whole controversy?
The answer to that is in the first incorrect assumption.  The one that says there’s no a “rape culture” in this country.  How can there be?  I’ve never wanted to rape anyone.
Do you see the illogic in that leap?  I didn’t at first.  Missed it completely.  So let’s look at some similar examples:
Just because you 100% believe that comedians don’t write their own jokes doesn’t make it so.  And making the leap from your evidence-free belief to dismissing comedians who complain about joke theft is willful ignorance on your part, invoked for your own comfort.  Same way with heckling.  Just because you 100% feel that a show wherein a heckler disrupted the evening was better than one that didn’t have that disruption does not make it the truth.  And to make the leap from your own personal memory to insisting that comedians feel the same way that you do is indefensible horseshit.
And just because I find rape disgusting, and have never had that impulse, doesn’t mean I can make a leap into the minds of women and dismiss how they feel day to day, moment to moment, in ways both blatant and subtle, from other men, and the way the media represents the world they live in, and from what they hear in songs, see in movies, and witness on stage in a comedy club.
There is a collective consciousness that can detect the presence (and approach) of something good or bad, in society or the world, before any hard “evidence” exists.  It’s happening now with the concept of “rape culture.”  Which, by the way, isn’t a concept.  It’s a reality.  I’m just not the one who’s going to bring it into focus.  But I’ve read enough viewpoints, and spoken to enough of my female friends (comedians and non-comedians) to know it isn’t some vaporous hysteria, some false meme or convenient catch-phrase.
I’m a comedian.  I value and love what I do.  And I value and love the fact that this sort of furious debate is going on about the art form I’ve decided to spend my life pursuing.  If it wasn’t, it would mean all of the joke thief defenders and heckler supporters are right, that stand-up comedy is some low, disposable form of carnival distraction, a party trick anyone can do.  It’s obviously not.  This debate proves it.  And I don’t want to be on the side of the debate that only argues from its own limited experience.  And I don’t need the sense memory of an actor, or a degree from Columbia, or a moody, desert god to tell me that.
I’m a man.  I get to be wrong.  And I get to change.

Two Tough Questions – Political Joke Archives

from www.extragoodshit.phlap.net

Question 1:
If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion? Read the next question before looking at the response for this one.
Question 2:
It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts. Here are the facts about the three candidates.
Candidate A.
Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with an astrologist. He’s had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.
Candidate B.
He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.
Candidate C.
He is a decorated war hero. He’s a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, only drinks an occasional beer and never cheated on his wife. Which of these candidates would be your choice? Decide first … no peeking, then scroll down for the response.




——————————————————-
Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Candidate B is Winston Churchill.
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler.
And, by the way, on your answer to the abortion question: If you said YES, you just killed Beethoven.

SHIT! from Joe Burton

Here are six reasons why you should think
before you speak -the last one is great!
Have you ever spoken and wished that
you could immediately take the words back…
Here are the Testimonials of a few people who did….

 

FIRST TESTIMONY:
I walked into a hair salon with my husband and three
kids in tow and asked loudly,
‘How much do you charge for a shampoo and a blow job?’
I turned around and walked back out and never went back
My husband didn’t say a word…he knew better.


SECOND TESTIMONY:
I was at the golf store comparing different kinds of golf balls.
I was unhappy with the women’s type I had been using.
After browsing for several minutes, I was approached by
one of the good-looking gentlemen who works at the store.
He asked if he could help me.
Without thinking, I looked at him and said,
‘I think I like playing with men’s balls’

THIRD TESTIMONY:
My sister and I were at the mall and
passed by a store that sold a variety of candy and nuts.
As we were looking at the display case, the boy behind
the counter asked if we needed any help. I replied, ‘
No, I’m just looking at your nuts.’
My sister started to laugh hysterically.
The boy grinned, and I turned beet-red and walked away.
To this day, my sister has never let me forget.

FOURTH TESTIMONY:
While in line at the bank one afternoon,
my toddler decided to release
some pent-up energy and ran amok.
I was finally able to grab hold of
her after receiving looks of disgust
and annoyance from other patrons.
I told her that if she did not start behaving
‘right now’ she would be punished.
To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said
in a voice just as threatening,
‘If you don’t let me go right now,
I will tell Grandma that I saw you
kissing Daddy’s pee-pee last night!’
The silence was deafening after this enlightening
exchange. Even the tellers stopped what they were doing.
I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked
out of the bank with my daughter in tow.
The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me, were screams of laughter.

FIFTH TESTIMONY:
Have you ever asked your child a question too many times?
My three-year-old son had a lot of problems with potty training
and I was on him constantly. One day we stopped at Taco Bell
for a quick lunch, in between errands It was very busy,
with a full dining room. While enjoying my taco,
I smelled something funny, so of course I checked
my seven-month-old daughter, she was clean.
The realized that Danny had not asked to go potty
in a while. I asked him if he needed to go,
and he said ‘No’ .. I kept thinking
‘Oh Lord, that child has had an accident, and
I don’t have any clothes with me.’ Then I said,
‘Danny, are you SURE you didn’t have an accident?’
‘No,’ he replied.
I just KNEW that he must have had an accident,
because the smell was getting worse.
Soooooo, I asked one more time, ‘Danny did you have an accident ?
This time he jumped up, yanked down his pants,
bent over, spread his cheeks
and yelled
‘SEE MOM, IT’S JUST FARTS!!’
While 30 people nearly choked to death on their tacos laughing,
he calmly pulled up his pants and sat down.
An old couple made me feel better, thanking me for the
best laugh they’d ever had!
LAST BUT NOT LEAST TESTIMONY:
This had most of the province of B.C. laughing for 2 days
and a very embarrassed female news anchor who will,
in the future, likely think before she speaks. What happens
when you predict snow but don’t get any! We had a
female news anchor that, the day after it was supposed
to have snowed and didn’t, turned to the weatherman
and asked:
‘So Bobby, where’s that 8 inches you
promised me last night?’
Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew
did too they were laughing so hard!

from www.funny368.com

Cartman Shrugged: The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand in South Park

by Paul Cantor

Previously by Paul Cantor: How Dinosaurs Were Made Extinct

Excerpted from The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV

Comedy makes fun of people – that is its nature. As Aristotle stated in his Poetics, comedy portrays people as worse than they are and makes them look ridiculous. To laugh at people is to feel superior to them. Comedy can thus be downright vicious. The contemporaries of a given comedy may well be offended by it, especially when they are the objects of its ridicule and feel threatened by it. Only the passage of time can soften the initially savage blows of satiric comedy and allow later generations to put up on a pedestal authors who were originally viewed by their angry contemporaries as being deep down in the gutter.
Thus the people who condemn South Park today for being offensive need to be reminded that comedy is by its very nature offensive. It derives its energy from its transgressive power, its ability to break taboos, to speak the unspeakable. Comedians are always pushing the envelope, probing to see how much they can get away with in violating the speech codes of their day. Comedy is a social safety valve. We laugh precisely because comedians momentarily liberate us from the restrictions that conventional society imposes on us. We applaud comedians because they say right out in front of an audience what, supposedly, nobody is allowed to say in public. Paradoxically, then, the more permissive American society has become, the harder it has become to write comedy. As censorship laws have been relaxed and people have been allowed to say and show almost anything in movies and television – above all, to deal with formerly taboo sexual material – comedy writers, such as the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, must have begun to wonder if there is any way left to offend audiences.

The genius of Parker and Stone was to see that in our day a new frontier of comic transgression has opened up because of the phenomenon known as political correctness. Our age may have tried to dispense with the conventional pieties of earlier generations, but it has developed new pieties of its own. They may not look like the traditional pieties, but they are enforced in the same old way, with social pressure and sometimes even legal sanctions punishing people who dare to violate the new taboos. Many of our colleges and universities today have speech codes, which seek to define what can and cannot be said on campus and in particular to prohibit anything that might be interpreted as demeaning someone because of his or her race, religion, gender, disability, and a whole series of other protected categories. Sex may no longer be taboo in our society, but sexism now is. Seinfeld (1989–1998) was perhaps the first mainstream television comedy that systematically violated the new taboos of political correctness. The show repeatedly made fun of contemporary sensitivities about such issues as sexual orientation, ethnic identity, feminism, and disabled people. Seinfeld proved that being politically incorrect can be hilariously funny in today’s moral and intellectual climate, and South Park followed its lead.

The show has mercilessly satirized all forms of political correctness – anti–hate crime legislation, tolerance indoctrination in the schools, Hollywood do-gooding of all kinds, environmentalism and anti-smoking campaigns, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Special Olympics – the list goes on and on. It is hard to single out the most politically incorrect moment in the history of South Park, but I will nominate the fifth-season episode "Cripple Fight" (#503). It portrays in gory detail what happens when two "differently abled" or, rather, "handi-capable" boys named Timmy and Jimmy square off for a violent – and interminable – battle in the streets of South Park. The show obviously relishes the sheer shock value of moments such as this. But more is going on here than transgressing the boundaries of good taste just for transgression’s sake.

A Plague on Both Your Houses
This is where libertarianism enters the picture in South Park. The show criticizes political correctness in the name of freedom. That is why Parker and Stone can proclaim themselves equal opportunity satirists: they make fun of the old pieties as well as the new, ridiculing both the right and the left insofar as both seek to restrict freedom. "Cripple Fight" is an excellent example of the balance and evenhandedness of South Park and the way it can offend both ends of the political spectrum. The episode deals in typical South Park fashion with a contemporary controversy, one that has even made it into the courts: whether homosexuals should be allowed to lead Boy Scout troops. The episode makes fun of the old-fashioned types in the town who insist on denying a troop leadership to Big Gay Al (a recurrent character whose name says it all). As it frequently does with the groups it satirizes, South Park, even as it stereotypes homosexuals, displays sympathy for them and their right to live their lives as they see fit. But just as the episode seems to be simply taking the side of those who condemn the Boy Scouts for homophobia, it swerves in an unexpected direction. Standing up for the principle of freedom of association, Big Gay Al himself defends the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals. An organization should be able to set up its own rules, and the law should not impose society’s notions of political correctness on a private group. This episode represents South Park at its best – looking at a complicated issue from both sides and coming up with a judicious resolution of the issue. And the principle on which the issue is resolved is freedom. As the episode shows, Big Gay Al should be free to be homosexual, but the Boy Scouts should also be free as an organization to make their own rules and exclude him from a leadership post if they so desire.
This libertarianism makes South Park offensive to the politically correct, for, if applied consistently, it would dismantle the whole apparatus of speech control and thought manipulation that do-gooders have tried to construct to protect their favored minorities. With its support for freedom in all areas of life, libertarianism defies categorization in terms of the standard one-dimensional political spectrum of right and left. In opposition to the collectivist and anticapitalist vision of the left, libertarians reject central planning and want people to be free to pursue their self-interest as they see fit. But in contrast to conservatives, libertarians also oppose social legislation; they generally favor the legalization of drugs and the abolition of all censorship and antipornography laws. Because of the tendency in American political discourse to lump libertarians with conservatives, many commentators on South Park fail to see that it does not criticize all political positions indiscriminately, but actually stakes out a consistent alternative to both liberalism and conservatism with its libertarian philosophy.

Parker and Stone have publicly identified themselves as libertarians and openly reject both liberals and conservatives. Parker has said, "We avoid extremes but we hate liberals more than conservatives, and we hate them." This does seem to be an accurate assessment of the leanings of the show. Even though it is no friend of the right, South Park is more likely to go after left-wing causes. In an interview in Reason, Matt Stone explained that he and Parker were on the left of the political spectrum when they were in high school in the 1980s, but in order to maintain their stance as rebels, they found that when they went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, and even more when they arrived in Hollywood, they had to change their positions and attack the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy. As Stone says: "I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum [the right] were trying to control my life. And then I went to Boulder and got rid of my Birkenstocks immediately, because everyone else had them and I realized that those people over here [on the left] want to control my life too. I guess that defines my political philosophy. If anybody’s telling me what I should do, then you’ve got to really convince me that it’s worth doing."

Defending the Undefendable

The libertarianism of Parker and Stone places them at odds with the intellectual establishment of contemporary America. In the academic world, much of the media, and a large part of the entertainment business – especially the Hollywood elite – anticapitalist views generally prevail. As we saw in chapter 5 on Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, studies have shown that those who are engaged in business are usually portrayed in an unfavorable light in films and television. South Park takes particular delight in skewering the Hollywood stars who exploit their celebrity to conduct liberal or left-wing campaigns against the workings of the free market (Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, and George Clooney are among the celebrities the show has pilloried). Most of the celebrities who are shown in South Park are impersonated ("poorly," as the opening credits keep reminding us), but even some of those who have voluntarily chosen to participate have been treated shabbily. Clooney, for example, who helped the show originally get on the air, was reduced to barking as Stan’s gay dog, Sparky, in the first-season episode "Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride" (#104). Like Tim Burton, Parker and Stone seem to enjoy taking Hollywood icons down a peg or two. They share Burton’s contempt for all the elites who set themselves up as superior to ordinary Americans. In an interview in 2004, Parker said of Hollywood, "People in the entertainment industry are by and large whore-chasing drug-addict f---ups. But they still believe they’re better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids and is a good, outstanding, wholesome person. Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they’re the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be." In Parker’s description of the typical Hollywood mentality, we can recognize the attitude toward the American heartland that we saw Gene Roddenberry adopt in Have Gun–Will Travel. Stone joins Parker in criticizing this patronizing elitism: "In Hollywood, there’s a whole feeling that they have to protect Middle America from itself. . . . And that’s why South Park was a big hit up front, because it doesn’t treat the viewer like a f---ing retard."

South Park is rare among television shows for its willingness to celebrate the free market and even to come to the defense of what is evidently the most hated institution in Hollywood, the corporation. For example, in the ninth-season episode "Die Hippie Die" (#902), Cartman fights the countercultural forces who invade South Park and mindlessly blame all the troubles of America on "the corporations." Of all South Park episodes, the second-season "Gnomes" (#217) offers the most fully developed defense of capitalism, and I will attempt a comprehensive interpretation of it in order to demonstrate how genuinely intelligent and thoughtful the show can be. "Gnomes" deals with a common charge against the free market: that it allows large corporations to drive small businesses into the ground, much to the detriment of consumers. In "Gnomes" a national coffee chain called Harbucks – an obvious reference to Starbucks – comes to South Park and tries to buy out the local Tweek Bros. coffee shop. Mr. Tweek casts himself as the hero of the story, a small-business David battling a corporate Goliath. The episode satirizes the cheap anticapitalist rhetoric in which such conflicts are usually formulated in contemporary America, with the small business shown to be purely good and the giant corporation shown to be purely evil. "Gnomes" systematically deconstructs this simplistic opposition.
In the standard narrative, the small business operator is presented as a public servant, almost unconcerned with profits, simply a friend to his customers, whereas the corporation is presented as greedy and uncaring, doing nothing for the consumer. "Gnomes" shows instead that Mr. Tweek is just as self-interested as any corporation, and he is in fact cannier in promoting himself than Harbucks is. The Harbucks representative, John Postem, is blunt and gruff, an utterly charmless man who thinks that he can just state the bare economic truth and get away with it: "Hey, this is a capitalist country, pal – get used to it." The irony of the episode is that the supposedly sophisticated corporation completely mishandles public relations, naïvely believing that the superiority of its product will be enough to ensure its triumph in the marketplace.

The common charge against large corporations is that, with their financial resources, they are able to exploit the power of advertising to put small rivals out of business. But in "Gnomes," Harbucks is no match for the advertising savvy of Mr. Tweek. He cleverly turns his disadvantage into an advantage, coming up with the perfect slogan: "Tweek offers a simpler coffee for a simpler America." He thereby exploits his underdog position while preying upon his customers’ nostalgia for an older and presumably simpler America. The episode constantly dwells on the fact that Mr. Tweek is just as slick at advertising as any corporation. He keeps launching into commercials for his coffee, accompanied by soft guitar mood music and purple advertising prose; his coffee is "special like an Arizona sunrise or a juniper wet with dew." His son may be appalled by "the metaphors" (actually they are similes), but Mr. Tweek knows just what will appeal to his nature-loving, yuppie Colorado customers.
"Gnomes" thus undermines any notion that Mr. Tweek is morally superior to the corporation he is fighting; in fact, the episode suggests that he may be a good deal worse. Going over the top as it always does, South Park reveals that the coffee shop owner has for years been overcaffeinating his son, Tweek (one of the regulars in the show), and is thus responsible for the boy’s hypernervousness. Moreover, when faced with the threat from Harbucks, Mr. Tweek seeks sympathy by declaring, "I may have to shut down and sell my son Tweek into slavery." It sounds as if his greed exceeds Harbucks’. But the worst thing about Mr. Tweek is that he is not content with using his slick advertising to compete with Harbucks in a free market. He also goes after Harbucks politically, trying to enlist the government on his side to prevent the national chain from coming to South Park. "Gnomes" thus portrays the campaign against large corporations as just one more sorry episode in the long history of businesses seeking economic protectionism – the kind of business-government alliance that Adam Smith criticized in The Wealth of Nations. Far from the standard Marxist portrayal of monopoly power as the inevitable result of free competition, South Park shows that it results only when one business gets the government to intervene on its behalf and restrict free entry into the marketplace. It is the same story we just saw played out between Pan Am and TWA in The Aviator. Like Scorsese’s film, South Park does not simply take the side of corporations. Rather, it distinguishes between those businesses that exploit government connections to stifle competition and those that succeed by competing honestly in the marketplace.

The Town of South Park versus Harbucks

Mr. Tweek gets his chance to enlist public opinion on his side when he finds out that his son and the other boys have been assigned to write a report on a current event. Offering to write the paper for the children, he inveigles them into a topic very much in his self-interest: "how large corporations take over little family-owned businesses," or, more pointedly, "how the corporate machine is ruining America." Kyle can barely get out the polysyllabic words when he delivers the ghostwritten report in class: "As the voluminous corporate automaton bulldozes its way. . . ." This language obviously parodies the exaggerated and overinflated anticapitalist rhetoric of the contemporary left. But the report is a big hit with local officials, and soon, much to Mr. Tweek’s delight, the mayor is sponsoring Proposition 10, an ordinance that will ban Harbucks from South Park.
In the ensuing controversy over Prop 10, "Gnomes" portrays the way the media are biased against capitalism and the way the public is manipulated into antibusiness attitudes. In a television debate, the boys are enlisted to argue for Prop 10 and the man from Harbucks to argue against it. The presentation is slanted from the beginning, when the moderator announces: "On my left, five innocent, starry-eyed boys from Middle America" and "On my right, a big, fat, smelly corporate guy from New York." Postem tries to make a rational argument, grounded in principle: "This country is founded on free enterprise." But the boys triumph in the debate with a somewhat less cogent argument, as Cartman sagely proclaims, "This guy sucks a--." The television commercial in favor of Prop 10 is no less fraudulent than the debate. Again, "Gnomes" points out that anticorporate advertising can be just as slick as pro-corporate advertising. In particular, the episode shows that people are willing to go to any length in their anticorporate crusade, exploiting children to tug at the heartstrings of their target audience. In a wonderful parody of a political commercial, the boys are paraded out in a patriotic scene featuring the American flag, while the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays softly in the background. Meanwhile the announcer solemnly intones, "Prop 10 is about children. Vote yes on Prop 10 or else you hate children." The ad is "paid for by Citizens for a Fair and Equal Way to Get Harbucks Out of Town Forever." South Park loves to expose the illogic of liberal and left-wing crusaders, and the anti-Harbucks campaign is filled with one non sequitur after another. Pushing the last of the liberal buttons, one woman challenges the Harbucks representative with the question "How many Native Americans did you slaughter to make that coffee?"

Prop 10 seems to be headed for an easy victory at the polls until the boys encounter some friendly gnomes, who give them a crash course on corporations. At the last minute, in one of the most didactic of the South Park concluding-message scenes, the boys announce to the puzzled townspeople that they have reversed their position on Prop 10. In the spirit of libertarianism, Kyle proclaims something rarely heard on television outside of a John Stossel report: "Big corporations are good. Because without big corporations we wouldn’t have things like cars and computers and canned soup." And Stan comes to the defense of the dreaded Harbucks: "Even Harbucks started off as a small, little business. But because it made such great coffee, and because they ran their business so well, they managed to grow until they became the corporate powerhouse it is today. And that is why we should all let Harbucks stay."
At this point the townspeople do something remarkable: they stop listening to all the political rhetoric and actually taste the rival coffees for themselves. And they discover that Mrs. Tweek (who has been disgusted by her husband’s devious tactics) is telling the truth when she says, "Harbucks Coffee got to where it is by being the best." As one of the townspeople observes, "It doesn’t have that bland, raw sewage taste that Tweek’s coffee has." "Gnomes" ends by suggesting that it is only fair that businesses battle it out not in the political arena, but in the marketplace, and let the best product win. Postem offers Mr. Tweek the job of running the local Harbucks franchise, and everybody is happy. Politics is a zero-sum, winner-take-all game in which one business triumphs only by using government power to eliminate a rival; but in the voluntary exchanges that a free market makes possible, all parties benefit from a transaction. Harbucks makes a profit, and Mr. Tweek can continue earning a living without selling his son into slavery. Above all, the people of South Park get to enjoy a better brand of coffee. Contrary to the anticorporate propaganda normally coming out of Hollywood, South Park argues that, in the absence of government intervention, corporations prosper by serving the public, not by exploiting it. As Ludwig von Mises makes the point: "The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way. Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers. The capitalists lose their funds as soon as they fail to invest them in those lines in which they satisfy best the demands of the public. In a daily repeated plebiscite in which every penny gives a right to vote the consumers determine who should own and run the plants, shops and farms."

The Great Gnome Mystery Solved

But what about the gnomes, who, after all, give the episode its title? Where do they fit in? I never could understand how the subplot in "Gnomes" relates to the main plot until I was lecturing on the episode at a summer institute, and my colleague Michael Valdez Moses made a breakthrough that allowed us to put together the episode as a whole. In the subplot, Tweek complains to anybody who will listen that every night at 3:30 a.m. gnomes sneak into his bedroom and steal his underpants. Nobody else can see this remarkable phenomenon happening, not even when the other boys stay up late with Tweek to observe it, not even when the emboldened gnomes start robbing underpants in broad daylight in the mayor’s office. We know two things about these strange beings: (1) they are gnomes; (2) they are normally invisible. Both facts point in the direction of capitalism. As in the phrase "gnomes of Zurich," which refers to bankers, gnomes are often associated with the world of finance. In the first opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold, the gnome Alberich serves as a symbol of the capitalist exploiter – and he forges the Tarnhelm, a cap of invisibility. The idea of invisibility calls to mind Adam Smith’s famous notion of the "invisible hand" that guides the free market.
In short, the underpants gnomes are an image of capitalism and the way it is normally – and mistakenly – pictured by its opponents. The gnomes represent the ordinary business activity that is always going on in plain sight of everyone, but which people fail to notice and fail to understand. South Park’s citizens are unaware that the ceaseless activity of large corporations like Harbucks is necessary to provide them with all the goods they enjoy in their daily lives. They take it for granted that the shelves of their supermarkets will always be amply stocked with a wide variety of goods and never appreciate all the capitalist entrepreneurs who make that abundance possible.

What is worse, the ordinary citizens misinterpret capitalist activity as theft. They focus only on what people in business take from them – their money – and forget about what they get in return, all the goods and services. Above all, people have no understanding of the basic facts of economics and have no idea of why those in business deserve the profits they earn. Business is a complete mystery to them. It seems to be a matter of gnomes sneaking around in the shadows and mischievously heaping up piles of goods for no apparent purpose. Friedrich Hayek noted this long-standing tendency to misinterpret normal business activities as sinister:
Such distrust and fear have . . . led ordinary people . . . to regard trade . . . as suspicious, inferior, dishonest, and contemptible. . . . Activities that appear to add to available wealth, "out of nothing," without physical creation and by merely rearranging what already exists, stink of sorcery. . . . That a mere change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all participants, that it need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others (or what has come to be called exploitation), was and is nonetheless intuitively difficult to grasp. . . . Many people continue to find the mental feats associated with trade easy to discount even when they do not attribute them to sorcery, or see them as depending on trick or fraud or cunning deceit.
Even the gnomes do not understand what they themselves are doing. Perhaps South Park is suggesting that the real problem is that people in business themselves lack the economic knowledge that they would need to explain their activity to the public and justify their profits. When the boys ask the gnomes to tell them about corporations, all they can offer is this enigmatic diagram of the stages of their business:

Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3
Collect Underpants	?	Profit

This chart encapsulates the economic illiteracy of the American public. They can see no connection between the activities entrepreneurs undertake and the profits they make. What those in business actually contribute to the economy is a big question mark to them. The fact that entrepreneurs are rewarded for taking risks, correctly anticipating consumer demand, and efficiently financing, organizing, and managing production is lost on most people. They would rather complain about the obscene profits of corporations and condemn their power in the marketplace.

The "invisible hand" passage of Smith’s Wealth of Nations reads like a gloss on the "Gnomes" episode of South Park:
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He genuinely, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good.
"Gnomes" exemplifies this idea of the "invisible hand." The economy does not need to be guided by the very visible and heavy hand of government regulation for the public interest to be served. Without any central planning, the free market produces a prosperous economic order. The free interaction of producers and consumers and the constant interplay of supply and demand work so that people generally have access to the goods they want. Like Adam Smith, Parker and Stone are deeply suspicious of anyone who speaks about the public good and condemns the private pursuit of profit. As we see in the case of Mr. Tweek, such people are usually hypocrites, pursuing their self-interest under the cover of championing the public interest. And the much-maligned gnomes of the world, the corporations, while openly pursuing their own profit, end up serving the public interest by providing the goods and services people really want.

The Wal-Mart Monster

The dissemination of an earlier version of this chapter on the Internet brought the wrath of the anticorporate intelligentsia down upon me. I was accused of having sold my soul for a double latte. For the record, I do not even drink coffee. I had already noticed that, whenever I lectured on South Park at college campuses, nothing infuriated my audiences more than my explication of "Gnomes" with its implicit championing of Starbucks. I am somewhat mystified by the way this particular episode provokes so much indignation, but I think it has something to do with the defensiveness of intellectual elites when confronted with their own elitism. What many intellectuals hold against capitalism is precisely the fact that it has made available to the masses luxuries formerly reserved to cultural elites, including their beloved mocha cappuccinos. From the time of Marx, the left argued unconvincingly for roughly a century that capitalism impoverishes the masses. But the general economic success of capitalism forced the left to change its tune and charge that free markets produce too many goods, overwhelming consumers with a dizzying array of choices that turns them into materialists and thus impoverishes their souls rather than their bodies. Parker and Stone regularly do a marvelous job of exposing the puritanical character of the contemporary left. It does not want people to have fun in any form, whether laughing at ethnic jokes or indulging in fast food. In an interview, Stone excoriates Rob Reiner for this latter-day Puritanism: "Rob Reiner seems like a fun-killer. He just likes to kill people’s fun. He supported a proposition in California that raised taxes on cigarettes. It’s like, Goddamn it, quit killing everyone’s fun, Rob Reiner! There’s such a disconnect. It’s like, Dude, not everyone lives in f---ing Malibu, and not everyone has a yacht. And some people like to have a f---ing cigarette, dude. Leave them alone. I know you think you’re doing good, but relax."

Having had the audacity to defend Starbucks, in its eighth season South Park went on to rally to the cause of Wal-Mart, using an even more thinly disguised name in an episode called "Something Wall Mart This Way Comes" (#809). The episode is brilliantly cast in the mold of a cheesy horror movie. The sinister power of a Wal-Mart-like superstore takes over the town of South Park amid lengthening shadows, darkening clouds, and ominous flashes of lightning. The Wall Mart exerts "some mystical evil force" over the townspeople. Try as they may, they cannot resist its bargain prices. Just as in "Gnomes," a local merchant starts complaining about his inability to compete with a national retail chain. In mock sympathy, Cartman plays syrupy violin music to accompany this lament. When Kyle indignantly smashes the violin, Cartman replies simply, "I can go get another one at Wall Mart – it was only five bucks."
Widespread public opposition to the Wall Mart develops in the town, and efforts are made to boycott the store, ban it, and even burn it down (the latter to the uplifting strain of "Kumbaya"). But like any good monster, the evil Wall Mart keeps springing back to life, and the townspeople are irresistibly drawn to its well-stocked aisles at all hours ("Where else was I going to get a napkin dispenser at 9:30 at night?"). All these horror movie clichés are a way of making fun of how Wal-Mart is demonized by intellectuals in our society. These critics present the national chain as some kind of external power, independent of human beings, which somehow manages to impose itself on them against their will – a corporate monster. At times the townspeople talk as if they simply have no choice in going to the superstore, but at other times they reveal what really attracts them: lower prices that allow them to stretch their incomes and enjoy more of the good things in life. To be evenhanded, the episode does stress at several points the absurdities of buying in bulk just to get a bargain – for example, ending up with enough Ramen noodles "to last a thousand winters."

In the grand horror movie tradition, the boys finally set out to find the heart of the Wall Mart and destroy it. Meanwhile, Stan Marsh’s father, Randy, has gone to work for the Wall Mart for the sake of the 10 percent employee discount, but he nevertheless tries to help the boys reach their objective. As they get closer, Randy notes with increasing horror, "The Wall Mart is lowering its prices to try to stop us." He deserts the children when he sees a screwdriver set marked down beyond his wildest dreams. He cries out, "This bargain is too great for me," as he rushes off to a cash register to make a purchase. When the boys at last reach the heart of the Wall Mart, it turns out to be a mirror in which they see themselves. In one of the show’s typical didactic moments, the spirit of the superstore tells the children: "That is the heart of Wall Mart – you, the consumer. I take many forms – Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target – but I am one single entity: desire." Once again, South Park proclaims the sovereignty of the consumer in a market economy. If people keep flocking to a superstore, it must be doing something right, and satisfying their desires. Randy tells the townspeople, "The Wall Mart is us. If we like our small-town charm more than the big corporate bullies, we all have to be willing to pay a little bit more." This is the free market solution to the superstore problem – no government need intervene. The townspeople accordingly march off to a local store named Jim’s Drugs and start patronizing it. The store is so successful that it starts growing, and eventually mutates into – you guessed it – a superstore just like Wal-Mart. South Park has no problem with big businesses when they get big by pleasing their customers.

Working for the Man

Parker and Stone acknowledge that they themselves work for a large corporation, the cable channel Comedy Central, which is owned by a media giant, Viacom. In the Reason interview, Stone says, "People ask, ‘So how is it working for a big multinational conglomeration?’ I’m like, ‘It’s pretty good, you know? We can say whatever we want. It’s not bad. I mean, there are worse things.’" Anticorporate intellectuals would dispute that claim and point to several occasions when Comedy Central pulled South Park episodes off the air or otherwise interfered with the show in response to various pressure groups, including Viacom itself. The most notorious of these incidents involved Parker and Stone’s attempt to see if they could present an image of Mohammed on television. They were deeply disturbed by what had happened in 2005 in Denmark and around the world when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoon images of Mohammed. Threats and acts of violence from Muslims turned the event into an international incident. As staunch defenders of the right to free speech and free expression, Parker and Stone set out to establish the principle that Americans could – in the spirit of satire – show whatever images they wanted to on television. Unfortunately, Comedy Central refused to air the very tame images of Mohammed that Parker and Stone had wanted to show, even though the network at other times had no problem with showing viciously satirical images that they crafted of other religious figures, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Joseph Smith. This incident probably represents the low point of Parker and Stone’s relations with Comedy Central and certainly left them with extremely bitter feelings about their bosses.

But despite this kind of interference, the fact is that Comedy Central financed the production of South Park from the beginning and thus made it possible in the first place. Like Tim Burton, Parker speaks with gratitude of the financial support he and Stone have received from the corporate world, with specific reference to their film Team America: World Police (2004): "At the end of the day, they gave us $40 million for a puppet movie." Over the years, Comedy Central has granted Parker and Stone unprecedented creative freedom in shaping a show for television – not because the corporate executives are partisans of free speech and trenchant satire but because the show has developed a market niche and been profitable. Acting out of economic self-interest, not public spiritedness, these executives nevertheless furthered the cause of innovative television. South Park does not simply defend the free market in its episodes – it is itself living proof of how markets can work to create something of artistic value and, in the process, benefit producers and consumers alike.

South Park is a wonderful example of the vitality and unpredictability of American pop culture. Who could have imagined that such a show would ever be allowed on the air, or would become so popular or last so long, or would have such an impact on American pop culture? To this day, I watch an episode like the sixth-season "The Death Camp of Tolerance" (#614) and wonder how it managed to emerge out of the world of commercial television. The imaginative freedom of the show is, of course, first and foremost a tribute to the creativity of Parker and Stone. But one also must give credit to the commercial system that gave birth to South Park. For all the tendencies toward conformism and mediocrity in American pop culture, the diversity and competitiveness of its outlets sometimes allow creativity to flourish – and in the most unexpected places.

For the full version of this essay, see The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, which also contains all the citations and scholarly references. Earlier versions of this essay were published in South Park and Philosophy: You Know I Learned Something Today, ed. Robert Arp (Blackwell, 2007) and Liberty 21, No. 9 (2007).

January 28, 2013

Paul A. Cantor [send him mail] is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. Hear and see him on Mises Media.

Copyright © 2013 University Press of Kentucky. Reprinted with permission.