*written sometime in August '09
No, listen folks. Here's the deal. I know you're getting concerned. Let me assure you right now: there are dick jokes on the way. Relax, I'm a professional.
-the late great Bill Hicks attempting to calm an anxious crowd
One of the funny things about Funny People, as I saw it opening night, was not that the likes of Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler tackled something as potentially grave as a mortality drama. Rather, it was the feeling, as an audience member patiently waiting through 2 ½ hours for Apatow’s comic human insight to finally reach its peak, of being slapped in the face by an orgy of dick jokes.
Not a half hour goes by in the movie without someone mentioning “cock,” “dick,” or “balls.” It’s almost as if male genitalia gets as much attention in Funny People as the “life/death/redemption” story itself. Certainly, someone can make the case that the two are not terribly exclusive to one another--that they can go hand in hand--though such a connection may require a bit of a stretch of the imagination. For instance, both are defined by its ups and downs, with “death” and “impotence” being the ultimate down, and “redemption” like the ontological equivalent of, say, Viagra pill popping. This connection has already been made a number of times, anyway, though not in the exact terms I’ve just used, I’m sure. I’ve yet to hear of a critic who’s read Viagra consumption like an Ebenezer Scrooge tale, where the impotent, and therefore crotchety, man is visited by the ghosts of his sexual past, present, and future, and once he’s given the chance to redeem himself for his “shortcomings,” he does so with a bigger heart, and a bigger penis.
As far back as the pre-Viagra days of WWII, legendary Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote (but could not publish until 1965 due to its controversial subject matter) Rabelais and His World, a study of the French satirist’s bodily imagery and the link, among many, between the workings of the human anatomy and that of modern society (awesome read, btw). But whereas Bakhtin, and others more or less like him, are as open about the human anatomy and its significance, with the same precision and fearlessness as Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the popular, contemporary take on our private parts, as embodied by Apatow & Co.’s vulgar but funny jokes, is at best childishly comic; crude observations, however laughable, that may hint less at a playful innocence than a ponderous insecurity about one’s body and sexuality.
However, this is comedy we’re talking about here after all. Why be so serious? And why come off as an artsy pompous ass at that, namedropping Bakhtin and Rembrandt when what we’re really discussing is sexuality and popular culture a la Apatow?
A joke wouldn’t be a good joke if it didn’t imply some truth, and all of culture—whether contemporary or otherwise, and whether of the comedy or drama sort—draws its strength out of revealing that truth or suppressing it.
So I did get Apatow’s human insight throughout the seemingly never-ending minutes of Funny People, and not just general human insight, but typical American insight. It just so happens what most stood out for me was not the existential rebirth of George Simmons, but a certain red, white, and blue tradition of making sex a lowbrow, laughing matter. But what exactly is funny, if also necessary, about our culture’s obsession with sexual slapstick? Why is it that our comic geniuses like Kevin Smith and Apatow have so much cock on the brain, they’d make Andy Dick blush? And speaking of Andy Dick, why, because he’s so gay, doesn’t he already change his name to Any Dick?
See my point here? It’s comical, it’s contagious, just as much as an An(d)y Dick joke--it’s our shameless but popular way of speaking about sex, however steeped our jokes are in an unspoken shame.
The Andy Dick example is a good one; Comedy Central Roasts will not only show you why, they will milk the sexual schadenfreude for all it’s worth. Dick’s sexuality shouldn’t make a difference to anyone but himself, but evidently the media focus on his alleged homosexuality—which rears its head in many a crass punch-line in these Roasts, as well as in Apatow’s Funny People—has bothered the comic enough to publicly deny the claim, and insist on the difference between his professed bisexuality and his supposed “gayness.” But there’s something to be said about these constant cracks at Dick—a bombardment of homoerotic gags, followed by Dick shaking his head in disgrace—that betrays an annoyed uneasiness he may have with being explicitly linked with that one crucial ying to his bisexual yang.
Maybe it’s an inward embarrassment the Roast regular has for his sexuality being so out in the open, and in such a burlesque fashion as to compel the attendant comedians and audience to point and laugh like so many schoolyard kids. Or maybe the embarrassment is not so much inward as outward; that the comic trend of teasing and snickering about his sexuality, rather than the sexuality itself, provokes Dick’s sense of shame, as it perhaps would for anyone else. Have enough people, and for a long enough time, to poke fun at you for your sex or your body, and most likely you’d want, if not insist, on covering yourself up before anyone else ever gets a closer look at you.
Or maybe we’re presuming too much here, and forgetting the simple fact that these jokes—anatomically-charged sound bites of a modern culture saddled with sexual hang-ups—are, for the most part, made in good, raunchy fun and nothing more. Whether it’s Sandler’s George Simmons and Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright fraternizing over how gynormous their dicks are (delusions of phallic grandeur?). Or Jeff Dunham, with his hand up a puppet’s rear, wisecracking about a gay superhero aptly named Gay Man. Or Donald Trump playfully insulting Joan Rivers’ “toxic pool” of a vagina in the latest Comedy Central Roast. American sexual humor airs out our -phobias, our -philias, our insecurities and our wish-fulfillments like the outrageous dirty laundry we conceive them to be. However, this, our brand of comedy—whether in the media or in our daily talks—seems to treat our deepest sexual hang-ups less like an unwholesome collection of jizz stains and skid marks that mortify us, and more like the granny panties and tighty-whities that never fail to crack a smile on our faces. Hell, even Andy Dick has laughed at a few Andy Dick jokes.
Talking dirty about our bodies and ourselves has been an American comic tradition since the late 50’s-early 60’s, pioneered perhaps by stand-up legend Lenny Bruce, who got arrested several times throughout his career for using terms such as “cocksucker” and “come.” Other comedians, such as George Carlin, Redd Foxx, and Rodney Dangerfield, would soon follow his “dirty-minded” example, dragging our sexual skeletons from under the shadow of asexual, moral culture and obscenity trials, and into the spotlight.
To rephrase the title of Carlin’s most infamous routine—soon enough, the “Seven (Plus) Words You Can Never Say on Television (Or Anywhere Else)” became common parlance, slowly but surely easing their way into our films, our magazines, our radio and television shows. Not only did these comedians leave us with the reassuring thought that it is natural, not illegal, to speak openly about the once unspeakable nature of our sexualities--however lowbrow our language for the subject may be--they also helped us to understand our deepest anxieties as absurd and yet normal enough to invite not quiet shame but laughing acceptance.
Whether it’s the way we think and talk about sex and how it mirrors our culture’s carnal fixations, or how we verbally overcompensate for our “bodily lacks”, or how we tend to sell ourselves short--dick jokes and other lewd, crude humor expose the nuts and bolts of our funny sexual logic, and how loosely screwed they are.
In his classic 1983 stand-up special, Delirious, Eddie Murphy plays around with the stereotype that black men pack more meat than white men, a rumor, says Murphy, created by white people (in an uptight, geeky voice: “You know, black people have tremendous dicks! But I don’t believe it…”) that can account for several things (i.e. “Every time you see a brother in a wheelchair, he ain’t always cripple.”). 2008’s cult fave Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay has one of its memorable scenes made all the more memorable for its background music—Mickey Avalon’s 2006 rap single, “My Dick,” a campy homage to the classic “My penis’s bigger than yours” American cockfight (“My dick/plays on the double-feature screen/Your dick/went straight to DVD”).
During his many visits to the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” in the 60’s, Rodney Dangerfield would shoot one-liners about how he gets no respect from women--whether it’d be his wife or his mother--for his ugliness (“My mother never breastfed me, she told me she liked me as a friend.”). In his 2007 HBO special Shameless, Louis C.K. explains why, of all “of-age” females, he prefers “women” over “girls”, citing how mindlessly naïve, and sexually impossible, girls are for him (“I do want to fuck you but you won’t fuck me so fuck you anyway.”) and how women are less generous with their goods than their “Girls Gone Wild” counterparts (“They don’t show their tits to nobody! They fuck with their bras on, it’s a whole other thing.”).
Dick jokes, pussy jokes, gay, gender, self-inflating/self-belittling jokes—Sex humor American style gets off on poking fun at our naughty bits, and our attitudes towards our naughty bits. But we still have to wonder if this frees us from our culture’s sexual apprehensions or only exacerbates them. After all, no straight, “short-changed” male with a bone to pick with his own body would want to end up the butt of many dick jokes. Media that focus on, and tell us how, we can and should improve our bodies, or how we should live our love lives, do so in many different ways, all of which suggest that there is something already wrong with us, something which, if not fixed soon, can be the subject of further dismissal, if not also mockery. From the rampant infomercials on male enhancement, to the Obama administration’s “reluctant” defense of the gay marriage ban, to the most recent case of infamous photoshopping—Self Magazine’s retouching of a Kelly Clarkson cover photo—it’s obvious that our culture still can’t sit well with its own body. And comedy of any kind seems to thrive most on not what is already “normal” or “right” with ourselves, but rather what is “off-kilter” or “wrong.” To again mention one of my comic idols, Rodney Dangerfield once joked in front of the ‘Tonight Show’ crowd that “My wife, she drives me nuts. She was afraid of the dark, she saw me naked, now she’s afraid of the light!” The uproarious laughter and applause that followed sounds quite reassuring, suggesting that the audience knew, as if they once experienced it themselves, the absurdity and hilarity of dreading one’s body or sexuality. But it still stands if this awareness of the comic silliness of it all made them and, ever since then, us, think twice about our reservations and turn the lights back on.
As for me, if my wordplay in this essay is any indication, I’m not terribly interested in an ultimate answer to this issue. To borrow a phrase from another comic idol of mine, Bill Hicks, I like a “thick, purple-veined dick joke” every now and then. Crude sex humor is without a doubt a guilty, or not-so-guilty, pleasure for me. However, I am interested in which question should be asked first, both of which seem equally important—is lowbrow comedy helping us to rediscover, and accept, both the limits and possibilities of our bodies, or is it suppressing them under all the nervous laughter?
-the late great Bill Hicks attempting to calm an anxious crowd
One of the funny things about Funny People, as I saw it opening night, was not that the likes of Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler tackled something as potentially grave as a mortality drama. Rather, it was the feeling, as an audience member patiently waiting through 2 ½ hours for Apatow’s comic human insight to finally reach its peak, of being slapped in the face by an orgy of dick jokes.
Not a half hour goes by in the movie without someone mentioning “cock,” “dick,” or “balls.” It’s almost as if male genitalia gets as much attention in Funny People as the “life/death/redemption” story itself. Certainly, someone can make the case that the two are not terribly exclusive to one another--that they can go hand in hand--though such a connection may require a bit of a stretch of the imagination. For instance, both are defined by its ups and downs, with “death” and “impotence” being the ultimate down, and “redemption” like the ontological equivalent of, say, Viagra pill popping. This connection has already been made a number of times, anyway, though not in the exact terms I’ve just used, I’m sure. I’ve yet to hear of a critic who’s read Viagra consumption like an Ebenezer Scrooge tale, where the impotent, and therefore crotchety, man is visited by the ghosts of his sexual past, present, and future, and once he’s given the chance to redeem himself for his “shortcomings,” he does so with a bigger heart, and a bigger penis.
As far back as the pre-Viagra days of WWII, legendary Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote (but could not publish until 1965 due to its controversial subject matter) Rabelais and His World, a study of the French satirist’s bodily imagery and the link, among many, between the workings of the human anatomy and that of modern society (awesome read, btw). But whereas Bakhtin, and others more or less like him, are as open about the human anatomy and its significance, with the same precision and fearlessness as Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the popular, contemporary take on our private parts, as embodied by Apatow & Co.’s vulgar but funny jokes, is at best childishly comic; crude observations, however laughable, that may hint less at a playful innocence than a ponderous insecurity about one’s body and sexuality.
However, this is comedy we’re talking about here after all. Why be so serious? And why come off as an artsy pompous ass at that, namedropping Bakhtin and Rembrandt when what we’re really discussing is sexuality and popular culture a la Apatow?
A joke wouldn’t be a good joke if it didn’t imply some truth, and all of culture—whether contemporary or otherwise, and whether of the comedy or drama sort—draws its strength out of revealing that truth or suppressing it.
So I did get Apatow’s human insight throughout the seemingly never-ending minutes of Funny People, and not just general human insight, but typical American insight. It just so happens what most stood out for me was not the existential rebirth of George Simmons, but a certain red, white, and blue tradition of making sex a lowbrow, laughing matter. But what exactly is funny, if also necessary, about our culture’s obsession with sexual slapstick? Why is it that our comic geniuses like Kevin Smith and Apatow have so much cock on the brain, they’d make Andy Dick blush? And speaking of Andy Dick, why, because he’s so gay, doesn’t he already change his name to Any Dick?
See my point here? It’s comical, it’s contagious, just as much as an An(d)y Dick joke--it’s our shameless but popular way of speaking about sex, however steeped our jokes are in an unspoken shame.
The Andy Dick example is a good one; Comedy Central Roasts will not only show you why, they will milk the sexual schadenfreude for all it’s worth. Dick’s sexuality shouldn’t make a difference to anyone but himself, but evidently the media focus on his alleged homosexuality—which rears its head in many a crass punch-line in these Roasts, as well as in Apatow’s Funny People—has bothered the comic enough to publicly deny the claim, and insist on the difference between his professed bisexuality and his supposed “gayness.” But there’s something to be said about these constant cracks at Dick—a bombardment of homoerotic gags, followed by Dick shaking his head in disgrace—that betrays an annoyed uneasiness he may have with being explicitly linked with that one crucial ying to his bisexual yang.
Maybe it’s an inward embarrassment the Roast regular has for his sexuality being so out in the open, and in such a burlesque fashion as to compel the attendant comedians and audience to point and laugh like so many schoolyard kids. Or maybe the embarrassment is not so much inward as outward; that the comic trend of teasing and snickering about his sexuality, rather than the sexuality itself, provokes Dick’s sense of shame, as it perhaps would for anyone else. Have enough people, and for a long enough time, to poke fun at you for your sex or your body, and most likely you’d want, if not insist, on covering yourself up before anyone else ever gets a closer look at you.
Or maybe we’re presuming too much here, and forgetting the simple fact that these jokes—anatomically-charged sound bites of a modern culture saddled with sexual hang-ups—are, for the most part, made in good, raunchy fun and nothing more. Whether it’s Sandler’s George Simmons and Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright fraternizing over how gynormous their dicks are (delusions of phallic grandeur?). Or Jeff Dunham, with his hand up a puppet’s rear, wisecracking about a gay superhero aptly named Gay Man. Or Donald Trump playfully insulting Joan Rivers’ “toxic pool” of a vagina in the latest Comedy Central Roast. American sexual humor airs out our -phobias, our -philias, our insecurities and our wish-fulfillments like the outrageous dirty laundry we conceive them to be. However, this, our brand of comedy—whether in the media or in our daily talks—seems to treat our deepest sexual hang-ups less like an unwholesome collection of jizz stains and skid marks that mortify us, and more like the granny panties and tighty-whities that never fail to crack a smile on our faces. Hell, even Andy Dick has laughed at a few Andy Dick jokes.
Talking dirty about our bodies and ourselves has been an American comic tradition since the late 50’s-early 60’s, pioneered perhaps by stand-up legend Lenny Bruce, who got arrested several times throughout his career for using terms such as “cocksucker” and “come.” Other comedians, such as George Carlin, Redd Foxx, and Rodney Dangerfield, would soon follow his “dirty-minded” example, dragging our sexual skeletons from under the shadow of asexual, moral culture and obscenity trials, and into the spotlight.
To rephrase the title of Carlin’s most infamous routine—soon enough, the “Seven (Plus) Words You Can Never Say on Television (Or Anywhere Else)” became common parlance, slowly but surely easing their way into our films, our magazines, our radio and television shows. Not only did these comedians leave us with the reassuring thought that it is natural, not illegal, to speak openly about the once unspeakable nature of our sexualities--however lowbrow our language for the subject may be--they also helped us to understand our deepest anxieties as absurd and yet normal enough to invite not quiet shame but laughing acceptance.
Whether it’s the way we think and talk about sex and how it mirrors our culture’s carnal fixations, or how we verbally overcompensate for our “bodily lacks”, or how we tend to sell ourselves short--dick jokes and other lewd, crude humor expose the nuts and bolts of our funny sexual logic, and how loosely screwed they are.
In his classic 1983 stand-up special, Delirious, Eddie Murphy plays around with the stereotype that black men pack more meat than white men, a rumor, says Murphy, created by white people (in an uptight, geeky voice: “You know, black people have tremendous dicks! But I don’t believe it…”) that can account for several things (i.e. “Every time you see a brother in a wheelchair, he ain’t always cripple.”). 2008’s cult fave Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay has one of its memorable scenes made all the more memorable for its background music—Mickey Avalon’s 2006 rap single, “My Dick,” a campy homage to the classic “My penis’s bigger than yours” American cockfight (“My dick/plays on the double-feature screen/Your dick/went straight to DVD”).
During his many visits to the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” in the 60’s, Rodney Dangerfield would shoot one-liners about how he gets no respect from women--whether it’d be his wife or his mother--for his ugliness (“My mother never breastfed me, she told me she liked me as a friend.”). In his 2007 HBO special Shameless, Louis C.K. explains why, of all “of-age” females, he prefers “women” over “girls”, citing how mindlessly naïve, and sexually impossible, girls are for him (“I do want to fuck you but you won’t fuck me so fuck you anyway.”) and how women are less generous with their goods than their “Girls Gone Wild” counterparts (“They don’t show their tits to nobody! They fuck with their bras on, it’s a whole other thing.”).
Dick jokes, pussy jokes, gay, gender, self-inflating/self-belittling jokes—Sex humor American style gets off on poking fun at our naughty bits, and our attitudes towards our naughty bits. But we still have to wonder if this frees us from our culture’s sexual apprehensions or only exacerbates them. After all, no straight, “short-changed” male with a bone to pick with his own body would want to end up the butt of many dick jokes. Media that focus on, and tell us how, we can and should improve our bodies, or how we should live our love lives, do so in many different ways, all of which suggest that there is something already wrong with us, something which, if not fixed soon, can be the subject of further dismissal, if not also mockery. From the rampant infomercials on male enhancement, to the Obama administration’s “reluctant” defense of the gay marriage ban, to the most recent case of infamous photoshopping—Self Magazine’s retouching of a Kelly Clarkson cover photo—it’s obvious that our culture still can’t sit well with its own body. And comedy of any kind seems to thrive most on not what is already “normal” or “right” with ourselves, but rather what is “off-kilter” or “wrong.” To again mention one of my comic idols, Rodney Dangerfield once joked in front of the ‘Tonight Show’ crowd that “My wife, she drives me nuts. She was afraid of the dark, she saw me naked, now she’s afraid of the light!” The uproarious laughter and applause that followed sounds quite reassuring, suggesting that the audience knew, as if they once experienced it themselves, the absurdity and hilarity of dreading one’s body or sexuality. But it still stands if this awareness of the comic silliness of it all made them and, ever since then, us, think twice about our reservations and turn the lights back on.
As for me, if my wordplay in this essay is any indication, I’m not terribly interested in an ultimate answer to this issue. To borrow a phrase from another comic idol of mine, Bill Hicks, I like a “thick, purple-veined dick joke” every now and then. Crude sex humor is without a doubt a guilty, or not-so-guilty, pleasure for me. However, I am interested in which question should be asked first, both of which seem equally important—is lowbrow comedy helping us to rediscover, and accept, both the limits and possibilities of our bodies, or is it suppressing them under all the nervous laughter?
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