Comedian Jeff Ross, left, and host Kevin Hart pose at “The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady” at the Kia Forum, May 5, 2024, in Inglewood, California. (Chris Pizzello/AP)
By Robert Lynch | Special to the Tribune
Laughter evolved as a form of play in mammals. It began as a training ground to practice predator-prey interactions. Humor emerged later, alongside language, and is still at its core risky play.
A good joke is a high-speed collision between what we know and what we think we know. By giving us space to be confused primates high on our own delusions, a good joke lets us stop pretending we’ve got it all figured out, take ourselves a little less seriously and confront, often against our will, the stupidity of it all. That’s why comedy has always been more than entertainment. It’s a socially sanctioned way of pointing out incongruities that don’t make sense and acknowledging the screws that stay loose without getting exiled for noticing them.
This is why comedians once occupied a special place in American culture. In an anxious society that turns political narratives into sacred beliefs, comedians were among the last people allowed to say what everyone else was thinking. Their job was to notice everyone marching in lockstep and break the spell.
But in a nation where partisan politics consume everything in their path, ideological conformity has started to affect Americans’ sense of humor.
You can feel the tension as the audience nervously checks whether a comedic bit is safe, whether it has been preapproved by the joke police or whether the comic is on the right team. Norm Macdonald called it a crisis of “clapter”: a humorless age in which jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter.
Politics can kill comedy by turning jokes into identity tests and loyalty signals. Politics moralize and set certain beliefs apart as inviolable, while humor thrives in the gray areas between the sacred and the profane. When Dave Chappelle mocks untouchable cultural totems, such as gender identity etiquette, he’s doing something extraordinary. When he’s lecturing his audience about racial justice, he’s just another self-righteous scold doing something anyone can do.
And when late night collapses into “Donald Trump sucks,” it stops being comedy and turns into propaganda.
Comedians used to be contrarians. They bristled at authority and mocked mawkish sentimentality. They were Patton Oswalt’s brother, Matt, at the Hollywood Bowl on Christmas Eve, screaming “F— you!” at the screen in the middle of Jerry Maguire’s “cynical world” speech. Their target wasn’t left or right; it was whoever was doing the policing or pretending. When the Moral Majority was telling everyone what to say, comedians went after them. When the liberal scolds did it, they mocked them too. They embodied Groucho Marx’s motto: “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” and their goal was to expose the hypocrisies of whoever was in charge.
American humor was anti-elite. Its mission was to upset hierarchies, not reinforce them, and few things were more offensive to comedians than bootlicking.
One of my favorite moments from the special “The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady” was when the host, Kevin Hart, caught Jeff Ross quietly apologizing to Brady for jokes he’d just told. Hart ripped into him: “Wow. Stop being a b—, Jeff. Just sit down. Stop kissing his ass. You OK?” Hart was reprimanding Ross for doing what is the most offensive thing a comedian can do — suck up to the most important person in the room — and enforcing an old ethic in comedy, which is not apologizing for your jokes. It was a throwback to when comedy clubs were places where people were allowed to stress-test the culture without being hauled before human resources.
Audiences stopped asking, “Is this funny?” They started asking, “Is this allowed?”
Tribalism gets the headlines, but the deeper threat is what it produces — within-group conformity and a shrinking tolerance for dissent. And although both sides celebrate their free-thinking iconoclasm, loyalty is strictly enforced. On the right, it’s “don’t tread on me” policed by a culture where one criticism of Trump can end your career. On the left, nobody’s in charge, but everyone is policing everyone else — so many rules about who can say what about whom that you need to consult a moral spreadsheet before you can make a joke.
On both sides, Americans have lost the ability to think beyond their own performance. The whole charade bears the mark of arrested development: the nervous conformity of a society stuck in adolescence. The old danger was a comic bombing. The new one is being cast as a bad person.
Never before has every half-drunk joke, every stumble of language, been so on the record; never before has the moral climate been so skittish — so quick to litigate tone, ignore intent and presume motive.
America was once the funniest place on earth. But as our culture turned life into a branding exercise and started treating discomfort as danger, we lost our tolerance for risky play. And as audiences are increasingly confused what a comedian thinks, with what he thinks is funny, the incentives shifted from surprise to safety. American humor has always been a tool for questioning orthodoxy, challenging certainty and keeping people from mistaking their sacred stories for reality. When that function collapses and every joke is screened for loyalty, society loses one of its best safeguards against tribal conformity.
Real laughter belongs to a culture willing to admit it might be wrong. A society that can’t tolerate being offended forfeits one of the clearest ways it has to signal that it hasn’t turned its beliefs into idols. When we can’t laugh at ourselves and comedians are no longer willing to risk offending us, there’s nobody left to break the spell.
Robert Lynch is a biological anthropologist at Penn State who has published peer-reviewed research on humor’s evolutionary function.
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