The Human Condition: Comedy

By DR. DANIEL SCHNEE on October 5, 2022.

Across all cultures, people enjoy humour: puns, limericks, a story with a punch line and so on.

Not everyone finds every single comedic item funny, but we can at least appreciate how comedic things have certain structures. There are also comedians and jokes that are definably obscene or controversial, yet people find them funny. Why? Because of context; the real, deeper meaning of their subject.

Comedian Doug Stanhope, for example, is known for his cynical, shocking work, but has a large following. Is it because he is saying something blasphemous or obscene? No. It is rather due to the fact that he uses blasphemous or obscene language to make a larger point, which is the actual subject of the joke. Stanhope’s blistering commentary on mentally ill people such as myself (or his own life partner) is shocking, but exposes the real obscenity: the apathy of politicians who pretend to care about us. In that sense Stanhope is an aggressively necessary critic of society’s worst elements, not merely a foul-mouthed gadfly.

Understanding this simple metric then, we can analyze recent obscene statements by online personality Jeremy MacKenzie, when he “joked” about sexually assaulting Anaida Poilievre, wife of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. After discussing her looks and her Venezuelan heritage he went on to say that he and like-minded men should violently sexually assault her, saying “it’s not really a sex thing, we just want to show people that we can do things to you if we want to. It’s a power move.”

He claims it was humour made in a drunken moment, but I disagree. Some comedians say such things for the shock value, but the actual humor is clearly found between the incongruity of the language and the fact they clearly do not truly believe in it. It is a common trope in comedy, and increasingly effective the more outrageously against type it is. But there is no such comic technique employed in MacKenzie’s words. It holds no form, no built-in joke structure, and therein reveals its grotesquerie.

MacKenzie needed to provide satirical or ironic context. But he recently stated on his Raging Dissident program, for example, that he hoped “the torment (journalists) receive as a reward for their service to evil is so overwhelming it inevitably ends them.” This kind of speech only makes his jokes seem that much more ideological than anything else.

Further context is provided by the fact that Mackenzie has been linked to an online community of people promoting “militant accelerationism”: the desire to violently speed up society’s (assumed) collapse, in order to bring about changes that favour decidedly right-wing citizens. Mackenzie’s so-called comedy works in tandem with this kind of thinking, not against it, and thus it is not really comedy at all. It is at the very least unfunny, and at worst potentially criminal.

So instead of violent, right-wing pseudo-comedy meant to turn Canada into a garbage dump, I suggest Mr. Mackenzie use his comedic talents for good. Focus on Jason Kenney’s talent for dismantling Alberta’s health-care system, or the Trudeau government’s inability to attract and manage foreign investment. Believe me, the jokes write themselves…

Dr. Daniel Schnee is an anthropologist and jazz/rock drummer

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