Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

Comedy Book effectively synthesizes trends and arguments in contemporary American comedy, particularly stand-up and its mediated forms, while offering tools we can use to understand and evaluate its cultural value. Fox writes that his goal is to show why comedy ought to be taken seriously as an art form and to model how that can be done. This book is for a popular audience. Indeed, humor studies scholars do not need to be convinced that comedy should be taken seriously. The breadth of the book’s engagement with contemporary comedy and critical approaches to comedy is impressive, though, making it valuable for use as a course text. The book is also a welcome read for scholars who need help wrapping their heads around whatever it is students are laughing at on their phones.Fox, who covers comedy for New York magazine’s Vulture and hosts Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, has likely spent more time interviewing comedians about their comedy than anyone else on the planet. In Comedy Book, he writes not as an objective reporter but as a life-long comedy fan whose aim is to document explanations for how comedy works. The book is organized into chapters with one-word titles like “Audience,” “Timing,” “Context,” and “Community,” each of which presents an element crucial to comedy. These elements effectively add up to comedy’s “media specificity”—an art historical term he does not use but that is consistent with his stated intention to show why comedy must be taken seriously as art. These are the qualities that make comedy different from other cultural forms and by which its artistic value might be assessed.In each chapter, Fox offers a number of case studies in twenty-first-century comedy, drawing from the comic artistry itself, interviews with comedians, and—brace yourself—actual scholarship on comedy and humor. His chapter on timing, for example, which examines how comedy helps process trauma, describes jokes by Gilbert Gottfried and Marc Maron as well as sketches on Saturday Night Live in the wake of 9/11 and references the work of Philip Scepanski. He then moves on to the subject of audience expectations with respect to comedy’s ability to help process such trauma, using the more recent example of comedians taking up (or not) controversies about abortion rights following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.In “The Line,” Fox does a particularly good job of showing that the complaint that political correctness is ruining comedy is misguided. The very people who are complaining that they can no longer say certain things “are often found saying [them] during a performance they earned tens of thousands of dollars for, on their podcast they make hundreds of thousands a year on, or the special they got paid millions for” (199). Given that his career depends on comedians agreeing to talk to him, Fox is to be commended for not pulling punches when it comes to interrogating the problematic work of popular comedians like Dave Chappelle. Fox points out that Chappelle’s defensiveness over criticism about elements of his routines that are markedly dehumanizing is ironic, especially given the fact that he left his own show based on the realization that people were laughing in a way he didn’t intend.One common and frustrating claim made by the popular press is that satire or political comedy isn’t effective unless it is changing people’s minds. Fox’s “Politics” chapter is a helpful corrective to this argument, usefully emphasizing that the power of political comedy is in its building and supporting the in-group, not the out-group. “More than helping the medicine go down,” says Fox, “humor smooths conflicts and unites disparate groups” (123). However, elsewhere he is careful to point out that “community” is not inherently a good thing. For example, he shows how comedy gets recontextualized in edited clips and postings that are circulated in right-wing forums. Drawing on the work of Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz, he argues that this is how comedy gets truly politicized.One of Fox’s stated intentions is to reframe expectations of what comedy is good for. That is, he wants to emphasize that comedy now does more than simply elicit laughter. He argues that YouTube and social media are to comedy what photography was to painting. Just as the photograph freed painting from the burden of naturalistic representation, the ability to easily access comedy on YouTube and through other social media has freed up comedians to do more than make people laugh. Enter what Fox calls “post-comedy,” which is not about pushing the boundaries of what is said but rather how it is said and how the audience is expected to respond in the cooperative art of making fun. “Comedy,” he suggests by way of a simple redefinition, “is the art of manipulating funny” (103). Fox uses Nanette as a prime example, showing how Hannah Gadsby exploits the structure of the comedy monologue to create a much more complicated experience for the audience.While most of the book is focused on stand-up comedy, Fox draws attention to the recent spate of generically ambiguous programs mixing comedy and drama as examples of “manipulating comedy.” He calls these “state comedies”: they activate a state of play and then instead of generating laughter, hold audiences in that state while doing other things. He analyzes Atlanta in depth but also points to Fleabag, Reservation Dogs, Barry, BoJack Horseman, The Bear, and numerous other films and television series as examples. “Unlike a traditional sitcom,” Fox contends, “which might have to figure out how to make the show 100 percent funny, Atlanta and shows like it are free to see if they can make the funny and terrifying and very sad exist all at the same time” (165–66).In these instances, Fox’s focus can seem myopic, too focused on the tastes of critics rather than those of popular audiences, and even ahistorical. He describes the development of stand-up comedy over the years and mentions the production of comedy records, but he does not dedicate similar space to the history of film or television comedy. This can be frustrating. Stand-up comedy is not the only cultural form or genre that invites people into a state of play, and comedy films and television series have always had to do more than generate laughter to work as storytelling forms in commercial media. Granted, Fox’s “state shows” are likely more interesting to critics than more popular comedies. Still, sitcoms from every era of comedy have not only engaged audiences in comic play but offered life lessons, character arcs, and narrative closure—and not just in limited “very special” episodes.Still, to be fair, Fox is careful not to get too in the weeds in contemplating comedy theory or producing knowledge for humor studies. Given the intended popular audience for the book and especially given the span of material he does cover, these limitations are understandable. As a book that aims to expand popular definitions of comedy and popular discussions about comedy, Comedy Book is an accomplishment.