Stand-up’s Next Act

On comedy’s growing generational divide

Between jokes about her sex life and Vancouver’s murderous crow population, Buddle isn’t afraid to poke at serious topics. She does one bit about the children of millennials: “Our kids are going to be the first generation of kids that can be whatever they want, sexually and, like, gender-wise. And that’s it — you know, we’re not going to have money to, like, feed them.” During one set, at the Siriusxm Top Comic competition, she veered into the #Metoo movement, bringing up the idea that those kids of millennials will be the first generation to be properly taught about consent. “I like that,” she quipped, before looking down at the people crowded around the narrow stage. “Big frown up front from this man,” she noted, gesturing to one person in particular. His obvious discomfort became a running gag during her next bit, about rape culture.

The relationship between a comedian and their audience is a complicated one. Finnish anthropologist-turned-comedian Marianna Keisalo argues that the line between the performer’s onstage persona and their real identity is often incredibly thin. It’s the kind of thing you learn in Comedy 101: if there’s something unusual about you, acknowledge it and move on. For a long time in Canada and the United States, “unusual” applied to anyone not straight, white, cisgender, or male. Even stars that didn’t fit this mould, like Joan Rivers or Richard Pryor, had to work harder to get audiences onboard. Pushing the wrong crowd to an uncomfortable place often meant losing the room entirely.

But, in recent years, audiences have been changing. Today, podcasting, streaming, and social media are bringing large and diverse audiences to comedians who might once have been dismissed as “niche.” A handful of years ago, writer Christopher Hitchens and comedian Adam Carolla were proclaiming that women could never be as funny as men. Those arguments now seem quaint: in the past five years, there have been four acclaimed Netflix specials featuring pregnant women alone (Ali Wong, Natasha Leggero, Amy Schumer, and Ali Wong again). In fact, many of the most exciting new performers are women, people of colour, Lgbtq people, or some combination thereof, bringing with them a raft of underexplored experiences that are transforming the nature of comedy.

But this shift has also meant a growing divide. On one side, new faces have meant less tolerance for the flippant bigotry that has long been a part of standup — Shane Gillis, for example, recently lost a spot on Saturday Night Live after people called out his history of using homophobic and racist slurs. On the other side — which includes some of the biggest names in the business, like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, and Ricky Gervais — comedians complain that people can no longer take a joke and that the art is losing its edge because of what they dismiss as “cancel culture.” It doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds that comedy is changing, and though they might have once been provocative or dangerous, they are now far from the cutting edge.

Tin Lorica likes to test the room with a joke. “My name is Tin,” they announce in a deadpan voice. “I use they/them pronouns, in case you want to talk shit about me after the show.” The amount of laughter defines the rest of the set: a few nervous giggles mean a turn toward “universal” jokes about life as a barista; gales of laughter allow Lorica to move on to their bit about why they quit dating white women. “That one I have to address,” Lorica explains over coffee one afternoon in Vancouver. For certain crowds — like those attending Yellow Fever, the all-asian lineup that Lorica co-produced for Just for Laughs Northwest, or Millennial Line, the monthly show they co-host — jokes about pronouns and queer- dating perils generally get a warm reception. But for other audiences? “I’m about to alienate half the room,” Lorica explains.

Not too long ago, comedians like Lorica might have struggled to perform in front of large crowds. Recently, however, a growing cohort of artists is finding success in pushing back against comedy’s

exclusionary history. In her 2018 Netflix special, Nanette, Hannah Gadsby announces that she is quitting comedy, then spends her time onstage exploring the violence she experienced growing up as a non-gender-conforming lesbian in Tasmania. Early in her career, Gadsby learned that the best way to make audiences comfortable with her appearance was to ply familiar stereotypes, like that old saw about lesbians having no sense of humour. Over time, she realized this habit was doing her and her community more harm than good. “Do you understand what self- deprecation means honest,” gushed Peter Rubin in Wired. “It’s challenging.”

This new willingness to be critical of comedy’s tendency to pick on marginalized identities has led some moreestablished performers to think of themselves as being “bullied,” as Ricky Gervais, star of the UK’S The Office, has put it. “It’s a slippery slope,” he said in one interview. “[If] you start going by these rules — what it’s okay to joke about — it’s a nonsense.” According to Gervais, if comedians start limiting themselves, thinking they can’t make jokes about certain subjects, the range of someone who played around with darkness in order to help audiences find their better selves. As Marianna Keisalo pointed out in a 2016 essay, C. K.’s more violent jokes worked because “his demeanor and overall comportment . . . suggest he is not actually a violent man: the reversals into violence are reversible.” Then, in 2017, the news came out that C. K. had been masturbating in front of women without their consent, and that shell of trustworthiness was shattered. Those same jokes would no longer land.

To a lesser extent, a similar phenomenon has happened with the once-radical Dave Chappelle. In the early 2000s, he delved head on into the racial politics of America in both his stand-up and the acclaimed Chappelle’s Show; in his latest special, Sticks & Stones, he spends a lot of time uncritically plumbing his relationships with his famous, wealthy friends. Structurally, his jokes are still strong, but his habit of poking fun at Michael Jackson’s accusers and his tirades about the imagined cultural power of the Lgbtq community feel more self-serving than scathing.

His newer material about transgender people has drawn particular ire. In a Q&A at the end of Sticks & Stones, Chappelle responds to his critics with a story about meeting a trans woman named Daphne, herself an aspiring comedian, after one of his shows. As Chappelle tells it, Daphne told him how much she loves his work