How many comics does it take to joke about a dim bulb?
If there’s one group of people who have been made fun of more than any other, it’s the stupid.
From Homer Simpson to Zoolander to Rose from “The Golden Girls,” no satirical target has produced more laughs. Jokes about the dumb are ancient and show up in nearly every country. Certain kinds go out of fashion (you don’t hear Polish jokes much anymore), but the idiocy of others has proved universally funny.
Why don’t we feel guilty about this? Sometimes, we do. But savvy comics have always found ways to mitigate the cruelty and condescension of mocking the moronic. And these days, when audiences can be particularly sensitive to the direction comedy is punching, the dumb joke often requires a lighter touch. Two deft new stand-up specials dig into stereotypes about the unintelligent, dust them off and renovate them for a new era, while a new mockumentary gets even bigger laughs through the stunt of placing a fool in a variety of intellectual arenas.
Nate Bargatze — whose new special, “Hello World,” is his first hour for Prime Video after breaking out with two popular and well- crafted Netflix efforts — told The Daily Beast that he wanted his comedy to be “the right amount of dumb.” His brand of clueless Christian dad self-deprecation isn’t buffoonish. He presents himself as a little slow in a world that seems far too fast. He speaks with a hint of a drawl, and his delivery moseys as he settles into a gem of a story about the time he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the light in a hotel room.
Bargatze, 42, says he knows he utters idiotic things, with a bit of bashfulness. “I try to keep it in front of large groups,” he explains in the special. “When you say something dumb one on one, it’s a lot for that person.”
The moment is characteristic: thoughtful about his lack of thought. Bargatze, who has a gift for making something out of seemingly nothing, has emerged as one of the finest clean, family-friendly comics in America, firmly in the conversation with Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Brian Regan. His last three specials begin with his adorable daughter introducing him. But he’s putting an updated spin on another comedy tradition, the Southern rube, poking fun at his own dimness but also at those who would look down on him.
Bargatze draws attention to his roots (a previous special is called “The Tennessee Kid”), but unlike Larry the Cable Guy or Jim Varney, he doesn’t lean on exaggerated accents or dopey language. When he tells you Andrew Jackson is from his town, it’s to set up a scene in which a snotty interviewer informs him that Jackson was a bad man. “I stopped him and was like: We didn’t, like, know him or anything,” Bargatze says, the slightest touch of defensiveness mixed with minor annoyance. “We didn’t move there because we were fans.”
There is a gentleness to his ignorance, one that taps into a fertile area for laughs: childhood anxieties. Even his joke about struggling to turn off the light is designed not to make you laugh at him but relate to him. He acts out a kind of helplessness that we all once had and often still do. It’s a dumb joke that makes you feel if not smart, then at least less alone in your stupidity.
While perhaps not as old as punch lines about country folk, the dumb blond joke has been around as long as America. Scholars trace it to a 1775 French oneact satire, “Les Curiosites de la Foire.” The archetype boomed in the middle of the last century with the stardom of Marilyn Monroe in movies like “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
Performer Chase O’donnell plays more ditsy than dumb, but she leans into it. Years ago, she starred in a cabaret double act called “Too Blondes,” and her new special, “People Pleaser,” an enjoyable Youtube distraction, is full of self- deprecating jokes and precisely timed malapropisms. Her most faithful strategy is to begin a joke, pause, bug out her eyes in an innocent glare, then shift direction to upend expectations. When a date tells her to dye her hair, she acts offended. “I literally died,” she says, glaring. “My hair the next day.”
The quality of her joke-writing is not as assured as her persona. It’s a low-budget production with rough edges, but like Bargatze, O’donnell finds laughs in being more innocent than those around her. There are some darker undercurrents if you want to look for them, which you probably won’t. A show about the consequences for a woman who can’t say no is not what this breezy act is going for. And credit where it’s due: It’s hard to stay this light. She performs obliviousness with enough savvy to make you not quite believe it.
In the hilarious “Cunk on Earth” (now on Netflix) Diane Morgan performs imbecility in an entirely different way. She’s an actor, not a stand-up, and as the spectacularly ill-informed anchor Philomena Cunk, she doesn’t wink at the audience. She commits, brilliantly. Dressed stylishly in an overcoat and boots, speaking in the sober and dispassionate cadences of high-toned public television, she stands in the desert, musing pensively: “Looking at the pyramids tonight, it’s hard not to be struck by the thought they are just big triangles.”
This five- episode series, produced by “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker, is based on a simple idea — place a dummy among posh, smart elites — but it’s exactingly executed. The show is beautifully shot and edited, impeccably deadpan and dense with jokes. In episodes that explore the history of civilization, our most popular religions or our greatest inventions, it captures a refined BBC aesthetic: staged in front of sweeping landscapes, inside museums or near ruins and featuring a collection of academics, authors and other intellectuals. How fully realized this world is only makes it funnier when Morgan, sitting across from a professor of Middle Eastern history, asks: “Were numbers worth less in ancient times?”
As with so many artists in the growing documentary comedy genre, Morgan uses real people as foils for her scripted lines. But in this case, they belong to a single class of experts whose tasteful clothes and thick spectacles project intelligence better than any design department could muster. There’s cringe comedy in their fluster opposite her flamboyant imbecility. At no point does she break character. Her confidence is impenetrable, though sometimes she does use vulnerability strategically, as when she tells an academic she’s worried that her question will sound stupid before asking about Aristotle saying, “Dance like no one’s watching.” This is a cagey manipulation that extends the scene and shifts the dynamic into something more polite than it otherwise would be.
It’s a reminder of a piece of wisdom from David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, the metal band at the center of the greatest mockumentary: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”