Sex, Comedy, and Intimacy
Content warning: sexual harassment, sexual assault, trauma.
Today I am going to continue writing unfunny things about comedy.
A laugh and an orgasm have a lot in common. If you’ve experienced both, I’m sure you have some sense of what I’m talking about. And no, I don’t mean that laughter feels like an orgasm, although I’m sure nobody will want to sit next to me at a comedy show after I publish this. But they definitely have a lot in common: they’re spontaneous, extremely interpersonal, the result of a subjective and largely involuntary physical reaction to stimuli, and they both can ripple through the body like an earthquake, relieving tension and even pain in the process. Inability to do either one is a possible symptom of mental health problems, but in the wrong place at the wrong time they can both be a sign that someone’s not quite safe to be friends with.
The subjectiveness is something I find particularly interesting, especially since it’s so commonly denied or ignored once someone starts to feel rejected. Not everyone is going to think you’re funny, in exactly the same way that not everyone is going to think you’re sexy. And yet, I’ve had an awful lot of people say to me that because I didn’t laugh at their jokes, I must not have a sense of humor. I imagine these are the same people who say that if a woman isn’t attracted to him it’s because she’s frigid. Or a lesbian. Same difference to him, really.
There’s another aspect of both comedy and sex that I really find interesting: their dependence on intimacy. Oh yeah, you can laugh at a cartoon or a recording of a stand-up comic, just like you could jerk off to a magazine if you really need to, but there’s nothing to compare to sharing uproarious laughter with a group of friends you’ve known long enough to make a joke out of a few words and a moment of perfectly-timed eye contact. It’s part of how acquaintances become friends, how family connect with one another after decades apart, and it’s even a major element of sexual intimacy. Humor and flirting are one and the same when they occur between two mutually-attracted people on the verge of acting on their attraction. If someone can make you laugh, that’s a good sign that they might be able to make you orgasm too.
In my earlier essay about satire, I wrote about trust as a necessary ingredient to turn an offensive joke into a friendly one. We need the safety of knowing that the joke will not escalate to an actual attack in order to relax and enjoy it. That’s why it makes me tense if someone I don’t know well makes a joke at my expense. I cannot laugh, because I simply don’t find it funny, because I take an especially long time to develop the trust required. But I also know from experience that if I don’t laugh, often the joke will escalate to an attack. I often make a concerted effort to smile, and bite my teeth against my own anger when they disparage my anxiety as a sign of a wounded ego.
It feels almost exactly the same as the tension I feel when I am sexually harassed. I know I’m expected to just take the compliment and reward it with a smile, or else I may be accused of sexual brokenness. I don’t trust that an honest reaction will not provoke an attack, so I lie in self-defense, pretending to enjoy the attention while searching for an exit or a change of subject. Even when I am attracted and on the lookout for a sexual opportunity, behind every flirt there is that potential threat — if I stop feeling okay with this, is there going to be a safe way out?
I think it goes both ways, honestly. Telling jokes can be just as fraught and as fragile-feeling as hearing them, and more so. If you try to tell a joke and nobody laughs, that can feel like being turned down by your crush. I know, I’ve done both, and it hurts. Makes me want to tear my own tongue out of my head for making me sound so stupid. Makes me want to tear myself inside-out trying to find whatever it is that’s stopping people from loving me, makes me want to cut myself to pieces trying to fit into the mold of what I think will make them happy. “What if I was more like her? I could be more like her, if that would make you love me.”
I’m sure you’ve heard somebody say something about Nanette in the past few months. I recommend it, but moreover, I think you should watch it. It gets into a lot of the same points I’m attempting to make, and will try to make in a few more essays I’ve got in the works. Nanette contains a lot of criticisms of stand-up comedy as an art form and what it does to the people making it, which I would posit are a result of comedy’s being a deeply intimate, interpersonal phenomenon that has been separated out, isolated, and packaged as a consumer product. I love comedy, don’t get me wrong. Some of my best artistic influences as a writer have in fact been stand-up comedians, who after all are often brilliant writers. Hannah Gadsby is one, and in Nanette, she uses the medium of comedy to punch up at comedy itself. Because in that impersonalized form, where the audience cares more about the jokes than about the emotional life of the person telling them, or when a comedian cares more about getting laughs than about the people he might be hurting to get them, suddenly it’s not as funny anymore. Just like how when a person cares more about getting sex than he does about how his partner feels about it, suddenly it’s a whole lot less sexy.
The best comedy I know of is the stuff that eventually gets serious and provokes a feeling other than mere amusement. It’s like cuddling after sex; it proves that this wasn’t just an empty exercise in manipulating brain chemistry for a momentary high. It shows that there’s a fully human brain behind the jokes, someone whose voice is inherently worth listening to. It’s a reminder that the best laugh is one shared with someone you genuinely enjoy as a person, someone you love, as just one part of a complex and nuanced relationship you can’t have with anyone else. Not exactly, not completely. And I think we know this, deep down, and that’s why the same joke told over and over stops being funny; we just can’t re-create that moment. Humor needs variety, and so does sex, even a change as mundane as switching which way your feet point on the bed, just for a night, to see how it feels. And yeah, that means you can’t tell the same jokes you did thirty years ago, when they were edgy, because now they’re just mean.
I don’t know much about medieval history, but in the period movies I’ve seen, I’ve been led to believe that the court jester was the only person who was allowed to speak his mind, and he earned that right by making the king laugh. Humor won him his freedom of speech, so he could get away with saying things that would otherwise get him beheaded. Likewise, the king’s mistress could potentially sway his decisions, and she earned that right through sex. Again, I don’t know much about medieval history, but I know a few things about contemporary society, and I don’t think any of us really want to live in a world where any attempt to influence the powerful needs to be disguised as a joke or exchanged for sexual favors. And we don’t. We have freedom of speech now, and freedom to assemble, and freedom to protest, and freedom to petition the government, and we don’t need to debase ourselves in the process by offering some pleasure to appease the egos of those we dare oppose. Maybe that’s why women collectively are telling men that no, you are not entitled to their sexual attention no matter how powerful you are, and maybe that’s why it seems like the very concept of humor itself is under attack by the SJWs. Frankly, it’s about time, really.
Because every time someone tells me that my capacity for empathy and feeling means I have no sense of humor, I know I can go back to my friends who have seen me bring down an entire room with a pun. And whenever someone’s sexual gaze makes me sick in the pit of my stomach, I can think of my girlfriend’s touch, and how easily it awakens the parts of me that felt dead. We don’t need to get these things from anyone other than the ones we trust, so we shouldn’t have to force ourselves to provide them to anyone who isn’t worthy. Let’s all agree that we shouldn’t have to pretend to enjoy what we don’t for the sake of someone else’s feelings. And for pete’s sake, learn to accept rejection peacefully, before you end up seriously hurting someone just because they didn’t laugh at something they didn’t find funny or get turned on by something they didn’t find sexy. Enough is enough, don’t you agree?
