Ed Henry, the senior White House correspondent for Fox News who is the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, announced this morning that Conan O’Brien, who’s currently hosting a late-night show on TBS, will host the Association’s dinner this April. Ever since Stephen Colbert hosted the dinner in 2006 and turned it into a brutal critique of President Bush’s performance as president, the Association has made a series of relatively safe choices who are unlikely to make the president and his wife, members of the press, or anyone else particularly uncomfortable. O’Brien, judging by the evidence from his experience hosting the dinner in 1995, knows the score, though there is a pretty good joke about Ira Magaziner, who was President Clinton’s chief health-care policy adviser, having a 6,000-ingredient recipe for veal piccata, in reference to the length of his health care reform bill, which had died the previous year:

But it’s too bad the Association seems to have decided that their choices are between skewering the president and going relatively bland and toothless. There are other ways to be funny than to make the head guest in the room feel uncomfortable, and I wish the Association would think a little bit more creatively about their host choice on that score—and on other ones as well. Since the dinner began having hosts in 1944, only three women have ever hosted the event solo, Paula Poundstone in 1992, Elayne Boosler in 1993, and then no one else until Wanda Sykes in 2009. Why not have Amy Poehler break up that drought a little bit and host in character as Leslie Knope, whose good-government and love of Washington would provide a much kinder framework than Colbert’s to satirize the event she’d be summing up? Want someone who might be able to riff on the idea of President Obama as a symbol and as a man, but who probably wouldn’t go too politically brutal? Why not ask Kevin Hart, in part in recognition of his huge stand-up success—and in part because a black comedian hasn’t hosted the dinner solo since Sinbad in 1991?

I don’t mind O’Brien, but he’s a choice who represents the problems of the Association itself—white, male, catering at this point to a limited audience, and unlikely to offend anybody. His announcement comes at a moment when, as Dave Weigel has pointed out, Henry is throwing a temper tantrum because members of the Association weren’t allowed to take pictures of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods, a fight that illustrates the White House press corps’ frequent focus on minutae and color over substance. I’m not saying thinking more creatively and independently about who is going to host the Association’s dinner will come close to fixing all the problems of the White House press corps. But it might help the Association consider who it wants to represent the organization on that dias, what role it thinks its’ members have, and its own capacity to take a joke—and criticism.

When I talked to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the stars of the sketch and standup show on Comedy Central that bears their name, in February, they were about to start airing for the first time, and they laid out their approach to everything from code switching, to Christianity, to Michelle Obama. Their second season begins tomorrow, and I checked back in with Key and Peele to talk about how meeting the President has changed their very funny sketches about Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator, what they think Giancarlo Esposito’s performances on Revolution and Breaking Bad mean for our understanding of race in America, and how to nail a potentially offensive joke without getting in trouble. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

As you say in the first episode of the new season, you met the president! What was your conversation with him like? And how has seeing him in person affected the Anger Translator sketches?

Jordan: One of the impresisons we had was that he was just very funny. That little bit you’re talking about, where he took a bottle of water form an aide when he had a cough in his throat, and he checked with the Secret Service jokingly, saying “We trust her?” We couldn’t believe that. He said, “I need Luther…He said to Keegan, I need Luther. I need him”. That was cool.

Keegan: I think also, it was more of a confirmation of things already assumed than it was anything else. I did have an impresison of him that he was more in real life than I expected him to be. He was taller, he was better looking. For as cool as he comes across, there was a very palpable warmth that he has about him that, frankly, I didn’t know that I was expecting. He’s right there, he’s with you, he’s talking to you. He has such a calming energy to him.

Jordan: That little sense of humor we’re talking about. You can tell it sneaks out now and then, even though he knows he needs to be the master and commander and dignified and together, so when it slips out and he says something funny, you can see him regather his posture a little. It felt like we hit [what] he may kind of be thinking on the head…I think he knows he can’t exactly align himself with the sentiments we explore. Whether or not it affects the comedy we do, our take on him has always been based on how we feel and what we feel are the unspoken truths that will get a laugh because they ring true. Nothing’s changed…we do a sketch where I play him back in college when he’s in Occidental College, and we do it as if it was found footage of him smoking weed, and more than smoking weed, but owning the party. And what if he brought his charisma and his people together to organize a party on the Occidental College campus. That was the premise of the scene. We felt a little bit rascally about it, especially having met him, to point out the fun side of Obama when he needs to bring his seriousness to a lot of the issues. It’s something that rings true and it’s funny. And at the end of the day…He brings that gravitas and that sense of American ideals to every little exchange.

Since your first season, FX has started airing Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and BET has announced the launch of TJ Holmes’ late-night show. I’m curious what you think of this mini-boom in late-night shows built around African-American men, and where you think Key & Peele fits in this new landscape?

Keegan: I’m not aware of these programs. I think probably a lot of it has to do with we have our foot on the throttle right now because we’re coming so close to the premiere.

Jordan: I do think that this is sort of a continuation of the evolution of things from, with Obama as a catalyst, even four years ago. It was very interesting, the way African-Americans have been in culture in general. Sidney Poitier back in the day…When I was growing up, there was Denzel Washington, and the idea of a black president came around, Morgan Freeman was cast as a president all of a sudden. The ideas of African-Americans as a leading man has sort of conjealed. What’s fascinating to me is these characters like Giancarlo Esposito, his character in Revolution seems kind of allegorical to Obama. They’re trying to do that somehow. There’s this refined black man who is in charge and somehow mysterious, and he plays it as a good guy.
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Some days, it feels like we’re in an arms race of stupid, as is the case when Dane Cook decides that the timing is right to pull this joke in response to the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado:

So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into the movie. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but the movie is pretty much a piece of crap. Yea, spoiler alert. I know that if none of that would have happened, pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, was probably like ‘ugh fucking shoot me.

There is, in fact, a point to be made about the extent to which images of gun violence are integrated into our culture, and the degree to which we’ve become callous about the prospect of shootings. But I’m not sure that this routine really conveys the horror of that disconnect between our everyday conversation and our reaction when the things we joke about become real. There’s a strain of comedy that relies on the people who stories are told about believing in things no one would ever believe, or reacting in ways actual humans would never react, whether it’s a disgruntled moviegoer wanting someone to end it all for them, or Daniel Tosh’s joke involving his sister thinking it’s hilarious that a prank he played on her left her unable to defend herself from a rapist. Jokes like that tend to reveal more about how the people telling them see the world than about the actual foibles and hypocrisies of their targets.

Comedian Lizz Winstead has opened for Roseanne Barr, co-created both Air America Radio and The Daily Show, and in May, she published her first book, the essay collection Lizz Free or Die. I loved her tour of Minnesota comedy clubs and behind-the-scenes look at standing up one of the defining progressive cultural institutions of the last decade, and when Daniel Tosh became the center of a wide-ranging conversation about comedy, gender and etiquette this week, she was the first person I wanted to talk to. We talked about the social contract between comedians and their audiences, owning—and executing—material on the highest level, and what she learned from Roseanne. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you talk about in Lizz Free or Die was how, when your friend Christine suggested you try stand-up, you realized it hadn’t occurred to you that your life could be material because so many of the stand-ups you saw were men.

They weren’t necessarily the comics I love. I wasn’t necessarily an aficionado, but they were the guys I saw doing comedy. I would be watching Carson with my family and there would be a bunch of guys in ties. I think it’s changed dramatically because of everything and the internet. Late night is still notoriously male, the women comics featured to the men comics featured are notoriously low. But women have said “If you’re not going to book us, we’re going to start our own web pages…[When people talk about new female comics they like] I ask, did you find them on late night? And the answer is no, I saw them on Funny or Die, or these cool pop-up shows. Women are forging their own paths. They get to hone their own voices and present what they want outside the limits of a ten-minute routine.

Carlin still throws a long shadow over the industry. Because he could pull off things like rape jokes with a high level of precision, a lot of people seem to miss the point that the key to doing that kind of material is doing it well.

Where I agree with Daniel Tosh is that everything can be funny…people have made all of these things funny. The movie The Aristocrats was hilarious, trying to one-up the most horrible joke ever. Every joke would put the most vulgar, horrible things within the confines of that joke. If there’s funny, there’s no controversy. And if there’s not, there is. I don’t defend anyone who apologizes [for their material], because if they apologize, they didn’t believe it when they said it. Louis [C.K.] and Patton [Oswalt] can be edgy, and Sarah Silverman can be edgy, but they’ve crafted these jokes and they believe in them. If you don’t believe in it, I don’t find it very interesting. Every time, and I can only speak for myself, the question I ask myself is “Do I believe it? And can I defend it?” When you’re a political comic, you’re immediately going to piss off half the people because America is divided. I get death threats from telling my abortion story once a month. Someone wants to rape me or wishes I was dead.

Well and that raises a central question here. How do you think comics should deal with hecklers without getting into ugly territory?

One is how was the audience reacting to the whole thing. Daniel Tosh hasn’t responded and neither has the woman, so we don’t know how this horrible thing was received. That would add a layer, this horrible thing was acceptable to this audience. If Daniel Tosh thinks anything is fair game, just tell those jokes, then. If he’s going on and on, there’s a constrast for a comic and a comedian.

If it’s a comedy club, the contract is the person’s going to get on stage and explore comedy however they see that comedy is. And the contract for the audience member is to come and see that, and you don’t get a guarantee it’s going to make you laugh, but the comedian is going to attempt to make you laugh. But if they’re not attempting to do material, and the article made [it seem like Tosh was discussing concepts rather than telling jokes]…

A comic should have the freedom to go on stage and say whatever they want. The only control you have is what passes your lips. After, you’re saying “I’ve passed this up to be judged.” Everyone else gets to decide whether it’s funny…all the comics say don’t laugh or leave. Those are your options as an audience member. The bigger discussion for me, is if someone walks into a comedy club and gets a lecture about what’s funny or not funny, has that comedian broken the social contract? That’s the question that I would ask because I don’t have any information about the context he was talking about it. It’s all very confusing. The whole thing, we’re talking about so many issues of what people get away with and what they don’t, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to do material that pushes boundaries, you better be fucking funny and know the purpose of why you’re saying those things.
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We’ve had a lot of conversation on this blog about the way Daniel Tosh handled a woman who told him rape jokes weren’t funny at a recent show. There are a lot of threads to parse here—how people handle heckling (and how clubs should handle them)*, whether rape jokes can be funny under any circumstances, why comedians close ranks around their own. But I want to separate those issues out and talk very specifically about another strain of argument. One thread of conversation here has suggested that the woman who related her story was wrong, or oversensitive to feel threatened when Tosh suggested it would be funny if she were gang raped. The idea behind those objections is that no one would ever act based on Tosh’s words, and that because there isn’t a real prospect of her being actually assaulted, there is no impact to his words.

This is wrong on two levels. First, if you’ve never had someone visualize raping you out loud, and I’m talking about actually visualizing performing sex on you without your consent, not use of sexual violation as metaphor for victory and defeat, I can tell you, it is not pleasant. It’s unpleasant randomly on the internet, and I can’t imagine having it happen in a crowded room. If we stripped away the circumstances, if Tosh had just singled out this woman as an example during his defense of rape jokes, maybe that would be clearer. But because the point of a comedian’s response to heckling is to shut the person interrupting the set down as quickly as possible, there’s an idea that the most effective way to do that is to be as gross and mean as possible. As the anonymous OffensiveComic told me during a long, and for me, useful conversation about heckling on Twitter, “If the thing a comedian says to a heckler isn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever said to them, the comedian lacks imagination.” Daniel Tosh meant for this woman to be uncomfortable. Whether she consented to it or not is another question.

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After Daniel Tosh responded to a heckler at a recent show who told him rape jokes weren’t funny by laying out a scenario that involved her getting gang raped, he tweeted an attempt at an apology. “All the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize,” he wrote. “The point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. ‪#deadbabies‬.”

There are two issues here. First, is that the main thing Tosh needs to apologize for is what he put the audience member through. She felt threatened and humiliated, and he targeted her in front of an audience. It’s be nice to see him use that power to impress an audience to explain why what he did wasn’t funny or insightful. I’d even be interested to hear him explain his thought process in formulating his response or his emotional reaction to the audience member’s comments, like Jason Alexander did when he apologized for his comments about cricket being a “gay sport” earlier this year. The best apologies involve conversation rather than deflection.

Which is the second problem with this response. Tosh restates the point that he was trying to make, which is that it’s possible to make jokes about rape. Again, that’s a subject that needs parsing. Jokes about sexual assault seem, to me, to fall into a category that requires heightened scrutiny. Reveling in someone else’s vulnerability or humiliation is not an inherently funny thing, and it’s upsetting to a lot of people. If you’re going to upset a lot of people, and defend upsetting a lot of people, you have to have more than a pedestrian joke to offer up. You have to have a point, and you have to execute it with a high degree of precision. That doesn’t appear to be something that Tosh understands in a lot of his schtick. But it’s particularly obvious here that he doesn’t seem to understand either his heckler’s original criticism, or why what he did to her subsequently was so upsetting, or feel the need to offer a specific elaboration of his point or exploration of his thinking. There is a genuine and interesting conversation to be had about how comedy works in this space. But it doesn’t seem like we’re in a place where we’re close to having it.

I’m not sure I expect better from comedian Daniel Tosh, but this story of a woman who saw him on a bill at the Laugh Factory (where, it should be noted, she got through a Dane Cook set just fine, lest anyone want to accuse her of oversensitivity) and ended up having to hear him talk about how hilarious it would be if she got gang-raped is…dispiriting:

So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

Now, I don’t know what jokes Tosh was telling specifically, but judging by, say, this routine, where the joke is that his sister gets raped after he replaces her pepper spray with silly string and her reaction is that he pulled a good one, I’d imagine it wasn’t particularly thoughtful or analytical:

Ditto with this “Acme Rape Trap” routine:

Heckling is, of course, a legitimate part of something that does happen during* comedy performances (though more so in clubs like the Laugh Factory than in a major auditorium), and heckling someone on the substance of their jokes is obviously a notch politer than simply telling someone that they’re terrible, or unfunny, or unattractive, or to get lost. A good comedian is an alchemist who can turn heckling into a transformative extended riff. Here it sounds like Tosh just doubled down on the same points he was making rather than actually responding, or providing an example of a rape joke that his heckler might find funny, undermining her objection. As I’ve written before, I think there is a case to be made that rape jokes that make fun of perpetrators can be very funny. Tosh didn’t go there, though. He just took the quickest route to run his heckler out of the club, and in using an image of her getting raped to mock and intimidate her, kind of made her point instead of his own. If rape was just hilarious and uproarious and trivial, it wouldn’t be a very effective rhetorical or literal weapon. Tosh isn’t just failing at civility here. He’s being a bad comedian.

*Thanks to the comedians who pointed out that heckling is less common than it’s sometimes portrayed to be. I regret the mischaracterization. The point I wanted to make is that is that the writers’ remarks weren’t entirely bizarre and a professional should have been prepared to respond to them.

BlackBook has a fantastic look at gay stand-up comedians that gets at a point that I think is a challenge both for gay comics and Muslim comedy in general: how do you make the vernacular that’s part of your community conversation legible to a wider audience so they can participate in the jokes with you? And how do you create jokes that are a base that you can build your comedy on, rather than define you on terms that may not precisely be your own? As one of the comedians BlackBook talked to put it:

Part of this is because of the constraints of gay comedy. “There’s a condescending attitude that gay entertainment has to involve drag shows or men being effeminate,” says Brent Sullivan, a New York-based comedian. “I did a show in Chelsea the other day where there was this screaming queen who did a lot better than I did. Even homophobes could enjoy that because you are putting yourself into this box that they’ve created for you. But I think we haven’t challenged the gay-friendly straight men of this world to actually enjoy a gay character or enjoy gay entertainment because we haven’t given them anything to enjoy.”

Watching Marc Maron interview Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW, one of the things that fun about watching them riff off each other was the total lack of need to clarify any of the Jewish humor. Even a moment when they may have crossed the line with a Holocaust joke was immediately apparent to everyone in the room, even though it’s hardly a setting that guarantees a majority-Jewish audience. Jewish humor’s just so deeply-integrated into the American humor tradition—Christopher Hitchens believed the only kind of women who could be funny were Jewish ones and lesbians—that while it registers as particular, it doesn’t register as foreign. Everyone can participate in it, and Jews own it, it’s a tool we get to turn on anti-Semites.

That’s true for a small portion of gay humor, and for essentially no Muslim humor whatsoever. Things like the Allah Made Me Funny tour, The Infidel, Four Lions, and Max on Happy Endings will help. But we have so much work to do to make that language feel automatic and accessible to broad audiences.

Yesterday, Blue Collar Comedy front man Jeff Foxworthy endorsed former Wall Street investment banker Mitt Romney for president, and announced that he plans to campaign with him at several events in Alabama and Mississippi. In honor of this occasion, we’d like to suggest several Foxworthy-appropriate jokes for the campaign trail:

• If your wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” you might not be a redneck.
• If you think $374,000 in speaking fees is “not very much” money, you might not be a redneck.
• If your tax return is 203 pages long, you might not be a redneck.
• If you think it’s a problem that billionaires aren’t allowed to give you all the money they want, you might not be a redneck.
• If your earliest memories include looking down upon the people of New York from a helipad with your CEO father, you might not be a redneck.
• If you think “cheesy grits” from a Hilton hotel is down home southern cooking, you might not be a redneck.
• If you only hunt “small varmints, if you will,” you might not be a redneck.
• If you help your son set up a business by fronting him $10 million, you might not be a redneck.
• If the business is named after the place where your “ski mansion” is located, you might not be a redneck.

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