At Netroots New York this weekend, I went to an interesting workshop by John Hlinko, the man behind Left Action (and, interestingly, the write-in campaign to get former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty reelected after he lost the Democratic primary) and Julianna Forlano, the Brooklyn College media professor and voice behind the Ironic News Report. They were discussing how to use comedy to recruit people for activist projects, which is, of course, different from comedy for comedy’s sake. But the presentation raised some interesting questions for me about how best to make arguments through comedy — and whether, as progressives, it makes more sense for us to be rallying the troops internally, or to be working on converting the unconvinced.

“What makes people laugh,” Julianna said, is “surprise and a feeling of superiority…this is one that can be used for good or evil. You can use it to create a feeling of solidarity with your people, or you can do that thing I mentioned, where Mexicans love gardening. What we want to do is turn our focus on those people who are in power.” Which I think is true, to a certain extent. But there’s always the danger that in cutting people down to size, you end up confirming your (and your audience’s) own biases in a way that disarms your ability to fight hypocrisy and damaging ideas. Take the idea that Republicans are stupid. John used, as an example, a campaign he used to attract followers to LeftAction, getting people to register Facebook likes for the concept: “Can this horse’s ass get more fans than Mitch McConnell?” “It was clearly tapping into the kind of community,” he told us. “It pre-sold them on the concept. And then I said if you like an edgy, creative approach to left activism, like LeftAction.”

I get the impulse, especially if you’re feeling beaten up, to take refuge in the idea that your opponents are stupid. But that’s not actually an argument that’s going to dislodge people who agree with the arguments you’re not actually addressing, a project towards which I am more temperamentally inclined. By contrast, there’s something like Hustler’s Jerry Falwell parody, which was both funny because it was obviously not true, and because it provoked him into a response that made Larry Flynt’s point for him: that Falwell was thin-skinned, brittle, and humorless. The parody ad worked precisely because Hustler was coming into it from a position of confidence, rather than insecurity. He didn’t scare them enough for Flynt and company to have to reassure themselves that they were better than Falwell was—in fact, the ad copy is written completely straight, and sets Falwell up as a figure of authority within the context of the joke. “The greater the prestige of the target, the greater desire of people to see them equalized,” Julianna said. “My theory is we all know this is an illusion…Some of us on the left have to get over saying we love everyone and go on the attack.” The question is, what’s the best way to expose that artificiality? Dismantling illusions takes more work than just stating that they’re mirages, but it’s probably more effective in the long term.

I brought this up in the session, and John and Julianna and I talked about it afterward, but I also think it’s important to remember that comedy can be an incredibly valuable tool for reframing debates. The funniest bit of Louis C.K.’s environmentalist riff on his current tour and in his special isn’t necessarily the bit about people who think the natural world is there for them to exploit. It’s him as an aggrieved, and slightly naive, God, asking, “What the fuck did you do to my duck? It had a green head and it was so awesome and you fucking killed it!” When our debates become about who is smarter, or cooler, we’re losing focus. Sometimes the most important thing about environmentalism is the wonder of the duck.

The Mary Sue is serializing a project by Emily Schorr Lesnick on the experiences women face as improvisational performers, and this anecdote stood out to me:

Two improvisers happened to (independently) share the same story to illustrate the ways that women are placed into stereotypical roles and not given the agency or space to get out of them. A friend of my two interviewees, the only woman in a ten-person improv team that touted their cutting-edge style, entered an ongoing scene between two men. Her “walk-on” initiation was a clear assistant dropping off important papers to a supervisor, entering to say “here are your papers, boss,” and then leave. However, when she entered the scene, her male scene partner labeled her a prostitute, exclaiming “You must leave, sir, my prostitute is here!”

Bad improv, yes. But let’s dissect further:

This line of dialogue made this improviser into the object of laughter (and, as a prostitute, an object of sexual desire) and destroyed her initiation into the scene as another character from the business setting. This improviser’s adherence to rules of agreement in improv scenes effectively silenced her, as she negotiated her visible hurt and frustration with her desire to
support her teammates.

I think it was striking in part because I can’t think of a way that a man could be put into a similar situation, something that’s simultaneously reductive and ridiculous, but that people won’t immediately dismiss as implausible to the point of unfunniness (for the same reason 30 Rock can make lots of nasty jokes about dead hookers and still be considered feminist). We’re better at finding ways to make women seem ridiculous and accepting it because we have more practice. I don’t think that means we’re always required to treat female characters with extreme and stiff dignity because that would be excessively boring, but we need some equal opportunity here.

Ezra Klein’s asked me to weigh in on some thoughts he has about Louie, continuity, and sitcom v. standup formats:

Sitcoms tend to have one defined plot that stretches through 22 minutes of show. Stand up, of course, doesn’t. An act consists of jokes and observations that may or may not be connected to one another, and each one gets exactly as long as the comic thinks is optimal. Here’s two minutes for how black people and white people are different, here’s one minute on the uselessness of bookmarks, here’s five minutes on the trauma and tribulations of marriage. The connecting thread isn’t a single storyline, but the comic’s unique point of view.

Louie CK’s original sitcom, Lucky Louie, was, well, like a sitcom. His current show, Louie, isn’t. It’s broken up by stand-up bits that are thematically, but not specifically, related to the narrative pieces, and even the narrative pieces often feel disconnected from one another. A recent episode, Bummer/Blueberries, included two storylines that were almost completely disconnected from one another. A more traditional sitcom would have made each into its own episode, and that would have meant padding them out. Louie CK clearly judged the material better at shorter length, and so that’s the length he used it at. Like a stand-up comic would.

I’d note that sitcoms are actually more broken up than this — B and C storylines may take up less time than A stories, but the 22 minutes of a sitcom episode are parceled out across a couple of different topics. But I do think there’s something radical about what pairing that parceling out of time with throwing out continuity has let Louis C.K. do. It’s not just that he allots time to bits based on how far he thinks he can reasonably stretch out the material. It’s that the allots time based on what he thinks the audience can bear.

I’ve written before that I sometimes feel like Louie is the closest I get to seeing the world as a (very specific) man might see it. And much of the critical praise for the show is based on how self-lacerating it is. In a world where we don’t have a lot of portraits of wounded masculinity, Louie almost single-handedly fills that quota.

There’s something categorically different about, say, 30 Rock‘s depiction of Liz Lemon’s inability to get and keep a man and the agony of Louis’ confession of love for Pamela. Liz’s misadventures are blunted by the fact that they’re somewhat implausible. It’s not painful to watch Liz have romantic trouble when it’s impossible to believe that someone that attractive will be alone forever, and when we know Liz Lemon is happily settled. We can watch her get embarrassed by dating a much younger guy whose mother turns out to look exactly like her or deal with dating Jon Hamm, because neither of those scenarios are actually wildly humiliating or particularly plausible. On the other hand, something like Pamela’s rejection of Louis is the kind of thing it’s painful to look at for too long, painful to revisit again and again precisely because it’s so initially affecting, so acutely observed. Looking at the sources of some of our worst emotional pain is like staring at the sun for too long: at some point, you just have to look away, to lock away the deepest hurts in your heart and not speak of them again.

And while there isn’t necessarily direct plot continuity, there are clear continuities in Louis’ behavior and emotions. The way he lunges in to plant one on Joan Rivers is the same way he lunges in on the abstinence advocate from last week’s episode. His daughters’ repeated slights to him, whether they’re directly saying they like staying at their mother’s more, or they’re reacting skeptically to his insistence that their visit to their great-aunt is a good idea, give us a sense of the weight of their disappointment and the pain they unintentionally inflict on him. There are some emotions, and life, that don’t actually take place or develop in particularly linear or predictable way. Louie‘s format lets it get at emotional truths that other sitcoms skirt. But I don’t think that the format alone would make the show revolutionary without Louis’ commitment to looking his own discomforts square in the face.