The Dark Side of Comedy ed. by Patrice A. Oppliger and Eric Shouse (review)

The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy, edited by Patrice A. Oppliger and Eric Shouse sets out to destabilize the sad-clown myth of stand-up comedians and ultimately succeeds. By the end of the volume's sixteen contributions (and four responses), the popular idea of comedy as essentially bound to a "troubled comedian" (6) is thoroughly dissected, torn apart, and put into perspective. In its first half, the book's essays interrogate the origin of dark topics—including mass death, childhood trauma and neglect, alcohol and food addiction, disability, sexual violence, and mental illness—in the material of well-known American comics, including George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Maria Bamford, and one Canadian comic, Mike Ward. Each contribution takes a distinct theoretical approach, but all of them interrogate the identity gap between comedians and their personae, decoupling comedy that makes light from dark human experiences.

The book's second half compiles contributions from amateur and aspiring comedians, who collectively expose the dark side of developing stand-up personae, a task undertaken in alcohol-infused, off-hour environments that make for unsafe working conditions. These authors offer an alternative to the picture of comedians as people who are, at the core of their personality, essentially broken. Their accounts of the physical, mental, and social risks for those who aim to make others laugh, as well as the financial and opportunity costs of choosing this profession, argue instead that being a stand-up is sure to wear you down. The shift in the book's topography—from a section titled "Darkness from the Outside" section to one titled "Darkness from the Inside"—effectively moves from a critique of the popular turn to tragedy to explanations of the origins of stand-up material, establishing a meaningful foundation on which to build future accounts of the complex psychosocial realities from and in which laughter arises.

To my mind, the strongest essay in the volume bears the name that most closely corresponds to its avowed mission. Edward David Naessens's "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona" tidily rejects the general impression of comics as figures who turn psychic tragedy into social light, eloquently articulating how the stage personae they construct emerge through engagements with audiences. The latter's laughter shapes the former's material, from the nature of its topics to the timing of its delivery. In refusing the "myth of catharsis" (240), Naessens's essay takes up another theme of the volume: the idea of humor "as a powerful source of healing" (4), a theme that many of the other essays wonderfully complicate. In "An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy: How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness," a nuanced discussion of how comedy often brings audiences into intimate contact with the heaviness of being human, Kathryn Mears and editors Oppliger and Shouse intervene in familiar theories of humor, including Freud's so-called relief theory and Warren and McGraw's more recent benign violation theory, complicating the oversimplified role of the audience embedded within both. The careful comparative reading of Bamford's style against the traditional setup-punchline is illuminating.

Also strong is Deborah M. Thomson's exquisite reading of Blayr Nias's retelling of being sexually assaulted while working as a stand-up, "The Ballad of Drunk McCreepster." She similarly captures the discursive dimension of comedy that Mears et al touch upon, while unfolding its transformative potential via Michel de Certeau's concept of "making do," or "'a calculated action' that takes place in 'the space of the other'" (274). Indeed, throughout the volume, a theme of restorative justice either supplants or thoroughly inflects what the book understands the therapeutic potential of laughter to be; this thread reaches its acme in Cait Hogan's must-read chapter, "The Ethics of 'Rape Jokes,'" a careful interweaving of personal sexual assault and comic responsibility. With its best essays, The Dark Side of Stand...