Permission to laugh? | How comics get audiences to accept contentious gags

Permission to laugh?

How comics get audiences to accept contentious gags

Any audience can be ‘manipulated’ into laughing at jokes about contentious topics, a conference about comedy has been told.

Academic Tory Gillespie said that comics can ‘negotiate’ with crowds to gain permission to talk about material generally deemed unsuitable for humour.

She identified specific techniques that professional comedians use to win such trust from their audiences including directly asking for permission to venture into dodgy territory; letting the audience know they would be wrong to be offended; or acknowledging or apologising in advance, what she called  ‘a Jimmy Carr favourite’.

Gillespie, who is conducting research into the topic at the University of Kent, where today’s Comedy On Stage And Page event is being held, said: ‘These comedians are confirming hat hey understand the joke is potentially offensive, but it’s just a joke so it’s fine.’

She cited Jim Davidson’s 2008 DVD On The Offensive of an example of a comedian ‘acknowledging he’s in dangerous territory’ and also conspiring with his military audience by uniting them as a tribe to give him permission.

Another example came from Brendon Burns’s So I Suppose THIS is Offensive Now show from the same year, where he acknowledged a joke had not been well-received by drawing attention to a woman’s shocked reaction.

Gillespie is conducting ‘practice as research’ for her paper Permission To Laugh, putting together her own stand-up routines into difficult subjects such as her grandmother ‘dying very slowly of cancer in a lot of pain’ and her grandfather dying suddenly in a car crash. 

She said most people’s initial reaction to the subject matter is: ‘‘Wow, that’s harsh’, but says: ‘My main objective is not to shock and offend.’

However she notes that unlike the professional comics she has studied: ‘People don’t know who I am so it requires a lot more manipulation [to gain permission].’

She also played a clip from a Ross Noble interview in which the comic addressed the topic of offence saying: ‘‘If you’re talking to a room full of people who are all recently lost an eye in a catapult incident, probably do’t talk about catapults… or you take that and try to make that funny.’

He then imagined himself calling all the victims ‘Cyclops bastards’… getting a laugh at the expense of his  own sincerity about being sensitive.

‘If you make yourself the butt of the joke you can raise permission though that,’ Gillespie said.

Published: 14 Jan 2016

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