Apocalypse Cabaret's Scout Durwood's noticed an unwelcome change

My favourite part about comedy is the immediacy of its interaction with the audience. On our best days, the exchange goes something like, I tell joke, you laugh. It’s a weird muscle, this being-good-at-comedy thing. It asks for a unique ability to label an experience within the sweet-spot of accuracy and surprise. Well crafted punchlines feel like magic tricks, a sleight of hand to reveal something that was there for the taking the whole time. 

On the other hand, the art of comedy is also fantastically related to the art of being mean. That’s why roast battles are a thing: our laughter response centres more on surprise than moral acuity, which makes comedy an excellent resource for both enforcing and discrediting social norms. 

I spent the last 22 months on a long-term contract telling the same tight five minutes of jokes every night plus a smattering of crowd work. Over the course of those two years, I witnessed an incredible shift in what audiences did and did not identify as laugh-worthy. Lighthearted jokes started to feel tense, a playful dig at corporate pride collections suddenly got the side-eye. The subtle suggestion that men don’t always know what they’re doing in bed now came off as fightin’ words. 

I think of comedy as a form of social nudge theory – if I can get an audience to contextualise something in a way that is surprising but makes sense, bingo!, I get a laugh. But as the world becomes more polarised, the margin for that reframe shrinks. 

It makes sense then that in our increasingly polarised world mean jokes – especially those that affirm someone’s pre-existing bias – aren’t just tolerated, they’re rewarded. Audiences are anxious, and comics are responding by going darker, edgier, and more extreme. Audiences are on edge, and we as comedians are responding in kind. Adopting this ‘when they go low, we go lower' attitude, only adds to this tenuous situation by giving clarity and voice to our increasing social divides. 

I noticed the shift most sharply when I left my show for a weekend in Los Angeles for the Netflix is a Joke festival. What was once friendly backstage banter suddenly turned into a parade of heroes and villains. Comic after comic came armed with performative social transgressions to prove that they were down to ‘tell it like it is’. 

I saw deeply racist humour go from cringeworthy to standing ovations at a Madison Square Garden political rally for Trump, though to be fair, I have seen meanness blossom on both sides, reinforcing social polarisation rather than undermining it, which is a cool thing comedy can do. 

We as comedians get to take sides. Both sides if we want to! Like the ketamine therapy of entertainment, comedy is a laser sharp tool to create new neural pathways of thinking, knocking audiences away from business as usual towards a more examined life. I’ll cite George Carlin’s ‘words you can’t say’ as an example of a comedian using their public square platform to identify social norms as arbitrary rather than divine. 

I’m not saying comedy should be nice, but I will say that the era of comedy as an avenue for supervillains will reach an expiration date, and all of us will have to reckon with how we handled it. Comedy as a tool for tearing down is only valuable up to a point. Eventually collective laugher will either win out or go down in her-story as a giant collective loss. 

Comedy as a tool of malice not only reflects cultural polarisation, it reinforces it, co-opting laugher to function as a tool for domination rather than subversion and critical thought. 

The upshot of comedy as a tool for polarisation is a reduced opportunity for audiences to come together. Mean jokes aren’t funny if you’re the one they’re being mean about.

This divide isn’t limited to one side of the political spectrum, either. I’ll cite ‘cancel culture’ among liberal comedians for being equally combative. At it best, comedy is about building up or questioning social values, not acting as propaganda to bolster the status quo. 

It’s also frankly not as funny, and what are we as comedians if not willing vessels to fan the flames of levity over time. 

• Apocalypse Cabaret: Songs From The End Of The World will be at the Underbelly Bristo Square   at 9.20pm for the duration of the Fringe.

Published: 4 Aug 2025