that's not funny!

8/15/2019 That's Not Funny!

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T around a café table inthe chilly atrium of theMinneapolis Conven-tion Center, talkingabout how to create the

cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’sin your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Bettersafe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered.Feraz Ozel mused about the first timehe’d ever done stand-up: three minutes

on giving his girlfriend herpes and bang-ing his grandma. That was out.

This was not a case of professionalsapproaching a technical problem as anintellectual exercise. Money was rid-ing on the answer. They had come toMinneapolis in the middle of a brutalwinter for the annual convention of theNational Association for Campus Activi-ties (), to sell themselves and theircomedy on the college circuit. Repre-sentatives of more than 350 colleges

had come as well, to book comics, mu-sicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists,

magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, andevery kind of boat act, inspirationalspeaker, and one-trick pony you couldimagine for the next academic year.

For the comics, the college circuitoffers a lucrative alternative to ChuckleHut gigs out on the pitiless road, spotsthat pay a couple hundred bucks anda free night in whatever squat the club

owner uses to warehouse out-of-towntalent. College gigs pay easily a granda night—often much more—and theycan come in a irecracker string, withrelatively short drives between schools,each hour-long performance paid for(without a moment’s ugliness or hesi-tation) by a friendly student-activitieskid holding out a check and hoping fora selfie. For all these reasons, thousandsof comics dream of being invited to theconvention.

The colleges represented were—to

use a word that their emissaries regardas numinous—diverse: huge researchuniversities, tiny liberal-arts colleges,Catholic schools, land-grant institutions.But the students’ taste in entertainmentwas uniform. They liked their slam poetsto deliver the goods in tones of the high-est seriousness and on subjects of lunarbleakness; they favored musicians whocould turn out covers with cheerful pre-cision; and they wanted comedy that was100 percent risk-free, comedy that could

not trigger or upset or mildly trouble asingle student. They wanted comedy so

h a t s

N o t

5 4 S E P T E M B E R T H E A T L A N T I C

Today’s collegestudents can’tseem to take a joke.

By Caitlin FlanaganIllustrations byKristian Hammerstad


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T H E A T L A N T I C S E P T E M B E R 55


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56 S E P T E M B E R T H E A T L A N T I C

hotels to the Minneapolis Convention Center, where hewould perform for 1,000 potential buyers, but he evinced nota trace of anxiety other than to glance at his iPhone now andthen to make sure he wasn’t late.

Keith is one of the kings of the college circuit. A few yearsago, he was the most-booked college comic, playing 120 cam-puses. He charges $2,300 for a single performance.

Keith is 31, fast-witted and handsome, possessed of an acuteand often witheringly precise ability to assess people and situ-

ations. He rocketed into comedy at a young age; at 22 he spenta year and a half on the road, performing with a popular head-liner: Pablo Francisco, who let him do half an hour, and allowedhim to tell filthy stories onstage. (Keith was a good-looking kidworking big gigs in Vegas and Dallas and Chicago; he wasn’tshort on filthy stories.) For a while he was in danger of becomingtoo dirty for mainstream audiences, but he’s smart and ambi-tious, so he toned down his material, put together a television

reel, and sharpened his crowd work.He now has TV credits and a follow-ing. He lives in Los Angeles, wherehe kills at clubs, goes on auditions,

and waits—impatiently, as do all theyoung and talented people in Holly-wood who have passed 30—for thebig break.

Until then, there’s the collegemarket, and the logic problem. Try-ing to explain to these kids any ofthe fundamental truths of stand-up—from why it’s not a good idea tohold a comedy show in the cafete-ria during lunch hour, to why jokesinvolving gay people aren’t neces-

sarily homophobic—is a nonstarter,and only serves to antagonize thecustomers. The logic problem isalso responsible for the fact thatmany of the comics at the conven-tion weren’t very funny, and severalof those who were funny didn’t getmuch work, despite garnering hugelaughs and even standing ovations.

A young gay man with a Broadway background namedKevin Yee sang novelty songs about his life, producing a de-lirium of affection from the audience. “We love you, Kevin!”a group of kids yelled between numbers. He invited students

to the front of the auditorium for a “gay dance party,” andthey charged down to take part. His last song, about the closerelationship that can develop between a gay man and his “sassyblack friend,” was a killer closer; the kids roared in delight, andseveral African American young women in the crowd seemedto be self-identifying as sassy black friends. I assumed Yeewould soon be barnstorming the country. But afterward, twowhite students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no.He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly.

“We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “Thatthing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.”Many others, apparently, felt the same way: Yee ended up with

18 bookings—a respectable showing, but hardly a reflection ofthe excitement in the room when he performed.

thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the mosthypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into aperformance, the words he would hear would fall on him likea soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging himto toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence adreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monsterhad upset him with a joke.

Two of the most respected American comedians, ChrisRock and Jerry Seinfeld, have discussed the unique problems

that comics face on college campuses. In November, Rock toldFrank Rich in an interview for New York magazine that he nolonger plays colleges, because they’re “too conservative.” Hedidn’t necessarily mean that the students were Republican; hemeant that they were far too eager “not to offend anybody.”In college gigs, he said, “you can’t even be offensive on yourway to being inoffensive.” Then, in June, Seinfeld reopenedthe debate—and set off a frenzied round of op-eds—when hesaid in a radio interview that comicswarn him not to “go near colleges—they’re so PC.”

When I attended the conven-

tion in Minneapolis in February,I saw ample evidence of the re-pressive atmosphere that Rockand Seinfeld described, as well asanother, not unrelated factor: theinfantilization of the Americanundergraduate, and this charac-ter’s evolving status in the worldof higher learning—less a studentthan a consumer, someone whosewhims and affectations (political,sexual, pseudo-intellectual) mustbe constantly supported and cham-pioned. To understand this change,it helps to think of college not asan institution of scholarly pursuitbut as the all-inclusive resort thatit has in recent years become—andthen to think of the undergraduatewho drops out or transfers as anearly checkout. Keeping hold ofthat kid for all four years has become a central obsession ofthe higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part,by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him fromwandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his

Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.But which jesters, which bards? Ones who can handle the

challenge. Because when you put all of these forces together—political correctness, coddling, and the need to keep kids atonce amused and unoffended (not to mention the absence ofa two-drink minimum and its crowd-lubricating effect)—theblack-box theater of an obscure liberal-arts college deep inflyover territory may just be the toughest comedy room in thecountry.

“

Y on these people,” GeoffKeith told me over dinner at the Hilton, “or then they

think you’re a dick.” He was about to walk throughone of the frigid skyways connecting a cluster of downtown


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highest reaches of human achievement, and it was not mere journalistic zeal that had me thundering down the main aisleto grab a good seat for each new showcase.

The kids in the audience belonged to their schools’ student-activities committees, and had thus been appointed the task ofpicking the paid entertainment for the next year. I found them,as a type, to be cheerful, helpful, rule-following, and nerdy.They were also—in the best sense of a loaded word—inclusive.

“We don’t want to sponsor an event that would offend anyone,”

Courtney Bennett, the incoming president of the student-activities board at Western Michigan University, told me. The kids were impossible not to like, although nothing aboutthem suggested a natural talent for identifying original formsof artistic expression. They would cluster around their grown-up advisers like flocks of ducklings to powwow about the per-formers they had seen. Then, with the casual ease of peoplespending someone else’s money, they would use an app toblast potential dates to the artists they liked. These were the

buyers, then: one half of the equation.The entertainers were the other half.

They had come to the event on their

own dime, and were trying to do what-ever it took to please these young peopleso that they could get some road work.Their first step might have been to readthe convention brochure. , it ex-plained, is dedicated to “promoting theimportance” of “eliminating” any lan-guage that is “discriminatory or cultur-ally insensitive.”

O, Utopia. Why must your sweetgovernance always turn so quickly fromthe Edenic to the Stalinist? The col-

lege revolutions of the 1960s—the ones that gave rise to thesocial-justice warriors of today’s campuses—were fueled byfree speech. But once you’ve won a culture war, free speech isa nuisance, and “eliminating” language becomes a necessity.

The process begins, as such processes always do, in a com-mittee of “undisclosed members.” In the fall, an anonymousgroup of staff and volunteers reviews hundreds of submissiontapes to determine which performers will get to showcase theiracts at the convention. What this seemed to boil down to, whenI looked at the slate of performers who had gotten a goldenticket, was that comics who even gestured toward the insensi-tive had been screened out, and those whose racial or ethnicbackground contributed to the diversity of the slate had been

given special consideration.There were comics of Nigerian, Afghan Pakistani, Indian,

Hispanic, and Korean–African American heritage. Some werevery good. But others barely had the 15 minutes necessary fora showcase; it was hard to believe they would have the hourneeded for college work. Many of these younger artists thoughtthat if they could just get the gigs off this audition, they couldthen do their regular club act once they showed up on campus.They were mistaken. Tell a joke that upsets the kids, and thenext morning the student-activities director is going to be onthe phone: to your agent, to , and—more crucially—to hisor her co-equals at the other four colleges in the region that

you booked.Geoff Keith had counseled Chinedu Unaka and Feraz Ozel

If your goal were simply to bring great comics to a collegecampus, it would be easily accomplished. You would gatherthe school’s comedy nerds, give them a budget, and tell themto book the best acts they could afford. But then you’d haveDoug Stanhope explaining to religious kids that there’s no God,or Dennis Miller telling an audience of social-justice warriorsthat France’s efforts to limit junk food in schools are part ofthe country’s “master plan to raise healthier cowards.” Youwould have, in other words, performers whose desire is not to

soothe an audience but to unsettle it, performers who hew toRoseanne Barr’s understanding of comedy: “I love stand-up.I’m totally addicted to it,” she once said. “It’s free speech. It’sall that’s left.”

College campuses have never been incubators for greatstand-up; during the 1960s and ’70s, schools didn’t dedicatemuch money to bringing in entertainers, and by the time theydid, PC culture had taken off. This culture—its noble aspira-tions and inevitable end game—was everywhere apparent atthe convention. In the lavishly produced,144-page brochure, I found a denselywritten block of text that began with a

trumpet blast of idealism—“ iscommitted to advancing diversity devel-opment and the principles of equal op-portunity and affirmative action throughits respective programs”—but wounddown to a muffled fart of unintendedconsequences: “There is no intent tosupport censorship.”

Bringing great artists to colleges isnot ’s mission. Its mission involvespresenting for potential employment onAmerican campuses a group of entertain-

ers whose work upholds a set of ideas that has been codifiedby bureaucrats. And in the comedians’ desperate attempts tograsp the realpolitik of the college market—and to somehow re-verse engineer an act catered to it—you could see why stand-upis such a singular form: it is mercilessly ineffective as agitprop.

B to hold a conventionin Minneapolis in February is not widely shared, theconvention center was largely deserted and dystopian.

Homeless men, some wearing hospital gowns and ID braceletsunder their parkas, slunk quietly inside to keep warm, althoughif they panhandled or menaced anyone they were bouncedback onto the urban tundra by security guards. Vast expanses

of the structure loomed in all directions, and empty escalatorswheeled ever upward. During the day, “educational sessions”on topics of inexpressible tedium—“Wave Goodbye to LowVolunteer Retention”—droned on, testament (as are the edu-cational sessions of a hundred other conferences) to the factthat the growth field in higher education is not Elizabethanliterature or organic chemistry but mid-level administration.

All of this was enlivened—mightily—by the fact that thedoors of the main auditorium regularly swung open for two-hour variety shows. These shows were like episodes of Amer-ica’s Got Talent—jolly and sparkly, sometimes diverting andsometimes wearisome—but in contrast to the lectures on vol-

unteer retention, the gloomy convention center, and the gelidmetropolis beyond, they came to seem like examples of the

“ W e ’ r e a v e r y

f o r w a rd - t h i n k i ng

s c h o o l. T h a t t h i ng

a b o u t t h e ‘ s a s s y

b l a c k f r i e nd ’ ?

T h a t w o u ld n ’ t

w o r k f o r u s. ”


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58 S E P T E M B E R T H E A T L A N T I C

A finished dinner, wemade our way to the auditorium and fell in with agroup of other comics who were heading over to catch

his set. Keith is deeply respected in this crowd: he may still bedeveloping his career in the real comedy world, the one whereyou perform for grown-ups, but he can book as many collegesas he wants.

Keith was dressed not in the understated clothing he wearsin comedy clubs, but in an almost clownish getup: bright-pink

pants, a green shirt, a polka-dot tie. The outfit was strategic—he didn’t want a kid forgetting his name and booking thewrong comic; he would remind the audience to think of himas the guy in the pink pants. Instead of performing for 15 min-utes, he would cut his set short at the first big laugh after the12-minute mark, so that the act would seem to fly by. He wouldtell jokes about his fiancée’s strict father, and getting out of

jury duty, and tricking someone by using an English accent.The students would love him, and book him in great numbers,as they always do.

But he would not tell the jokes that kill at the clubs. Hewould not do the bit that ends with him offering oral sex to

the magician David Copperfield, or theone about a seductive woman warninghim that she might be an ax murderer, orthe one about why men don’t like to usecondoms. Those jokes include obser-vations about power and sex and evenrape—and each, in its complicated way,addresses certain ugly and possibly im-mutable truths. But they are jokes, notlessons from the gender-studies class-room. Their first objective is to be funny,not to service any philosophical ideal.They go where comedy always wantsto go, to the darkness, and they sucker-punch you with a laugh when you don’t

think you should laugh.And maybe you shouldn’t. These young people have de-

cided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are soserious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics. They wanta world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’trigged in favor of the powerful. And it’s their student-activitiesmoney, after all—they have every right to hire the exact type ofentertainment that matches their beliefs. Still, there’s alwaysa price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughtsand ideas. Drive those ideas underground, especially the dark

ones, and they fester.Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a

“mouth full of blood”—the hearty laugh from the person whounderstands your joke not as a critique of some vile notionbut as an endorsement of it. It’s the essential peril of comedy,as performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, AmySchumer understand all too well. But to enroll in college anddiscover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand-up comics who tell jokes in the stu-dent union—great care has been taken to expose you to onlythe narrowest range of approved social and political opinions:that’s the mouth full of blood right there.

Caitlin Flanagan is an Atlantic contributing editor.

not only to work clean, but also to confine any jokes about eth-nicity to their own heritage. Unaka delivered an original andinteresting set about growing up black in Los Angeles, the sonof Nigerian—not African American—parents; Ozel, whosefamily is Middle Eastern, also did a bit about his cultural back-ground. They were both well received, but they earned fewbookings. Who could predict how such jokes would go overback on campus? Zoltan Kaszas, on the other hand, did a cheer-ful, anodyne set about Costco, camping, and pets. He was

the breakout star of the convention. “Look at him,” one stu-dent group’s adviser said to me as more than 40 campus repsclamored for a visit from Kaszas. “His career just got made.”Another victory for better-safe-than-sorry.

As I listened to the kids hash out whom to invite, it be-came clear that to get work, a comic had to be at once funny—genuinely funny—and also deeply respectful of a particular setof beliefs. These beliefs included, but were in no way limitedto, the following: women, as a group, should never be madeto feel uncomfortable; people whose sexual orientation fallsbeyond the spectrum of heterosexuality must be reassured oftheir special value; racial injustice is best addressed in tones of

bitter anguish or inspirational calls to ac-tion; Muslims are friendly helpers whomwe should cherish; and belonging to anypotentially “marginalized” communityinvolves a crippling hypersensitivity thatmust always be respected.

The students’ determination to avoidbooking any acts that might conceivablyhurt the feelings of a classmate was inits way quite admirable. They seemedwholly animated by kindness and by anopen-mindedness to the many varieties

of the human experience. But the flipside of this sensitivity is the savagerywith which reputations and even aca-demic careers can be destroyed by a single comment—perhapsthoughtless, perhaps misinterpreted, perhaps (God help you)intended as a joke—that violates the values of the herd.

When you talk with college students outside of formal set-tings, many reveal nuanced opinions on the issues that was so anxious to police. But almost all of them have internal-ized the code that you don’t laugh at politically incorrect state-ments; you complain about them. In part, this is because theyare the inheritors of three decades of identity politics, whichhave come to be a central driver of attitudes on college cam-

puses. But there’s more to it than that. These kids aren’t dum-mies; they look around their colleges and see that there arehuge incentives to join the ideological bandwagon and harshpenalties for questioning the platform’s core ideas.

Meanwhile—as obvious reaction to all of this—frat boysand other campus punksters regularly flout the thought po-lice by staging events along elaborately racist themes, eventsthat, while patently vile, are beginning to constitute the free-speech movement of our time. The closest you’re going to getto Mario Savio—sick at heart about the operation of the ma-chine and willing to throw himself upon its gears and levers—isless the campus president of Human Rights Watch than the

moron over at Phi Sigma Kappa who plans the Colonial Brosand Nava-Hos mixer.

T o g e t w o r k , a c o mi c ha d t o b e g e nu i ne l y f u nny — a nd a l s o d e e p l y r e s p e c t f u l o f a p a r t i c u l a r s e t o f b e l i e f s .


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C o p y r i g h t o f A t l a n t i c i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f A t l a n t i c M e d i a C o m p a n y a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e

c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s

e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r

i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

that's not funny!

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