An Un-Humourous Treatise On Punching Up Vs. Punching Down

I. Why We Laugh

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. I’ve seen Andy Kindler do both.

There are many theories for why we laugh. There’s the superiority theory; we laugh at the superiority we feel when we witness the misfortune of others. You’ve probably heard the German word for this- Reliefgeraüsch. To quote Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

There’s the relief theory; laughter is the emotional release to a build-up of psychic energy. In other words, tension and release. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a masterclass in this theory.

There’s also the man hit in balls theory; we laugh because a man is hit in the balls. This theory was first put forth by Aristotle in 338 BCE.

One thing you start to realise when reading up on the many theories as to why we laugh, they seem to explain why some jokes are funny, but they never explain all of them. There is one theory that does take a stab at explaining why we laugh at every kind of joke, however, the benign violation theory (BVT).

Essentially, BVT posits that we laugh when we perceive (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously. In other words, we *feel* and recognise both “safety” and “violation”. A man getting hit in the balls is funny because we recognise the pain of getting hit in the balls (violation), but also recognise it’s happening to Chris Williams on a movie screen and not to us in the theatre (safety). If the dodgeballs start flying for my testicles, the joke becomes a lot less funny.

While safety has an innately broad understanding among most people, we have to use a pretty lax definition of “violation” in order to keep the theory universal. Violation isn’t just in regards to pain, abuse, or infringement, but any threat to the way someone views the world. This can include surprise destinations, like with the use of paraprosdokians, incongruities that seem to break laws of understanding, like with the use of surreal humour, or even just not providing a punch-line where a punch-line is supposed to be, like with the use of anti-humour.

It also explains the subjectivity of humour. What I find violating, you might not find violating. What makes me feel safe may not make you feel safe. And our ability to recognise both at the same time may be affected by a thousand little subjective things. As a comedy nerd, joke craft is endlessly fascinating, but while I could spend 10 minutes explaining to you why “During sex, my wife always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel” is a perfectly crafted joke, if it doesn’t hit you on the BVT level, you’re just not going to laugh. It would also make me a pretty boring house guest.

In this context, the term violation can be misleading- the violation doesn’t have to be shocking, offensive, or vulgar like the word would normally imply, though a lot of comedy does employ this to varying effect. In fact, it’s that kind of comedy I want to do a deeper dive into.

II. The Comedy Of Yesteryear

Comedy is going through a culture war. This is news in that the people in this culture war think it’s the only time comedy has been in a culture war. In reality, comedy tends to always function on a boom/bust cycle of permissibility. What was acceptable yesterday is offensive today, what is taboo today becomes anodyne tomorrow. This is how comedy works, and it’s good that it does. The tree of comedy needs to feed on the blood of dinosaurs; the next generation of comedy should always be a response to, not a continuation of, the last.

What it does mean, however, is that there are a lot of dinosaurs who now need to evolve or be wiped out (look, I went to a catholic school, this evolution thing is still new to me). Understandably, many dinosaurs want things to stay the way they were when they were thunder lizards forever. This is good for the old, unchanging comedians and their acolytes, but bad for us, the rising generation of comedians and comedy fans. Luckily for us, we’re winning, as we always will. And I don’t mean in a paradigm of “edgy vs. P.C.”, “hate vs. empowerment” or “punching up vs. punching down” (hey, that’s the title of the essay!), simply in terms of “old vs. new”. Every once in a while the new must become old and that means the old needs to die. It’s now time for us to become old.

Of course, you can always adapt. You can also hold out in the hope that what was old becomes new again (it tends to happen quite a bit). That requires either effort or patience, so I understand why people choose anger instead. In reality, the world of comedy has expanded so much and old ways of gate-keeping are dying so quickly, that nothing ever truly disappears; it can all exist in some form, even if it’s not du jour. But du jour is a very nice thing to be, so why would you give it up without a fight?

What I’m interested in is what comedy was, what it’s becoming, and most interestingly, how it’s retconning the past. In the broadest sense, we’re moving away from “punching down” and towards “punching up” and it’s re-calibrating the past in a way it hasn’t before.

III. The Nine-Year-Old Rule That’s As Old As Christ

It’s a rule as axiomatic as praxeology; “good” comedy always “punches up”, whereas “bad” comedy always “punches down”. And yet, for the life of me, I can’t find where Eddie Murphy talked about punching up. Or Lenny Bruce. Or Henny Youngmen. Which is strange, because pop-culture editorialists have been imploring this as a hard and fast rule since time immemorial. If you enter the term into Google Trends, there’s a massive spike in 2004, but using the time settings search function I can’t find anything that relates to it as a comedic theory. The earliest reference I can find is a New York Times article in 2009 specifically in regards to the context of political communication. The earliest example I can find of talking about punching up in a comedic context is a 2011 interview with UK comedian Richard Herring a mere two thousand and seven years after the first joke book;

For me, if I’m doing a joke I’d want to be on the side of the weak punching the strong, rather than the strong bullying the weak.

It’s worth noting the lack of universality (he’s not saying good comedy is only the weak punching the strong, but that it’s his preference), and that he’s using it in defence of Jerry Sadowitz, a comedian who many would say is an extreme of punching down. (Just look at that headline!)

While the terms are not used, an oft-cited quote that many attribute to the root of the concept is a 1991 People Magazine interview with satirist Molly Ivens;

There are two kinds of humo(u)r. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity — like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule — that’s what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.

But it’s important to note she’s talking explicitly about satire. Punching up in that context is not just good satire, it’s tautological. Satire needs to take aim at the powerful, otherwise, what is it satirising?

But she’s also explaining the existence of comedy that doesn’t punch up nor down. And really, how often does comedy actually punch? It shouldn’t take you long to think of a list of jokes that don’t punch in any direction. If you look at the earlier explanations of why we laugh, almost none of them are explained by punching up (if they punch at all, it’s down). If you were to study improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, you’d learn Game- find the first unusual thing, isolate it, and heighten it. Where does punching enter into that?

So when we talk about good comedy punching up/bad comedy punching down we’re talking about one part of a much bigger whole. Redundant? Probably, but it’s something that seems to get left out of the discussion which seems to consume all of comedy. It’s also necessary to establish the part we’re referring to because to understand punching up/punching down we need to tie it to BVT. Good comedy doesn’t always punch up (or down) but rather makes us feel violated and safe at the same time. Punching up makes us feel safe, so good comedy that punches up needs to find some way to make us feel violated. Punching down makes us feel violated, so good comedy that punches down needs to find some way to make us feel safe.

IV. If The P.C. Police Make The Past Unfunny, Are They Time Cops?

Megan Amram is sorry. The Good Place writer wrote some jokes in the early 10’s that could be considered anti-Semitic, ableist, and anti-Asian American. She wasn’t sorry in 2019 when it was easier to block her critics than address the call-out, but we live in a time now where white people are committing to amplify minority voices and how can you do that while at the same time silencing them? So she’s sorry now. Good comedy punches up, you see, and in the early 10’s, Megan punched down.

Comedian Bryan Yang (who has since deleted his Twitter account) was not impressed. Many of these tweets were less than 10 years old. Surely she should have known the error of punching down on the oppressed and vulnerable. The apology, as far as Bryan was concerned, was too little too late;

This sucks. Personally @meganamram has been really kind to me but this shit is reprehensible even coming from someone that you’ve admired and has given you advice. Not too sure what the joke is here either. Shit is way worse when it comes from someone you considered a friend.

Megan was super sweet and kind to me and my fam when I was in the hospital with covid. I believe there is a thing where good white people can still be racist. Has she burned a cross? No, but her biases and jokes have probably negatively impacted poc around her. That is painful.

As a comedian, Bryan knows good comedy always punches up, except in the first half of the 10’s when it was revealed that he also used Twitter to publish jokes that punched down against battered women, Native Americans, and holocaust victims. Bryan immediately began apologising and looks to have deleted his account in response to this.

Apart from the Reliefgeraüsch experienced from seeing a comedian instantaneously getting called out for their hypocrisy (hey, that’s the superiority theory of comedy!), the likelihood is that unless a comedian from that time period has scrubbed their Twitter history, nearly any comedian would have at least a couple of jokes that would put them in the same hot water as Megan and Bryan. And those who were late adopters are probably thanking God there isn’t footage of their open mic sets and late-night improv shows. The past was different.

Of course, it feels weird to talk about the past being different if we’re talking about less than 10 years ago, but this is the way comedy cycles; the old dies and the new takes its place, and we’re in the middle of that change right now. Ironic racism, sexism, homophobia et. al. were popular comedic tools of the old that are currently being rejected by the new. But how was it even possible? Surely we knew racism was bad in 2010? Of course we did! But this isn’t an issue of “we thought racism was good 10 years ago but now we’ve learned it’s bad”. The difference is much simpler; 10 years ago we felt safe and now we don’t.

As we know from my cleverly explaining BVT at the beginning of this essay, knowing that it would come into play later, safety is an integral part of why we laugh. Take away the safety from a joke that was working and it’s now just violation. In 2010, even if things weren’t perfect, even if things were moving forward too slowly, even if you want to argue things were actually regressing, it *felt* like things were moving forward and therefore more people felt safe. Yes, in part that’s because audience members who didn’t feel safe weren’t included in the equation, but it’s a lot easier to drown those voices out when there are so many more people who felt safe.

The consequences of comedy crowds feeling safe are twofold- 1) a comedian has to devote less effort to making an audience feel safe before violating them, and 2) a crowd that already feels safe can be violated more than a crowd that is neutral or feels unsafe.

As punching up/punching down became the dominating discourse on what good comedy is, we worked ourselves into overtime to justify why the comedy we already liked punched up, while other comedians we didn’t like punched down. “Targets”, “Irony”, “It’s a Character”, pretty much everything to try and make a joke we like fit into one category while a similar joke we don’t like fits into another category.

It’s much easier to understand when looking at these jokes through the lens of safety. But apart from comedy discourse often being divorced from *why* we laugh, there’s also a big problem when taking into account safety’s role in comedy- it’s too subjective. What makes me feel safe may not be enough to make you feel safe, and how safe we feel changes over time, often, completely divorced from the joke and joke teller. That makes it a lot harder to diagnose comedy with the pseudo-objectivity culture writing demands. And yet that’s the reality; things that haven’t happened yet will determine if a joke made today is funny tomorrow. We can’t control for that.

And it’s ok that we can’t. Changes in the culture means cultural commentary becomes out of date and we need new cultural commentary. That’s a good thing! What we wrote about comedy 10 years ago shouldn’t be relevant today because it’s good that comedy changes. However, it is also good to look and see how it changes, and it’s next to impossible to discuss changes in comedy over the last decade without discussing noted sexual harasser and sometime comedian Louis C.K..

V. Louis C.K. Admitted He Did What He Was Accused Of

It took Louis C.K. 20 years to find his comedic voice. Whether you believe that, it’s the common interpretation of his career. A minor stand-up comedian who had found some success writing for Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock, the story goes, Louis threw away all his old material and began working on a blank slate, re-invigorating his career. Starting with Shameless in 2007, Louis began working on nearly an hour a year, creating a body of work that would make him not just *the* comedian’s comedian, but massively popular with audiences, including many who would usually be “too offended” to laugh at the topics he regularly dealt with.

Louis’ influence didn’t just extend to stand-up, but TV as well. A sweetheart deal with FX where he had near unlimited creative control as long as he kept the costs down, meant Louis could create one of the weirdest and most challenging comedies on tv. Surreal, philosophical, unburdened by continuity, and very rarely funny, Louis pretty much single-handedly ushered in the “auteur sitcom”, which continues to influence the tv landscape today. Everyone wanted the “Louie Deal”, which ignored the fact that having developed his skills as a filmmaker during his dark period, Louis could act as his own director and editor, giving him a clear creative vision and the skills needed to get that vision under budget.

The secret to the Louis revival was so simple but revolutionary; he knew the things he was saying were awful. Not in a naughty boy getting away with something kind of way. Not in an “I guess I’m too edgy” kind of way But in a genuine “isn’t it fucked up that the mind works like this” kind of way. Now you weren’t laughing at rape, you were laughing at “how fucked up the logic of a rapist is”. Louis cracked the code, and when combined with audiences increasingly feeling safer, it allowed Louis to capitalise on a “right place, right time” moment that his less successful (and less talented) co-workers could not. It’s not a coincidence that Louis’ rise and fall closely aligns with the Obama administration. He made comedy that could only have wide appeal during a time like that in America.

And we’d twist ourselves into defining it as punching up. Here’s Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg highlighting a Louis C.K. rape joke in an article for ThinkProgress about the difference between good rape jokes and bad rape jokes;

He’s not making himself the target here. But instead, he’s taking square and effective aim at people who believe they have a right to sexual access regardless of consent are bad people. A lot of it is in the delivery: Louis’ deadpan reveals just how ridiculous and scary the thought process by which someone decides they deserve to have sex with someone no matter whether they can get consent or if the person they attack can give consent is.

But on the 2011 HBO special Talking Funny, Louis admits he doesn’t know why people find the joke funny. For some reason, on a panel show about stand-up comedy, Ricky Gervais is there to diagnose that it’s funny because it’s clear that he doesn’t mean it. Actual comedian Chris Rock is able to actually diagnose why the joke works;

But they know you. And that’s part of being famous. That’s the kind of thing you kind of can’t get away with not (being famous).

Chris gets to the heart. It’s not because the joke punches up (it punches down), but because audiences already feel safe around Louis, in-large due to his fame. I started attending open mics around this time and this was one thing Louis’ fans, who couldn’t understand why their rape jokes were bombing, couldn’t wrap their head around. Louis could say it because audiences already felt safe around him. His fame gave him a wider berth.

Louis’ success inspired countless imitators, and as with anything that becomes incredibly popular, some of it was good but most of it was awful. New comedians entering the scene quickly adopted this style, both because its success was evidence that this is what comedy is supposed to look like, and audiences were trained to think this is what comedy looks like. Along the way, the nuance gets lost, either because less talented comedians don’t spot it, or audiences, trained on this comedy, feel safer and no longer require it. So, newer comedians, like Megan Amram and Bryan Yang make ironically racist/sexist/homophobic jokes, not because they’re racist/sexist/homophobic, but because in the 2010’s, that’s what comedy looked like.

Adoption is another key to the cycle of comedic styles; whatever is popular will become bad through the sheer number of bad comedians imitating the successful (the bad will always greatly outnumber the good). Meanwhile, talented and inventive comedians, bored with the status quo, will push their superior talents to other forms, making what’s currently popular seem hacky and out-of-date. Newer forms of comedy then become the status quo and the cycle repeats.

But the culture has also changed. There’s a fascist in the White House. Actual Nazis roam the streets. Society is more aware of cops murdering black people, and Joe Rogan has a podcast. We no longer feel safe. Even if the audience’s relationship with comedians hadn’t changed, the in-built safety of comedy audiences would be different and comedy would need to evolve anyway. But the relationship has changed. Louis is the one who killed it.

The reveal in 2017 that Louis C.K. is a serial sexual harasser meant that audiences just couldn’t feel safe around him, and likely any comedian. As more comedians are revealed to be sex criminals, it’s likely we won’t begin to automatically feel safe until the comedy institutions that allow this activity to flourish change on a systemic level (or, cynically, superficial changes are made and enough time has passed that we forget all about this until the next spate).

It’s not a coincidence that when Louis mounted his return less than a year after he admitted to being a sexual harasser he dropped the “isn’t it fucked up that the mind works like this” part of his act. A disillusioned Louis fan can listen to his bit about the Parkland Shooting Survivors and know exactly how he would have tackled this prior; “isn’t it fucked up that these kids managed to survive a tragedy and turn it into activism and my first response is to feel jealousy?” But the audience that would work for is no longer there, and the audience he’s actively courting; right-wingers, culture warriors, people who actually love that he was jacking off in front of women without their consent; don’t want that. Perversely, feeling empathy makes them feel “unsafe”. So instead, the joke is “aren’t these kids fucked up”.

It’s easy to think change is permanent, that the death of violation-heavy comedy (as opposed to “punch-down comedy”) will never be relevant again. But it won’t always be this way. Things cycle, and as such it will rise again. We’ll feel safe again, someday. A talented comedian will crack the new code. Perhaps we’ll enter a new generation of comedy that looks back on the comedy of today as too twee to be funny. But the key to understanding how to succeed in comedy *today* is understanding that more of us don’t feel safe and so comedy has to be invested in making us feel safe before it can get us to laugh. Violation without safety is not comedy, it’s just violation.

VI. Lessons To Be Learned

While comedy changes with the culture, there are comedians who are defiantly choosing to stay behind. Most of these comedians are, by definition, bad comedians; a comedian who can’t evolve with the culture is like an ice cream truck heading out in a snowstorm. But they’re also bad in a less tautological way; if comedy is about violation and safety, and you’re only practised in violation, then you can only do half the job. As the rise of niche audiences and podcasting allow comedians to perform to increasingly self-selecting audiences, you naturally lose the well-rounded skills that make you a good comedian. If you even had them in the first place.

If punch-down comedy is to survive until it cycles around again, the key is learning how to make audiences, not your podcast fans, but actual audiences, feel safe. And as punch-up comedy becomes the dominant form, it needs to learn the exact opposite lesson.

If violation without safety is not comedy, then neither is safety without violation. On Ilana Glazer’s hilariously titled 2020 special “The Planet Is Burning”, the Broad City star typifies the biggest problem facing punch-up comedy- clapter. On Gender & Sexuality Script Sucks, Glazer praises the rise of gender non-conformity and the death of boomer culture to the cheers, woos, and barely any laughter from the audience. This is not an artistic choice to forego laughter, as Hannah Gadsby employs, but a failure to understand why we laugh. It’s not satire, it’s preaching to the choir. When it’s all safety and no violation you have to clap because clapping is a choice. Laughter is not, and Glazer’s joke-telling rarely meets the standard required for laughter (violation + safety).

Hershal Pandya laments the rise of clapter in his article for Vulture and it’s hard not to see the problem getting worse. And while Glazer’s chasing of clapter isn’t as harmful as say, Shane Gillis’ racism, it’s rooted in the exact same laziness. It’s only half the job. It is also less effective; an audience can bring their own safety to a comedy show but they can’t bring their own violation. If comedy wants to punch up, it also needs to violate.

Again, I want to stress that violation isn’t just what we typically think of when hear the term violation. It can be a logical violation, or surrealness, or even a surprise pun. But it has to be something. It can’t just be saying safe things to a safe audience that already agrees with what you’re saying. You can become popular in today’s comedy culture by doing that, but you’ll never be funny.

Good comedy punches up. Good comedy punches down. Good comedy punches sideways. Good comedy doesn’t punch at all. It’s never the joke that’s the issue; it’s always the joke teller. Except for when it is the joke, then a good joke teller learns to either drop it or change it so it starts working again. And those joke tellers who can’t recognise that were never good to begin with. They just capitalised on a culture, and the culture changes. No one can tell you how to write a joke that will stand the test of time, but if you look at why we laugh, you can write a joke that will stand the test of today.