Borat, Kramer and Other Things Unfunny

In these past weeks, two men, in their own distinct ways, have turned humor on its head. In so doing, they have exposed not only our gluttonous love of humor but also the humor of hate.

In the first case, humor was, ostensibly, used for serious commentary. In the second, humor turned into an inadvertent, serious commentary of a different sort. Both cases, however, are a comment on the seriousness of our times, and our bizarre propensity to laugh through it all, leaving discussions of racial tensions up to humor or to be forced up to the surface by hurricanes.
"Borat,” the fictitious character of the film that is inexplicably being hailed as iconic, did everything racist, sexist and downright crude, but succeeded in somehow convincing us that the joke was on us. So, we laughed, sportingly.

“Kramer” (as comedian Michael Richards is better known, for the character he played on sitcom "Seinfeld")raged in a Los Angeles comedy club , shifting between almost incoherent frenzy and very eloquent nostalgia for hate crimes against African Americans. But, the cellphone camera recording by an audience member reveals more than the comedian’s humorless breakdown.

The soundtrack of laughter that laced Richards’s comments reveals our own over-developed, almost steroidal, collective sense of humor. The live audience in the comedy club, unsure about whether or not this was part of the comedian’s routine, laughed. And laughed some more, nervously. One female audience member could even be overheard pleading, “Don’t go, Kramer,” when the performer finally walked off stage. Similarly, when the comedian apologized in an interview on The Letterman Show, television viewers and live audience members who were unaware of the context of the interview, did what we know to do with our entertainment-driven media – they laughed.

But, didn’t the film critics hail Borat as “intelligent” humor? Critics were intelligently aware of the very Cambridge-educated, very British Sasha Baron Cohen’s appropriation of racial, gendered and ethnic stereotypes and his deliberate use of offensive chicanery for the purpose of taping people’s baser tendencies. Critics and the hype transferred through them -- smugly told us that either we’d either “get it” or we wouldn’t. So, we, the viewers, were alerted to what would be the most “educated” response: we should both fall off our seats with laughter and sit up straight for a slap on the wrist.

Where we do deserve a slap, though, is on the funnybone. Because, the result of it all, of course, is that we’re laughing too easily about things that are just not funny. Both Borat and Richards made jokes about black people (yes, Borat’s use of the character of the poor, overweight black “prostitute”/actress riding a mechanical bull might have made you go “Awww,” but how wasn’t that exploitative of her, again?). Just like people unknowingly played along with Borat’s humiliating gags, other people unwittingly stayed amused through Kramer’s abuse. However, what today’s effortlessly amused audiences must come to recognize is that while laughing easily is charming, laughing on cue is, increasingly, dangerous. The humor imperative of our mass-mediated society is almost as dire as the thing is seeks to oppose – political correctness. As a result, we laugh more easily than we talk, especially about issues like racism. And, we leave the job of airing these issues to Borat and Kramer and other things unfunny.

More importantly, we are relegating these conversations – on race, gender and sexuality – to the sphere of humor and humor alone. Certainly, there is something potent about the fact that one of the most charged explosions of racist public speech in recent times occurred in a comedy club, where, given that people went right on laughing, it could just as easily have been a joke, after all? We have, here, a fine example of the humor of hate, fuelled by laugh-a-minute audiences with a predilection for mirth over something as awfully un-hip as conversation.

The humor ethic in today’s entertainment-driven media demands that we pull out all the stops and then some more, until we are smack-dab in the middle of a naked, obese man’s legs, wrestling with Borat to get out of the grip, while what we really ought to do is walk out.

Political correctness, despite the bad rap it’s been given, isn’t the culprit. Standing at the extremes of either political correctness or dim-witted humor is. The politically correct are asked to “lighten up,” maybe watch SNL or go to a comedy club or something, where desperate, competitive comics grab at the low-hanging fruit – jokes about race, gender, sexuality, disability. Often, the jokes are by comedians who belong to the group that the joke is on. The message is – if a “fat” joke is delivered by a fat person, it’s OK – go ahead, laugh your heart out. It’s time, however, to pull the rug from under humor’s feet. And not laugh when we see it fall.