Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(36)

I did stand-up once in a while too, usually at Hari’s urging, but knew pretty quickly that it wasn’t my thing. I hated telling the same jokes over and over, and I hated the grind, which means I never tried hard enough to actually get good. (If you’ve never done stand-up in a brightly lit pizzeria at six p.m. in front of four people who were not informed that there would be comedy, try it, it’s great.) I liked performing, though, and eventually I started hosting the Seattle outpost of The Moth, a live storytelling show—three hours of crowd work twice a month. I was good at it.


Through some dark sorcery, I managed to parlay my parenting magazine clips into an internship in the theater department of the Stranger, which turned into freelance writing work, which turned into a staff position as a film critic, where I wrote goofy movie reviews and a column covering Seattle comedy called “Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes.” A representative excerpt:


WEDNESDAY 6/1

ROB DELANEY

Rob Delaney is the best person on Twitter. He loves pussy. Rendezvous, 10 pm, $15, 21+.



I was going to comedy shows at night, interviewing comics, watching movies and TV for a living, and writing jokes in the newspaper all day. Then, one day, it struck me: I did it. I got paid to watch comedy and make people laugh. In just seven years, I’d actually lived up to that stupid Autobiography presentation.

Like, Toby isn’t a professional scuba diver and Jessica C. isn’t an itinerant bassoonist and Jessica R. doesn’t run a pupusa stand, although maybe she should get on that already because those things were hella good. I did hear a rumor that “Gettin’ Dipped” guy is a male model now, so technically he is professionally “dipped” (touché), but other than that, I couldn’t think of anyone else from class whose presentation actually foreshadowed the course of their life. Not that they were supposed to, of course—it was just a throwaway assignment. But for me, who’d struggled to define myself for so many years, it was an unexpected wonder to realize that my presentation wasn’t an embarrassment—it was a goddamn prophecy.

At the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland (in 2010, its third year), I found myself standing next to Ahamefule in the back of a club, watching an old friend’s set. The guy was doing a bit about sex, or maybe online dating—I don’t remember the premise, but I remember that the punch line was “herpes,” and it was killing. It wasn’t a self-deprecating joke about the comic’s own herpes. It was about other people. People with herpes are gross, ha ha ha. Girls with herpes are sluts. I hope I never accidentally have sex with a gross slut with herpes! Let’s all laugh at people with herpes and pretend like none of the people in the room has herpes, even though, depending on which statistics you believe, anywhere from 15 percent to 75 percent of the people in the room have herpes. Let’s force all of those people to laugh along too, ha ha ha.

It’s a lazy joke, but a common one, and a year earlier I might not have thought anything of it. Just then, though, a friend was going through some shit—a partner had lied about his STI status, then slipped the condom off without her consent, and a few weeks later she erupted in sores so painful she couldn’t walk or sit, move or not move. She was devastated, not just because of the violation, the deception, and the pain, but because the disease is so stigmatized. She was sure she’d never be able to date again. It seemed entirely possible to her that she might be alone forever, and, she thought, maybe she deserved it. “You know,” I remember telling her, “it’s just a skin condition. A rash, like acne or hives or eczema. Are those shameful?” I rubbed her back while she sobbed in my car.

That interaction was fresh in my mind as I watched this dude—who is a funny, good person—tell his joke, and I thought about all the people in the audience who were plastering smiles over their feelings of shame, of being tainted and ruined forever, in that moment. I thought about my friend, who—unless you believe recreational sex is an abomination and STIs are god’s dunce caps—didn’t “deserve” this virus. Neither did anyone else in that room. So, did she deserve to have her trauma be the butt of a joke? Even if you could milk a cheap laugh out of the word “herpes,” was it worth it to shore up the stigma that made real people’s lives smaller and harder? Was the joke even that funny anyway?

Stigma works like this: Comic makes people with herpes the butt of his joke. Audience laughs. People with herpes see their worst fears affirmed—they are disgusting, broken, unlovable. People without herpes see their worst instincts validated—they are clean, virtuous, better. Everyone agrees that no one wants to fuck someone with herpes. If people with herpes want to object, they have to 1) publicize the fact that they have herpes, and 2) be accused of oversensitivity, of ruining the fun. Instead, they stay quiet and laugh along. The joke does well. So well that maybe the comedian writes another one.

I cycled through that system over and over in my head. It was maddeningly efficient—what were people supposed to do? More broadly, in a nation where puritanical gasbags have a death grip on our public education system, can we really expect ironclad safe sex practices in people from whom comprehensive sex ed has been withheld? Blaming and shaming people for their own illnesses has always been the realm of moralists and hypocrites, of the anti-sex status quo. Isn’t comedy supposed to be the vanguard of counterculture? Of speaking truth to power? The longer I turned it over the more furious I became. Why do we all just laugh along with this?