Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(37)
I moved close to Aham’s ear and said, over the boisterous crowd, “You know, I could have herpes.”
He looked at me, clearly startled. A little thought throbbed in the back of my head—how handsome Aham was, with his broad shoulders and mole-brown eyes, towering over me at six foot five. He was an incredible comedian—insightful and fearless, always one of my favorites—and I’d recently found out he was a jazz musician too, like my dad. (He’d also been divorced multiple times, like my dad, and had two kids and a vasectomy, like my dad when he met my mom.) A mutual friend had mentioned the other day that Aham was a great cook. Was this really a dude I wanted to say “I might have herpes” to? I shoved the thoughts aside. It’s just a skin condition.
“A ton of people in this audience probably have herpes,” I went on, “but they have to pretend to laugh anyway. That has to be the worst feeling. Why do that to people when you could just write a different joke?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re right. I could have herpes too.”
Aham and I had been chatting at house parties and open mics for five years, but we didn’t really know each other well. Years later, he told me that he’d always been a fan of my writing, but that moment shifted his perception of me forever. “I was just blown away to hear a woman talk like that,” he said. “I started to realize that you weren’t just funny—I’d always thought you were funny—but that you might be a really, really, radically good person.” Sometimes it pays to tell hot guys you might have herpes, kids!
We were inseparable for the rest of the weekend—we went to an arcade, played hours of Plinko, drank beer, helped Hari come up with burns in a text fight he was having with Marc Maron. Within a year, Aham and I were a couple and he and my dad were playing gigs together.
This was the life I’d dreamed of at twenty-two: hanging out with comics, falling in love, riffing all day. But, in the same moment, I felt my relationship with comedy changing.
Death Wish
Comedy doesn’t just reflect the world, it shapes it. Not in the way that church ladies think heavy metal hypnotizes nerds into doing school shootings, but in the way it’s accepted fact that The Cosby Show changed America’s perception of black families. We don’t question the notion that The Daily Show had a profound effect on American politics, or that Ellen opened Middle America’s hearts to dancing lesbians, or that propaganda works and satire is potent and Shakespeare’s fools spoke truth to power. So why would we pretend, out of sheer convenience, that stand-up exists in a vacuum? If we acknowledge that it doesn’t, then isn’t it our responsibility, as artists, to keep an eye on which ideas we choose to dump into the water supply? Art isn’t indiscriminate shit-flinging. It’s pure communication, crafted with intention and care. Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find?
The short answer, I’d discover, is “nah shut up bitch lol get raped.”
For years, I assumed it was a given that, at any comedy show I attended, I had to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about why we deserve it, about ranking us, about fucking us, about not fucking us, about reducing our already dehumanized existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. This happened all the time, even at supposedly liberal alt shows, even at shows booked by my friends. Misogyny in comedy was banal. Take my wife, please. Here’s one I heard at an open mic: “Last night I brought this girl home, but she was being really loud during sex, so I told her, ‘Sssshhh, you don’t want to turn this rape into a murder!’” Every time, I’d bite back my discomfort and grin—because, I thought, that’s just how we joke. It’s “just comedy.” All my heroes tell me so. This is the price if I want to be in the club. Hey, men pay a price too, don’t they? People probably make fun of Eddie Pepitone for being bald.
When a comedian I loved said something that set off alarm bells for me—something racist, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise—I thought: It must be okay, because he says it’s okay, and I trust him. I told myself: There must be a secret contract I don’t know about, where women, or gay people, or disabled people, or black people agreed that it’s cool, that this is how we joke.
But in that moment at Bridgetown, it dawned on me: Who made that rule? Who drew up that contract? I don’t remember signing anything, and anyway, it seems less like a universal accord and more like a booby trap that powerful men set up to protect their “right” to squeeze cheap laughs out of life-ruining horrors—sometimes including literal torture—that they will never experience. Why should I have to sit and cheer through hours of “edgy” misogyny, “edgy” racism, “edgy” rape jokes, just to be included in an industry that belongs to me as much as anyone else?
When I looked at the pantheon of comedy gods (Bill Hicks, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld), the alt-comedy demigods (Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Marc Maron, Dave Attell, Bill Burr), and even that little roster of 2005 Seattle comics I rattled off in the previous chapter, I couldn’t escape the question: If that’s who drafted our comedy constitution, why should I assume that my best interests are represented? That is a bunch of dudes. Of course there are exceptions—maybe Joan Rivers got to propose a bylaw or two—but you can’t tell me there’s no gender bias in an industry where “women aren’t funny” is widely accepted as conventional wisdom. I can name hundreds of white male comedians. But how about this: Name twenty female comics. Name twenty black comics. Name twenty gay comics. If you’re a comedy nerd, you probably can. That’s cool. Now ask your mom to do it.