Conan O’Brien had an interview I think with Taylor Tomlinson where they talked about this topic.
Their conclusion was that comics that complain about it being harder to do comedy are just lazy.
It’s always been hard. Even if it’s true that there are less topics that you can touch, it means that you have to dig deeper in the well you can. It’s your job as a comic to do that hard work, not the audience’s job to laugh at your shit joke.
Conan has been doing comedy his whole life and talks about jokes that do great one night and jokes that bomb the next. Comics need to learn to read the room and adjust their jokes accordingly.
I agree but I do sympathize with one part of it. Things that were widely considered funny a few years ago are not today. I do think it’s unfair to hold people in the past to the standards of today, but people love digging up old footage and bludgeoning people with it.
If a comic makes a joke and it bombs, maybe it’s not funny. Maybe they used it with the wrong audience. Reading the culture and the room and choosing wisely is part of the job, like you say. But if it bombs 5 years later on Twitter, maybe it should have just been left in the past with the context it belonged in and not dug up and resurrected for clicks.
Plenty of people had the courage to call out injustice before it was popular. Mark Twain is a famous counterexample to “everyone was racist in the 1800s.” Being an ignorant sheep is a valid defense for bigotry, but it’s the lowest possible form of defense.
I’m not saying, “Hey, it’s fine” I’m saying that people and cultures change, and should be allowed to change. Never before have people been so unable to escape their past. Yeah, occasionally you get a Bernie Sanders who seems to nail it right off. But most people have some skeletons or some shit they’d be embarrassed about if it were dug up and went viral.
When you dig up the past and hit people with it, you discourage progress. People are more likely to dig in their heels, knowing that the opinions they have today they’ll have to answer for tomorrow.
