The word “comedy” is derived from the Attic Greek root word “Komos” which translated, comes out as “merrymaking” which is a Dionysian Ritual. Dionysus was a Greek God with attributes of ecstasy and pleasure. To most people, comedy is meant to convey to the participants a sense of enjoyment, and laughter often follows suit. When a modern day comic makes his jokes and punchlines, if his sense of humor resonates with people, the crowd erupts in guffaws. If not, he as they say in show business “bombs” and loses the crowds’ mutual participation in the act. So what defines what is funny and what is not? Well, its largely subjective but often reinforced by social norms, which never remain static but change alongside society, through ebbs and flows. A Joke about a woman being stupid would not fly today, but plenty of TV comedy shows make men the butt of jokes, often to an audience’s amusement. Since so-called “progress” depends on subjective perception, what is funny to one person may be unfunny to another depending on where society stands on norms. However, if humor is truly a Dionysian rather than Apollonian adventure, wouldn’t the best forms of comedy appeal to base desires instead of solving or fixing a perceived injustice to three or more parties? Lately comics have been trying to push an Apollonian agenda, at least the ones pushed by big wig media networks, probably for nefarious, ulterior reasons. In the 1990s the big thing was irony, which was the staple of Generation Xer apathy and carelessness, to give way to Millenial “new sincerity”. From a philosophical and philological standpoint, they both appear to violate the categorical imperative of honesty, even the latter which is a somewhat hamfisted attempt to save face from staring into the abyss. There is also satire and black humor, which both betray a cartoonish sense of evil and were also employed by Generation X to a great degree. But for all intents and purposes, none of these styles of humor really were anything but an exaggerations of a truth, rather than truth itself, save for something such as parody which was not the truth but a direct inversion of it, that it was least honest in its claims of mockery. So what’s left? Enter blue humor, the humor of the days when men were men and women knew better than to enter the domains of bars and gentleman’s clubs. Trouble is so much of it has been attempted to be appropriated by women but falls flat because blue humor, or ribaldry, is considered unseeming for a woman to attempt. No one wants to hear gross, disgusting things come out of a woman’s mouth despite what your average low test, oversocialized “male” will tell you. I have never met a straight man who confided in me that Amy Schumer was funny, and if they exist, they wouldn’t come near me. Blue humor was at its peak with Seth Putnam, the infamous vocalist and lyricist of the Boston band Anal Cunt. He was a master of getting people aggrivated, and today he probably wouldn’t have career thanks to the woke mob. Schumer making tiny penis jokes is nothing compared to Putnam’s musings on domestic violence, rape, and homosexuals. Because women generally pass their thoughts through a consensus filter “will everyone think this is okay?” which is just another way of second guessing one’s intentions, a form of a white lie, in a sense, which violates the categorical imperative of truthful statements. On the contrary, Mr. Putnam had no such filter, and if one wants to simultaneously obey the categorical imperative whilst return to Dionysian roots of comedy’s true origins, instead of lying for the sake of fixing a perceived injustice in an Apollonian manner much like today’s so-called comedy, one must remove the mask that separates actor from audience, and tell it like it really is.
