Punching Down: Plutonium in a Comic's Hands... by Hunter Collins
Punching down. Merely typing it, I shiver. It used to just be called “a tasteless joke”. Now, some say it’s singlehandedly impeding transformative social change. Is punching down but a toxic element, best left buried deep in the ore of our comic fossil record? Or can it be harnessed responsibly to power your comedy to glowing heights?
I watched ex-Saturday Night Live recruit Shane Gillis’ racist podcast banter and tuned out after about 13 seconds. I seriously doubted I could glean some greater context that would absolve his schtick if I hung in there. Granted, I’ve never heard his stand-up, but I found this banter pedestrian and cruel - not for me, and probably not a wise fit for an institution like SNL. Since then however, I’ve seen the usual reactionaries come out of the woodwork to grandstand in the Twitterverse, offering zippy truth nuggets like:
“How hard is it to just not punch down, though?” (wondrous take)
“Punching down not good” (scintillating commentary)
“You’re not edgy or funny for punching down”. (you have a point there)
To this last tweet, I concur: you are not edgy or funny for punching down. But the opposite isn’t true either. I’ve seen my share of “punching up” stand-up sets that frankly needed to be punched-up; Weezer-cosplay dweebs inwardly cumming their platitude cornucopias. Bottom line: you are only funny for being funny - how you get there is completely up to you. Lo and behold, you can even be funny by employing the deplorable tactic of *gasp* PuNcHiNg DoWn!
While I’m not saying comedians must punch down, I object to anyone who tells me I can’t. I am not here to defend comedians who punch down recklessly and cite freedom of speech as a shield for being shitty, either. I’m not even saying punching down is always a good call. What I’m saying is, you can’t write punching down off completely as a tool in the comedian’s toolbox. I’m also not here to extol the merit of punching down in lieu of punching up. I don’t care if you’re Hannah Gadsby or Andrew Dice Clay; there’s room for all of us and I yearn for a day where we comedians are left alone to experiment with our art and let laughter be the ultimate judge.
Much of the criticism for punching down can be ascribed to a notion one GLAAD blog refers to as ‘collective liberation’: “the recognition that all of our struggles and identities are intimately connected, and that working together is necessary to create a better world. It is the belief that every person is worthy of dignity and respect and that, within systems of oppression, everyone suffers [1],” and that punching down undermines this. Here is where I believe the crux of the disagreement on the punching down debate lies: some comedians feel that punching down -when done well- can help achieve collective liberation, in that it grants the subjects of jokes some egalitarian dignity. Meanwhile, others disagree because these same groups haven’t achieved equality yet. Is the practice of punching down oppressive, plain and simple? Or can it serve to level the playing field?
Personally, I think it’s case-by-case, and I’m only here to express that much. I find it uncomfortably self-aggrandizing to assume that any group is beneath me; too weak to suffer the great indecency of mockery. I feel that we’re all on this twirling shit-heap together, and that to avoid bringing any group in on the joke is tantamount to a more profound, extra sinister form of discrimination: the soft bigotry of low expectations. Not to mention the nasty implication that there is some sort of ethno-socio pecking order to which we must abide, as if we are “ranked” by the circumstances that determine our identities. Claiming that jokes directly perpetuate systemic oppression mirrors the bogus republican argument “video games lead to gun violence”. I credit my audience enough to believe they can tell the difference between a gag and a call for prejudice.
Though I do not exclusively punch down in my act, I do use it as an occasional tool. Think of it as barbecue sauce: a little squirt can be nice, but no one wants a whole bowl. If you do, that’s a dead giveaway that your insides stink. Here is how punching down works as a viable comedic device: sometimes, in a bit, the vulnerable take it on the chin and the audacity of manufacturing this travesty amplifies the effectiveness of your comedic surprise. Think, “Egad! I can’t believe they went there!” A few examples:
“I know you’ve only publicly identified as a woman for a few years, but I just want you to know that I know that deep down, you’ve always been a cunt.”
-Nikki Glaser on Caitlyn Jenner
“Aspirin will not bring dead hookers back to life.”
-Dave Attell
"When did fat became a disease where people feel bad for you? I’m watching Jerry Springer have a thousand-pound man on. People in the audience crying, ‘Oh my God. He’s a thousand pounds. What happened?’ He ate! You don’t catch 1,000 pounds. Nobody stick you with a dirty needle and give you a thousand pounds. You eat.”
-Patrice O’Neal
“[brutal Vietnamese accent]”
-Joe Koy
“Immigrants are the scourge of the country and should just go back to where they came from. I’m not even kidding. That’s it, show’s over, shit-heads!”
-Maria Bamford
Okay, I made the last one up.
I keep reading articles with titles like “Why punching down will NEVER be funny”, but I can tell you from personal experience that the audience for punching down is out there and they don’t give a rat’s ass’s dick that Twitter is mad about it. I get booked on all manners of “XXX”, “nasty” and “dirty shows at clubs and festivals and I’ve recently had the great fortune of being the token white guy on some soul-validating gigs for predominantly Black and Caribbean crowds. These crowds walk in primed to laugh with impunity. It’s comedy Valhalla. On these shows, I’ve joked about not being “allowed” to go down on my Jamaican girlfriend and that subsequently, I’m now basically living the life of a Jamaican man. I have to wait half a minute for the laughter to subside. But didn’t I punch down? I used my privileged standpoint to perpetuate a reductive stereotype AND appropriate a cultural identity. Double whammy! If I did cross the line, are YOU going to tell them they were wrong for uttering laughs; the most basic form of human joy? To all the righteous “Calebs” and “Addisons” out there: please do me a favor and try tone-policing a crowd of West Indian women. Should go over smoothly.
Once, when I was playing a club in Vancouver, I had a front row table of people in wheelchairs. No one said peep to them (even though they had fucking euro lights on their wheels!) until I got onstage. I prefer that everyone feel included in the show rather than feel othered, so I lace into them like I did with other members of the crowd. I notice all the regular club seating has been stricken from their table, so finally I go, “can we get these poor assholes some goddamn chairs to sit in?” Huge laugh from everyone, especially the wheelchair gang. It was a joke at their expense in theory, but punching down can translate as endearment. Sometimes we poke fun to show you you’re part of the tribe. (“One of us! One of us!”) And you can bet your mama’s last nipple that the folks in wheelchairs came over to me after the show and thanked me for incorporating them instead of treating them like sad, rain-soaked puppies. This group understood from my smile and disposition that I was punching down with love! There is a charisma to pulling it off. And it’s not like I kept roasting them once the house lights went up, because I have no desire to trivialize anyone’s challenges if I’m not at onstage, playing the heel for laughs.
You will certainly witness comedians punching down ineptly, thus providing you with “material” that only adds up to racism or other types of ignorance that reek of a deeper dysfunction. Admittedly, some comics do make it their mission to hurt people and I understand that criticism. There is a difference between comics cracking jokes and people espousing beliefs. But the comics I roll with are contemptuous of these types because they make our jobs as crafty imps who dabble in the darker side of comedy harder. They make every purveyor of the odd punching down joke seem like a smegma case who recites the tired credos of the unlaid: “PC snowflakes”, “you can’t say anything anymore”, “I jerk off to Jordan Peterson”. Look, some of us are just nihilistic perverts!
Mainly I balk at writing off punching down categorically. If you enjoy roast jokes, from “Comedy Central Roasts” to “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, you yourself have enjoyed punching down (you monster). That should be the end of the argument: “Tons of people love roasts. Punching down can be effective.” Plus, punching up or down, you’re still punching. Imagine we applied these rules to crimes beyond those of the word variety? “You can’t convict me, your honor. I was murdering UP!”
The entire premise of directional punching is wishy-washy at best, because it’s predicated upon a context that shifts according to geography and circumstance. If you’re an atheist comic deriding Islam in favour of secularism at a comedy club in Wichita, you’re punching down. But try that same shit at a show in the UAE, apostate! You’ll be hauled off to Neverseenagainville faster than you can say “Christopher Hitchens’ bald head is worm food”. Ultimate punch up!
What are the rules for the directions one is allowed to punch in, exactly? Who is the arbiter? Take the Patrice O’Neal quote above: is he allowed to ridicule fat people he’s less fat than? If not, what is the fatness discrepancy one must cover before it qualifies as punching down? Tell me, if it’s all based on privilege and I make 40 grand a year, am I forbidden from poking fun at someone who makes 39 grand? What if they’re a Scientologist? Does that make them more or less punchable? What if you’re a billionaire female oil tycoon with a wooden foot who’s one-eighth Laotian - can Larry the Irish hobo with taint cancer jokingly call you “Ol’ Mahogany Toes” without facing a human rights tribunal? It all falls apart so quickly.
Patrice O’Neal
What about ethnocide jokes? Can I, the descendant of Ukrainian immigrants, make jokes about the Holodomor, a Stalin-orchestrated famine that caused the death of 10 million noble, chunky-headed Ukes? Some might say yes, because I belong to that culture. Others might call that punching down, because I am alive and the Holodomor victims are not. Through I do not have any jokes about the Holodomor, if one happened to pop into my head, I would probably at least try it out. It’s a lot of fun to say “Holodomor”.
Now sure, you absolutely shouldn’t punch down if you are a legislator. You shouldn’t make it harder for people who got a rough cut in life to achieve upward social mobility. Thank cripes comedians are just artists trying to take power away from the true ivory tower bastards with their zany yuk-‘em-ups. I can’t imagine what kind of person would want to hold comedians to the same standard as lawmakers, but I’ll bet they prefer cash bar weddings.
Keep in mind that not everyone has the same taste. Unlike with live musical performance, the audience generally won’t have the luxury of knowing what brand of comedy they’re in for when they attend a show. Sometimes you get a ska comedian - sometimes you get a death metal comedian. Sometimes you get them on the same show! Some might enjoy both. Some people fucking hate ska (“Nice… trumpet shorts?”). Punching down may just be more akin to a horror movie than a heartfelt children’s tale. Just because you prefer or perform a brand of comedy that’s closer to “Tickles the Golfing Golden Retriever” than “Friday the 13th” doesn’t mean that EVERYBODY must. Imagine complaining about a horror movie because the killer put a person of lower socio-economic status through the blades of a lawnmower. “Jason should only kill cis-het CEOs and spend more time volunteering!”That’s just not what Jason does. Jason is indiscriminate. And though you don’t have to enjoy Jason movies, enjoying a Jason movie doesn’t mean you enjoy seeing people being thrown into lawnmowers either - it is not an endorsement of this behavior from the audience’s part nor the writers’. But if you watch a Jason movie, don’t be surprised when heads roll.
Punching down is routinely written off as lazy, easy and mean. But what no one talks about is that in this climate, punching down is risky. Think about it: which stand-up comedy tactic poses the bigger gambit: spouting off some facile, anemic truism that you know your entire audience will agree with, or something vile and controversial that might alienate the crowd and get you fired from your Jugo Juice day-job? When a comedian punches down and still succeeds in garnering laughs, that truly defies the odds. That takes mastery. I mean, you wanna see a guy juggle a coupl’a flaming chainsaws or one nectarine? Look at what happens to comedians who dare to punch down nowadays: they not only risk standard fare heckling, but complaints to management, death threats (I’ve gotten them a-plenty), maybe a barrage of angry tweets, followed by full-on excommunication and finally loss of livelihood. And that isn’t for throwing acid in the front row’s faces; that’s for jokes.
The ironic part is, we who punch down are so often on the side of the those we joke about. By and large, comedians are broken toys who’ve been (often literally) punched down upon themselves. You might see a comedian who on the surface has all the privilege in the world, but what you don’t know is their foster parents beat the shit out of them and they’re currently battling addiction. A big reason for why we are drawn to these verboten subjects is because we’ve been harangued by the very same evils of which we make light. We make jokes about subjects that scare us and face our fears by tackling them in front of an audience. These taboo topics are our dragons in the cave. Sometimes we slay the dragon. Sometimes you see the dragon eat a motherfucker to bits. Sometimes punching down fails miserably. That said, a comedian who makes cancer jokes isn’t necessarily laughing at people with cancer - they might be laughing at cancer. To take its power away. That’s what gallows humor like punching down can yield: laughs at our collective mortality.
Anthony Jeselnik describes his approach as such: “The character is such a monster that you know I’m on the right side of things,”[2] which resonates with me. Here’s a stand-up joke I’ve performed after I’ve established a) a trusting rapport with the audience because b) I have a deeply progressive outlook:
“I just came out to my parents and they really didn’t take it well. I finally mustered the courage to let them know I’m actually bisexual; I am equally attracted to women AND kids.”
The joke isn’t “haha - child abuse is hilarious”, nor am I trying to liken bisexuality to sexual deviance. The joke is, “holy shit, he spun what is supposed to be a brave, momentous rite of passage into a horrific and despicable scenario”. It pulls the rug out from under you. I am disgusting despite the self-righteous preamble. That’s the joke: a simple irony. What a journey!
I wouldn’t be so gum-flappy about this topic if I didn’t feel like there are people looking to eradicate careers over something said in jest. There are people in comedy, online and at clubs who want to impose rules for art and they want you to conform to their parameters or suffer the consequences. Comedy always belonged to the weirdos and the freaks and it’s as if a bunch of squares barged in and started firing motherfuckers. If anyone wants to label irreverence as “punching down”, they can knock themselves out. I can’t help them realize they are a speck of dust hurtling through an infinitely expanding universe, devoting their cosmically-scaled nanoseconds on this planet to harping on clowns with no dental plan. I’ve lived through the chill that comes from bucking groupthink. There are comedians who’ve shunned me for jokes I’ve made in the past and there may be comedians who will stop talking to me moving forward after reading this. To them I say, just know that I would defend any comedian’s right to say whatever they want on-stage, regardless of their background or identity (even if they hate my stupid guts), and I would hope they would do the same for me. I might not defend what they say, just their right to say it. Let an audience inform them whether they should say it again. From Mike Ward to Dina Hashem, I believe censorship of expression is dangerous and I wretch doubly hard when it comes from within our own ranks.
Punching down, like plutonium, is a volatile force that in the wrong fists can cause all sorts of unexpected harm. On the other hand, one crazy bit, as reprehensible as it may seem, can spectacularly light up someone’s day. In the end, it appears certain people can’t laugh at something if their interpretation of it conflicts with their values. Some can. We’re all different and that’s what makes us interesting. Just forgive me for yawning when you paint yourself as a gift to the planet for scoffing at a good joke.
“I’ve always said that if I look back on my old stuff and don’t cringe, there’s something wrong. If you’re putting yourself out there, it’s not going to be timeless — it’s just not.”
-Sarah Silverman
^ Prussack, Micah (2018). Punching down: navigating jokes at someone’s expense https://www.glaad.org/blog/punching-down-navigating-jokes-someones-expense
^ Zinoman, Jason (2019). His Punch Lines Cross Moral Lines. Anthony Jeselnik Gets Away With It. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/arts/television/anthony-jeselnik-netflix.html
Hunter Collins is a comedian who lives in Toronto with vitiligo and several curses. He votes Green, calls his mum, sponsored a rescue tiger and graciously always nuts second. You can watch him being a nasty boy here: https://youtu.be/nF9EH06fAxE
