Lawless: It also depends on who your audience is. You don't set yourself up to be completely misunderstood. If you do a show in New York City downtown, you know you'll have to be listening to the darker corners of your imagination. If you're doing the road or a college, you don't want to make yourself so vulnerable that they're not going to get on board with your premise.
Mirman: People have to trust you.
Lawless: You have to start with something that gets their ears open.
Let's talk about when humor
crosses the line.
Hanson: When the towers came down, there was a joke that was well constructed, funny, and sad. But it was too cavalier and we didn't feel like being cavalier at the time. It was "America Stronger than Ever, Say Quadragon Officials." It's funny, but it was inappropriate because that fifth of the building that was missing had dead people in it. We decided it was not right for the time. It's not the subject matter, it's not the language. It had to do with the target of the joke.
Mankoff: It's difficult to make jokes about things people care about. After 9/11, we got some very funny anti-terrorist jokes. The best one showed the prophet Muhammad in heaven, and the terrorist all in pieces. Muhammad says, "You'll get the virgins when we find your penis." Which points to the real insanity of the thing. We didn't run that cartoon. The New Yorker is a serious magazine. If you've just read 50,000 words by Seymour Hirsch on terrorism, that joke would seem inappropriate.
Is there anyone you can't make laugh?
Hanson: The less is wrong in your life, the less you need humor. There's this great Mark Twain quote where he said there's no humor in heaven. I thought that was very sad and funny and a good dig at all the humorless Presbyterians he was raised by.
Mankoff: Humor's for things that go wrong. If you have a good vacation and the luggage gets there on time, there are no jokes in that.
Schaal: Only stupid people don't have senses of humor.
Mankoff: People who are funny have something uneven, some grit, some damage. Anyone who does things just for fun is going to laugh and if you do a lot of things just because you enjoy them, not to achieve something, not for some greater purpose, I think you'll have a sense of humor.
What about when people are offended by a joke?
Mankoff: There was a cartoon in The New Yorker of two surgeons cutting open a baby on the operating table and the caption says, "There's gotta be an easier way to get candy from a baby." I had this psychotherapist calling to complain. And I'm saying, "It's a fantasy! Like a children's fairy tale or Grimm's." Let's understand that the baby getting killed is not real. "We use anesthetic ink," I say. "There is no baby here." He was a psychotherapist who treated abused children. And he somehow thought this related to that! That this joke related to abused children!
What do you think it was about the joke that he didn't get?
Hanson: That it's funny because it's wrong.
Mankoff: And that it's not real! It has nothing to do with babies! It's also his narcissism. Abused children are the most important topic in the world to this guy. Anything that bears on that, he is the monitor. He's the watchdog against this cartoon being the trigger for someone taking some kid on an operating table.
Hanson: At The Onion we get so many emails that start: "Normally I'm a fan, but the blah blah blah you did recently went too far when you took on the subject of..." And then it's, "Insert anything that has to do with their specific life." If it's whatever happened to you, then it's wrong, but if it's one of the many things that didn't happen to you, it's OK. So finally we just ran an op-ed called, "That's Not Funny, My Brother Died That Way." But the thing the guy is taking offense at is the scene in Police Academy where he goes flying off the edge of his motorcycle and his head goes up the horse's rectum. And he's like, "I don't know how they could make a joke about that, because that's exactly the way my brother died."
Mankoff: But that's such a slippery slope. You have anybody being held up in a cartoon—then you say, "Well, some people get held up and get killed!" So there's almost nothing you can do.
Lipsyte: Mark Maron got tackled on stage. He did a suicide joke, and some guy's brother had just attempted suicide and jumped up and tackled him.
Mirman: You can make a joke that does hit too close to some people, it's true. I mean, some books make people cry! It's upsetting, it's life.
How did you become funny?
Mirman: I was the most hated child in my school system for 10 years. And sort of vaguely started joking around. Somewhere, it went from, "He's super weird," to "Oh, he's funny." And then it was OK—except for the fact that I was then driven to become a comedian and prove myself to the people I knew in eighth grade.
Hanson: It's a weird combination of a deeply ingrained sense of self-hatred and a grandiose self-absorbed narcissism.
Myrin: Being an oddball when you were little. I looked like a boy until I was 12. Literally, people would say to me, "What a nice young man!"
Do you think there are different motivators for women than men?
