As we’re all reeling at the sudden Italianing of our latest folk hero, Luigi Mangione, I’m just reflecting once again on what comedy actually is and the purpose it can serve because, and you’ll have to forgive me here, I’m seeing a moment worth reflecting upon, and I promise it’s relevant.

There’s a common notion among people that view comedy as a vehicle for social change: that the role of the jester is this sacrosanct, untouchable position in a society—the only person who can talk shit to the king’s face and get away with it. There may have been a point where I thought that was a valid viewpoint, but the more I come back to it, the more it feels like the dumbest shit I’ve ever come across in my entire life. I know in my current tax bracket, there’s no way I would ever want to hang with a king to begin with, let alone be in there telling jokes under pain of death, or whatever they do to a bad jester, since the point of this whole anecdote is that they can’t kill him.

As I’ve been in and around the entertainment industry in multiple capacities for embarrassingly long, I’ve had to ask myself how these jesters are getting that close to the king to begin with. What are they doing to gain his favor and, maybe worse, what are they doing to keep it? And the sad, shitty conclusion I keep coming to is that the jester obviously sees proximity to the highest power in the land as being advantageous to him, but the maybe less obvious side of the conversation is the king’s motivation. Whether it’s Shakespeare, or some other work (please don’t ask me for a specific example), the king is always presented as being vaguely honor bound to never kill the fool, which is completely counter to what I believe to be the truth, and a very obvious one, I think: the king has to give the impression that he’s hearing out the will of the people.

I mean, I hope I’m not saying anything new here. We’ve all seen presidents gritting their teeth through the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I’m just saying, that spectacle is basically what’s at play throughout the entire comedy industry at all times.

I don’t like the idea of giving so much special attention to comedians like they should be a protected class or anything like that, but I’ve been doing it for twelve years and pretty much every part of my life is in some way colored by this fact about me. And over the past decade or so, I’ve watched comics fall prey to varying interpretations of what they’re supposed to be doing, whether it’s verbally or through the coaxing mechanisms of algorithms that force us to sanitize our words and opinions to avoid “shadowbanning,” all while claiming to be a democratizing force in entertainment. All these views generally amount to the idea that comedians should avoid being “divisive,” without ever explaining what that means. You get vagaries about Lenny Bruce performing to nearly empty rooms because “every audience is worth the time,” or hypothesizing about Dave Chappelle’s appeal (he can play to black rooms AND white rooms), while we ignore the reality that, especially in 2024, every successful comedian is playing to the money in the room.

At risk of putting a big downer on what has been my favorite thing to do for over a decade, stand up comedy has essentially become a playground for the bourgeoisie, to use the corniest turn of phrase I could think of.

It’s not surprising, considering the art itself was reverse engineered from over-inflated Vaudeville shows that got too expensive. That’s not to say it would have been impossible to have stand up comedy without market forces destroying an industry, but that’s just not what happened. Stand up comedy, as such, rose from the still burning embers of an industry where blackface was still super cool, and I’d love to see a graph lining up the so-called “comedy booms” with the economic booms and busts that define the economic system it’s grown out of.

The reason I highlight this is that we have a system by which success can serve anyone much in the same way that it serves the jester. Social mobility under capitalism allows basically anyone the *potential* proximity to people in power, and those in power the ability to operationalize working class identity for their own purposes. We put a lot of social stock in where people came from and a lot less, it seems, in where they are. Which is why someone like Dave Chappelle can parade his identity as someone who was once taken advantage of by Comedy Central while dropping $20million bullshit on Netflix. Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice and we’ve collectively responded by just standing in the river I guess.

This is why, frankly, most stand up comedy sucks now. People achieve success and they stop being the people we loved, because as we all know and ignore on a daily basis, money changes people. But it’s not just the money, it’s also the very academia-coded mindset around what we can and can’t say, paired with the pace of output. We invent theories that we can revisit and rely on for our entire careers while fundamentally resisting change that might threaten our creative output (see: comedians refusing antidepressants to keep the spark, or Afropessimism, for something more academic), or we make the same tired ass jokes about identifying as such and such almost alway non-human object.

Along with radicalizing the youth, Tiktok and Twitter (I refuse to use the new name) highlighted something for me especially over the years, which is that people love effortless comedy (again, obvious), but to put it less obviously, the average comedian, as acknowledged by Patrice O’Neal, is nowhere near as funny as somebody who’s just naturally funny. I personally think it’s because there’s a hidden grossness that comes with selling what amounts to an essential social function, especially one that just about every person on the planet is capable of in some capacity.

It’s weird, and it highlights something Todd McGowan comments on in his book, Only a Joke Can Save Us, which my brother gave me for my birthday. I can only commit to paraphrasing here since I’ll be editorializing a bit, but basically comedy serves as a way of highlighting the contradictions within society by bringing them as close together as possible, when polite society wants them to remain distant. The difficulty, then, arises when one of those contradictions is the status of comedians themselves. We’re presented as mouthpieces for the working class while those views are being bred out of us at every turn. Every career success is a step closer to capital and toward becoming someone entirely unfamiliar to the public. And the common refrain of “give [them] a Netflix special” in the comments of any high quality stand up clip highlights the way broader society accepts and encourages this trend. But it’s natural, especially in a supposed meritocracy, to want someone to be rewarded for being good at something.

There isn’t really a place for ongoing dissent within any part of the entertainment industry, only for the struggle to be bred out of the individual while it persists in their community. And I didn’t go this long way to make the case the Luigi Mangione was an aspiring comedian, but he is responsible for what a lot of us have decided is the funniest thing in recent memory. Under normal circumstances, someone might have mourned Brian Thompson’s death, but smashing together the fact of his murder with the countless deaths his company is responsible for, makes it an objectively funny event that only gets funnier when you see Elon Musk out sympathy-baiting with his own son and Anthem immediately reversing a possible cap on coverage for anesthesia.

Modern society has operationalized the role of the stand up comedian in the name of capital and created mechanisms to ensure a constantly replenishing pool of “talent” to act in service, or at least deference, to the status quo. Unable to bite the hands that feed them, the lucky ones can shit on corporations that they aren’t, and don’t expect to be, getting a check from, while the less fortunate ones submit to captioning their shitty jokes with the word “grape” instead of what they actually mean, and hope it’s enough for their reel to get reposted to a meme aggregator. Meanwhile, they all decide the safest target for when they do write a real joke (because comedy has to have a target), has to be people without power of recourse, which of course are the people that have been left behind by the social mobility they’ve benefited from—which at the current moment, seems to still be black trans people.

Of course, while we can’t all immediately pull these comics’ Netflix deals directly, we can still speak with our dollars and stop going to their shows, which they’re of course aware of, which results in a psychological squeeze from both ends which forces not an examination of the economic circumstances under which they’re performing, but special after special about how you can’t say anything anymore, while people with anything worth saying are getting their healthcare claims denied. Of course, this also means these dogshit, half thought “jokes” and bougie sensibilities trickle into the real world where they get vomited out by other people with just enough of a working class aesthetic to sell the dream that we live in left vs. right world when it’s really just up vs. down (a lesson worth keeping in mind when you find out our boy was watching Jordan Peterson clips on youtube).

So, if the unheard opinion of someone like Luigi Mangione creates a more fertile ground for comedy than anything the average comedian has said in the last decade, what do we learn from this? To put it simply, comedy can look like anything, but its most profitable form obviously relies on its acquiescence to capital, at best ignoring it and at worst actively riding its dick into oblivion. And this might sound like I’m working toward an argument about how artists should stay broke and retain their integrity or some shit, but that’s a bad faith interpretation.

What I’m saying here is that comedy is best when it has the freedom to explore reality uninhibited by capital interests—what could be, unencumbered by what has been, or whatever Kamala said (idk sometimes politicians say something worthwhile even if they still suck). I think modern comedy hints at what a comedian could be—the current epidemic of crowd work clips hints at our potentiality as local anthropologists taking field notes and facilitating community forums, even if we constantly waste that potential to ask people about their lame ass jobs, so we can keep them entertained just long enough to make it worth going back the next Monday.

From here, I’ll abandon any pretense that the rest of this argument comes solely from me, but I think that, if we have any hope for CEOs to stop being murdered, or for comedy to ever be worth watching again, we all need to become familiar with the principle of usufruct, ie. that simply by virtue of already being alive against our will, we are all deserving of anything that we are in need of—whether its food, shelter, or healthcare—the implication being that the entire notion of “earning a living,” whether through art or anything else entirely goes out the window and we can reorient society toward the cooperative care work that we know is the entire basis of human sociality. I originally learned the term from Murray Bookchin, but I’ve seen it articulated in dozens of ways in talks about the solidarity economy, which is something worth googling if you don’t want to spend the rest of your existence waiting for more comedy to pop up on the news.

I’ve been writing this for a solid four hours now and I think I’ve made enough of a point to justify this not being funny at all. Anyway, free Luigi he didn’t do shit.