Today I want to discuss lowbrow humour…. You know; fart jokes and genitalia and stuff.

Typically, everyone judges a comedian who relies on this kind of satire. We call it peurile. We call it a cheap laugh. We assume that these jokes are both childish and easy. We assume that the comic in question has taken a shortcut, invoked a lazy way of getting people to laugh.

I want to challenge that assumption, and make the argument that there’s a lot more value to this kind of humour than you might suspect.

This might suprise some of my peers. In the years I’ve been a comedian, I’ve been accused of being snobby and judgmental about many forms of comedy. And, I’ve also been accused of using this kind of comedy, pandering to crowds with the lowest common comedy denominator.

It’s weird to be accused of both. It’s like hearing lots of people claim to be Jesus: they can’t all be right.

To clarify, there’s types of comedy that just annoy me…. Including but not limited to puns and racial or gender sterotypes. The jokes just don’t appeal to me. They don’t make me laugh and I generally don’t include them in my act.

That’s got nothing to do with snobbery. I don’t enjoy country and western music, so when I was a musician I didn’t make country and western. Why would I make music I don’t like?

For the record, presenting material that you don’t like but think others will is one of the definitions of “hack” in the comedy world. Writing jokes that you don’t respect is “hack.” But ifyou think the dick joke or fart joke is an “easy” laugh, you’re also very wrong.

Argument #1: There’s no such thing as an “easy” laugh.
Seriously, if you think it’s easy to “kill” onstage with fart jokes, you’re not a comedian and don’t understand comedy enough to even participate in these arguments.

Yes, farts are funny. No, you’re not automatically going to prevail in a comedy performance by referencing them. If anything, you’ve got an uphill battle trying to make us laugh with the stuff we already giggled at in kindergarten. Unless you have a new or unique twist on flatulence, it’s highly doubtful you’re going to get far with well-worn jokes that 6 year olds already did.

Farts and dicks might be inherently funny premises, but amusing premises are not the guaranteed killer that you might think they are. If they were, all comics would be doing them all the time. If you think comedy is easy if the comedian talks about farts, you don’t understand comedy at all.

Argument #2: All jokes are valid.
This is the point I’ll be coming back to from different angles, because I cannot stress enough how important it is. All jokes are valid, and anyone who pretends otherwise is gaslighting you.

The main argument against peurile jokes is a matter of taste, and I get it. I really do – I find a lot of immature toilet humour personally distasteful. But I don’t think my personal taste is the arbiter of validity.

The simple truth is that for comedy warriors in a battle for our hearts and minds, any weapon is legit.

There’s two things I distrust automatically: People who impose fake rules where rules aren’t required or relevant, and People who tactically define their ways as “clean” and the others as “dirty.”

To explain what I mean about the second part just think of a situation where a massive force like America declares war on a much smaller and less technically resourced nation. Somehow, we all agree that the only tactics the underdog can defend them,selves with – guerilla warfare, sneak tactics, throwing rocks, terrorist acts – are all filthy, underhanded and evil.

But weirdly, we also all agree that the stuff that only the bigger force can do – like using aircraft to drop bombs on homes and schools – is perfectly fine.

These “rules” are almost a fake construct to reinforce existing power structures. Marxist ideas about false consciousness aside, I can ‘t trust anyone who invokes “rules” where rules don’t belong.

Comedy is a world where most rules don’t belong, but has a lot of fake rules anyway. Comedians hear “you can’t say that” and “you can’t make jokes about….” more than people could imagine.

Fun Fact: The phrase “Working Blue” or “doing Blue humour” refers to doing transgressive or offensive material – And it originates from a time when venue management would send a Blue Envelope to the comedian in the Green Room. That Blue Envelope would have a list of topics the comic wasn’t allowed to talk about.

So OK, some of these pronouncements are genuine conditions of employment given to contracted workers. The rest of the time, though, it’s people trying to legislate their own taste. Fake rules constructed from the personal sensibilities of people who aren’t even stakeholders. Every man and his dog seems to be heavily invested in telling comedians what they can and cannot say.

This shouldn’t suprise us. Most of us were raised with the suggestion that we don’t discuss sex, religion or politics in polite company – the idea that talking freely about them is wrong and should be treated like a dirty secret.

Ever the contrarian. I’d suggest that sex, religion and politics are the most foundation aspects of being a human. I’d propose that keeping our sexual, religious and political inclinations from the rest of humanity is unhealthy for us as individuals, bad for society and only serves the conservative interests who invented this fake rule.

I’d also argue that the social value of comedy is speaking freely about the unspeakable. You might not be allowed to speak your mind about a tyrannical emperor, but the court jester can. The social function of comics is to give a voice to what the people in charge say shouldn’t be spoken about.

But…. dick jokes? Farts?

Absolutely.

I think everyone will agree that George Carlin was one of the truly great comedians of the 20th century, that he was brilliant as well as funny and set the bar for a comedian’s ability to make clever social commentary with the punchlines.

Carlin used to say that his jokes were divided into three types: The Big World, The Little World, and Wordplay. A lot of the credit he got for clever humour was for the Wordplay – puns and ironies, wondering why was have to park on a Driveway and drive on a Parkway, that sort of thing. The kudos for his social importance came from his “Big World” humour which he described as covering war, politics, race, death, and social issues.

Wordplay and Big World were lofty ideas that elevated Carlin’s respect, but it was his “Little World” humour – the stuff involving driving, food, pets, idle thoughts and the mundane minutiae of life – that was the glue holding it all together. What made these other ideas work was aiming the spotlight at the tiny things we all share but don’t discuss.

That includes farts and toilet humour. The chin-strokling academics forget that George Carlin also told jokes about farts and toilet stuff. These things are relatable, precisely because they’re a part of all of our lives.

Not only that, but they’re a bigger part than we’d ever admit. Whatever we like to tell ourselves about how civilised and cerebral we are, most of us will spend a lot more of our lives in the toilet than we’ll ever spend reading Doestoevsky or advancing knowledge in theoretical physics.

More importantly, it’s all of us. Everyone shits. Isn’t it weird that we have universally shared attributes and experiences, these things that are a big part of our identities and how we spend our lives, but we don’t discuss them and prefer to focus on other stuff that doesn’t matter to most of us? Thank goodness for comedy, huh?

Except there’s people who inist it’s not spoken about in Comedy either. They call it cheap and easy and childish. They discourage comedians from “potty humour.” They want us to be more like Carlin, but they’ve forgotten a lot of Carlin’s actual act.

I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories (except for the one about Megan Markle being a robot – that cracks me up) but I also distrust of claims about how we should all behave and think.

Given this, I can only assume that the people who want us to avoid discussion of farts, genitals, sex, masturbation, toilet stuff, etc are trying to divide us. They want to keep us all in our own emotional quarantines, all of us believing somehow that the experiences which we actually share with the rest of humanity are private, shameful and uniquely ours.

I have to assume the social effects of this are a corollary to the Instagram experience, where everybody compares their own gritty real lives with the shiny fake ones everyone else is projecting on social media… with the result being that everyone feels inferior, poorer and bitter about it. Social media boasts a lot about “connectedness” and “sharing” but the results are usually disconnection and alienation.

Stand up comedy, at it’s best, unifies people. I can’t tell you how good it felt, after a year of Covid quarantine, to be in a room filled with people sharing laughter. The power of comedy is to say what’s generally unspoken. Comedy does it’s best when it gives us stuff we can relate to even if those shared things are anger, frustration or embarrasing bodily functions.

When people insist that some things should never be discussed, I’m troubled. When they say that particularly applies to Comedy I get annoyed. When they want to silence talk with no better reason than their own personal taste, I get angry.

I’m never going to tell you that potty humour and fart jokes are awesome. Personally, I’m a bit averse to them, mostly because I probably heard all of it fifty years ago. I like my comedy with more irony than dick jokes are generally served with. Also I think the art of standup is about making a premise funny, not merely in identifying funny premises.

But what I will say is that most requests to not talk about peurile or filthy things are little more than gaslighting; a dishonest attempt to prevent discourse about earthy and shared experiences and force us into shame-filled emotional quarantines.

I think arguments about “easy” comedy are weak, the insistence that jokes be “appropriate” is disingeuous, and the implication of a moral and intellectual deficiency in the comedian who works “blue” is both dishonest and lame.

And frankly if it’s good enough for a legend like George Carlin, it’s good enough for me.