Photo: Koury Angelo/Disney
The two weakest jokes in Bill Burr’s otherwise-solid new Hulu special, Drop Dead Years, are inspired by the same muse: hypocrisy. “I love that shit,” he says. “It’s what makes human beings hilarious.” The first of these jokes is about the discrepancy in empathy between society’s treatment of the average person with dementia and Joe Biden. The second asks why there is such militant enforcement of car-pool-lane regulations, while people are still free to join the Ku Klux Klan. Both jokes get laughs in the room at the Moore Theatre in Seattle, but their premises are flawed. Illustrating a moral or logical contradiction onstage is too often an easy way for a comedian to create the impression of a joke when it’s more of a sincere point dressed up in a joke’s clothing. Consider George Carlin in his 1996 HBO special, Back in Town: “We made them both up: sanctity of life and the death penalty. Aren’t we versatile?” It’s a fine-enough premise; Carlin’s use of contrasting language even makes it sound like a joke. But his punch line is essentially “Would you look at that?”
As comedy’s greatest living contrarian, Burr generally avoids this. Throughout his career, he has gotten a lot of mileage out of picking apart the inconsistencies of conventional wisdom, and he’s typically careful to heighten his jokes an extra notch or two. Take his famous 2020 SNL monologue, in which he jokes about white women “hijacking the woke movement.” His joke isn’t just that white women are historically too complicit in the marginalization of other groups to claim solidarity with them today. It’s that “white women swung their Gucci-booted feet over the fence of oppression and stuck themselves at the front of the line.” Even with its colorful imagery, he doesn’t just let that observation sit there. He adds another tag: “You rolled around in the blood money, and, occasionally, when you wanted to sneak off and hook up with a Black dude — if you got caught, you said it wasn’t consensual! So why don’t you shut up, sit down next to me, and take your talking-to?”
But not all watchdogs of hypocrisy have Burr’s finesse or discipline, and in a time when “dunking” is a primary mode of sociopolitical discourse, the temptation to get an initial pop from calling out hypocrisy and stop there is strong. Take comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz, who, in his 2022 special, Infamous, tells a four-minute story about witnessing a woman wearing Minnesota Vikings gear confront a Baskin-Robbins employee over a MAGA hat he wore to work. “‘You know what those hats stand for?’” he remembers her screaming at the employee. “‘For the disrespect of women! For the mistreatment of women! For the abuse of women!’ I’m just looking at this chick like, You’re wearing a Vikings outfit! I don’t know if you’re familiar with Viking history, but they were the first ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ people!” The comedian’s audience eats it up, even though this joke, when dissected, amounts to little more than evidence that the outrage of an anonymous woman they all just learned about was morally inconsistent. Similar audience reactions follow this Fahim Anwar joke about women who won’t date short men but are opposed to body-shaming, this Chris Rock joke about people who boycott R. Kelly but still listen to Michael Jackson, and this Trevor Noah joke about how British people have no right to complain about unwanted immigration because of their country’s colonial history.
In jokes like these, the comedian is having a one-sided argument against a straw man, and their punch line is written to clinch victory rather than provide further food for thought. And while it’s not the responsibility of comedians to reconcile the contradictions they raise, to focus exclusively on them is to miss the point — and, often, a stronger joke — in favor of easy laughs. It’s why there are dozens of comedians, from Gabriel Iglesias to Josh Johnson, who have similar jokes about how rebranding “homeless” people as “unhoused” has no effect on their quality of life. “Thank God we got to the core issue here,” Usama Siddiquee says sarcastically in one joke to enthusiastic audience laughter. The way society fixates on the semantics surrounding this population while doing nothing to help its economic reality is an example of empty progressive virtue signaling so juicy that comedians can’t help but jump on it. And for most audiences, that’s enough; it scratches the same itch as a “This you?” post on social media. But what are these jokes actually saying beyond that? That irrespective of whether you call these people “homeless” or “unhoused,” they’re fucked?
At their best, jokes about hypocrisy are an exploration of the multitudes of people and the tangled world we inhabit. But at their worst, they tear things apart without introducing anything additive, philosophically or comedically. The irony of most of these jokes being so one-dimensional is that Burr is right when he says that hypocrisy is the secret sauce that makes human beings hilarious. It is funny that every single person, community, and guiding belief system is a mess of contradictions, because we’re all just animals trying to grapple with an impossibly elaborate world. There is so much potential for comedy in this complexity. It’s a shame that most jokes about hypocrisy seek to oversimplify it instead.
