Dealing Beautifully With the Ordinary
Jim Gaffigan: Quality Time
Prime Video
The seventh comedy special from four-time Grammy-nominated comedian Jim Gaffigan.
In the last generation, comedy has migrated from the movies to specials, from Hollywood to Netflix. And as audiences, we’ve moved from following plots to funny observations made by characters we like. You could say we cut out the middleman. This is typical of our storytelling, which is all about character arcs, and typical of TV. We see with comedy specials, too, a hypertrophy that bespeaks confusion and indeed decadence. But some artists thrive in such times and the most impressive is Jim Gaffigan, whose new special, Quality Time, is now on Amazon.
Our comedians tend to come in two varieties, depending on the pleasure they give by giving offense. We have, accordingly, clean comedians and those who work blue—or, filthy. This is not the same as, but remarkably close to, comedians who talk about politics or social issues, since cursing is associated with social protest, to use a euphemism. More, clean comedy is primarily family comedy. It fits middle class tastes and therefore asserts America’s middle-class identity. It’s not transgressive.
But it is one thing to say we have middle class comedy and another to say we need it. It is this latter thought I would like to pursue, since I believe Jim Gaffigan and comedians like him are doing a public service. This needs arguing because the reputation of comedians is that they are unserious entertainers, which follows from the opinion that the ridiculous is the contemptible. Accordingly, they are unlikely to win Oscars or medals. But they deserve them far more than the comedians who get raves in the press or enthusiastic followings.
Gaffigan’s comedy seems throwaway because we treat our ordinary lives with contempt, though we don’t often realize that.
We mistakenly associate seriousness with talking politics. Comedy is said to be political when comedians insult a Republican president or a Christian church. Many liberals then praise this as speaking truth to power and many conservatives complain that it’s not really funny. That sort of comedy is essentially partisan—not that it’s without insight, but it cannot deal with America as a whole and it accordingly waxes and wanes as partisan flattery, depending on which party is in office. Strangely, by committing itself politically, comedy loses independence and even artistic integrity.
Partisan comedy is based on anger that a wished-for, fantastical justice is denied by the world we’re actually stuck with. Agonized sarcasm is its humor and disbelief its preferred rhetoric. It is necessarily divisive, since it is denunciatory. But its alternative, observational comedy, insists instead on looking at this world we inhabit and seeing how to deal with it, without assuming radical transformation is either desirable or possible. Gaffigan’s comedy seems throwaway because we treat our ordinary lives with contempt, though we don’t often realize that. But his popularity suggests we have a longing to return to reality, not just to dwell on fantasies.
Gaffigan shows us a way to return, through comedy, to a preference for the actual over the potential. Being dissatisfied with ourselves seems constitutive to being human, but how we should deal with it is not obvious. Do we embrace fantasies for their transforming power or at least as escapism? But then were divided against ourselves. Do we reject fantasizing? But then what do we do with our imaginations? Comedy is as much make-belief as any other art, but it may be the rational way to examine ourselves reasonably, that is without self-loathing.
Gaffigan shows us a way to return, through comedy, to a preference for the actual over the potential.
Gaffigan’s new special is thematically about tourism—he’s against our touristic abhorrence of the banality of our lives. Tourism is pilgrimage for atheists—maybe peak experiences, like Peak TV, can save us from ourselves. Entire industries are based on this attitude, rejecting ourselves as unworthy. But the banality of life is necessary to comedy, since it cannot, without a certain connection between our nature and our way of life, arrive at any general statement. If we’re primarily the creatures trying to escape our conditions, then our conditions don’t say much about us—indeed, nothing does. We have to reject the secular holiness of the holidays if we’re going to acquire any self-knowledge.
Now, I’ve argued very much in the abstract, because I have to make a case that the banal is actually important; this takes us too far away from the banal, however; more, I cannot argue about his jokes since nothing is so silly as explaining jokes! Talking comedy is going through a rhetorical minefield—proving the seriousness of the endeavor would be too dangerous. That’s ticklish, so you have to just listen to his special and then you’ll see what I mean. All I can do is point out how far his criticism of our self-delusions goes. It’s not just tourism, it’s everywhere in our lives.
The comedian is an anti-Romantic: Wherever he steps foot, following in the steps of romantic tourists with their love of the exotic, he dispels their illusions.
This is what I meant when I said comedy properly understood is a public service. The comedian is an anti-Romantic: Wherever he steps foot, following in the steps of romantic tourists with their love of the exotic, whether artificial and pre-modern (Europe) or wildly natural (Alaska, safaris), he dispels their illusions. It’s not because he’s got a mean streak, though probably comedians all do. It’s because he wants us to like ourselves better instead, follies and all. And he wants to defend the American mind against fantasies—which American have dedicated themselves to doing going back at least to Mark Twain, another famously comical observer and home and traveler abroad.
Comedy, too, is an art, and can be said to deal beautifully with the ordinary—it’s therefore the necessary corrective to the passions that lead us to reject America for some fantastic alternative. I don’t think he wants people to stop doing tourism—he’s too moderate for that and talks about his own touristic adventures. But even in the realm of wonder, he jokes about his failure to live up to the expectations of achieving peak experiences. That reasonableness is necessary—his self-deprecatory humor is a recommendation, that we be less boastful, which of course would apply especially to elites. This, too, is a political statement, as the middle-class audience and taste suggest, but it is not partisan–it’s patriotic.