Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Sarah Silverman vs. Groupon

Sarah Silverman vs. Groupon

Last updated on: August 4, 2013 at 11:22 pm by Fred Clark

Sarah Silverman vs. Groupon 2013-08-04T23:22:25-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I'm a big fan of Sarah Silverman. Her jokes are mostly funny on their own, but her meta-joke — the shallow, self-centered, cruelly oblivious idiocy of her comic persona — is pure genius.

That persona allows her comedy to address forbidden topics with forbidden candor, to be both dry and enthusiastic at the same time, both sardonic and perky — two things that one wouldn't expect could go together. She is able to say the most odious and appalling things while smiling sweetly like a demented and cruel version of Gracie Allen. Unlike Gracie, though, Silverman works solo — with no George on hand to reassure the audience that it's OK, folks, it's all part of the joke. The result is an act that cuts closer to the bone than much of the safer, less ambitious pablum that passes for stand-up comedy and that allows her to pull off the remarkable trick of ferociously criticizing a room full of people while making them laugh at the same time.

Silverman makes this look easy. It's not. There are a thousand ways this kind of thing can go wrong, and some of the most painfully unfunny comedy I've seen has come from comics attempting, and failing, to imitate Silverman's high-wire act. Instead of exposing and eviscerating the prejudices and stupidity that Silverman targets, these comics wind up just expressing it. Sometimes they still get laughs, but for the wrong reasons.

Sarah Silverman's meta-joke is dangerous even when it all goes right. The danger with her act is that not everyone who's laughing seems to be in on the joke. When she viciously deconstructs racism, misogyny or homophobia, some of the people in her audiences aren't laughing at the deconstruction, they're laughing at the racism, misogyny and homophobia. Silverman combats that by "turning it up to 11" — taking the joke appallingly, delightfully too far to force the audience to acknowledge the presence of the meta-joke, to realize that her sharpest, most venomous arrows are actually flying at herself and at them.

But I'm not sure that always works. On balance, I think, Silverman's comedy does more to undermine prejudice than it does to reinforce it among those who only half understand her act, but that reinforcing does occur, for some. That "on balance" is a tricky thing and the recognition that Silverman's dark comedy does, in some measure, contribute to the darkness adds another layer of difficulty.

For an illustration of what can go wrong with this balancing act, consider the former show of Silverman's former boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel used to co-host "The Man Show" on Comedy Central, a program that tried something like Silverman's meta-joke by mocking sexism while pretending to revel in it. Kimmel and co-host Adam Carolla occasionally succeeded in finding the right balance, but the overall effect proved that frat-boy feminism wasn't really a sustainable conceit. Too often they were just plain reveling in the sexism. The result wasn't "Aren't men ridiculous for objectifying women?" but rather simply "Hey, look — girls on trampolines!" The show wound up reinforcing prejudices more than it undermined them.

When Kimmel and Carolla left the show it was passed on to the miserably unfunny duo of Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope, who didn't get the meta-joke and abandoned any attempt to tell it, just spending their time instead savoring as much misogyny and sexism as they could get away with. The show was quickly cancelled, but not quickly enough.

The problem for Sarah Silverman is that some of the same people who were laughing at Rogan and Stanhope's boorish misogyny are also laughing at her apparent espousal of those same ideas in the ironic voice of her cheerfully horrible persona. This is an inherent danger for anyone using irony to combat hateful ideas. The irony will be lost on some portion of your audience, and that same portion — the not-so-bright portion — will also be those likeliest to espouse the hateful ideas you're combatting. Missing the irony — not getting the joke — these folks will wind up laughing at the wrong things, for the wrong reasons and believing you're on their side.

This raises a next-level question regarding the responsibility of the artist for how her art is received or perceived by others. I'm not really qualified to address that question. For one thing, I'm not an artist. For another, I've got that evangelical Protestant instinct of obsessing over meaning — an unfortunate tendency to approach art didactically, trying to determine what the point in is a way that's often beside the point. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in "Ars Poetica":

A poem should not mean
But be.

I think he's right about that. But I also notice that those lines are, themselves, should-y and propositional and didactic. His poem means. So this is complicated.

So maybe rather than discussing this in terms of responsibility — the ethical considerations for Sarah Silverman of knowing, as an artist, that her comedy will be misconstrued by a portion of her audience as reinforcing the very prejudices she's seeking to ridicule — maybe it's easier to just consider it in terms of success.

If you're telling a joke — even a really good joke — and most of the people hearing it won't get it, does it still succeed as a joke? Can you still regard that joke as working? Or if you've written a really good joke — an elegant, pointed, devilishly clever, multi-barbed joke — but you realize that most people in the room won't get it, should you still tell it? Is a joke that kills with 10 percent of the audience and dies with the other 90 percent really a successful joke?

The reason I bring all this up is because I've been asked about the flap surrounding the Super Bowl commercials for Groupon. Those commercials were the handiwork of Christopher Guest — the man who gave us the "it goes to 11" joke referenced above. Guest is a funny man and I think his ads contain a funny joke. But unfortunately, they're not just jokes — they're also commercials. And they failed as commercials — generating a backlash against Groupon — because the joke just didn't work in that format.

Which is not to say it isn't a funny joke. But what I think what we have here is a classic case of Good Joke, Wrong Room. Or, even worse, a case of a great greenroom joke unwisely retold outside of that context. That usually spells disaster.

The comics are gathered backstage and somebody hits on a basic joke that everyone starts riffing on in a game of Can You Top This? The most outrageously funny variation is later repeated on the stage before a larger, much different audience that brings different expectations from many different contexts. The multi-layered irony of the joke loses some of its layers. The wounded idealism that cracked up the comic's peers backstage comes across as mere cynicism. Instead of being heard as a logical reversal, the joke's elegant quadruple-negative inversion is received as repetition for emphasis. In short, the joke bombs. Good Joke, Wrong Room.

The first Groupon ad, if you haven't seen it, starts out with Timothy Hutton earnestly describing the plight of the people of Tibet before abruptly switching gears to "but they still whip up an amazing fish curry!" He goes on to gush, with comical obliviousness, about how Groupon lets customers save on delicious Tibetan cuisine at local restaurants. "Save the money," the ad says at the end, a parody of do-gooder slogans like "Save the Whales."

Critics of the ad complain that this is appalling, and it is. It's supposed to be. But some critics also complain that the ad makes light of the suffering in Tibet, and it really doesn't do that. The ad makes light of American narcissism. It makes light of shallow, feel-good, all-about-me moralizing. And it makes light of our ability to know the facts of others' suffering while still preoccupying ourselves with our own appetite and greed. The people of Tibet are not the butt of this joke. We are.

The basic idea here would have made a good parody ad on Saturday Night Live, but as an actual commercial for an actual service I think it was doomed. Wrong room. One doesn't anticipate having to navigate layers of irony in a 30-second Super Bowl spot. The medium is more amenable to beer-can-to-the-balls jokes or cute kids in Darth Vader costumes. This joke just wasn't going to work in this context.

Maybe it could have worked better if Guest had cast his old colleague Fred Ward Willard. This bit is, after all, a variation on the shtick Willard has been performing, impeccably, for decades. But I think they were going for something edgier than the sweet, well-intentioned buffoon Willard usually plays. His character is often cruel, but never intentionally so. That self-centered obliviousness is only part of what I think they were trying for in this ad.

To get the bite that Guest was trying for I can only think of one person who might have pulled this off: Richard Gere. By having an actor known for his advocacy on behalf of Tibet play this scene, more viewers would have been cued in to the actual joke and its actual target. That would've given the joke more punch, but I doubt it could have rescued the ad as an ad.

As an advertisement it fails because what's the marketing angle here? The point of the joke seems at odds with the point of the ad. The ad wants us to use Groupon for savings at local businesses. The joke tells us we're shallow, apathetic bastards who need to put down the fork, turn off the TV and do something more important with our lives than stuffing our faces and entertaining ourselves and acquiring as much stuff as we can. (I'm inclined to agree with that sentiment, although I'm not sure that's the most winsome way of expressing it.)

The appeal of the ad as an ad seems to be something more insidious — a kind of self-congratulation that often accompanies other forms of comedy. It's the idea that by laughing at a barbed joke, we somehow exempt ourselves from its sting. Richard Pryor or Chris Rock makes a joke about white privilege and the white members of the audience laugh, nervously, hoping that by getting the joke they somehow make it only about those other white people and not about them. Pryor and Rock, at their best, never let their audiences escape that easily, but other comics sometimes feed off of this — allowing their audience to feel that they have been granted immunity from the jokes being told. That makes audiences happy, but it's not good comedy or good art. The comic's job, like any artist's, is to tell the truth. "Tell the truth, but tell it slant," the great comedian Emily Dickinson said of her profession. Telling audiences what they want to hear is not the same thing.

And that, finally, is why I think these ads failed. They had the courage to say, "Hey, you, the wealthiest people in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, you have the power to make this world better but you're too self-absorbed and lazy to do it." But then they pull their punches by allowing us to exempt ourselves from that truth, not by actually doing anything constructive, but by accepting an invitation to feel better about ourselves by smirking at all those other self-absorbed, lazy people.

I tend to think that the only way to exempt oneself from an accusation of self-absorbed laziness is to not be self-absorbed and lazy. Mocking others for their complicity doesn't erase one's own. And acknowledging one's own complicity and mocking oneself for it doesn't erase it either.

The reason I like Sarah Silverman's comedy, at its best, is because it has a hook in it. And unlike the joke in these Groupon ads, it's not over-eager to please me by easily letting me off that hook.

Previous Post

February 16, 2011

Honors English

Next Post

February 18, 2011 The Apostate and Me

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What Christian group commonly uses the Book of Common Prayer?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Presbyterians Lutherans Methodists Anglicans