Visions and Voices: Comedy Festival, Vol. 4 kicked off Friday, featuring a showcase of short films by USC comedy students, a conversation with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris, a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Frasier, and discussion surrounding topics in comedy. One of the eight panels you shouldn’t miss is the Laughing with Versus Laughing at: Otherness and Comedy panel at The Ray Stark Family Theater in the School of Cinematic Arts, Sunday Nov. 4 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
“It’s not your mother’s diversity panel,” says moderator and event organizer Sara Alize Cross. “We are going to be talking a lot more in depth about the creative side versus the business side. I think a lot of panels talk about the business side, but we are trying to get into the issues of identity and creativity in comedy.”
The seven panelists include comedy writer and director Meena Ramamurthy, stand-up comedian Danielle Perez, writer and storyteller David Crabb, and Native American comedian and TV writer Lucas Brown Eyes. One of the panel topics discusses how writers can reshape comedy to tell stories that speak to truth and not prejudices or stereotypes.
“For decades and decades we’ve all decided who we get to laugh at in the moment,” says Crabb.
“We get to laugh at the really gay guy who has the lisp, we get to make jokes about the Black guy who plays basketball well, we get to make jokes about the Asians great at math. The reason those jokes fall out of favor, as they should, is because just intellectually they are low hanging fruit. They are not that complexed or layered or nuanced or funny… The world is changing, there’s more of a voice, there are more minorities, there are more gay people, there are more people who represent and identify as other to say, ‘No, I’m more complex than that, I’m more than a stereotype.’”
Event organizer and moderator Neima Patterson says part of this discussion is not only unpacking minorities stories, but understanding what and who has shaped those narratives. She explains this by citing double consciousness theory, coined by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903. This theory defines the inner conflict marginalized groups face when forced to present a palatable version of themselves for the dominant culture, and a different one among their cultural fellows; essentially, performing two vastly different lived experiences based on the audience consuming the portrayed identity.
“How do we know what our authentic selves are, based on the fact that we’ve seen ideas and images of what our voice should sound like regurgitated through the media?” asks Patterson. “I think that happens a lot with comedy performers…they are seeing themselves and realizing they’ve been taken as a stereotype rather than their authentic story they were trying to tell based on who’s watching, based on who’s laughing, based on who they’re performing it for.”
In the past, Crabb describes comedy largely as a space where minorities had little control over their own narratives because their identities were often turned into punchlines by white cisgender straight men.
“I think comedy is getting a lot more narrative, there’s less and less observational joke comedy and more and more comedy about the protagonist and more about the person explaining what their experience is,” says Crabb. “I think one of the things that’s great about that and very progressive, is that it means the teller gets to own their experience.”
This allows writers like Ramamurthy to channel her Indian culture into a web series like “FOB and I” or stand up comedians like Perez to make fun of her own disability, but beyond that, break down the lack of representation in entertainment.
“If people are in a small town that doesn’t have diversity, what they see on-screen is what they believe that group to be,” says Ramamurthy.
This becomes a problem when what people see on-screen are often “tasteless and stereotypical” misrepresentations of marginalized groups. While these sorts of jokes are frowned upon, Perez believes comedians can tell any joke just as long as it’s funny.
“The thing is if people don’t think it’s funny, they won’t laugh,” says Perez. “With that freedom to joke about anything is also the responsibility to read the room, get some feedback––hear it… You can’t act like everyone’s too sensitive or they just don’t get you, it’s like, they got what they got from it and if they’re not happy, you need to examine why.”
This provides space for comedians to learn from their intended audience, rework jokes, and reevaluate if what they’re speaking on is something to joke about. After all, this is how you grow as a comedian according to Perez, through practice and gauging audience reactions.
As Brown Eyes points out, laughing with someone includes them, while laughing at someone excludes them.
“So the quickest way to do it is, are those people included in the process or are you talking about them?” says Brown Eyes. “In that case it can quickly devolve into laughing at.”
Which ultimately suggests the writing process needs to value inclusion at all stages of the creative process, especially when discussing a marginalized demographic. For example, it’s difficult to write a show about black culture when your writers’ room has few or no Black people, because non-Black writers will often miss nuances due to lack of experience and exposure.
“Overall, I’d like people to take away from the panel a better understanding of how comedy operates in our culture and how otherness is part of that and think about how the power structure of comedy works,” says Cross.