Expressing our smuttier thoughts

One of the liberating thrills of stand-up is watching someone uninhibited by social mores, because comics love nothing better than speaking about rude or censored things like shit, sex and obscenity. For Freud, the reason we joke is partly because we need somewhere to express our smuttier thoughts. We crave places where the lewd ideas we’re walking around with, consciously or not, can come out. This need, Freud believed, was as vital to us as the need for sexual discharge itself, which is an extraordinary, remarkable idea when you think about it.

In his book on jokes, Freud divides jokes into two main varieties, the innocent and the tendentious. Tendentious jokes always have a victim, and sexual jokes are of this variety. Freud defined smut as the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual acts and relations made by speech. What motivates the comedian is the desire to see what is sexual as not hidden, but exposed. For that to happen, three people are required: the teller of the joke, the object of the joke’s sexual aggressiveness and the hearer of the joke, in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.

Seeking release from repression

Photo by Supamotion.

Since the object of the joke’s sexual aggressiveness tends to be a woman, there’s an implicit assumption that both the teller and the intended audience of the joke are men indulging in a permissive form of otherwise risqué homosocial bonding. By the same token, with this idea that the function of jokes is to release people from a certain kind of repression, Freud says that this need to achieve real sexual fulfilment via joking is particularly marked – in his day, at any rate – amongst the higher social classes, because the rules of politesse deem that smut can only ever really appear in joking form.

And yet, despite all of these complex uses of far from innocent and often very vicious joking, even in these jokes there is still a tie to the innocent joke. In fact, Freud ends his book on jokes rather nostalgically with the idea that all of our joking is really an attempt to recover the gleefulness of the infant, who laughed and delighted in the world because they found it fun and funny long before they felt any need for jokes.

Joking as sexual sadism

A man in the company of other men who enjoys smut is enjoying what he can’t usually get away with under oppressive social inhibitions. His enjoyment is in daring to imagine obscenities in company. A man who laughs at smut, Freud says, is laughing as though he’s the spectator of an act of sexual aggression, meaning the excitement or the pleasure he derives is really from shaming the woman who is the object of the joke.

Joking thus construed is a kind of act of sexual sadism. Many a comedian has gained many a laugh over many, many years by shifting from sex to aggression and making women the prime victims of the joking industry. But it isn’t just professional comedians who get away with that; non-professionals are clearly no better.

Demonstrator in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. during the Women's March on Washington. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

You need only watch, for example, Donald Trump in the Access Hollywood tape, where we find him laughing with another man about how he acts around beautiful women, ‘grabbing them by the pussy’ and so on. We also hear these two men forensically, anatomically discuss and describe the woman who’s about to meet them off the coach. The pleasure of that scene for whoever enjoys it is clear: she is the humiliated object and implicit reference of their banter, whose pussy is already being grabbed metaphorically.

A return to infantile hilarity

This gives a kind of libidinal release for many Trump fans, which is why Trump is the perennial joker in our historical pack. He is quintessentially a man who will say the forbidden things, which is why his opponents initially failed to understand his appeal. At first, they didn’t really grasp that his rude words weren’t putting people off – they were turning people on.

But the critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno did grasp this long before the world had ever heard of Donald Trump. He was comparing the shamelessness of such leaders with that of light entertainers in their popular appeal, and he said that these extreme narcissists, almost always men, ‘are generally oral character types with a compulsion to speak incessantly’. Their language functions ‘in a magical way’ to cause a regressive movement in their hearers; the people who listen to them regress by listening to their words. Their success rests on returning adoring crowds to an infantile experience of words by returning them to the sense of a time when terms weren’t yet fully fixed, allowing for that playfulness, hilarity and exuberant sense of freedom.

Only now, the sense of freedom has been identified with the authoritarian leader as the word magician with the power to create new definitions according to the free play of his own desires. So a politician or a comedian who denounces political correctness and who seems to promise a freedom whose first promise is that of orality – of being able to say whatever you damn well want – appears to offer his supporters a kind of sexual emancipation, albeit one which is very much on the other shore to forms of sexual emancipation we also find today, such as #metoo.

Women responding to sexism in comedy

Entertainers and liars know that words have a funny side, but victims of bullying and befooling can know this, too. One of the tried and tested techniques for revealing this funny side of words is by repeating them in such a way as to show the kernel of weakness nestling inside every strongman performance. It’s a gesture used by a lot of female comics looking to undermine misogynistic discourse simply by aping its lines.

Take, for example, this aside by the comic Cathy Ladman: ‘I don’t have any kids. Well, at least none I know about.’ We can hear how, by word-for-word parroting a stereotypical male comedian’s brag, she provides about as deft a moment of comic outwitting as you could wish for. Indeed, since every Narcissus must have his Echo, the fact that echoes can subvert the lines that they echo has developed into something of a feminist practice.

In Hannah Gadsby’s ground-breaking stand-up show Nanette, for instance, we hear parroted another wisecrack from the male comedian’s playbook. The wisecrack goes, ‘What sort of comedian can’t even make the lesbians laugh?’, whose punchline Gadsby then mirthlessly proffers: ‘Every comedian ever.’

As we slowly get the joke, we also get how its punchline has undergone a stunning inversion, one that allows us to perceive the powerlessness of the object of ridicule. In this case, that’s the stereotyped, humourless lesbian who gets skewered by the joke precisely because she cannot respond smilingly or unsmilingly without confirming the joker’s thesis about her one way or another – unless, like Gadsby, she turns the tables not only on the joke, but on the whole business of joking itself.

Jokes that spare no one

Likewise, consider the American comedian Sarah Cooper’s lip-synching videos of Donald Trump, which were popular comedy memes that went viral during lockdown precisely because she used his exact words to hoist him by his own petard. For a slightly earlier example of this echoing, you could consider the American comic Michelle Wolf. As the invited speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2018, she told a joke about ‘grabbing them by the pussy’ and then added the kicker, ‘He said it first’, which was funny, one commentator said, because her obscene humour exposed the fundamental unfunny-ness of it all.

Michelle Wolf performing at Comedians You Should Know in Brooklyn on Sept 21 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

In fact, if you watch Wolf’s speech, which is on YouTube, you’ll see that the laughter she provokes in her audience is mostly of a nervous kind, as if people are becoming less sure of themselves or their own positions while listening to her, regardless of who they are, or where or with whom they’re sitting. By the end of her act, nobody is beyond the reach of the joke, as we all discover together the critical risk of comedy: that for all joking may have its usual victims, in the end, everyone at some point will find themselves drawn into the same fine mess.

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sexual jokes and responding to sexism in comedy

Baum, D. (2018, August 9). What do women want? Reading Grace Paley after #TimesUp. Granta Magazine, 144, 243–253.

Appignanesi, J., & Baum, D. (Directors). (2016). The New Man [Film]. The Creative Life Film Company.

Appignanesi, J., & Baum, D. (2017, August 16). The New Man: Hisham Matar in conversation with Joshua Appignanesi and Devorah Baum. Granta Magazine, 140.

Sexual jokes and responding to sexism in comedy