You Know Why I Think That? Because That’s What He F**king Said!

After going to see him live at the 100 Club the week before last, I ended up listening to both of David Cross’s live albums (‘It’s Not Funny’ and ‘Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!’) on Friday night, while staying up until the wee hours inking one of the last Dubious Tales pages.

The albums are both very funny, and a couple of times were almost responsible for a nasty inking mistake while my arm shook with laughter, but considering Cross’s reputation for shocking and or controversial themes, I am either a) incredibly jaded or b) broken inside by the natural comedians I’ve long associated with. I think it’s probably a mixture of both.

I was thinking about this kind of satirical comedy on my way to work this morning, and ended up wondering what the point of it all is. Obviously, the central drive of any comic’s performance is to make the audience laugh all the way through his or her set, not fluff his or her gags, not run out of material while on stage and get paid a decent amount by the promoter at the end of the night for having successfully negotiated all the obstacles above.

When you get into the territory of comedians like David Cross who incorporate ‘issues’ into their comedy, however, the drive becomes a little muddier; the aim of the comedian that little more didactic. But does anybody really believe that someone attending a David Cross show will somehow be confronted by a viewpoint they hadn’t considered before, and shamefully renounce their Bigot credentials? One of my favourite gags on ‘It’s Not Funny’ goes a little something like this:

“So I was watching this show the other day… You know the one where there’s a guy, and he stands up in front of all of these other people and… you know, he thinks he can talk to dead people – the dead people talk to him, you know?

“Oh, wait, that was church.”

Now I loved that: it was a well-put together reversal that approached the age-old, “Hey kids, Christianity is bad, because the Catholic church is filled with men who fiddle with young boys” gag from a different perspective. Not that the ultimate message was any different, or that Cross didn’t talk about kiddy-fiddling about three minutes later. And not that I don’t agree with the sentiment.

But again, are there likely to be any priests in attendance? Or any Republicans, who, when confronted by the barrage of true facts about the Bush administration and its hypocritical cronies that Cross gleefully and angrily reads out, immediately cross partisan lines to address the crimes of their racist benefactors?

I was reading an Observer article yesterday ( ‘The New Age of Ignorance’) about the divide between the Arts and Sciences in society, but it seems to me that Cross’s comedy is one example of another, more stringent, divide – most obvious in America – between liberal and conservative media, where each side only hears what they want to hear.

In today’s narrowcasting world, the likelihood of a television viewer or – god forbid! – reader stumbling across something that challenges their perceptions and prejudices (conservative or liberal) is smaller than ever, so the idea of any punter coughing up their £20 or $40 in order to have the ground cut out from under them seems pretty fantastical.

I appear to have wandered massively off the point in this post – I really enjoyed the albums and think Cross is great, but I’m not sure issues-based comedy confronts its audience with anything more than what it wants to hear, aptly phrased.

That should do it. Check the albums out, if you haven’t already.

'It's Not Funny' at Amazon
'Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!' at Amazon