In 2016, death killed.
At
a time when cultural journalism covers the deaths of beloved artists
more rigorously than ever, the list of titanic figures who died this
year feels tragically long. On the stand-up scene, mortality loomed
large, and not just because comics like Garry Shandling and Kevin Meaney died. In his funniest work
in years, Louis C.K. found laughs in suicide, a subject Chris Gethard
explored movingly in a breakthrough solo show. A recently released special
by George Carlin, “I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die,” was a
welcome reminder of his apocalyptic tendencies. But what particularly
lingers in the memory is the cathartic comedy that processed the loss of
a father, a mother and a wife.
The
comedy boom has not yet bust, but it is in flux. Comedians are
increasingly migrating toward streaming platforms and big rooms. After
decades with HBO, Chris Rock signed a $40 million deal with Netflix.
Kevin Hart told jokes to 50,000 people in his latest special, and Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, stars of “Oh, Hello,” followed Trey Parker and Matt Stone, translating a Comedy Central sensibility to Broadway.
It
was also a great year for intimate experiments, particularly ones with
an improvisational streak. After a strong body of work this year from
Reggie Watts and Rory Scovel, Nina Conti brought her irreverent
ventriloquism show to New York, where she turned audience members into
dummies and ad-libbed most of the jokes. Just as digital comedy grew, so
did its critics, including Bo Burnham, whose third special offered a
biting and resonant commentary on fame in the social media era.
Even
before comics became stars broadcasting from their bedrooms, they
confronted demons with a directness that few other art forms could
match. Richard Pryor cemented his reputation as the greatest stand-up of
his generation by spinning his story of setting himself on fire
into a hilarious yarn. It was a refined and tightly controlled
performance. By contrast, Tig Notaro revealing she had cancer in 2012
proved to be one of the most emotional sets this decade.
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Patton Oswalt’s
heartbreaking set at the Beacon Theater in the fall navigated between
these two styles, while doing material about his response to the sudden death of his wife
in April. Mr. Oswalt, whose comedy special won an Emmy this year, told
bracing stories that Ping-Ponged between silly jokes and deeply felt
moments grappling with his tumultuous state of mind.
He
has always been a wry observer of the intensity of feelings, although
in the past, that skill was put to use skewering (and celebrating) his
own cultural obsessions. Here he redirected his analytic mind to his
paralyzing grief, mocking the language of recovery, preferring “numb
slog” to “healing journey.” At his most moving, Mr. Oswalt told
self-deprecating stories that doubled as tributes to his wife, the
writer Michelle McNamara. In one of their running arguments, he
recalled, she would quarrel with his notion that “everything happens for
a reason.” After mapping out this debate, he paused, adding, “She won
the argument in the worst way.”
Two
years earlier on Twitter, Mr. Oswalt singled out jokes from the comic
and “Conan” writer Laurie Kilmartin, who was tweeting about her father’s
dying of lung cancer. These sharply written one-liners captured the
pain and frustration of caring for a dying loved one (“Hospice is a
medical term that means “Here, you do it”), and they evolved into a
special, “45 Jokes About My Dead Dad,” having its premiere on Seeso on
Thursday. It’s a slightly deceptive title, since the jokes cover a broad
swath of territory, including the impossibility of predicting someone’s
last breath and more than a few sharp jabs at her mother, but the main
focus is on walking the audience through the treatment, recovery, raised
hopes and hard realism of helping a loved one die with dignity.
In
an interview at the beginning of the special, she describes her impulse
as making “something precise out of something wild and huge and
terrifying,” but she pulls off something even more ambitious: showing
that comedy can tell a story of complexity and nuance and emotional
power. In an election year in which television hosts were forever
eviscerating, the boldest late-night sketch put Kate McKinnon, dressed
as Hillary Clinton, at a piano singing a tribute to Leonard Cohen.
But
Ms. Kilmartin touched on the toughest moments of mourning without a
note of the maudlin. “Ever cry so hard and so thoroughly,” she asks,
with deliberate pace, before shifting into the absurd, “that when you
finish you like jazz?”
Doug
Stanhope is a more argumentative and polemical comic, and in the first
chapter of his book “Digging Up Mother,” he described the death of his
mother in the meticulous detail of someone fascinated by all things
uncomfortable and taboo. While he talked about her in a previous
stand-up special, this lucid account, deadpan but too impertinent to be
called clinical, is even more harrowing and funny. He relates her final
moments soberly, lets her have the amusing lines, but once she dies, he
destroys any trace of solemnity. “Mother was in a better place now,” he
wrote. “And by that, I mean she wasn’t all dead and drooling in a
hospital bed in my living room while I was trying to watch football.”
As television comedy has increasingly merged with drama — a development routinely skewered
by “Difficult People,” whose second season had some of the best jokes
on the small screen this year — it’s perhaps no surprise that stand-ups
have made light of the darkest events. But the trend toward comedy that
confronts personal experiences with death is also a result of a culture
that encourages confession and that has cut the distance between artist
and audience.
While
the jokes and comedian personas are as shaped as the dialogue and
characters in movies, they feel more real. We trust stand-up comics in a
way that we don’t for almost any other artist, and it’s part of the
reason they have such stature in our culture now. That’s why when they
joke about death, it can come across like a friend’s sharing intimate
secrets. And that allows them leeway to express themselves without
euphemism.
What
stand-ups proved this year is that just because humor can provide
comfort doesn’t make it comic relief. Jokes can help an audience hear
difficult things more clearly.
A version of this article appears in print on December 29, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition
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