The Future of Humor: Anti-Humor Robert Mankoff | Big Think

The Future of Humor: Anti-Humor

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Where does comedy go from here? According to the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, it can only journey inward or towards ever-increasing depths of absurdity.

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Robert Mankoff:

A cartoonist and the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff is one of the nation’s leading commentators on the role of humor in American business, politics, and life.

A successful entrepreneur, he created The Cartoon Bank (now a New Yorker Magazine company), the world’s largest and most influential cartoon licensing businesses.

Bob edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, the best-selling coffee table book for holiday 2004, featuring all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its debut in 1925. Bob has edited dozens of other cartoon books and published four of his own. He appears frequently on network talk shows, cable TV networks, and syndicated radio programs.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Has humor changed in this age of political correctness?

Robert Mankoff: Well, you know I think it’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times in that yeah there’s a lot of politically correct humor, and there’s a lot of absolutely politically incorrect humor. You know go up on YouTube in which the basic humor is you know someone getting hurt to a mash-up of jointy music – you dumb humor, and a lot of humor is dumb and a lot of dumb humor is you know very, very funny, but if you go you know on XM radio, you’ll hear a lot of absolutely raw stuff. There’s a lot of politically correct humor in politically correct places which would be universities. That’s where you when I do a presentation and let’s say I show a cartoon in which it’s a gallows and there are steps you know okay going up to the gallows, and then there’s a ramp for the handicapped. Okay so you get a type of laugh there – if you’re in private people will laugh at that. In public people laugh like ha, ha, ooh. They do the oohs. The first part is sort of reflex of response and the thing. The other part is a little confused thing saying is this making fun of the handicapped; we can’t make fun of the handicapped. You know and besides it’s about executions and we’re also against that, so you know I want a larger protest about this cartoon and remove the laugh that I actually laughed which is actually something you can’t do, and conversely when someone doesn’t find something funny you can’t put the laugh back in.

Question: Do you see any difference in the humor sensibility of liberals versus conservatives?

Robert Mankoff: Well, I would say that since you know most of the people are funny are liberal, and I think it depends on what area you come out of. There’s something about humor that tends to be subverse as questioning of authority, so since that’s often been the case or even the ideological stance of people on the left, they seem to more naturally have gravitated to it. And in a broader sense, not with a liberal but I would say comedians themselves are liberal in simply that they want less rules of a social nature opposed upon them by society. They want more freedom. They want freedom to say whatever they want on stage and stuff like that, and traditionally, it’s been the conservative’s stance to say in terms of censorship that’s where censorship has come from, so I think that that’s been the province. I think liberals find it harder now especially if they back Obama, and it’s easier to since the authority tends to be democratic now or more. From Obama he becomes a harder target for liberals because they don’t want him as target at all and an easier target for conservatives.

Question: What upcoming comedic trends can we expect?

Robert Mankoff: Well, I do I think you see more what I call meta humor – humor about humor, as humor’s so infuses everything that for instance we have a caption contest in The New Yorker, and then there’s an anti-caption contest. And with the idea is to the unfunniest caption. Of course, unfunniest caption is actually funny in itself. You can see trends like this going aways back. For instance when you started off with elephant jokes, they might seem to make first somewhat sense at the start you know like you why do elephants paint their toenails red, so they can hide in cherry trees, so they’re all very silly and stuff. But then eventually you see it’s a joke about that joke because the riddle will be how do you fit six elephants in a Volkswagen, and it says well three in the front, three in the back.

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