Comedy and Shame
Charlie Potter -
This is my first time writing for Further & Further and while I started out many years ago as an ethnographer, having spent many more years now working in tech my exposure to the insight world is a little rusty. While I play catch-up, I thought I would share something I’m working with as I enter middle age that may shine a light on a dark corner of the human experience in 2025.
I’m straddling an old and a new world. The world I was raised in and the world that’s unfolding. In that context I’m wrestling with the complex parts that make up my personality, trying to fit in while remaining the ever-elusive ‘individual’, and through my Buddhist practice working to see through all of this, love unconditionally and transcend the self(!).
I’m 39. I grew up on the rampant objectification and nihilism of the nineties and early noughties. My cultural influences were characters like Stiffler and Tyler Durden. My content landscape included slash and gash horror films that made comedy out of murdering - often virginal - teenagers. I listened to pop-punk and grunge; created by artists who I’d now label as insecurely attached depressives trying to cope with their difficult lives through co-dependent relationships, alcohol and drugs - and being romanticised for it. Add to the mix an era of hip-hop that glorified violence - sometimes towards women - and it’s a hell of a melting pot.
I had a great time but if you really look at it - and I don’t want to sound like an alarmist nineties mum - it’s pretty fucked up. Let’s say this gave me some warped views of society, what was expected of me and how I should view and treat friends, partners and strangers on the street.
Like a lot of people now I’ve been on a bit of a journey. A decade plus in various therapies, exploring communities, experimenting with psychedelics…the list goes on. It’s working. I no longer turn to substances to cope and what I look for in friendship is radically different. I’m also in the happiest romantic relationship of my life so far with a woman who I respect and admire and who makes working through my shit even more purposeful for the clarity it brings to our connection.
However, I am a complex being of multitudes and different parts have different needs. So now to the less glamorous part…
I don’t want to admit this but, deep down, I love a grubby non-PC joke that pokes fun at a defenceless social group, judges harshly something unalterable about someone I’ve never met or hovers grimly around a sexist or racist subject.
It’s not that I don’t also find it offensive - I do. I’ve been at stand-up gigs and had jokes made about issues that impact me personally and I’ve wanted to storm out or hurl abuse at the comedian for being insensitive and uncaring - but the hypocrisy forces me to stay. And I have a line - it can go too far - but teasing this skillfully is part of the entertainment for me.
I can rationalize all of this and say that comedy seems to be about a dialogue between comedian and audience, testing boundaries, squeezing humour out of uncomfortable cracks to gauge what will fly. And that the most seductive humour seems to come from when we’re not supposed, or allowed, to laugh. It’s probably very shadowy, tapping into something deep in our collective consciousness and something we likely all share. Still, given all of this, it remains a confusing and conflicting experience.
On the one hand I strive towards acceptance, tolerance and inclusion and I have incredibly high aspirations around love and compassion. On the other, there are whole parts of my psyche that were formed at a particular point in time, under certain conditions, that need an outlet every now and then so they don’t foment and become a pressure valve of repressed, unarticulated sludge.
I’m not here to paint a picture of myself as a ‘good guy’ who’s merely a victim of his environment and circumstances - well, maybe a little - but I do have agency here. I do keep seeking it out and ultimately I am still laughing.
So, it’s complicated. And where have I landed with all of this? I don’t know.
For now all I can do is take those conflicting parts with me to the next comedy night I go to. Ducking for cover when I go in. There to get a break from all the do-gooding and for a few minutes laugh at someone else’s expense. Leaving bewildered, shameful, angry, triggered, confused…but also a little relieved.