Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Sources: JUST FOR LAUGHS/SUPPLIED, LESTER COHEN, RAY BURMISTON, FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP, ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
I like Maria Bamford: she’s hilarious. Also, she didn’t go to the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
Truthfully, I have no idea if the comedian was among the invitees to the Saudi regime’s joke-washing comedy festival this fall. But on Sept. 27, the same day that Dave Chappelle and Aziz Ansari, among others, yukked it up onstage for Mohammed Bin Salman & Co., Bamford performed at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto.
And, as far as I know, no one in upper admin at Just for Laughs, who hosted the event, has ever orchestrated the beheading and dismemberment of anyone – even in their wacky gags.
That said, Bamford did begin her show by lying down and writhing on stage, like something maimed or sick. In response to the audience’s discomfited chuckling, she cheerfully explained: “I’m doing my job!” This was not the only self-aware, disorienting moment of the night.
Bamford’s comedy is often folded into the layers between what’s said and how it’s delivered, and if there’s a particular tenor to the laughter she elicits, it might be: delightedly uncomfortable. In Toronto, her set touched on suicide, the deaths of her parents and, as it often does, her own struggles with mental illness.
While many comedians tend to approach this stuff salaciously, or for shock value, Bamford’s extreme candidness tends to soften how everything lands. If she’s ever punching down, it’s only to sock herself in the gut and wheeze out zingers – about her financial incompetence, her hospitalizations, her STIs – of masochistic catharsis.
We laugh to participate, rather than be implicated in the cruelty of not being in on the joke. At least that’s my best attempt at explaining how she gets away with what she does. Because, really, someone imitating the gargling death rattle of their mother’s final breaths should not be funny. And yet.
People walk past an installation showcasing the Riyadh Comedy Festival, on Oct. 6.FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images
Like everything these days, comedy has a weird relationship to the truth. Stand-up comedians tend to operate under the pretense that what they’re telling us is real, or at least based in fact. Bamford takes that presumptive dynamic of authenticity and turns it almost aggressively intimate.
Addressed so frankly and explicitly, within a structure that already conflates the onstage persona with its creator, we become not just her audience, but her confidantes – and maybe even something like her friends.
As W.B. Yeats once put it: “It is well to be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned.” So, captive to her onstage confessions and vicarious participant in her healing journey, not only do I like Maria Bamford, I believe that Maria Bamford likes me.
Of course, stand-up as performed memoir isn’t new, or exclusive to Bamford. Most comedians mine their lives for laughs, often culminating in sitcom characters based on themselves – including the Netflix-produced Lady Dynamite, which stars Bamford as a bipolar comic named Maria Bamford.
And so, through ostensibly personal material from comics, we gain illusory access to marriages (Bill Burr), parents (Russell Peters), sex lives (Amy Schumer), neuroses (Jerry Seinfeld), childhoods (Kevin Hart) and bowel movements (Sarah Silverman).
If poets were once esteemed as cultural truth-tellers, many American comedians have embraced this role in the 21st century. Exploiting the accessibility of their onstage personas – in a format that evolved from public sermonizing – and aided by social media, they have transformed from social commentators to oracles of alleged wisdom and morality.
It’s a questionable formulation since humourists have long explicitly rejected the imposition of more broadly sanctioned social codes, dodged public accountability and claimed that whatever they say shouldn’t be taken seriously (ergo, be subject to moral scrutiny) because “it’s just a joke.” And there’s a whiff of that same tautological inculpability from folks who performed at a comedy festival expressly designed to punch-up the grim reputation of its Saudi organizers.
The duality of those onstage personas is curious, since that illusion of personal immediacy is so actively cultivated in comedy, yet the mask hardens into disavowal, and even aggression, when called to account. In Dave Chappelle’s 2017 show, The Age of Spin, he tells a story about a female heckler objecting to his pontification about Bill Cosby.
Dave Chappelle performs at the Hollywood Palladium on March 25, 2016, in Los Angeles.Lester Cohen/Supplied
I was at a live performance of this tour, in Toronto, and the mostly male crowd around me roared when Chappelle announced he would kick the woman in the face. The laughter was thunderous, nasty and feverishly liberated. Though Chappelle tried to use the episode to question intersectional equivalencies of sexism and racism, an Instagram post dedicated to the entire three-minute bit is titled, tellingly, after his threat to kick her in the face.
Like so many comics, Chappelle might defend himself by claiming that he is not meant to be taken seriously, and that what’s funny about it is that he’s acknowledging a dark instinct he’d obviously never realize. Yet Chappelle, especially, has dug in his heels around his perceived entitlement, and attendant impunity, to say whatever he wants about whomever he wants.
This flexing of privilege informs how Chappelle and fellow A-listers invited to Riyadh have turned reactionary in their moral rhetoric, seemingly more invested in upholding the status quo than speaking truth to power.
People walk past an installation in the Hittin neighbourhood of Riyadh, on Oct. 6.FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images
Contrast this to the most influential and iconoclastic American stand-up acts of the 1960s and ’70s (Elayne Boosler, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor), who built routines around polemical and/or satirical critiques of social inequities and injustices, and whose legacies were an obvious inspiration, curiously, for Chappelle’s own early work.
Of course, that was long before comedians were getting paid more than $2-million to perform for Saudi princes – never mind the US$40-million Netflix gave to Ricky Gervais, another avowed “free speech defender” and reactionary moralist, for a pair of one-hour specials. The stand-up comedian has transitioned from a voice of dissent to a spokesperson for the small-c conservatism that dominates popular discourse in North America.
Ricky Gervais performs in London for his Netflix special, Ricky Gervais: Humanity.Ray Burmiston/Netflix
(Along with the 2025 comedy festival, Riyadh has also hosted a recent country music concert and WWE showcases, as if these signifiers bear a more official stamp of “freedom” than the democratic standards of a just and open society.)
Perhaps this says as much about the current state of affairs under the Trump administration as it does about the Saudis. Although, despite being subsumed into the mainstream, comedy finds itself in combative territory with a President who seems to fear, more than anything, being made fun of on TV.
Jimmy Kimmel is far from a counterculture warrior, and yet he felt the wrath of daring to speak his mind – albeit a little mindlessly – in a monologue back in September. And before we champion his return to late-night as a victory against fascist censorship, consider that Disney+ and Hulu, key carriers of his show, lost about seven million subscribers during his two-week suspension.
So what are we to make of this whole ordeal, while The Late Show with Stephen Colbert remains cancelled? Does The Late Show really run US$40-million in the hole? I don’t know. It’s bewildering, nonsensical and absurd. And maybe that’s the point.
As a reflection of the times we’re living in, Bamford’s comedy can tilt toward absurdism, too. Her routine includes a slew of voices and characters, often in conversation with one another, and jags at lightning speed from maximalist non sequitur to aggrandized anecdote to heartfelt confession – sometimes within the same joke.
And so to me, perhaps more than any other comic, she captures how it feels to be alive, right now: the wide-eyed horror, the manic paranoia, the desperate and flagging hope that some higher power, somewhere, is going to make things right.
Comedy shouldn’t ever allow us to get too comfortable, whatever that comfort looks like. I think a lot about that chorus of dude-bros, sanctioned and unified in their misogyny, chortling away at Chappelle – not just for how sinister it felt, but as a warning against seeking experiences that only consolidate and endorse my own worldview.
(As leftist comedian Stewart Lee chides his overly sympathetic fans in his 2018 special, Content Provider: “That’s right, clap the things you agree with. Clap, clap, clap! Agree, agree, agree!”)
Perhaps what I like most about Bamford is that she creates and luxuriates in communal discomfort, the only escape from which is to laugh. Or, as an audience member once responded to her gory detailing of a botched hysterectomy, pass out in the aisle and have to be carried away by paramedics. What’s funnier than that?