Send in the Clowns
Photo/David Gamble Jr.
By David Gamble Jr.
Although I am an attorney in my day job, one of my passions is stand-up comedy, which I have performed for the last seven years. In this role, I was once able to get a room full of law enforcement officers to agree with the premise that police violence falls disproportionately on African Americans.
In 2018, several other comedians and I were invited to perform stand-up comedy for members of law enforcement at an annual conference. On the final night of the conference, some 70 officers from all over the country crowded into a darkened hotel ballroom, no doubt looking to cut loose after a week of the lectures, role-play, and breakout sessions inherent to the setting.
It was a “hot crowd” in the parlance of stand-up comedy, with the officers giving as good as they got; including laughing uproariously when one comedian flipped them “the bird” from the stage in response to persistent good-natured heckling.
As is often the case in my hometown of Reno, Nevada, I was the only Black comic on the bill. I opened my set with a joke that got my best laugh of the night. Stepping to the microphone I said, “You know, when I was first hired to do this show, I was a bit hesitant, but then I just thought, ‘c’mon, what’s the worst that could happen to a Black guy in a room full of cops?’” The audience laughter that followed was uproarious, and even included some whistles and cheers.
It is a well-worn maxim that beneath every joke lies the truth. I believe it is more accurate to say that jokes based on false premises will not be broadly funny. Author Stephen Rosenfield concisely illustrates this point in his book Mastering Stand-Up: “For eight and a half years audiences laughed at George W. Bush jokes that had the exact same premise: he was stupid and struggled with the English language[.] Likewise Bill Clinton’s philandering was the premise of jokes for his two terms as president, and beyond[.] People would be mystified at jokes about Bill Clinton being dumb or George Bush being a philanderer.”
Whether George W. Bush actually is stupid or Bill Clinton is a philanderer is not the point. The audiences for these jokes would have laughed at them in part because they perceived the joke’s premise to be true.
A joke is first and foremost just that: something someone says in order to make people laugh; but it can also be much more. Jokes can help us maintain perspective in the midst of seemingly dire circumstances - Hollywood affirms this via wisecracking action heroes like Spider-Man, Tony Stark, and John McClane. More importantly, research has shown that laughing with others can communicate that we share a worldview, which strengthens our relationships to one another. In other words, jokes offer us the chance to build consensus among diverse constituencies. In this way, a set up and punchline represent a comedian’s proposition to the audience, and the audience’s laughter is assent to that proposition.
Beneath my joke is the truth of the matter. Multiple studies—including this one from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health—have shown that African Americans are many times more likely to be injured or killed in police encounters than are others.
The officers’ laughs in response to my joke by no means indicates total agreement with me on the matter; after all, people laugh for many reasons. Jokes are not a panacea for all that ails society. However, the laughter indicates an awareness of the issue, and acknowledgement of the unspoken part of my punchline—that the worst that could happen to a Black man during a police encounter could be serious injury or even death. Such awareness and acknowledgement give us a place from which to build together, and so long as there is that, there is hope that we can solve society’s seemingly intractable problems.
Photo/David Gamble Jr.
David Gamble, Jr. is a Deputy Public Defender with the Washoe County Public Defender's Office in Reno, Nevada. He also participated in the October 13, 2021, Learning How to Listen event hosted by Nevada Humanities. You can view this conversation on YouTube.