This vibe deserves to die and I hope it burns in hell

As usual, I feel the most inspired when I’m supposed to be writing some other shit, but I’ll forgive myself for adding a little bit more stress to the latter half of my day.

My feeling today, and in general, is that the vibes have been too good for too long and this shit needs to end. And I’m sure that sounds insane coming from me, a known hater, in a time when there are so many things to hate, but I look around every day and feel like, in spite of everything, we all remain committed to the illusion that everything is fine. And as bad as it all is, I’m not only referring to simultaneously the most documented and most ignored genocides of all time in the Congo, Palestine, and Sudan, or the global rise of fascism, or the fact that 2024 is now the third hottest-year-on-record in a row. 

I’m referring to the fact that, broadly speaking, we have a culture of keeping our feelings about these things to ourselves in the interest of preserving a superficial “vibe” that is slowly killing all of us. I’ve been saying for over a decade we’re gonna “it’s not that serious” ourselves into the apocalypse, and unfortunately that is exactly what seems to be happening and I wonder when it gets serious enough that we actually decide to be fucking for real with ourselves.

I’ve been a stand up comedian for going on 13 years and I’ve watched us go through so many trends as an industry that I’ve only grown more suspicious of the avenues through which we’ve been expected to build our careers. And in the modern age of tiktok, IG reels, and podcast micro-celebrities, I’m willing to bet the average age of “famous” comedians these days is considerably lower than even 10 years ago, because the pandemic made internet fame just as viable as “real” fame for arguably the first time, unless you’re a fan of rap music, and because this generation of comics (not that I’m so much older than them) didn’t get burned out on late stage youtube, Vine, Seeso, Quibi, audio-only podcasting, Clubhouse or any of the other features that inevitably got swept up into Meta’s UI. 

What all of these things have in common is a supposed “democratization” of art, all while seemingly having no handle on what democracy actually is. And I think, based on all the cries about “saving democracy” by voting for someone who, like her or not, was handed the nomination without any of our consent, and is actively committing genocide, I would argue many of us don’t know what it means either. I don’t want to get too deep into it and risk parroting things I’ve heard from David Graeber about the Federalist Papers and how “if there were direct democracy, poor people would vote to redistribute land and wealth,” but it’s worth a quick google search.

The point I’m building toward is that, as the years have gone on, I’ve watched the world get worse and worse, hotter and hotter, closer and closer to asynchronous societal collapse, and in the midst of all this, artists (who we all seem to acknowledge have some role to play in whatever “revolutionary” head canon we’ve adopted) have been regularly enticed by entertainment industry vultures who tacitly acknowledge that the game we’ve been playing up until now has been fucked up, shady, rigged against us, and all sorts of similar platitudes. And these vultures are offering us a way out, by taking a chance on their platform, app, product, whatever. This has left us with a landscape where the people who “make it” are either the ones who don’t see through the grift, or who have the drive to grift right back and become glorified social media marketers who do comedy on the side.

I have plenty of measured respect for my peers that go that route, but the fact of the matter is that, in a creative landscape that rewards quantity over quality, and undercuts the creative process by offering a vague “way out,” but only on its own terms, whatever radical, democratic potential we believe artists to have is completely nullified and we end up in a world where stating the obvious--that we have been watching a genocide on our phones for over a year--brings a hush over a room like we don’t all know it’s happening. And that’s not to say every comedian needs to do such intense social commentary--there’s just as much to be said about the ones who bask in abject horror and build a personal “brand” out of trauma porn--but I do believe we need to elevate our baseline understanding about the purpose of art, especially comedy since I believe it’s the most subject to this type of obfuscation.

Our current world is fixated on running from its problems, and we convince ourselves the role of a comedian is to help us do that, so we hate the ones who see the world for what it is and put all our weight behind the ones who put out hour long crowd work specials threatening women in the audience with sex. It will never cease to amaze me the glory and overall penissuckery that we give George Carlin’s name while simultaneously demonizing anyone who has the nerve to earnestly imitate him in any substantial way that goes beyond “taking the power” away from the N word as a white man. We love the part that “tells it like it is” but we hate the part that reads critical theory and knows what “manufacturing consent” means. 

I think it’s safe to say we’re all feeling differing degrees of the same pain, but we’re being driven to put it to the side in search of fame that we only want because our collective sense of community has been in shambles for hundreds of years (see Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom for more on this). Meanwhile, the vultures take advantage of the fact that our only emotional reprieve is paying a therapist to help us blame our parents or other people in our community for our problems, while ignoring the broader systems that drove the wedge in our networks in the first place. 

I think that, like every other art form on the planet, we can use stand up comedy to engage with the entire breadth of human experience, and to move through our collective suffering instead of tiptoeing around it, and I don’t mean in the “I’m x identity, please clap while I stare into the middle distance” kind of way. I mean we can actually take our time to seriously engage with the ideas that we’ve collectively been running from and stop trying so damn hard to protect a vibe that sucks to such a clinical degree. We are in the imperial core, just barely teetering on recognition that our comfort is entirely dependent on the suffering of others (see: union made weapons in Gaza), and while I don’t believe it will necessarily fix anything, I do believe that political and creative imagination are part of the same mechanism, and that maybe if we can apply the same critical thinking that Seinfeld’s dumb ass applied to pop tarts, we can at least envision a world that’s actually worth living in. If we want to escape this hell, maybe we need to stop chasing algorithms and checks from shady production companies that couldn’t help you sell out a special taping in your home town (for legal reasons, this is purely hypothetical) and allow ourselves to be genuinely curious about the world and the people around us and create art that actually embraces humanity, whether it’s profitable or not.

Even if the ICC warrants are enforced, business as usual makes the next genocide, the next pandemic, and the next climate catastrophe inevitable, and if our solution to that is to keep making jokes about green text bubbles, like children didn’t die to make iPhones too, then I don’t know what to tell you.