Now that George Carlin is safely dead, the Kennedy Center has given him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

I'll try to be charitable and imagine that, since the award was announced before his sudden if not unexpected death, the timing was accidental.  (But still, it was better to give the award to Billy Crystal last year?  Really?)

I caught the awards ceremony on television last night, and I want to remark on two things that occurred to me.  Here's a version of Carlin's Two Commandments bit:


Notice first how the jokes cut both ways -- for instance, around 2:20 when he contrasts "primitive people" to "intelligent, civilized humans in the 21st century" or around when he presents his own list as a convenient, pocket-sized version.  Carlin never shrank from making fun of religion, but he's obviously not only interested in this.  And it seems to me that this bit is much less funny if it's stripped down to just the mockery of religion.  (However, the fact that the "two commandments" might recall some version of New Testament ethics doesn't make this mockery less pointed.)  What I notice, though, is that Carlin's monologues work on these ambiguities.  The jokes may have two or three points, but they're very specific points.  So I want to start by distinguishing this kind of comedy from what seems to predominate now in the US (or did a few years ago), which I take to be a sort of universal irony in which jokes more or less disintegrate.

This distinction isn't at all original.  But what I wonder is what kind of historical typology we might come up with for modern comedy, particularly for the joke.  For instance: the self-deprecating joke, which mocks some aspect of society while implicating the speaker too.  Or the exaggerated-tone joke, now common, where the comedian uses pauses and facial expressions, often blank, to let us in on sarcasm.  (Margaret Cho uses both of these. Jon Stewart seems to rely on the latter a lot to punch up his hyperbolic satire.)

Does some kind of joke seem most appropriate to the present moment?  If most comedians are moralists, what kind of moral center do we now expect or need in a comedian?

Maybe someone who has read Bergson or Freud recently can shed some light on different kinds of jokes; but I'm especially interested in the historical specificity of the joke.

The second part of my question is about jokes and performance.  Carlin tried other forms, like the list-essays that talk about the modern consumer self, but he was pretty committed to the joke and its punch line.  Maybe this form feels inadequate to some audiences today, as it admits that the joke is planned, part of a performance.  (A similar dynamic drives other cultural forms, as Michael Fried has shown in regard to western painting.)  I don't feel this particular problem in regard to Carlin's jokes, but maybe only because avoiding the joke feels like even more of a performance.  (Just as for Fried the idea of theatricality is fixed but its field of reference changes dialectically.)

Yet I do feel an awkwardness in Carlin's comedy in one regard: its capacity for repetition.  One of the presenters of the Mark Twain prize remarked on the Carlin's craftsmanship, his long hours of labor over a joke and his ability to deliver it so that it seemed improvised.  What he didn't say is that this sort of comedy requires the feeling of improvisation.  On YouTube, we can watch five different versions of the Two Commandments, and Carlin's jokes were always available in several forms, repeated and re-worked in stand-up.  This seems to be a general problem with stand-up comedy and its derivatives.  (I found some of John Waters' writing very funny until I read the same story in four different pieces.)  How do other people respond to the performance element of the joke?

Or how do you compare other comedians' work?  For instance, Woody Allen's jokes usually feel scripted to me -- even in movies, and of course in his books -- but in a less problematic way.

Or finally, to reverse things, how do you feel when telling a joke?  I myself avoid jokes, since I find them uncomfortable to tell -- precisely because of the element of performance.  Is this related to other kinds of speech that many people find difficult (romantic speech, motivational speech, and so forth)?  Does it make a difference in what language you are speaking?