Demetri Martin: An Annoying Person

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Demetri Martin, if you dare

I thought it would be nice to hear from a younger-generation comic. I heard he was very bright, very talented. He plays music! He does mindmaps! He dreams up whole costumed scenarios! He's appeared on the Daily Show, so maybe he knows satire too! Maybe, ooh...just maybe, he could be the nerdy, graph-sketching George Carlin for our times!

Boy, was I in for a disappointment. Martin applies all of his very real talents to jokes like this:

I like "Rock, Paper, Scissors Two-Thirds." You know. "Rock breaks scissors." "These scissors are bent. They're destroyed. I can't cut stuff. So I lose." "Scissors cuts paper." "These are strips. This is not even paper. It's gonna take me forever to put this back together." "Paper covers rock." "Rock is fine. No structural damage to rock. Rock can break through paper at any point. Just say the word. Paper sucks." There should be "Rock, Dynamite with a Cutable Wick, Scissors."

And this: (showing us a graph drawn on a pad of paper)

This is very autobiographical. This is the cuteness of a girl versus how interested I am in hearing about how intuitive her cat is. You see, the cuter the girl is, the more I'm willing to hear about the cat. "Oh really?" "Yeah, he's very intuitive." But you'll notice, at a certain point, I don't care how cute you are. I don't wanna hear about your fucking cat anymore. I hate your cat. When you leave the room, I try to get it.

Sigh. I know I am kicking a horse that won't die. And yet, I must, for my own edification, make a statement about this terrible, stultifying form of comedy.
I know I'm channeling my current reading at the moment, but I do feel that comedy gets better when it takes up the responsibility to show us our assumptions and prejudices in a vivid, challenging way. Chris Rock at his best. John Stewart, especially jokes about Fox News. George Fucking Carlin. Carlin really cared about the problem of us getting along with each other; this alone explains why he had a very cynical attitude.

Comedy must have a strong critical spirit to satisfy us as art; otherwise, it may be a simple exploration of the world we live in. Analyses of silly games that we hardly notice. Observations of completely typical sexual desire; confirmation of heteronormative gender frameworks. What about this one:

Those that say their glasses are half-full are considered optimists. Yeah, but shouldn't we be more specific about the contents of the glass? If it's a glass of shit, I'm going half-empty. I don't like shit as an optimist. "Yeah, we gotta half-empty shit glass right here."

The main purpose here is to direct our attention to an idiomatic expression, and then show that a slight change in the expression can deplete its meaning utterly. See, folks? With Martin's incredible talents, even set idiomatic expressions can be totally depleted of meaning.

Is there a word for the opposite of satire? A comedy that comforts, that says the world is doing just fine, so we might take a little time to indulge in childish questioning carefully subtracted of any social or political content? It seems strange that there not be a word for this anti-satire, this "antire" since Martin (and Carrot Top, and Gallagher, and I'm sure it goes back even further...) proves easily enough that it exists, and many find it worthwhile for its cleverness. For the safe, comfortable giggles it delivers. We see this kind of comedy in the Sunday comics, and in Reader's Digest as well. It has a democratic quality, to be sure, but more importantly a domesticating quality, a force on us to observe our lives in the smallest details, find a way to make a small transformation to our perspective on those details, and then to be satisfied that we really are thinking and living.

Well, we're not. It's piffle, childishness. It's the self-satisfied contentment of a shrinking class of ugly Americans. It answers not to what the audience needs, but what they think they want, poor devils. At this moment in my life, at least, Demetri Martin's whole persona, and the whole form of "antire" both just make me really sad.