Academia needs comedy now more than ever

(new essay published in Los Angeles Review)

Hey everyone. Happy end of summer to you all. I didn’t do as much writing as I would have liked this summer, but I did write a little something about comedy and academia. Comedy has become something of a pastime over the past year, and I’ll do another post soon about PCWB, a new podcast we’ve put together at Northwestern with undergraduate students. PCWB is collaboration with Chicago comedian Mike Knight and filmmaker and professor Raphael Nash, where we bring together dynamic scholars and comics for conversations on big topics. Stay tuned for more on that. For now, I’m sharing text from an essay published (yesterday) by the Los Angeles Review:

Academia Needs Comedy More than Ever - by Sepehr Vakil

Not long after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack at the Nova Music festival in Israel’s Negev Desert, I was traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area for work, and decided to extend my visit to spend a couple days with close friends in Los Angeles. As has become customary during my LA trips, my childhood friend and stand-up comic Hormoz Rashidi hooked me up with complimentary tickets to a show at the legendary Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. I’ve attended shows there countless times now, catching sets by comedy greats like Neal Brennan, Leslie Jones, Bill Burr and Maz Jobrani. After a few days at a work conference, I couldn’t wait to relax and have a few laughs.

But this time something was different. Not for the comedians, but for me as an observer. It felt inappropriate, perhaps “too soon” to find any humor in the unfolding devastation wrought by the war in Gaza. As the assault escalated, so had political divisions across college campuses — including at my own, Northwestern University, where I teach in the School of Education and Social Policy. At Northwestern, conversations on the war in Gaza and the politics of the Middle East have been simultaneously everywhere, and nowhere. Paradoxically, while many students have been courageously protesting on campus, the majority of faculty talk in whispers and behind closed doors, even as our President came under fire by Congress over his handling of the campus protests. Statements have been written and circulated, committees formed. The climate has felt tense and awkward. Of course Northwestern is hardly alone in this respect. These dynamics have pervaded university campuses across the U.S. even prior to Oct. 7. But lurking right under the surface of high-profile news stories about campus battles resides a political climate in academia marked by timidity, fear and stifled discourse. 

The exact opposite could be said about my night out at The Comedy Store, where it’s apparently never too soon, and no topic is forbidden. One comedian after the next came out with irreverent, ridiculous, unapologetic and sometimes outrageous humor centering on Israel and Palestine, Jews and Muslims, colonizers and terrorists. Notably, the humor reflected a diverse ideological spectrum including pro-Palestinian as well as pro-Israeli sentiments. I wriggled in my seat and cringed at some jokes, while at other moments I surprised myself with outbursts of laughter. After all, I’ve been socialized in a professional context where serious topics are discussed only in serious, buttoned-up ways, inside advisory committees and peer-reviewed journals, behind panels and podiums in windowless conference rooms in three-star hotels. I felt a disorienting combination of discomfort and admiration for the comedians’ skill and readiness to bluntly discuss the war, as well as for the open-mindedness of audience members to tolerate multiple perspectives on an intensely divisive topic.

In a political moment where student activism has become a central feature of campus life, where some university presidents have been fired, others have deployed armed police officers to arrest student protestors, and yet others (like President Schill at Northwestern) have dared to negotiate with student activists, what might the culture of comedy offer to ongoing deliberations about open dialogue and free speech in higher education?

There is and has always been a vital role for comedy and humor to engage even the most serious of topics. Thinkers from Cicero to Hobbes and Freud (among many others) have theorized laughter and humor as fundamental to the human experience. Humor is to speech as salt is to food: one of many lessons commonly associated with Cicero’s “De Oratore” (“On the Orator”), a foundational text in rhetoric and philosophy. In his 1905 classic “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” Freud interpreted humor as a release valve for psychic energy that needs somewhere to go amid social repression.

Palestine is no exception. While I may have cringed at jokes that I felt were too soon, or too crass, or too politically ambivalent, or even contradictory to my own views, the show went on. And it’s a good thing it did, because as Mark Twain was known to have said, “The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”

Political satire and political comedy are defined precisely inside the tension that exists between freedom and repression. Richard Pryor is considered one of the greatest comedians ever because of his raw courage and the oratorical skills with which he exposed the absurdity of racism in America. Pryor showed that white supremacy is both sick and hilarious, a theater of the absurd. Unsurprisingly, the butt of his jokes were often white people. In his 1982 stand-up special, “Live on the Sunset Strip,” Pryor quipped:

It’s not that I don’t trust white people. It’s just in the night, something happens to white people when you start drinking. When you hear one of them motherfuckers go, ‘Yee-haw!,’ it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. ‘Cause I know what’s next. That ‘yee-haw’ means ‘get a rope and get a Black motherfucker.

In just one bit, Pryor nods to the history of lynching in America, and humanizes the African-American experience by elevating what is often left unsaid in discussions of American racism: the sense of fear and vulnerability that many Black people experience in mundane moments of everyday life. The bit also contains a jab at the colloquialisms commonly ascribed to White cowboy culture. “Yee-haw!” We laugh along, albeit nervously, tacitly acknowledging the uncomfortable truths about America in Pryor’s humor. 

More recently, Egyptian humorist Bassem Youssef’s masterful performance during his interview about the Gaza war with British journalist Piers Morgan powerfully illustrates the subversive potential of comedy, even — or perhaps especially — beyond the confines of the stage. Early in the interview, Morgan asked Youssef for his reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Youssef sarcastically responded:

We’re used to them being bombed every time and moving from one place to the other. You know, it’s just like those Palestinians, they’re very dramatic. “Ah, Israel is killing us,” but they never die. I mean, they always come back. You know, they’re very difficult to kill, very difficult people to kill. I know because I’m married to one. I tried many times, but I couldn’t kill her.

In one sense, of course, what Youssef said is shocking. How is it possible to find comedy amidst the oceans of suffering and death in Gaza? Youssef answers that with his deftly employed dark humor, subverting the pro-Israel narrative that dominates mainstream media. The Jon Stewart of the Middle East, as they call him, Youssef turns tragedy into comedic triumph.   

So it should not be surprising that comedy as a form — as a mode of talking, writing and thinking — has historically faced stern opposition and prohibition. Even today, in nations like the Islamic Republic of Iran, where I was born, joking publicly about the government’s cruelty or corruption is a ticket to Evin Prison, or worse. How dare you? the authorities implicitly inveigh in the face of the satirist’s gall and the comedian’s irreverence. To take one example, the Iranian TV host and poet Fereydoun Farrokhzad frequently took aim at Ayatollah Khomeini in his satirical performances. He once joked to a live audience about Khomeini engaging in bestiality, a satirical allusion to Khomeini’s well-known sexual fixations (some would say perversions). The joke rests on the hypocrisy of Iran’s leading cleric moralizing to the masses about sexual purity, all the while flouting those very codes behind closed doors. In 1992, while living in exile in Germany, Farrokhzad was found dead in his apartment, stabbed multiple times. While there has never been a smoking gun, most observers believe the Islamic Republic assassinated Farrokhzad.

Perhaps this is the most important lesson from comedians: their courage. 

While Youssef may not be facing the threat of death like Fereydoun (or like the family of Youssef’s wife in Palestine), his subversive irreverence has surely caught the attention of powerful forces who will seek to minimize his presence in the media and on digital platforms to the extent possible. Moreover, we should remember that despite the proliferation of comedy specials on our favorite streaming services, most comedians are struggling artists with marginal economic security. The comics who carefully craft their jokes to expose hypocrisy at the highest levels of power are risking their reputations and livelihoods. That kind of courage is admirable, to say the least.

But there’s another lesson that academics can learn from comedy. And it’s a surprising one, given the self-image of universities as places of intellectual freedom and open dialogue: the capacity to listen and engage across political and ideological differences.

It’s worth noting that in recent years, academic culture has become inhospitable even to politically progressive comedy. While there is no equivalency to be drawn with authoritarian police states, or even with domestic conservative assaults on freedom of speech, it certainly is the case that on college campuses humor is often viewed as incompatible with the serious atmosphere of scholarly research and education. This extends to the realm of political discourse on college campuses as well. Whether your cause is Palestine or pronouns, comedy is often viewed as antithetical or even heretical.

Some may think of this as the inevitable collision between the DEI train and the freedom of speech train. DEI (the ubiquitous and polarizing acronym for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) initiatives seek to foster a culture of belonging and fairness in learning environments and confront the discriminatory practices that have historically marginalized women and people of color in the academy. At the same time, universities have a mandate to cultivate open and vigorous dialogue, including and perhaps especially when it’s most difficult to do so. Unsurprisingly, the principles of academic freedom and DEI occasionally clash. Comedy brings this conflict into particularly sharp focus.

Using humor to engage serious issues risks offending people who are already marginalized by virtue of their identities in what are often unwelcoming institutions of higher education. The risk is heightened when the joke-teller is an outsider to the community that the joke is about or on. For instance, a cisgender heterosexual man telling a joke about the fashion proclivities of gay men, or a non-Black comic joking about Black people’s relationship with punctuality. Or perhaps as an Iranian immigrant, I may disapprove of an American or British comic who makes a joke about Iran’s despotic government while failing to mention the role of the CIA or MI6 in subverting democracy in Iran.

But who gets to decide what is acceptable, or funny? I can think of a lot of Iranians (or if you’re in Los Angeles, please excuse me, the Persians) that would delight in any joke that takes aim at the ayatollahs. Many of the Iranian immigrants who arrived as a result of the 1979 revolution and living in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Houston have suffered the double trauma of the Shah’s dictatorship and the loss of their country to religious extremists. Having been born after the Revolution in 1983 and leaving Iran at age 3, who am I to tell them what kind of Iranian joke is permissible? Who guards the gates of offense? 

These are not easy questions, and particularly challenging to navigate in the fraught minefields of identity politics that pervade the contemporary political landscape. Universities have chosen to play it safe by elevating the moral tenet of the campus as a “safe place” above all else. From this angle, prudence dictates minimizing the presence of comedy in academic environments.

But others don’t buy the premise. South African comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah has called this a problem of “faux outrage,” where every topic appears to be someone’s sacred cow. This explains the decline in high-profile comics doing shows on college campuses. After all, why run the risk of not only bombing in front of a college audience, but offending students and being “canceled.” The cost of an offensive joke can be severe, especially for newer comics. 

In 2018, the comedian Nimesh Patel was invited by the Asian American Alliance at Columbia University to do a show at its annual event. Patel was the first South Asian to write for “Saturday Night Live,” and his comedy is known to be acerbic, bold and progressive. And yet, with 30 minutes left in his set, three student organizers walked on stage and his mic was unceremoniously disconnected over a joke he made about how gay Black men as a category of people serve as proof that homosexuality is not a choice. Here’s how he later summarized the joke in a New York Times op-ed:

I open by saying I live in Hell’s Kitchen, a diverse area in New York populated by, among others, gay black men who are not shy about telling me they don’t approve of what I’m wearing. I try to learn things from everyone I encounter, and one day I realize oh, this is how you know being gay can’t be a choice — no one would choose to be gay if they’re already black. No one is doubling down on hardship. Then I say, no black dude wakes up and thinks that being a black man in America is too easy. No black dude says, “I’m going to put on a Madonna halter top and some Jordans and make an Indian dude real uncomfortable.” That’s not a choice.

For the student organizers, this was unacceptable speech. But at its core, the joke’s premise is simply that being gay and Black is a doubly difficult social experience, what critical race theorists call intersectionality. In his New York Times piece, Patel wrote, “This particular joke has worked at New York clubs full of gay people, Black people and college students multiple times. I didn’t think twice about using it in a room full of smart, progressive young adults.” (After the incident, several students reached out and apologized to the comic.) 

These days inside universities, everyone seems to be thinking twice before they speak. In 2014, Chris Rock told New York Magazine he stopped doing shows on college campuses because of the conservative social views of students and their determination “not to offend anybody.” I can relate to this as a university professor. Last October, I went to see Dave Chappelle alongside 22,000 attendees at the United Center in Chicago. But merely mentioning I attended his show, let alone sharing any of his material in my classes would expose me to criticism. Chicago comic Mike Knight puts it like this: “not all..but a lot of students..they’d wear a Richard Pryor t-shirt, but they couldn’t handle his actual comedy.” These examples point to a broader dynamic I see playing out across the landscape of higher education: a tense and nervous culture on campus that stifles open and vigorous dialogue about critically important and complex issues.

But it would be a mistake to blame students, whose bold activism has taken college campuses across the country by storm in recent months and undeniably shaped the national discourse related to the Gaza war, punctuated of course by the historic Presidential elections that are upon us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking offense at certain ideas or statements. It’s good to be sensitive to and critical of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. While in a different context and through different means, the students at Columbia who cut Nimesh Patel’s mic were acting from a commitment to inclusion and justice. In its intention, their silencing of Patel was an act of protection and solidarity with marginalized groups who they felt were being harmed by Patel’s comedy. Some might even view their act as an exercise of their own free speech. From this lens, their intentions share common ground with students at Northwestern, UCLA, Columbia, and dozens of others who have courageously protested the war in Gaza.

But there is a crucial difference between silencing an artist and expressing your own free speech through acts of peaceful anti-war protest. One effectively shuts down speech, while the other opens and expands discourse on campus. As it turns out, that’s also the function of comedy. At least good comedy. Comedy that doesn’t just make you laugh, but also makes you think by making you uncomfortable. You don’t always have to agree with the premise, or laugh at the punchline. But good comedy will always make you think. And that’s precisely why it’s so needed in academia.

While there are important differences in degree and context, there is a growing hesitancy from people of different political persuasions to speak freely in universities across America. Whether it’s the cancellation of USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech last Spring, the NYPD arresting hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia, the interrogation of and in some cases ousting of university presidents or the inhospitable environment for even progressive comics, we have cultivated a culture in higher education that discourages — even punishes — open and rich dialogue.

It’s also true that universities have been under fire — and very public scrutiny — since Oct. 7. Several donors have withdrawn their support from universities that they say have not done enough to combat antisemitism on campus. Congressional hearings led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and put Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, under intense and unfair scrutiny. She stepped down from her position shortly after the hearings. Thus, it’s imperative to assess the political culture of universities within the broader context of the culture wars and specifically the conservative attack on higher education. The walk-on-eggshells and clutch-your-pearls culture pervasive on college campuses is not entirely self-inflicted. 

And to be sure, the ongoing attacks on higher education will only intensify in the weeks leading up to the 2024 elections. We’re in a political moment where the core purpose and function of the university is being challenged and placed under society’s microscope. The silver lining is that this moment also presents a great opportunity for self-reflection and change. Embracing the spirit of comedy can be part of the answer.

And to be clear, comedy doesn’t need us. In the last couple decades, the rise of comedy as an art form and as an entertainment industry has been nothing short of meteoric. And as much as universities are often on the cutting edge of innovation, sometimes culturally they manage to completely miss the moment. This is one of those times. It is long overdue for academia to give comedy its due as the dynamic and exciting cultural phenomena that it is,  and to give recognition of comedy as a serious art form. And similar to music and theater — a craft that is deserving of careful study and analysis. Let’s lift up existing efforts and initiatives aimed at opening avenues for students to participate in the local comedy scenes that exist in practically ever collegetown across the nation. .

At my university, in partnership with Chicago comedian Mike Knight and filmmaker Raphael Nash, we’ve launched a new video podcast series titled “PCWB: A Professor and a Comedian Walk Into a Bar.” The project is supported by a diverse team of undergraduate interns with an interest in comedy, media production and politics, and features comics and scholars who take on challenging topics in their respective fields. Our podcast aims to create a platform for insightful conversations that bridge the gap between the academic and entertainment worlds. Conversations that are provocative and frankly a breath of fresh air from the stuffy and accusatory atmosphere of academia. Our first few episodes are focused on the politics of DEI and critical theory in the city of Chicago during Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first term (Episode 1), the state of campus protests and what they foreshadow during an election year(Episode 2), and how conversations related to abolition and carcerality play out in the context of the presidential campaign of former prosecutor madame Vice President Harris (Episode 3).  

Of course, the devil, as always, is in the details. We have to walk the tightrope of simultaneously respecting speech and people. An embrace of comedy in academia will require recalibrating the concept of safe spaces, learning to be more comfortable with discomfort and renegotiating the relationship of the academy to the broader public. We’ll have to ask our students, and ourselves, to unlearn certain tendencies in the academy that discourage bold engagement with thorny and taboo topics. Importantly, vulnerable groups on campus should not only be consulted, but tapped to lead these efforts towards changing institutional cultures and practices. 

Ultimately, this would make us more relatable to the public, which would directly enhance the core function of public engagement most universities claim to value. The bottom line is that, particularly in our current political climate and with the upcoming elections,  we desperately need the playfulness, laughter and levity of comedy. Learning and laughter go with each other – and complement one another – like beach and sand. Comedy challenges us to have more courage in our convictions, to have a sense of adventure, and to admit it when it’s funny. We are all aware that there’s a lot at stake in the next several years. From historic elections across the globe to ongoing wars and increasingly frequent climate disasters, catastrophe and calamity seem lurking around every corner. When the only certainty is uncertainty for our students and for ourselves, I hope we can all learn to laugh a little more.