It’s Only a Joke

When I was in first grade, my mother ruled that I had to rid my speech of the words “no offense.” I learned the habit from a girl in my class who liked to preface her cruelest remarks with the sociable expression. While it wasn’t in my nature to be unpleasant, I realized long before that the ruthless execution of less than kind judgments could make people laugh. And all I wanted was to make people laugh.

A simple offer of “no offense,” I understood, allowed me to say exactly what I wished and risk nothing. I could make fun and joke and play. I could demand that my audience not be insulted.

But according to my mother — queen of rhetoric, lover of language — the pronouncement had no such power. Because it is impossible to control how people will react to what you have to say. Because it is stupid to try. Because the fact is humor exposes and jeopardizes, and we know it. The verbal tic — “no offense or anything” — suggests that we can anticipate the effect our words will have on our friends and frenemies and roommates. It implies that we can neutralize hurtful language.

It was not the biting observation that my mother policed. It was the attempt to defuse it.

“Own it,” she insisted.

Blame her, then: I have offended people ever since. As a writer, I sacrifice maybe some measure of decency for narrative. I accept the cost of good work — broken friendships, hurt, lots of eye rolls. I admit what language can do and ruin and make. And I do not apologize for it.

The lesson is harder to accept this week after it emerged that celebrity dermatologist Fredric Brandt committed suicide over the weekend. As the news ricocheted around the Internet, the New York Post reported that a parody of Brandt on the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — for which the madcap mind of Tina Fey is accountable — had not escaped his notice. The Post quoted his publicist, who commented that the show took a toll on him: “He was being made fun of because of the way he looks. It is mean, and it was bullying.”

Brandt’s doppelgänger on the show is “Dr. Grant,” a dermatologist who shares his hairstyle and has had so much plastic surgery that he is unable to speak. The portrait is extreme and outrageous and very funny. It is harmless compared to the tweets that Trevor Noah should probably have deleted and the satire that Lena Dunham recently published in the New Yorker. But as friends and clients of the beloved doctor mourn him this week, it raises questions about the limits of comedy and the culture of outrage that contributes to them.

Comedy is dangerous and powerful and important. It treads on thin ice, and it does so on purpose. For me, it has always been a dark magic — potent and weird, healing and destructive. But what distinguishes the absurdity that enlivens and the humor that hurts? Is there a way to differentiate between them? Should we? Is Tina Fey a bully? Do we have to be responsible jokesters or does that compromise the very work that we ask jokes to do? Is Trevor Noah even funny?

Let’s talk about it.