Bad comedy is our only hope for the future
The Kill Tony show is a microcosm of the real world, one that highlights hope for humanity.
and I are writing letters to each other. They are deeply profound, incredibly moving, philosophically deep, and best of all, totally free to you. Read about 747s, Margaret Thatcher, wolves, the end of the world, every kind of excess, cannibalism, martial arts, and long train rides.
Mr. Geebo,
Thank you very much for finishing your story about the serial killer. I was really worried that we'd lost your tremendous story-telling mind for good in that balcony incident. Being an atheist, I found myself doubting the bit about the literal devil in the basement. Perhaps it was a very large dog?
I'd also like to thank you for the prompt this week. You told me to go and watch then review an episode of Kill Tony, and I dove in with absolutely no context. It was a fantastic and profound experience, and I'm very excited to outline my thoughts for you here. In a nutshell, I found the Kill Tony show to be a microcosm of the world we live in today, one that, in my opinion, highlights true hope for humanity.
But first, we need to talk about orthodoxy.
I.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramaphone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment. -George Orwell
Given that you've literally been living under a rock for most of the recent past, I'm sure it's a concept that's hard to grok for you. Briefly, the orthodoxy can be described as thus: the stuff that most people in any given population believe, consume, or do. In the US we have the dual orthodoxies of left and right politics. We have mainstream media. We have business degrees and desk jobs at Fortune 500 companies. We have suburb commutes, 2.5 children and a dog. We have a predictable spread along the normal distribution. Except, that's not really the case anymore.
Historically, orthodoxies have been pretty localized and fragmented. Orthodox behavior in Ming dynasty Beijing was probably quite a bit different from orthodox behavior in Tenochtitlan. Modernization and globalization changed what 'orthodox' meant pretty drastically. The orthodoxies got bigger, the world got smaller. There were identifiable 'centers', and humanity could be described in our totality with cardinal terms like 'East' and 'West'. We don't live in that world anymore.
'East' and 'West' are nonsensical in a world where Berliners dance to music created by AI born in San Fransisco on a music social media app headquartered in Beijing. The world of the digital age has no center. 'What does that actually mean?', I hear you ask, 'What does it mean to live in a center-less world? What does any of this have to do with the fucking show I told you to watch?'. Don't fret dear friend, herein lies the answer to all of those questions.
At some point between now and World War Two, a guy with the last name Overton made an interesting observation about discourse in America. He showed that orthodox views were well represented and reinforced via mainstream media like newspapers, radio, and news television. The things that most Americans agreed with were the things that got the most airtime, that printed the most words. As ideas got further from this mainstream, they were less oft repeated, and therefore they did not catch on as widely. At the extremes, not only were things not said, but the public discourse actively suppressed them. For example, If you were looking for positive discussion about recreational drugs in the 1980s you weren't likely to find it. In fact, you were instead likely to be actively silenced by others in the mainstream conversation. You would have had to gone to the edges of the polis to find a forum for that kind of talk, and that chilling effect kept the ideas at the extremities stunted.
Fast forward thirty years and things pretty obviously change on the recreational drugs front. Discourse shifted. Once distasteful topics become vogue. This shifting window of what passes as 'acceptable' conversation is known as the Overton Window. And at this point, it's a complete myth. With no centers of authority, no bastions of truth, there is no frame in which to hang Overton's window. The very idea of mainstream discourse presupposes that there is one main stream, a tributary from which the lesser topics can fork. With the rise of the internet, this is no longer the case.
If you've read or watched the adaptation to Jules Verne's classic about the center of the world, you know that it's mostly filled with dinosaurs, jungles, and lost cities. I'm convinced our un-centered world is pretty similar: where once we had bedrocks, like trust in authority and a shared understanding of truth, we're now awash in maverick perspectives and fractured myth. Orwell's orthodox doesn't exist anymore.
This has all sorts of interesting socio-political consequences that I'm not even distantly qualified to opine on, but since we're already talking about erosion of authority and shaky truths, your directive to 'watch an episode of Kill Tony and report back' gives me the justification to spend several hundred words doing just that.
II.
For the uninitiated readers of our correspondence, Kill Tony is an improvisation insult comedy show featuring open mic performances by everyone from first time performers to seasoned comics. Comedians are selected randomly and given sixty seconds on stage to do their set. Then, regardless of whether they bomb spectacularly or kill it, the panel of hosts keeps them at the mic for an interview. The results are recorded and broadcast to all the interested people of the internet, of which there seem to be a fair few. Most of the comics I watched were really bad. Over the course of two hours I laughed quite a bit, but I cringed even more. At a few points I had to pause the show and walk away. Even though I knew the show had been recorded months before, that the people portrayed had long since suffered these gaffs, I couldn't help but to be mortified.
As I said before, Kill Tony is a microcosm of reality, one that makes me very hopeful.
In the absence of an intelligible orthodox, people are left to fend for themselves. Think of the orthodox mainstream discourse of yesteryear, the New York news media, the behemoth television and radio companies. These orthodox broadcasters are like the Titanic, actively sinking into irrelevance and oblivion, leaving the everyman to jump into the icy abyss to fend for himself. As the big boat splinters, people flock to the flotsam, the little lifeboats, and most importantly to each other. Since we're human, we first fill the voids of Truth and Authority with each other. We're all looking for community.
Our entire world now consists of lifeboats and little islands, with no mainland in site. But the Titanic isn't done sinking. Every once in a while, somebody yells at the little lifeboats for sailing off so far from center, for drifting out at the once-edges of an Overton Window that has been shattered. Instead of one continuous gradient of acceptable dialog, we now have a myriad of smaller windows all along the spectrum. We have lots of littler, disjointed populations, discussing all sorts of things as if they were completely normal. We have growing communities of people that think the earth is flat, that stars can tell your future, that computers are going to turn everything into paperclips, and that getting a college degree will result in the ability to own a home at a reasonable age. And then we have Kill Tony.
Kill Tony is one of our lifeboats. It's unorthodox in all of the ways that every internet-age community is unorthodox: because it has to be, because there is no such thing as the orthodox any more. In a simpler time, Kill Tony would have been at the edges, art serving to push the fringe toward the mainstream. But lacking a mainstream, Kill Tony exists at its own center. And unlike many of the other lifeboats that clog the waters of our new reality, Kill Tony nurtures something worth caring about. It cultivates a community that is centered on the idea of growth. With each painful flop, we see the raw and unedited growth that comes from failure. There were points of the show that were genuinely hard to watch. It's hard to watch someone fail. It's even harder to fail yourself. We don't typically see enough of that, because our instinct is to shy away from failure even if it's someone else's failure and not ours. And yet, failure is the only way we truly can grow.
A world made up of tiny lifeboat communities is a scary one. A world where you can spend all of your time interacting exclusively with people that share your exact goals and convictions and blind-spots is a world ripe for problems. Kill Tony is a beacon of hope on these uncertain seas. It's raw and it's authentic. By its very nature, it roams outside of the 'correctness' of other discourse. It's at times offensive, racist, misogynistic, insensitive and uncouth. Humans are all of these things. We are completely imperfect, and it's only through these imperfect, uncomfortable failures that we can find our boundaries and live fulfilled lives.