Illustration by Jandos Rothstein
This article appears in the June 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
America’s comedians are the real victims of gun violence. Of course after the actual victims, their children, parents, grandparents, cousins, friends, neighbors, pets, and our entire nation mourning our soulless politicians, who continue to sit on their blood-soaked hands instead of passing gun reform. But after that, it’s comedians who are the real victims. Let me explain why.
As a stand-up comic, I can attest to this. America’s obsession with guns and the steady stream of mass shootings is a huge topic on many of our joke-writing minds. And tragedy + time = comedy, right? But what happens when it’s just tragedy + tragedy + tragedy + tragedy + a week and a day + tragedy? The conditions for comedy are a bit different. Nowadays, it seems like there’s never a time to laugh, never a time to step back, never a time to digest because the bodies keep piling up.
I have a bit about how 98 percent of mass shootings are carried out by men, and that if women were shooting up bro landmarks like Dave & Buster’s, we’d have gun control faster than you can say The Joe Rogan Experience. It’s interesting to note when the bit works and when it just makes everyone depressed. It has to be around 72 hours after a mass shooting for the numb despair to wear off and the manic despair to set in. Once, I did the joke and there was a mass shooting later that same night. I had the macabre thought of being glad that I slid it in just in the nick of time! I’ve refrained from doing the joke when, like the other night, I checked my news alerts beforehand and saw that there was yet another mall shooting in Texas. Skipped the bit.
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Beyond timing, let’s talk about substance. My gun control joke isn’t unique (though it is true). In fact, nearly every comedic angle on gun control is now hack. There’s Chris Rock’s about making bullets more expensive, or Wanda Sykes’s angle of banning assault weapons because not every citizen can own a tank, or the well-worn territory of comparing abortion rights to gun control. Like, “How about we rename the classrooms ‘wombs’ so we’ll finally protect the life inside of them?” Good stuff.
In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, for my former news comedy show Newsbroke, I listed a whole host of measures to stop gun violence that have nothing to do with gun control. They included background checks on people who have windows in their hotel rooms, zigzagged sidewalks to dodge bullets, and a thoughts and prayers SWAT team. How about bulletproof fashion? Is any of this getting funnier? It all depends on what side of the despair you happen to be reading this from.
The entire premise of guns is so hack that even gun manufacturers are mocking our outrage, as evidenced by WEE1 Tactical’s rollout of the JR-15, an automatic weapon meant for CHILDREN! That’s just a couple years after Sacha Baron Cohen recorded a spoof ad for selling guns to kids on his show Who Is America? It’s ALL been done.
Gun control jokes have become what airplane food jokes were in the ’80s. Only, unlike mass shootings, comics actually roasted airplane food out of existence and made it better!
Even though every gun control joke has been done, nothing has been done about the nightmare we live through day in and day out. You need something new to write a good joke. But while everything else changes, gun violence remains constant. Since Sandy Hook, we’ve had two more presidents, 11 new SNL casts, a rover on Mars, even a new King of England, finally. But the conditions that created that massacre remain the same. The killings don’t change, the political inaction doesn’t change, and of course the automatic weapons never change.
It’s become too tiresome to make mass shooting jokes. Even when—and it’s definitely a when—someone shoots up a comedy club, which would do nothing to change our material but might get one of us laid out of sympathy. Give me an O.J. joke, a 9/11 bit, the white male comics who open with “I know, I look like a guy who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.” I mean, that’s a funny tragedy!
Sadly, no comic could come close to being as hilarious on gun control as the clowns we’ve elected. Greg Abbott blaming “anger,” or Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to find an anti-trans angle? Their deadpan humor is unrivaled.
I’m done with the escapism of gun jokes because there is no escaping this sick reality we live in. Not even for that brief 72 hours in between massacres and two-drink minimums. We’ve got to murder the mass murder joke, for all of our sakes. And if we can’t do that, then please send thoughts and prayers for our shows this evening.
