Can Comedy Still Be... Edgy?

Stand-up comedy is experiencing what can generously be called a “boom period.” Comedians are making more money than ever. More people are finding success than at any point in the art form’s history, largely thanks to social media’s ability to turn literally anyone with a Ring Light and moderate confidence into a “content creator.

I guess this is good?

But I can’t help but feel like social media has fundamentally warped what gets rewarded, redefining what comedy is exactly. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are dominated by female viewership, and while I will never say women aren’t funny (because that’s a braindead position held exclusively by men who peaked in high school), I do believe women can sometimes be catastrophically bad at identifying what is funny.

In fact, we have plenty of evidence to suggest women love the worst comedians to ever happen. Truly bottom-tier hot dog shit. Chris D’Elia built an entire career on women forcing the rest of us to pretend his recycled Def Jam crowd work was groundbreaking. Matt Rife is doing arena tours because women decided his face was hot enough to excuse the fact that his jokes sound like they were written by a baby.

And it’s not just the women either. I started with them to piss people off for sake of the algorithm but men are 100000 x’s worse when it comes to the amplification or the mid. Pat McAfee should be selling cars at a Fred Haas Toyota in Spring, Texas. Yet I am force to see this buffoon (and JellyRoll) every where I look.

Social media rewards gimmicks. It rewards sideshow acts. It rewards freaks painting themselves green or doing characters or rolling out in wheelchairs and leather bound gimp-suits, eating urinal cakes, and spray farting collage paintings on stage with their bare butt cheeks fully exposed… anything to distract from the fact that they are not writing coherent jokes.

And the king, the undisputed emperor, of this girlfriend-brained, gimmick-obsessed, sideshow circus that has become the algorithmic marketplace of humor is Tony Hinchcliffe and his ever-expanding Kill Tony universe.

For the uninitiated, Kill Tony is a live game show where aspiring comedians get their names pulled from a bucket and perform one (1) minute of material in front of a panel consisting of Tony Hinchcliffe, his co-host Redban (who plays sound effects on a keyboard throughout the show), and usually two guest comedians, or whatever character Adam Ray has decided to become that week.

Comedians flee to Austin just to get pulled from the bucket. Even the two comedians set to perform at the White House Correspondents Dinner this year were Kill Tony “golden ticket” winners. An award given to comedians pulled from the bucket that perform exceptionally well.

Everyone wants a piece of the KT pie, especially those who view stand-up as content creation and would prefer to skip the decade or two it generally takes to develop an actual act. This is understandable. Patience is difficult. Building a fanbase through years of grinding road gigs and writing in notebooks is significantly less appealing than going viral for sixty seconds of ethnic cosplay.

I don’t believe stand-up can be condensed into one minute. I think it cheapens the art form, which is precisely why Kill Tony functions as a game show; a mockery of stand-up rather than a vehicle for advancing it. And what many comedians fail to realize is that becoming a “character” within the Kill Tony universe has little to do with comedic talent and everything to do with type. Every Asian person must be a stereotype. Every Black comedian must perform a specific, pre-approved version of Blackness. Foreigners exist as accents. The disabled are novelties. It is less “who is funniest” and more “who can we gawk at for sixty seconds before the algorithm serves us the next dopamine hit.”

There is a reason the show’s audience skews heavily Republican, led by Hinchcliffe himself, an unabashed Trump supporter. These are people who prefer their comedy the way they prefer their politics: shallow, fast, and built on easily digestible stereotypes that require no introspection. It tracks. Deep thought and continued Trump support are functionally incompatible without immense cognitive dissonance or a complete absence of shame.

But I digress.

This is the new model. This is what success looks like now. But here’s the question: Is the comedy better? Has this explosion of opportunity, this democratization of the stage, produced better material? Sharper writing? More daring ideas?

I honestly don’t know.

It can sometimes appear that Comedy has been trapped in a spiral of lazy, self-indulgent mediocrity for years now, ever since the pandemic. For a while, I attributed this to complacency. Comedians getting comfortable, who’ve stopped writing, and instead coast on crowd work and whatever TikTok trend was popping that week.

But I think that analysis is itself lazy and uninspiring. I see comedians all around me working their ass off to create great art. I don’t think comedians have become lazy at all, even the characters who exist within the Kill Tony universe. They’re tasked with writing a new minute of material every week, and there’s real difficulty in that. Sure, many of them resort to the most hack, low-effort forms of comedy imaginable. But even then, there’s something to be said for giving an audience exactly the kind of red meat it wants.

What I feel is missing from comedy today, and especially my own comedy, is a crunch that I felt when I watched comedy throughout my teens and 20’s. I think we are all collectively struggling to find that bite, that raw, impactful stand up that sticks with you. We all quoted “HE’S PARALYZED!!!” For years after Patrice O’Neal dropped Elephant in the Room. Who is dropping quotable these days? I think comedy, as an art form, is struggling to be transgressive not because comedians lack courage, but because there’s nothing left to transgress.

What is left to shock people with?

The President of the United States is a convicted felon and credibly accused pedophile who cannot stop shitting himself in public. In a broken society, the commentary about that society (which is what comedy is) will also be broken.

Many people say comedians “speak truth to power” (I’m doing an aggressive jerking-off motion as I say this, by the way), but what happens when power becomes so grotesque, so openly cruel, so absurd that merely describing it feels like eating white people tacos? How difficult is it to masturbate to a picture after years of watching 1080p videos of Violet Myers going absolutely insane on it? Is it possible we’ve all lost our comedic sensitivity, numbed by a society that bombards us nonstop with its filth and dismay?

It was just 2 weeks ago the President of the United States threatened to nuke Iran in the same manner he flippantly celebrated the murder of Rob Reiner. How do you satirize an administration that’s bombing children in Gaza while the President posts about it on Truth Social like he’s reviewing a restaurant? How do you write a punchline sharper than the reality of scrolling through your phone and seeing a dead baby in your Instagram feed sandwiched between an ad for pills to keep your dick hard and your hot cousin’s engagement photos?

The Trump administration oscillates wildly between incompetence so staggering it borders on slapstick and cruelty so deliberate it stops being funny. We laugh at their incompetence one day. We have a panic attack at their fascism the next. And comedy is stuck in the middle, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with any of this.

How do you write a joke that challenges an audience when the reality is already more absurd than anything you could invent? How do you be edgy when the edge has been sanded down to nothing? How do you shock people who have become numb to shock itself? We aren’t phased by mass shootings anymore, we don’t care about genocides and tragedies in other parts of the world either. Gas is expensive. People in the government are gambling on war crimes and becoming rich. The world is complete and utter shit right now. What else is there to make fun of?

I have spent the better part of several weeks drafting this essay, a process initiated after witnessing David Lucas perform thirty minutes of what can only be described as some of the worst stand-up comedy I have encountered in my entire adult life. Typically, when I undertake these essays, I arrive with a thesis in hand; perhaps a Hegelian dialectical framework through which to examine some perverted sociocultural pathology, or at minimum a coherent premise. In this instance, however, I find myself adrift. I remain uncertain what to conclude about the state of the world, about comedy’s role within it, or about my own favorite pastime besides eating box. His comedy was so bad I visited my local masjid a spoke with my imam, inquiring whether there existed within Islamic jurisprudence a dua (a supplicatory prayer) specifically designed to ward off hack comedians and Uncle Toms. I further asked whether Shaytan’s tolerance of such evil could be reconciled with a benevolent cosmology. He asked me to leave his office. He claimed he had no idea what I was talking about.

But again, I digress.

After weeks of thinking about this, I’m starting to believe I’ve been asking the wrong questions. Not “how can comedy be more edgy?” or even “what’s wrong with comedy?” but something more fundamental: does comedy need to be anything at all? Every explanation I’ve come up with feels incomplete, and that incompleteness may be the point.

I struggle to think what would even be transgressive in a time like this. Do we really, truly need “dark” humor when the world itself is so unbelievably dark? Shouldn’t we just… laugh?

I have always found the phrase “speaking truth to power” to be particularly grating when applied to comedians. First, because I have no fucking clue what it actually means in practice. Second, because it is wholly untrue. The job of a comedian is to be funny. This is a basic premise that we (myself included) often forget in our rush to assign moral weight to what is, at its core, a commercial entertainment product.

While it is reasonable to interrogate the motivations behind why certain demographics find certain material amusing, the operational definition of a successful comedian remains unchanged: one who sends an audience home satisfied. Comedy can alter perspective. It can challenge assumptions. But it can also function as respite; a temporary reprieve from the cognitive burden of processing an increasingly incomprehensible reality.

It is tempting to dismiss the Kill Tony audience as a monolith of credulous reactionaries, applauding racial caricature with the enthusiasm of trained animals. It would be easy to say they should be dragged into the street and shot like the dogs that they are. That is an easy thing to say and something many people would agree with. And while there is undoubtedly a segment that fits this description, such reductive categorization serves no constructive purpose. These are not abstractions. They are citizens. They comprise a measurable portion of the electorate. More importantly, their behavior is not immutable. The question, then, is not whether their preferences are objectionable, but whether mockery or alternatives prove more effective in reshaping those preferences. Because at the end of the day, who truly gives a shit?

What comedy requires at this moment is not shock value or performative transgression. It just requires humor. It requires jokes that function as jokes rather than as ideological signaling or algorithmic bait. Good comedy is good comedy. I have always believed comedy to be the great equalizer precisely because funny is funny. (a tautology, yes, but one that withstands scrutiny)

Therefore, go and be funny, in whatever manner you believe that to be. Play your music your way. Your people will find you. This is not aspirational platitude but observable market behavior. Audiences are currently selecting for what they need, and what they need varies widely depending on their tolerance for discomfort.

The Republican-aligned audience, for instance, gravitates toward comedy that simulates edginess without delivering actual transgression. Fear seeks safety, even when that safety is costumed as danger. AND THATS OKAY!

Whatever tickles your pickle is what we need right now. Nothing more, and nothing else.