The Sweat Lodge

I went to Mexico to draw, to fill sketchbooks and notebooks. To write, and to figure out my life because I hadn't actually looked this far ahead. That's all going well. It's hard to describe what I've been doing this past 9 months, as an 'adventure' because to be honest, I don't do much.

While nobody except maybe a few tax-auditors are likely to look over the work most professions produce. Unless I guess, you make hamburgers, ramen, cafe lattes, crepes etc. and art. But back when I was making art in a studio back home, I would find myself telling people at parties that found my job interesting about how the work of an artist involved a lot more TV watching and eating Doritos than many would assume.

And my time in Mexico is much the same, except eating Doritos here is kind of pointless. But I was bestowed with both the opportunity and the honor last Sunday to be invited to join in a Temazcal, or more descriptively known as a sweat lodge. I of course accepted the invitation and did something interesting, at least, that is to say, I don't find my daily life that interesting or assume it isn't because it takes place mostly in my head.

So we caught a bus from the center of town where I live, out, out, out to the outer edges of Guadalajara, arriving late to be just in time for the lighting of the fire that would heat the stones that create the steam that I won't say induces, but exacerbates the sweat in the sweat lodge.

Alejandra ran me through the do-not's of the ceremony, and allow me to then provide my layman analogy of what a sweat lodge is, which is a purification ordeal. The obvious analogy is a sauna, but it is also dark and people sing and play instruments. Furthermore, my prior experience with saunas, I generally lasted about 5 minutes before I decide it's time to submerge myself in the cold pool.

This will subsequently seem misleading, but I stayed in the sweat lodge for an hour and a half. Which consisted of 3 of 5 actual sessions where the exit was sealed and the rocks wet, and the songs sung. However my brief was that the sweat-lodge would run between 3-5pm.

So I was sitting where I was told, a little nervous, but my concerns were whether I could sit cross legged on the ground for a long time, since I have always struggled with my flexibility and sitting on the floor. And also I guess the indignity and disrespect of maybe having to interrupt the ceremony to make an exit if I was feeling woozy. Then the doors were closed.

It's an incredible experience. Intensely unpleasant.

So maybe the first thought on it is a callback to a hypothetical I used to, and still do ask people. Which was:

You're at a party, and a shady guy who calls himself 'stretch' offers you a choice between two freebies. The first is basically xtc, it will give you 10 minutes of sheer bliss no matter the circumstances. The second is the opposite, absolute despair, 10 minutes where you feel the worst you have ever felt in your life, before you promptly recover. Which do you take?

A minority of people, including me... well to be honest, I prefer to reserve my nervous system and brain receptors for their natural purposes. My most honest answer is shamefully, the weasel one of passing on both. Most people, reflecting life or the portion of life I've experienced, are pretty keen on MDMA. I only have interest in the 'absolute despair' pill, it's the only one I'd consider.

I asked a Tinder date in Mexico this hypothetical, who picked the MDMA, claiming she'd experienced absolute despair and absolute bliss and definitely prefers bliss. I responded at the time, that I wasn't sure she had her mathematics right, but I wasn't sure I had mine right either.

What I mean by that is, if you are a relativist, so on a cold winters night, stepping into a warm tavern and having a hot meal and some mulled wine is just the best thing in the world, and on a hot summers day partaking in the exact same experience of warm tavern and hot meal, then becomes the worst thing you can think of. That's generally my approach, 'better' and 'worse'.

If you are an absolutist, (and apologies, this approach is foreign to me, so it's hard for me to conceive of and describe) that's taking the view not of moment to moment, but taking the sum total of moments in your life as the endgame. So it isn't now is better than just before, but things are 'good' or 'bad'.

As a relativist, this means most of what I'm going to experience is my normal state, so I take absolute despair because it will calibrate 10 minutes as being worse, possibly 'the worst' and then my normal life will always be 'better' than that experience. In which case, taking some pill that induces the pinnicle experience, then becomes a curse upon the rest of my life.

Alternatively, if you are absolutist, you only get so many chances in life to experience anything at all, so if you get a chance to experience absolute bliss, you take it, and if you can avoid any despair, you avoid it.

...so the doors are closed, and I should point out, I was already drenched with sweat just from sitting in the lodge before hot stones were placed in the pit. Steam starts to expand off the rocks, people are singing and I am just trying to keep my shit together.

Steaming is a literal method of cooking. I assume everyone has the experience of pouring out pasta water into a strainer, or opening a microwave dish, and immediately burning their hand and exclaiming 'ah fuck!'

I was in pitch blackness, but I felt like I was sitting under the Australian sun on a 40 degree day. I no longer really practice mindfulness, but I have done a fair bit of it, and so I was moving my consciousness around my body. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, my toes in the dirt, and my lips having the humid air dragged over them, and the skin on my face and shoulders cooking.

It was taking all my concentration, my attention, just to sit still. Alejandra in a panic had mouthed at me from across the lodge, that my watch was on. She evidently didn't recognize that it's a Casio G-shock, and would survive the sweat lodge even if nobody else did. I glanced at my watch several times, trying not to move my wrist in such a way as to set off it's back-lighting. I was doing so to make deals with myself.

I have enough experience from running of what it's like to get light headed, and lose consciousness and what not. I figured I would be safer crying out in panic, than losing consciousness at what I presumed at this point was going to be a 2 hour sauna session. What I was mostly doing was trying to get stock of what the time was, to gauge how long I could endure sitting upright, before I might resort to laying down, where there was less steam and less heat. If I did that immediately, or too soon, I had no line of retreat.

I had helped carry the buckets of water, and knew there were around 7 PVC buckets to go through in the 2 hours. So I also wanted to figure out how long this first bucket would last, how hot it would get before it would somehow be refilled, probably by the guy outside whose duty it was to tend the fire, open the doors and keep things real in the real world.

The other thing I had to do, was each time it got worse, as in, hotter, steamier. I gave myself the conscious instruction to imagine it would get 3 times worse. To always, always anticipate that this was not as hot or bad as it would get. And thus to save my precious line of retreat, of going to ground.

While I was doing all this, everyone else was singing and shaking shakers, and beating drums.

Then the elder, running the session, took his dipper and started dousing us with water, one by one. It was unexpected relief, one of the great gifts in my life for which I am eternally grateful. At this point, I was still under the impression this was one long sauna session. I figured, the experience had to eventually taper off into a steady state, a steady temperature. You can't just endlessly douse rocks with water, they lose their residual heat and stop producing steam. Then the elder called out 'Doors please' and the blankets front and back were lifted. Light poured in, air flowed. My second unexpected relief.

I initially thought that maybe I looked like I was dying, and the elder had declared an emergency. It became apparent though, that in order not to routinely kill people, the sweat lodge runs through several sessions. Some people even sitting out a session or two.

Taking a leaf from Josh Waitzkin's book, I decided to take the recovery time seriously, and lay flat on my back breathing in as much air as possible and calming my heart rate down as much as I could. When water was offered I drank, but also tipped a lot over my head, more or less the same as I do running marathons.

Then I reset, back to sitting ready for the second session. Now a profoundly different experience.

For one thing, I had new expectations to be betrayed by. In one sense, anticipating how bad it could get, as new stones were pushed into the pit, I could panic. For another, the second session could go longer, or get hotter, and thus if I felt I knew how bad it would be, I could find myself without mental reserves. But I no longer had to manage with any expectation that I had hours to endure, not minutes. A lot more minutes than I'd ever spent in a sauna, but still well shy of solid hours.

This second time, I went to hell. Part of the reason I'd eagerly signed on, was that that day was the anniversary of the suicide of my oldest friend, James. I had been catching up with him in the months before, and I'd seen stuck on his wall in his old room, papers with numbers to call if he was in a bad place and so forth. One of them read the short message 'breathe deep and pray to no-one.'

James was raised Catholic, I can recall as a child, the one time I had the misfortune to attend mass with his family when I slept over on what must have been a Saturday night. I can't recall what age I would have been at the time, but I feel it would have been an act of restraint on my part to not blurt out after the congregation was discharged into the light 'what the fuck is with all the kneeling on those fucking wooden boards?'

I'm fairly confident, James was not Catholic at his end, but I'm told Catholic guilt goes deep, and I imagine even after discarding one's faith, when it's been inculcated as a kid, you probably still look over your shoulder expecting God to be there for the rest of your life.

And It is my layman understanding, that if you attempt or commit suicide in Catholicism, you go to hell. Also probably if you are just an unbeliever like me, post the revelation of Jesus Christ, and I've certainly heard of the guy, I go to hell.

So here I was, in Hell, Hell light. Not one of the 'Hell House' theatrical productions teen christian evangelists apparently do in 'Merica. But more just experiencing what it feels like in a basic atmosphere where breathing is pain, not relief, and there is no relief, and imagining this as unending.

I had professional reasons for going there too, as I am sketching out a script for a comic set in Hell, about how Hell just doesn't work, is an entirely pointless exercise. Inspired by civil disobedience movements like Gandhi's work in South Africa where they got arrested to destroy the fear of prison.

Anyway, one point is that if you are immortal and eternal in construction, pain then conveys no information. It is just pain for pain's sake. I should point out that I do not understand the actual intentions of the Indigenous people's ritual of the sweat lodge, I was just getting from the experience what I could.

Drawing hot, suffocating breaths, where the pain means nothing, and there is no recourse, and imagining that just being the basic atmosphere in hell, an environment calibrated to one in which no human being could survive, unless they couldn't die. Hell by most literary accounts, is probably overthought, and overengineered. One does not need much for it to be unbearable torture, just crank up the temperature and humidity, bury people in dirt with just a handful of air to gasp at and experience permanent claustrophobic suffocation.

The sweat lodge, was not hell, because in an environment where pain is meaningless, I wouldn't be sitting on dirt, but on the hot rocks themselves, such that there would be no relief in going to ground, no relief anywhere, ever.

The second session ended quite quickly, at least to my perception, I was doused in water what I felt was quite early on, which I then thought if there were no seconds, would make this session worse. But it ended after I think, or perceived, only two songs.

By the time it ended though, I'd been blessed with release from a nagging fear of the soul. That James was in Hell. Sure, only for on the scale of things, a blink of an eye before I joined him. But join him I would, and join him I must, for there can be no Paradise where someone I love is excluded. And that's the thing, once one person you love is consigned to a lake of fire, it's game over for the whole afterlife system.

I realised while cooking in that steam, that there could be no salvation for me, no paradise offered that excludes James or anyone for that matter. Nor could I be admitted to any paradise where I am given a reunion with James as necessary for my paradise, while James suffers for eternity simultaneously for his sins, for then there can be no souls, our essence are but programs, duplicated.

And no good person, dealing with eternity can watch their friends thrown into the fire and think of their own salvation and secure it at any cost. The suffering cannot escape, unless empathy can be escaped. I picture a paradise of cool breezes and people given an eternity to contemplate the suffering of those who were not permitted through the gates, so suffering cannot be escaped except for those few who care for no one but God. Who have the resolve to wash their hands by saying 'I warned them' to the sinners.

Thus, while I can appreciate that most people would conceive of Paradise and Inferno as night and day, to me they have no meaningful difference, something I've known for quite some time. Both are merely cruel meaningless forms of torture. The only paradise, release, is oblivion.

And so the second session ended and I no longer just knew it, but felt it. Having felt the frailty of my resolve in the minutes of steaming in the sweat lodge, the knowledge that I as a frail mortal pack of meat, could not last an hour in such conditions as those, would have no recourse but to endure much much worse in any conception of damnation. I could not be damned, I could not be saved and the same was true for all of us, whether they have the courage to believe it or not.

So I lay, and the guys around me lay where we could fit, as if we were all in kindergarden taking a nap. The purification was a re-calibration for me, laying drenched in sweat in dirt, I didn't care, the dirt sticking to me, painting me in a thin coating of sweaty mud, didn't bother me, nothing bothered me because I could breath, cool 32 degree air. I could drink room temperature water. The elder excused himself and his partner lead the next session.

The guy beside me, who sat closest to the firepit where the experience was most intense, requested for a pair of eagle wings for the next session. I had a hunch looking at the matron running this one, that it would be longer, harder than the second session and to brace myself. Here was someone that calibrated time possibly based on childbirth.

The doors shut, and the third session began. The guy in front of me flapped the wings, circulating the air inside the sweatlodge such that it was as hot at my feet as it was around my head. A new experience, an even harder one.

I was conscious of, and intune with my body. I found curiously that I could induce panic in my chest by thinking about panic, and just as easily think it away. Like I had my hand upon some panic knob.

Alejandra sang, and I still somehow had the presence of mind to think that this was an easier way to hear the girl of my affections perform, than sitting through a free jazz gig. She told me afterwards that she wanted to keep on singing that song, it had more words, more verses, but she sensed the mood was that it needed to end soon, and she obliged. I counted four songs in this session, which the matriarch kept calling for.

Somehow from lying down and sitting up, I'd repositioned myself such that the guy sitting near the pit was now blocking line of sight between me and the elder running this session. If she tried to douse me with cool water it was all hitting him except for a few droplets that landed on the edges of my arms and legs. This session was longer, was harder, for the wings and the lack of water dousing. I resolved to lay down. There are sacred directions, I could only move around the tent clockwise I think, so I didn't want to risk shaming the other guy by trying to move around his body.

The session eventually ended, the doors opened, but I was done after three. In halting bad Spanish I asked if I could exit, but probably said 'Can I am exit, please' and crawled out, kissing the dirt several times as I left, with the other participants taking my arm to steady me/keep me from falling into the fire pit.

Outside the door I was helped to my feet, where I just stood until I felt I could stand for my own volition. Then asked in which direction I should exit, and followed that direction until I could get my towel.

It took me hours and liters to get rehydrated to the point I could use a bathroom again. I noticed myself thinking again, became aware of my own consciousness, when I saw a hummingbird feeding. Not my first, but hummingbirds are rare enough it was pretty special.

I would later think that it would be even more special had the first thing I became conscious of was a giraffe, not native to Mexico that only I witnessed, before it snuck off. I would read much more meaning into that.

Alejandra lasted five sessions, in other words, all the sessions. It was not her first sweat lodge, I suspect she does it most months. I was asked by a participant if I would do it again, I politely told her that it's difficult because I would return to Australia in a few months, she told me a few more times I could do it then.

I don't think I will, because I feel I got what I needed to out of the ceremony. I am already committed to running five more marathons to get a green t-shirt by the time I'm 40. I feel for me, to rejoin the sweat-lodge again would be an act of masochism, not purification.

I regard all spirituality as such. It is a mine-field for hubris. To think that opening a third-eye permits for the closing of the other two. There is a feel, an energy best described as greed in my experience among spiritual practitioners. The experience for many is not often enough, just as it is, they have to reach for more.

I'm not referring to this specific custom, or these specific people. But more the people who will take a strange phenomena like deja vu, and try and pull a justification for telekinesis, telepathy, prescience through it.

For me the sweatlodge was that pill of absolute despair, but in a physical rather than emotional sense. In my first year of Uni, when my then partner dumped me, my first long term and intimate partner, it was James' number in my little black address book I had called in my absolute despair. I spoke to his mum through gasping tears, and she arranged for me to come to dinner and dispatched James to come pick me up and give me a lift.

That's probably the closest situation I've been to an emotional sweat-lodge session, when I get dumped. I don't think I'm in any actual danger, but it's the despair combined with an inability to escape it.

I don't know how many times I got the call from James, when he was drowning in despair, and subsequently bought him a few more days, weeks or months. He shared the despair around, which is to say the love, but I suspect I got the call and answered a few times, before he stopped calling anyone.

A year on, I sat on a cinder block, in the very yard-like back yard of a loving strangers house, feeling like a 32 degree day was crisp and fresh, as my sweat drenched singlet started to actually chill me to shivering. I had experienced perhaps, a pretty good opposite of XTC, of Heroin. A brief trip to hell, before coming down to Earth again. It is great to be alive, amazing.

On Punching Down

I've heard the presumptive advice to 'punch up, not down' which I guess, and hope I receive with my best poker face, for I don't wish to cause undue offence to a well intended Bill Cosby type.

There's something truismy of course about a one way 'punch up' policy. If people who are 'down' are permitted to punch up, but people who are 'up' are not permitted to punch down, then they are defenseless, and anyone up becomes down, and anyone down becomes up.

To be clear, I have nothing against punching up, it is one of my favorite things and furthermore a cornerstone of liberty everywhere. Punching up is the core of free speech, of parliamentary privilege. One has to be able to complain about and criticize the King of England, about El Presidente, about the Government.

And there's a certain artistry to punching up in comedy in particular, Nassim Taleb's 'the height of charm is to insult someone without offending them.' or Dan Dennet's evolutionary theory of humor as 'debugging pleasure'. The comic debugs our system of government by finding ways to be seditious that avoid detection, censure, denial, defensiveness.

Humor is important because it is disarming, and by now I assume everyone is aware of the phenomena of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention, double standards. A well reasoned argument as to why the solar system is in fact heliocentric and not geocentric, can bring about the frustrating experience of your audience refusing to look through the telescope less they be corrupted by the blasphemous evidence.

But people gifted with wit don't have to flex their rhetorical muscles they can often get right past people's defenses. Which brings me to punching down.

When Lee Mack says 'My own wife got offended by something I said on stage. On the last tour there was one joke I must promise never to repeat again. It was offensive to her, it was offensive to the children and I must promise never to utter those words again on stage.' I shudder with anticipation when he take's a moment's pause and says 'I'll tell you the joke: I always wanted three kids, but now I have two I only want one.' and then he double's down with 'It's a joke isn't it! Of course it is... I don't want any.'

Which you know, of course Lee could be completely mischaracterizing his wife and children in the service of the joke. So when Dave Chappelle in his stand up special 'Equanimity' confides that he received a letter from a trans fan reporting they were 'devastated' by a transphobic joke he told. And he says something akin to 'my first response was that I felt bad, that I had made somebody feel bad. But then I began to wonder what I had said that had been so devastating, and I suspect it is the joke I am about to tell...' [paraphrased] and then he goes onto do a Caitlin Jenner bit, that I won't reproduce for reasons of spoliers, given that ruin one Lee Mack joke in an hour long set is to spoil 1/200th of the jokes, ruin a Chappelle bit and you might ruin the whole show.

But I enjoy viscerally the brinkmanship of comedy that punches down. I enjoy being scandalized. I enjoy seeing audiences laughing at something they know to be wrong. Scandalization is like the beautiful, glowing twin sibling of offense. Such that when I hear people advocate 'comedy should punch up, not down.' it rings in my ears like saying 'Rollercoasters should only go up, not down' the down part of the roller-coaster is where all the fun is, because it's frightening, the pleasure of going up on a roller-coaster is the building of anticipation. Punching down, by my personal preference has to be the pinnacle of comedic talent, because it's so high risk. Fuck it up and the whole crowd is against you, fuck up punching up as Bill Maher often does and the whole crowd is often still with you.

How to make the case, not that I am not a horrible person, but that you should be more horrible too.

So I would put it as the Nadir of humor is puns, and god help us all if people find a worse form of comedy. With a lot of hard work, someone like Tim Vine can elevate puns to something entertaining, but to the children out there, why waste your life? The Zenith of humor is to say the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time.

For example, imagine your physics teacher has just drawn out a diagram explaining how vision works, like a camera obscura with arrows donating light rays hitting the top and bottom of a poorly drawn tree and then travelling in straight lines to intersect at the pupil of a poorly drawn head and then replicating an inverted tree on the retina at the back of the poorly drawn eyeball.

A student that doesn't get it might say: 'Mr Knight you dickhead, the trees upside down' precipitating the teacher explaining that our brains actually unconsciously invert the information to the retina automatically and maybe tells an anecdote about Michelangelo after doing the Sistine Chapel, or experiments conducted with eyeglasses that invert our vision.

An intelligent student might say: 'So light reflects off objects in the real world that then travel in straight lines through the lens that adjusts the focal length so the corresponding optic nerves on the retina are stimulated sending signals to the brain.' reassuring the teacher that they have successfully discharged their duties and won't be fired after the whole class flunks their assessment.

A smartass student might say: 'So light comes from the eyes, shoots out and hits the tree and that absorbs the essence of the tree into the brain.' indicating to the teacher that they too not only understand what has been transmitted by the teacher, by saying something so heinously incorrect that they know exactly what is wrong. Furthermore demonstrating their erudition by actually voicing the psuedoscientific theory of sight espoused by ancient Greek philosophers.

In summary you can demonstrate you don't understand by saying the wrong thing, demonstrate you understand by saying the right thing, and demonstrate you understand by saying the wrong thing.

Such that sometimes the difference between the right thing and the wrong thing is not actually comprehension but sophistication. As confusingly, is the difference between the wrong thing and the wrong thing.

Here's one of my favorite examples of 'the wrong thing' which is the kind of ignoramus that doesn't get that racist jokes are most often anti-racist, as well as perfectly conveying the pain and suffering of someone with a sense of humor living in a largely humorless world:


That last guy's riff on the initial joke, demonstrates his actual values because the racism is inserted around the punchline.

Now Australian's of a certain age probably recall this joke that was the other 'wrong thing' but simply failed to land:


A botched attempt at punching down. Such was the public furor that the show was suspended for two weeks, and resumed with an apology for the sketch. The joke was obvious, perhaps even derivative of the far superior (and longer) Mr Show sketch of two bumbling idiots setting up their own 'Dream of a Lifetime' foundation. Albeit that joke works differently because it is punching down on the two idiots that over-promise and under-deliver. Sean Micallef similarly did another 'Make a Wish' inspired sketch where a bed stricken teen wishes for 'a handjob from Lisa McCune' to which Francis Greenslade turns to Sean and remarks 'well she did do The Potato Factory.'

I'm not sure where the Chaser's sketch went wrong, I mean obviously the line was 'they're going to die anyway' was what was offensive, but why did the punch fail to slip past defenses?

There's a class of jokes of which at a pinch I can recall at least 5, and worse known as 'dead baby jokes' that in Australia at least are jokes you tell either while in primary school and blissfully unaware of the tragedy and suffering in the world, or in a hushed voice after looking over your shoulder to make sure you know exactly everyone who will actually hear the joke, as a measure of calculated risks.

And when I write 'you tell' and 'your shoulder' I do not mean to impute an ignorant understanding on my part that everyone tells these jokes. I merely suggest that if you are to take a crack at black humor, gallows humor, offensive humor, this is the way I advise telling it, because the repercussions are real.

But with the Chaser sketch, I don't quite know, I'm agnostic. The degree to which they are broadcasting makes me think that to construe that their intent was to upset sick children, their families and friends seems to be acting in very bad faith. Nor can I fully credit any slippery slope, or contagion based arguments.

I actually heard the joke 'What did the blind, quadriplegic boy get for Christmas? Cancer' from a weatherman on one of Australia's more conservative morning breakfast shows. (although they are all conservative). Yeah, and maybe they received a bunch of complaint calls and letters, but it makes me suspect that Chaser went wrong with timing, and not comic timing but hadn't anticipated living in the age of Moral outrage pile-ons.

And I hear progressives 'Yes, but' this with 'pile ons are a problem but...' which like 'I'm not racist but,' indicates what you will immediately hear is going to be an apology for pile-on public shaming behavior.

Jimmy Carr wrote a book on comedy that I have no intention to read, but on Qi he asserted that all jokes work the same way, by employing two narratives such that the listener thinks they are on one narrative and the punch line switches them to another. In the case of the weatherman's cancer joke, the setup fosters the expectation culturally that something nice is going to happen to this unfortunate child because that's the feel good fluff piece trope, and the punchline then works by subverting the expectation and forcing us to deal with something really horrible.

This is punching down in humor, the joke is that we know it is wrong. If we can't get there, we can't get the joke, if enough people can't get the joke and it's punching down, then it fails and therein lies the delicious risk, the pleasure of being scandalized. Something is at stake.

A joke that doesn't work anymore is 'Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.' I was in my early twenties before it was explained to me through a dissection by Alan Moore, that the whole joke hinges on the listener presuming they are being asked why the chicken crossed the road, and why a chicken in particular for some good reason. And once I could empathize with someone hearing the premise and trying to deduce a chicken related punchline, I suddenly got how this joke could have been funny, some where, some when.

The chicken crossing the road, is actually despite it's reputation of being one of the oldest and lamest jokes in the book. (punching down pun on the lame not intended, I never intentionally pun) It actually can't be the oldest joke, because it's quite a sophisticated meta-joke. A joke about jokes. A variation of one of my favorite jokes 'what's brown and sticky? A stick.'

Chicken joke aside, how jokes work is so intuitive to me, what I really struggle with in defending and advocating for punching down, is that it's hard for me to get, what people don't get. I suspect it's why a lot of the people that push back, particularly comedians, suspect much of the moral outrage and sermonizing is conducted in bad faith. I suspect, it's the usual story of censorship, people advocating for censorship are never advocating on their behalf, that they don't get it's a joke, it's on behalf of the poor morons who won't get that it's a joke. Like the last guy to repeat back to Steven Russell the lawyer joke with extra racism. These censorship arguments in the words of Steven Russell are the province of 'fucking morons'.

Or maybe, it's that everyone has a sense of humor until the joke is on them. As my highschool running buddy use to say 'you can dish it but you can't take it' Here is the principle neatly illustrated by neat illustrator and generally left-wing artist Tom Gauld:

I went to Uni in the Bush Administration, and did a course that had me commute past the almost weekly protests driven by Bush's foreign policy or an emboldened IDF. Such that I can recall seeing the Lebanese community out on the state library lawns protesting the latest air strikes from Isreal, and thinking 'where were you all last week for the Iraqi protest?' which is equally true of where was the Iraqi community at this protest? It's just happenstance who the players were, but it struck me that the principle was a bit tribal. It's not that you are anti-war per se, it's that you are anti-war against your community. Which I feel isn't good enough.

Such that I respect the pacifists, and I respect the non-pacifists, but not the tribalists. This does somewhat undermine my opening remarks about the truism of 'punch up, not down' so allow me to steel man it, if unintentionally.

Punching up is fine, but in part it doesn't do it for me. Risk = reward, and perhaps in the domain of humor why I'm fine with punching up, is that when historically you've been on the side of the whip I have, (although statistically the odds that I am decended from a slave or multiple slaves is 100%, as are the odds I am decended on multiple occassions from rapists and the corresponding rape victims) those punches are quite impotent, flaccid, adorable even.

I recall fondly when my friend from Thailand complained audibly how 'white people fucking loooooove potatoes.' and my white friend remarked how he loved collecting white stereotypes citing an example of 'white people smell like cheese.'

Even as a stranger in a strange land, I thrilled to the novelty of having a Han Chinese in an upmarket Beijing restaurant wearing military uniform see me balk at the squat toilets and scoff before derisively saying 'guilo' or however it is spelled.

There may be a future where China comes to dominate the Pacific in such a way that I develop a sensitivity, but as of now, I don't.

But there are people who are 'upwards' in society that are clearly sensitive, and their moves to censure 'punching up' have to be resisted. Like when Australia passes a law criminalising any reporting on their offshore detention centers. Or in the world's most prominent example and psychological case study in how to share the misery: Donald Trump, you have a man who is ostensibly powerful, but doesn't feel powerful until such a time as he can do whatever he wants and nobody will criticize him, at which point I suspect his sensitivity will convert into full blown paranoia that nobody actually loves or respects him.

These are the types for which the ability to punch up is admirable and indeed vital.

I have no problem, if a new market is emergent and sustained for people who cannot enjoy punching down. Who's idea of a comedy special is Nanette. I believe that it's actually been a long emerging trend perhaps started by Daniel Kitson of the UK to basically do 'comedy' shows that are tragic one-man plans about people's struggles in life. The Athenians used to regularly watch tragedies, and talking about traumatic events and struggle and suffering is a good and healthy thing.

I just enjoy it more when people make fun of trauma, struggle and suffering in an artful way. And I hope just as I wouldn't want to tell people how they can spend $120 on a Saturday evening, people will not tell me how to spend mine. It's possible in certain quarters, certain markets, what I find funny will have to go underground, and my only consolation is John Waters who complains that it was more fun to be a homosexual when it was illegal and all underground.

What would scare me is if the zeitgeist got such that genuinelly funny comedians had to perform to the Ku Klux Klan or Neo-Nazi's thanks to their experience of running clandestine meetings. That would be a really bad development.

I also feel entitled to come down hard on the position that academics have no place nor say on comedy, particularly stand up comedy. Comedy is a practice, not a profession. It is the only artform that has to be practiced in front of a crowd, which is to say the only way you can practice stand up is through the practice of stand up.

And in a situation where Chappelle, or Tosh, or Louis CK, or Anthony Jeselnik, or Ricky Gervais tell a joke that punches down, and it results in a pile-on of thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of anonymous people online expressing their moral outrage. In a situation where it is one against a mob, who is punching down and who is punching up?

Jon Oliver might argue that all those men are public figures, powerful celebrities and also that they are all notable for their unapologetic ability to withstand a pile on, but you don't get to their level (with the possible exception of Gervais) without cutting your teeth on open mics, college tours, comedy clubs.

Or whether some civilian like Justine Sacco deserves to have her life ruined by making a racist joke on twitter.

If people can't hone their craft at punching down, such that they can successfully ridicule the ridiculous, then it will be the case that 'punch up, not down' will become a truism, because having the position to punch up will be the position of privilege if you cannot punch down.

Comedy is definitely a domain where it is especially true that 'those that can't do, teach' and I think since the whole SJW vs Alt-right polarisation broke out, I always knew which side I was on. I am on the side of the comedians.

It'll be interesting, as it is interesting to see how this plays out. Because a philosophy that defines speech as violence, and violence as contingent on privilege and not contingent on intent, is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of comedy. Nor do I suspect, is an edict of 'punch up not down' even sincere. I do not believe that people who espouse it for example, think that a wheelchair bound Nigerian lesbian comedian could do a set of vicious racist jokes about Asians, even though she would technically be punching up.

When I see compelling evidence of an efficient causal chain between say racist jokes, and race hate crimes or sexist jokes and domestic violence, I might actually entertain notions of censorship. However to my knowledge while the causal arguments exist, and lived experience narratives exist, and are worth hearing, the causal evidence does not. I suspect because it cannot, and other correlates prove more compelling for these social problems such as the presence of austerity, economic inequality and honor cultures (of which much progressive thought resembles).

 I feel like I should end on a lighthearted note so here:

Unpacking my Superficiality Part 5: Age, Height and Single Motherhood

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