Comedy and Masculinity

Welcome back everyone! Enbies! Girls! … Fellas…

Last time we looked at The Aesthetics of Intellectualism, the ways that toxic masculinity and fascist rhetoric disguise themselves in thinkyman speak, and of course the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise.

Alright.
This was supposed to be a sequel to that, but then something really important happened. Something that shook society to its core. On October 4th 2019, Joker was released.

Right lads look. It's like this: Joker fucking slaps. It's like, Joker - Joker from Joker, the Joker, the guy - he laughs right, but, he's not laughing cos he's happy, right? He's laughing cos he's sad. Super sad. Sad as fuck.

But then he realises, all the things that were making him sad right? They're actually pretty funny.

Okay no, this isn’t going to be a Joker essay. I just think it's interesting to look at the way the film is being received. You see, Joker is a dangerous movie that will empower incels to do misogynist terrorism! Apparently, if you believe the reviewers who started a mass panic over the politics of the film before it was even out. But if you've actually watched the movie, there's a clear anti-austerity political narrative not of the disenfranchisement of men who can't get a date, but of poor people, of the working class. Joker kills and inspires the killings of primarily very wealthy people in this film, even telling a joke - a joke in which he kills someone, a sort of "Killing Joke" if you will - in which he asks "what do you get if you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that treats him like garbage? You get what you deserve." Bang.

So why are these reviewers so convinced that this is an incel film? Well in part it has to be because people are becoming more generally aware that mental health and the broader state of society are extremely closely linked.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher makes a case for some mental illnesses and personality disorders being rooted in the conflict between human nature and basic needs and the way that people are forced to behave under capitalism. I think it’s important to acknowledge that Fisher’s perspective was coloured by his own depression, and I don’t see eye to eye with everything he says there, but I think he’s on the money as far as the basic relationship goes, and community psychology - that study of individual mental health with the context of the society we live in - is one of the most valuable tools for looking at the world.

For example, if we were looking at men, and their mental health, it would be sensible to look at how society looks at masculinity, especially in a society in which feminism exists, which has critiqued toxic masculinity, and so many men seek to hide that behaviour, either by, as we previously discussed, disguising their toxic masculinity in false intellectualism, or by using irony, and comedy as a disguise. By becoming, in technical terms, “the Joker, baby”.

It would be useful to look at how creating a character of yourself, a sort of mask, or painted face, allows you to distance yourself from behaviours that you know are bad, but also keeps you from being truly introspective, which might really damage your emotional growth.

But this isn't a Joker video, so don't worry about that. I'm sure none of that will be relevant at all.

Let's talk about Gavin McInnes, and the Proud Boys.


Section 1: A Boy, Proudly


Let’s start here: who is Gavin McInnes?

Gavin is a American Canadian Scottish-Canadian far right political commentator originally born in Hitchin, England. Right, so he's one of the lads. One of our boys. But what's he doing starting an American nationalist gang?

Well, we'll get back to that, but firstly here's how he got there:

McInnes grew up in Canada and worked as a writer before co-founding Vice Magazine in 1994, after which Gavin came to be worth 10 million dollars. Right. So not really one of the lads after all then…

Gavin was pushed out of Vice because everyone thought he was a pissboy, after which he founded an ad agency called Rooster, which he was pushed out of because everyone there thought he was a pissboy too he wrote an essay titled Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural which caused too much negative press for the company. So there's Transphobia again… really not one of our lads at all is he…

Naturally Gavin needed another big win after being kicked out of Rooster in 2014, and so that’s more or less when he started the Proud Boys.

I spoke to someone very familiar with the Proud Boys and they said “The basics are that Gavin McInnes wanted to start a midlife crisis fraternity and landed inside of a violent street gang” and you know, that’s just a really good summary.

That conflation between midlife crisis fraternity and violent street gang has really led to a consistently embarrassing existence for the Proud Boys.

The Proud Boys didn’t show up to the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, and that’s probably for the best, since the most extensive and thorough coverage of the event was done by McInnes’ former company Vice, which would have made for an embarrassing reunion. If anything their absence showed that Charlottesville really was a lose-lose situation for the alt-right, in that the gangs that showed up all showed themselves as open white supremacists, and the gangs that didn’t show up were ridiculed by the rest of the alt-right as cowards.

For a while the Proud Boys had a subreddit, /r/proudboys, but then it was infiltrated and overthrown by non-fascists, and now it’s a subreddit for selfies from trans men. You know, proud boys. Boys who actually have something to be proud of.

There was also the time that one of the Proud Boys claimed on twitter that his mum performs oral sex on him and the whole gang, but my family watch my channel so I’m just gonna move on with the rest of the video now.



Somewhere along the line the Proud Boys gained their tiered system to determine who is the… proudest boy? I mean, the answer is Gavin, basically, but he’s devised this system to make so his boys can proudly strive to be as proud a boy as him. First you have to recite an oath about I’m a proud western boy blah blah blah, then you have to go through a hazing ritual where you get punched while answering pop culture trivia questions. I know, it’s really seeming like the coolest gang you’ve ever heard of. Next you have to give up masturbation, and get a Proud Boys tattoo, a part of the process that has proven more and more difficult as more tattoo parlours become aware that the Proud Boys are a nationally recognised hate group with links to actual neo-nazis. The last step of course, is violence “for the cause”.

And that’s an interesting one, because… what’s their cause, exactly? It can be really easy to assume that they’re a white supremacist group, because.. Uh… but the group itself is not exclusively white and not even as homogenous as you might expect. I don’t want to leave it unsaid, the Proud Boys are racists, and they are undeniably fascists, and frankly white supremacists are clearly a dime a dozen in their membership, but also, they aren’t actually a white supremacist group. We’ll get back to it.

But it’s also a pretty serious, and pretty scary step. Everything else so far has been ridiculous and deserving of your scorn and your laughter, but then they do this? Get in a “serious fight” for the cause?

You keep laughing at them like this and then suddenly they’re calling at the homes of anti-fascist activists to threaten them into silence. Suddenly they make this surprisingly small step from sad memelord pissboy gang to domestic terrorist organisation.

By the way, if you want to do your bit to stop the Proud Boys, one of the most effective ways is attacking their revenue sources, for example 1776.shop the online shop they set up to raise funds for the legal defense of some of their pissboy goons convicted of assaulting protesters. How can you help to shut down this shop you ask?

Well, 1776.shop uses Squarespace, an online tool that makes it easier than ever before to make your fascist terrorist group a reality. Squarespace has loads of easy to use tools that make it so easy to get your domestic terrorism up and running today!

Wow I’m really never going to get that sponsorship… please share my patreon link… and contact squarespace to take down this fascist website.

Anyway, now the Proud Boys are a recognised hate group, and that’s when Gavin says he wants off this ride.

In November 2018, Gavin McInnes did not step down as the leader of the Proud Boys. He wanted to be as clear as possible that he was never the leader, only the founder, so I guess we should be really clear, he didn’t step down as the leader, he quit as the founder. He’s done… uh… founding the group. He won’t found it any more. No Proud Boys will look up to Gavin as their founder any more.

It was a really strange statement actually. He claimed that white supremacists and white nationalists don’t exist and accidentally said that gay people are a separate race. It wasn’t the most clear or concise rhetoric, but what came across straightforwardly was that Gavin had realised he’d really really fucked up, and he needed to get the heck out of dodge.


Enc’s Journal, October 4th 2019


Heard a joke recently.

Man is depressed, goes to doctor. Man says “doctor help me, I've lost everything. My rich friends won't talk to me any more, my wife is mad at me, and I founded a violent street gang of piss boys.”

Doctor says “treatment is simple. When I am sad I just remember I'm not Gavin McInnes. Cheers me up.”

Man says “but doctor! I am Gavin McInnes!”

Doctor says “I know, get the fuck out of my office”


Roll on drum. Curtains. Good joke. Heh


Section 2: The Comedian


So what is Gavin up to now, now that he isn't the uhh, “founder” of the Proud Boys any more?

Gavin is trying to arrange guests for his new show, basically a debate show where he pairs up a liberal and a conservative and gets them to argue. The thing is, in his increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant, he seems to be trying to sell the show to liberals by saying they get to make fun of him. If they come on his show, they can make him look foolish. Firstly, obviously, that’s not how that works. When you go onto someone else’s platform they have all the power. But secondly, and I think much more interestingly, this is such a sad attempt to still be in control of his situation.

They always say that people can either be laughing with you or laughing at you, but I think there’s slightly more to it than that. As well as laughing with you, people can be laughing at you in a way you want, and I don’t mean finding your jokes funny, I mean ridiculing you, in a way that you feel totally impervious to.

I think that’s something that shows as a through-line for all of the Proud Boys’ utter humiliations, and Gavin’s continued clawing at the edges of relevance: that they’re making themselves into characters, and that the criticisms of those characters mean nothing to them. Laughing at those characters is still under their control.

After all, as the Mohandas K Gandhi quote goes, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

Actually, Gandhi never said that, it’s commonly misattributed. But that's the Aesthetics of Intellectualism baby!

They want you laughing at them because that means they’re being seen, and that’s all they care about. People who are that desperate to be seen, that they are happy for you to laugh at them are scary. Being laughed with is one of the best feelings there is, and being laughed at is one of the worst, so someone who is willing to accept that feeling to gain attention has a frightening determination.

We know about Gavin’s new show by the way, because he tried to recruit Sam Seder of The Majority Report for it. Sam, of course, didn’t want to give Gavin the time of day, but thought it was a pretty good opportunity to try to get Steven Crowder, who had ducked out of debates with him before, to finally sit down and debate. Alas, Steve still continued to refuse to debate Sam, possibly because his manager didn’t think it would be a good idea. His manager, who is, incidentally, also his dad.

Hang on hang on hang on! Now let me be clear about this: I'm not saying that it's funny that Steven Crowder’s dad is his manager.

I'm not saying that Crowder, who was the voice of Brain on the show Arthur - sorry for ruining Arthur - was probably pushed into his showbiz career by a helicopter parent, and lacking any comedic talent whatsoever just repeated increasingly disgusting Conservative views in the style of jokes for the approval of people he looks up to. I'm not saying that, because that would be tragic, not funny. I'm also not saying that lil Steve is the perfect case study of the way that men perform cruelty as if it's comedy in order to form a toxic masculine in-group that necessarily eliminates anyone who doesn't find bigotry funny and brands them as weak or too sensitive. And the thing I'm most definitely not saying is that Stevie’s dad doesn't have the confidence in his intelligence and his ability to debate Sam Seder because Steve's whole life is built off parroting back things his dad told him. Because if I was saying that, that'd be pretty fucking grim, wouldn't it?

Steven, and other conservative… comedians(?) are a pretty good study of the post-masculine identity I was talking about before - a sort of ironic masculinity, engaging in all the shittiest possible behaviours while insisting that it’s all just a joke. Now to be clear, this is absolutely nothing new as a defence against accusations of being a pissboy - I just think the actual contingent of men who internally, seriously believe that their toxic masculinity is just a joke is an emerging identity, a more recent thing. And to be clear about the term post-masculine, I’m referring to identity in a society that has recognised a critique of masculinity, a society aware of feminist ideas. It doesn’t mean masculinity is over, but that we exist in a time after its emergence or acknowledgement.

Let’s take a moment to talk about notorious big wet boy Ricky Gervais. Gervais recently started doing standup in the well established “am I offending you, haha you’re so offended” genre of standup comedy, and then taking to twitter to frequently search his own name and get definitely not mad at people who say he isn’t funny.

I could definitely talk a bunch here about punching down, and how pathetic it is, and how performative cruelty isn’t comedy, it’s just the constant reinforcement of an in-group, but I’m realising as I write this that Ricky Gervais might be namesearching on youtube too, and I’m worried he doesn’t have the attention span for all that so Ricky, uh, hi. I’m never going to stop tweeting at you that you’re a big wet boy. You can click off the video now.

One thing a lot of people who are now banned from commenting on my videos have said is that I don’t engage with the ideas that I criticise properly. This is because I usually only read books by people I respect, but, point taken, so I picked up Conservatism by Roger Scruton.

I wanted to check out Conservatism in the words of a Conservative, and what came across really strongly is that Roger Scruton has no fucking clue what Conservatism is. He spends a whole section defining the “prehistory” of Conservatism as ideas that conservatives today no longer believe in but we're definitely Conservative at the time, with the exception of a few famous faces like Thomas Jefferson that he tries to claim were conservatives of their day, which is frankly just baffling.

When he's done explaining that conservatives used to be proponents of the divine right of Kings he just moves on to the next stage of Conservative history and never acknowledges the total lack of any kind of intellectual consistency at all. It becomes apparent to the reader that Conservatism is just whoever doesn't want things to change at that particular moment in history trying to prevent change by any means necessary, but this revelation seems to elude Scruton.

I kept thinking about Scruton and his extremely terrible book while I was researching for this video, because just like Gervais and Crowder and McInnes, I think he is genuinely unaware that his politics really just boils down to defending the status quo at any cost.

(for more on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4CI2vk3ugk)

From the point of view of the right wing comedian, he's a totally original, boundary pushing act. Nobody has ever thought of doing before what he's going to do, and if someone wants to stop him, they're just anti free speech, and the next thing you know he'll have antifa protesting his gigs, right?

The scary thing about Antifa is, if they'll punch a fascist? Then what's next? They could punch ME (if I was a fascist).


Section 3: Antifa is Good Actually


In 1936, on the 4th of October, a famous battle occurred in London, in a place called Cable Street. Funnily enough it was remembered as The Battle of Cable Street. It happened because Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists tried to organise a march, and London, and especially the working class Jewish community around Cable Street said no, fuck that. If you don't know, Sir Oswald Mosley was a weird rich old racist man who was a really big fan of Hitler, black turtlenecks from M&S menswear, and apparently having piss and shit thrown on him by passersby as he tried to hold fascist parades in the streets of London. Yes really. They really knew how to show fascists the appropriate level of respect in those days…

3000 fascists marched in demonstration, accompanied by 6000 police, and protested by over 100,000 anti fascists.

The battle of Cable Street is remembered as the point at which the fascists were driven back, defeated, never to be seen again.

The only problem with this memory is that it's entirely fucked. And useless. And terrible.

Because about a year later the fascists assembled again, this time in Bermondsey, in a place near where I live, to celebrate the anniversary of their organisations founding, and marched again. 3000 fascists escorted by 6000 police countered by over 100,000 anti fascists, except according to contemporary sources the antifascist crowd was even bigger this time.



The antifascists formed a blockade across the announced route, chaining old iron ovens and fridges and other bulky objects together to make a physical barrier, because uhh when we say “battle” we mean battle.

Antifascists speaking in anticipation of the event told crowds that these weren't people from Bermondsey expressing their fascist views, this was the BUF trying to invade Bermondsey, and take it, which was true. It was the BUF’s stated intention of their march. It's crucial to understand that, that the anti fascists represented and to this day represent the local community - that this was the working class of Bermondsey pushing back and fighting off Sir Oswald Mosley, and that because of their efforts he never got to hold his racist pissboy rally in West Lane.


At Bermondsey, as at Cable Street, the antifascists gathered to say, as antifascists have said all around the world, “They shall not pass”

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. Gandalf is Antifa.

But more importantly, a lesson we should learn from the Battle of Bermondsey, is that anti-fascism isn't a single fight against the forces of evil, but an ongoing struggle. A constant fight that encompasses everything from taking down stickers and reporting graffiti, to voting to, yes, punching fascists, and yes, punching me, if I was a fascist.

When you see Antifa reported on today, it can be easy to buy the rhetoric that this group is an extremist movement, and not just local people getting together to stop fascists from sinking their disgusting claws into your community. I love that headline, Bermondsey says ‘NO’ to fascism. I think if you want to understand what Antifa does, you need to think of the place where you live, and picture that headline. My neighbourhood says ‘NO’ to fascism.

There we go, my job is to play video games and say antifa is good, and I've done my job!

And since we're talking about headlines, let's talk about the New York Republican headquarters. Fox News reported on what happened here as Antifa Attacks Again - Swords and Vandalism at New York GOP Office, and showed a video of a man brandishing a sword in front of the GOP building. Naturally, this would lead you to believe that Antifa attacked the republican offices with swords, but in fact the person with the sword is, drumroll please, yes, Gavin McInnes.



See, Gavin was there in a powerfully racist costume to re-enact and celebrate the assassination of a japanese politician by a far-right terrorist in the 1960s. An act he called an “inspiring moment” in his instagram post about the event. It’s a murder Gavin, not a body positivity post.



There's something interesting about Gavin though. In 2017 when the alt right was becoming more and more publicly prominent, McInnes started distancing himself from them, citing that their major focus is race whereas his is on “western values”.

Don't get me wrong here, “western values” is the “states’ rights” of the 2010s, but I think Gavin really means this. I think the fact that the Proud Boys aren't an exclusively white group, Gavin’s transphobia, the nofap rule, and this distancing all have something to do with each other.

Ian Danskin made a very pertinent point in his video White Fascism - uh, actually he made a whole bunch of very pertinent points so maybe we just keep referencing this one. Fascism, as a word, has become so ubiquitous and also colloquialised that it seems ridiculous to call anyone or anything fascist sincerely, even when they are, or it is, by the most fundamental definitions of fascism, fascist. I think a similar thing has happened with The Patriarchy, especially if you’re quite online, because anti-feminist gotcha arguments have been so memed to hell that the idea of sincerely talking about the patriarchy feels, for want of a better word, a bit cringey to some people. This expresses itself as a guilt, an apology pre-empting the audience discomfort at sincere discussion of things that edgy pissboys say you aren’t allowed to talk about.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about fascism and the patriarchy.

We could define fascism by a hierarchy that mythologises an “us” - an in group - as inherently superior, and defines every group that is step by step less like that group as more and more inferior. In this system, any time that the fascists don’t succeed, the blame should be put on people who are lesser, and so don’t belong wholly to the “us”. The adage goes “Fascism can never fail, it can only be failed”.

The internal logic of fascism says that when you see someone failing, it doesn’t make sense until you can explain why they are less like the “us” than they would need to be to succeed. This is where the word degenerate comes into play.

Anyone who lets fascism down is a degenerate, and therefore part of the out-group, and they should be cast aside. This is where we encounter what I call the “shrinking circle of fascism” - a contracting, tightening ring  that closes in until only the perfect ideal person is left. I think it’s a pretty useful term, and for bonus points describing it sounds a bit like a butthole, and that would make the fascists really uncomfortable.

For white supremacists, lesser members of the white race exist essentially as a logical prop, to explain why anyone huwite could ever do anything they don’t approve of.

For misogynists, any man being seen to do anything wrong, or inferior, or simply unexpected is feminine. This is so baked into our thinking that many of us would use “like a girl” without thinking to just mean bad.

You see why I’m making this comparison:

The patriarchy is, itself, fascist.

So getting back to our earlier dilemma:

Are the Proud Boys fascists? Yes. Are they racists? Yes. However, they don’t exist to serve white supremacy and white fascism. They exist to be the stormtroopers of the Patriarchy.

The Proud Boys describe themselves as “Western Chauvinists”. They aren’t necessarily aiming for Richard Spencer’s white ethnostate, they’re aiming for The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead.

Now my statement here works only if you agree that fascism is, while very commonly nationalistic, not inherently nationalistic. My academic backing for this idea is a long fart noise, but, I think it’s plain to see that english speaking fascists in the US and the UK in the age of the internet view their mission as one and the same, and that these fascists talk often more about “The West” than about their specific country. And if those fascists can have a nationalistic loyalty to something as nebulous as “The West” or as patently fake as whiteness, I don’t think it’s a stretch to understand people like the Proud Boys are defending the abstract notion of masculinity as if were the borders of their country. They are expressing loyalty to the nation of manhood.

And just as the blackshirts were swindled into parading around playing dress-up by a rich old asshole with a knighthood, being told they were defending the honour of Mother Britannia, today Gavin, an actual millionaire, is tricking sadboys online into defending the nation of manhood by putting on a special outfit and refusing to masturbate.

https://twitter.com/JamesonJaymie/status/1186662070667735041


Section 4: Marc Maron, woke bae 2019

Right at the time of Joker’s release, its director Todd Philips made comments to the effect that he had to quit making comedy films because woke culture has killed comedy. You can’t be funny about anything because everyone expects you to be woke. All jokes insult someone and there is no such thing as a power dynamic so your joke insulting a minority group and your joke insulting the rich and powerful is exactly the same thing. Nobody can be funny without appealing to bigotry. There is no difference between pooping and eating poop. I am Todd Philips and I definitely understand comedy.

Okay so I’m not quoting directly.

In response, Marc Maron, long time comedian and also an actor in Joker, had a fair few words to say. On his podcast WTF he said

“There’s plenty of people being funny right now. Not only being funny but being really fucking funny.
“There are still lines to be rode. If you like to ride a line, you can still ride a line. If you want to take chances, you can still take chances. Really, the only thing that’s off the table, culturally, at this juncture – and not even entirely – is shamelessly punching down for the sheer joy of hurting people.
“For the sheer excitement and laughter that some people get from causing people pain, from making people uncomfortable, from making people feel excluded. Ya know, that excitement.”

And I don’t know if I could put it better than that. What a king. Thank you Marc Maron. In an interview with NME he also put it a little more succinctly:

“It’s about men, women, and how men deal with being ‘woke’. The way I’m approaching it in the performance is just by trying to speak as a man who is trying to be woke, empathetic and have a dialogue without being condescending. It’s about taking responsibility for maybe not having the right lens about what women go through in the world.”


The thing about the patriarchy is that it makes men powerful, not happy. And where lots of conservative men point to the fact that they are unhappy as proof that the patriarchy isn’t real, the Proud Boys have taken the fact that they have power through male privilege, and decided that that is what makes them happy - yes, I guess kind of like the Joker - and that anything they treat as a signifier of that is good, and powerful, and masculine, and makes them happy too.

When these guys are funny characters with memes and jokes and secret symbols for their special boys club, they can do anything they want, because they're untouchable. When they're funny, they're scary. But when you take a closer look and realise that these dingdongs actually derive their masculinity from a special uniform, and a bunch of pictures of a cartoon frog… That's not scary, that's fucking tragic. And that tragedy? now that's funny!

There has to be a better model for masculinity than desperately trying to cling onto old shitty behaviours through irony and memes and nofap boys clubs. There has to be a model of masculinity that’s all about caring about the less fortunate, the less strong, about helping the less capable. Or at the very least, follow Marc Maron’s example and just show these edgy pissboys you’re tired of their bullshit.