Talking irony with comedian Benny Feldman
Benny Feldman, the internet: Hey, what's up? Basically, I think there's a bunch of comedians who are doing evil comedy and pretending they are not. These comedians pretend that jokes have no meaning, or they'll pretend that they're just doing irony, or that all irony is somehow inherently good. They make fun of anybody in society who has less power than them for the big reactionary conservative audience that that brings. A bigger audience means more ticket sales, more sponsorships, more tour dates, more deals, more money, more power. You'll often hear them say, "It's just a joke, dude. I'm just being ironic. You can't do irony anymore these days." Uh, I disagree. So I'm gonna talk about how irony works and why you should give a shit...
Fil Corbitt: All right, so can you just introduce yourself and say where you are right now?
Benny Feldman: Hey, I'm Benny Feldman. I'm a one-liner comedian with Tourette's syndrome. Uh, I'm currently in New York City in Brooklyn.
Benny Feldman, the internet: Tourette's is sort of the, uh, abstract art of disabilities. A lot of people are like, "I can do that."
Fil Corbitt: Did you see a comic when you were younger and think like, "Oh, I should get into this"?
Benny Feldman: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, Mitch Hedberg is, like, kinda the touchstone for the last little while of one-liner comedians. Spec- very specifically, I actually saw a Sarah Silverman joke. It's a very dirty joke, um, but it was, like, one line in her show, and I was like, "Oh, I like, I like just jokes." And it was like, even though she's not a one-liner comic, I still just am like, "Oh, th- I like what that does to my brain. I like how... I like when there's just, like, a funny idea."
Fil Corbitt: How would you explain, like, what it does to your brain?
Benny Feldman: Well, comedy makes me, like, literally feel good. There's, like, a, a physical pleasure sensation that you get from comedy. There's the external part. There's, like, laughter. You know what I mean? But you can... That's not always, um, pleasurable 'cause you can laugh without finding something funny. Like, um, you know, if somebody at work tells a joke or something , your internal and your external sensations are not necessarily intertwined.But I'm, I'm a big internal sensation head. I love the feeling y- of pleasure you get from comedy.
Fil Corbitt: What's your internal monologue like?
Benny Feldman: (nervous Iaughing) I don't know. That's who, uh, uh, uh...have no idea how to answer that.
Fil Corbitt: All right. (lauging)
Benny Feldman, the internet: I'd like to offer you my current framework for how to understand irony. This will hopefully help you see right past that bullshit, and also hopefully appreciate the good stuff better.
Benny's principal example of evil comedy hiding behind the guise of irony is Tony Hinchcliffe, who hosts a well-known podcast where comics of a similar ilk do short sets and banter. It acts as a hub for alt-right and manosphere-aligned comedy. Hinchcliffe was dropped from his management company in 2021 for making extremely racist comments about a fellow comedian in Texas on stage, then he famously disparaged Puerto Rico while opening for a political rally Benny also mentions Dave Chappelle's transphobic Netflix special, which I think better identifies the problem, as would podcasters like Joe Rogan. These ideas can be smuggled into comedy specials and podcasts, or downstream into real life arguments and conversations, then downplayed or excused as just a joke, implying that the person objecting is at fault for taking them seriously.
Benny Feldman, the internet: All jokes have meaning and an underlying message, and what we choose to say in this world matters, dude.
Fil Corbitt: You did a long form breakdown of how irony works in comedy. And I found it first of all, super fascinating. It was something I really enjoyed watching, but it also kinda explained a lot of these things that I, I think I, I understood, but I didn't know why.
Benny Feldman, the internet: Just for clarity, this is about irony in the online sense or, like, being ironic, also known more formally as verbal irony. Sometimes people use online irony too much and it becomes hard to tell what their actual opinions are, and those people are sometimes called irony poisoned. This use of the word irony is not to be confused with the two other uses of the word, dramatic irony and situational irony. Just real quick, dramatic irony is when we know something that a character in a piece of media does not. Basically, when a character has imperfect information, like in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet fakes her death, but Romeo thinks she kills herself for real. Situational irony is when your intent or your actions contradict with the outcome. I have a joke where I go, "Lately I've been squishing all the caterpillars that have been eating my garden, 'cause I want it to look nice for when the butterflies arrive." My character in that joke ends up ruining the exact outcome that I want through my actions. Okay, with that shit out of the way, what is irony?What does it mean to be ironic? Irony is when you say or do something that you do not mean, but with some clear contradiction to show that doing or saying that thing is flawed. We're supposed to get that you don't actually mean the thing you say or do, but we are supposed to get that you're trying to say that that thing is flawed.
Fil Corbitt: How did you kinda come up with that theory and learn how to break down these systems of joke telling?
Benny Feldman: So I was doing improv for a couple years, like from 2013 to like 2017. But I started doing stand-up like 2015, and I just was like, "All right, how do I write a joke?" I literally went on like Wikipedia. I was like, "Well, what is comedy?" There were a couple key moments there. The first one was that I saw like a set from Kumail Nanjiani, where I was like, "Oh, those... I recognize that there's clear structure here." Like, I could figure out how to, like, construct a joke like that if I, if I figure, if I look into it. And then I, um, I went on Wikipedia, and I was looking at, like, different types of comedy. It's extremely poorly structured, the information. It'll be like hyperbole or dark comedy or blue comedy. Before I go further with that, my third element is that I come from a computer science background in college, and so I was thinking a lot about information graphs and information nodes and, um, how, like, idea structures and, like, idea trees and stuff like that.
And so I was looking at, like, the Wikipedia for comedy. I was like, hyperbole and dirty jokes are not even remotely comparable category concepts. One of those is a, um, information, uh, heightening structure idea, and one of those is a topic-based thing of like, uh, penises and balls and vaginas and stuff. Heh. And, um, the initial impetus of this was I just started to take all this stuff that was public information and just start to reorganize it appropriately 'cause it was pissing me off that stuff like hyperbole was considered anywhere remotely a near similar category to dirty jokes. I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Irony is more in line conceptually, structurally to something like hyperbole. Through looking at that, those systems, I end up going, "Oh, this thing's like hyperbole or metaphor or irony or futility or whatever," and I, I expand that out and I go, "Okay, then what is irony?" And that's how I ended up going down that pathway.
And so I had already been studying, I'd already been studying, like, what is irony for years prior to all these guys using it, like, fascistically, and then I was able to just be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Because I just, you know, being a weird little nerd trying to organize this information, I went, "Oh, holy shit, I, I'm, I now have something here that a lot of these people don't, and I, and I'm able to see right past, like…their lies."
Benny Feldman, the internet: Let's look at how we tell irony apart from earnestly saying or doing stuff. Clear contradictions. You need to deliberately and clearly contradict yourself so we know you don't mean it. You can do this by including some obvious failure in logic, going against your reputation, going against the context, and it can also help to play some sort of character. You can also do any sort of combination of these. An obvious failure in logic is when you say or do some stupid shit. It's being stupid. It's b- it's stupid stuff. You're being, it's when you're a fool. You make yourself clearly deliberately wrong about something with the goal of pointing out that that thing is flawed or incorrect, and so are the people who say or do that same thing
Benny Feldman: And for the record, some stuff, um, uh, the idea of saying just a joke is actually a useful idea when you say something that like, where it's like it's meant to be clear and you have like a positive underlying, uh, goal or whatever. So like I've got a joke where I'm like I'm, I'm at the aquarium petting zone just absolutely grabbing. Somebody commented, uh, "You're not supposed to grab at the aquarium?" And I'm like, "No, I'm... No, obviously." That is, that is- That's the whole point. Yeah. So I'm like, no, so saying it's just a joke in that context, that doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning. But it lets them know that I'm like, "No, the meaning is that I know you're not supposed to do that, obviously." I'm reinforcing that. A lot of people will say something like, "Oh, it's just a joke. You know, jokes don't have any meaning. Like, comedy is comedy. Don't take it seriously." And I think that is very blatantly obviously a false idea that is being used to let people do jokes that have very negative ideas behind them.
A clear example of something is if I say, "That guy looks like a whale," I'm calling them fat. And there's other elements involved of, like, context and reputation and stuff like that that can, like, change the meaning. But the idea that if I were to say "You look like a whale," the idea that I don't mean anything at all whatsoever by that because it's just a joke is…nonsense.
Unless you're saying it, ironically or sarcastically or something, but that doesn't remove meaning entirely, it just changes the meaning. So if you say something sarcastically, you mean the opposite. One of the things with irony is — to tell whether or not somebody is being sarcastic or ironic to tell what direction they mean the meaning in… if somebody does an anti-trans joke; if it's a trans woman, they're very likely doing an ironic character making fun of people who have that opinion. When you do the "You look like a whale" joke or whatever, that's not irony, that's just visual metaphor. You are saying visually you have some similarity to a whale.Whales are known to be large. I'm calling you large. To tell if somebody's being ironic is what are their other opinions and what actions do they take and do? So when they say all that stuff and they say, "Oh, we're just kidding, we're just being ironic," and it's like, no, we know that you materially support those actual policies involved. So when you're doing this anti-immigrant material, you mean it. Uh, it's not-- we're not able to see it from a, uh, ironic lens. We're only able to see that from a, no, you directly support, uh, anti-trans legislation, anti-anti-immigrant, yeah, deportations, et cetera.
Fil Corbitt: I mean, I've just been thinking a lot about how, you know, the, the corporate surveillance capitalism world that we're increasingly living under, it like thrives specifically on media illiteracy and people not kind of understanding what they're seeing and what it means. I mean, do you, do you agree with that?
Benny Feldman: A hundred percent. If these ideas were common knowledge and people knew that jokes could be used in this way, I think that we wouldn't have seen anywhere near as far of a rise of a lot of these guys. Media literacy is pretty low for a lot of stuff, but I would say it's specifically, gutter for jokes.
Benny Feldman, the internet: Going against the context. Without doing some stupid shit or by going against your reputation, you can also go against the wider or immediate situation. To show how this is different from reputation, let's keep the person the same. Your coworker says to you, "I've actually never driven a car before." In the first context, you're getting lunch with them. In the second context, you just got into their car and they're about to drive you home. Only one of those is a contradiction against the situation. In the first situation, it'd be totally reasonable that a coworker had never driven before, and they're just telling you, like, a fun fact about themselves.In the second situation, it goes against the fact that they have somehow procured a car and are behind the wheel and are about to drive you home.
Benny Feldman, standup: Yo, Eve ate that apple and it gave her all that knowledge and stuff. Dude, when she ate a second apple, she must've been like, "This one, this one's just a apple?"
Fil Corbitt: It seems like you're kind of actively trying to change that by doing these, like, long form videos about it.
Benny Feldman: Yes It felt so pressing and I was like, "Oh, people don't know, and this matters right now and is really relevant." And so, like, for instance, like, it seems to have, uh, heavily informed your perspective. You seem to now get it. You get that these guys are using the guise of irony to propagate fascist ideas. I've had different people come up and say that they like the video. That is the exact intended effect, is to be a idea manufacturer in the culture war.
One of the core, um, sticky ideas of rhetoric going the wrong direction is literally, "It's just a joke. Comedy is comedy." And it's like, the idea of, oh, it's just a joke? Or like, don't take comedy seriously. It's like, those are very sticky ideas, 'cause they make sense. What I'm trying very specifically to do, um...Well, I did the long form video, but I know I'm not, I know, I know 99.9% of people are not going to watch a 30-minute video essay on irony. And so what I try to do for a broader audience is carve sticky rhetoric ideas the other way that undercut the things like, "It's just a joke."
I've done a whole series of it's just a joke ideas and those have gotten much broader reach, I think, than the irony video. It'll be like, "Oh, it's just a joke, dude. It's just a form of speech. Speech doesn't communicate ideas." And it's like flipping the just a joke on its head, and so that people have that in their mind as like a cure to the original idea.
Benny Feldman, standup: Steampunk asks the question, “what if technology was only hot water and clocks?”
And some people answered, "We'd dress up all horny about it."
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Benny Feldman, standup: If Pokemon were real, we would have used them in the Iraq War
Benny Feldman: I know that there's a lot of people who have a brother or a coworker or, uh, a friend's partner or whoever in their life who have these dog shit bad opinions, but they, and they have a hard time arti- articulating these people why they're wrong. And so the other person ends up winning these arguments, 'cause it's like people don't have these idea structures that are such, uh, sticky things. And so I'm handing them the tools to win that argument or convince that person or whatever, and so... Or hold their own or not get pushed back. You know what I mean? The goal is to change the public's opinion, but by giving them the tools to do it.
Fil Corbitt: It's interesting you brought up, like, the social media videos.. The TikTok algorithm correctly put me directly in your, you know, in your target audience a while ago. And I'm wondering, what you make kind of fits the format so perfectly. I'm wondering what's your relationship like with these social media platforms?
Benny Feldman: It's an interesting thing where you're working for the platform. Like, I know people who, like, their whole income is, like, Instagram or TikTok or whatever. It's like, well, fundamentally, you work for Instagram. You know what I mean? But at the, but at the same time, you're also still sort of the capitalist owner of ideas. If I have a video of me telling jokes, the way that this architecture of the system works is, you become the capitalist owner of...you own these ideas, these trademarked sort of ideas. And so then I am sort of in joint capital ownership of this video with those platforms. Instagram doesn't pay any money at all for the Reels, and so that's actually a weird one where you're literally just working for them for free.
Fil Corbitt: Yeah. And I mean, are you thinking about these, like, you know, platforms as you're creating the art? Like, do you think that that, that kinda output is changing what you make? —-
Benny Feldman: No ...
Fil Corbitt: No.
Benny Feldman: Yeah. Okay, but I do know people are. So yeah, coming back to part of why I'm getting so into the weeds on the capital side of it— the money side of it is, the different mechanisms for how to get money in comedy, or how to have a career literally are what shape what people create.And so you see people... back in the, I don't know, '90s or '80s or whatever, the only mechanism was a five-minute set on Carson or whatever. And so not only did it have to be five minutes of, like, s- stand-up, but it had to be, uh, stand-up that Johnny Carson would approve of, and that network TV would approve of. You know what I mean? Yeah. So there is a, there is a beauty... One of the pros is, like, the decentralized nature of it, where it's like anybody can just do it now,
Fil Corbitt: Do you imagine, like, a version of this that is better? Like, can you solve all of these problems real quick?
Benny Feldman: Ha! It is all interconnected, 'cause, like, the, the thing with all these fascist ideas, all these guys who are truly doing evil harm to the country, part of it is … they're really doing amazing in the clip economy. They're going viral. They're got whole teams that are cranking out clip after clip after clip. It's like this success and money machine. This thing of, like, complaining about this capitalist side of it, it's all interconnected to the fact that what does well within the capitalist framework of these clip economies are these big capitalist machine guys and shows... Like Netflix, a lot of the specials that they've gotten in the last little while, they've had all, all the Dave Chappelle trans stuff controversy was on Netflix. And that was some of their early forays that they were doing of letting stuff go further to the right. Then they've got their full media machine that they can put behind cranking out quote, unquote, "viral clips" or whatever. Like, they've got a whole system.
Fil Corbitt: Obviously structurally having a lot of money behind these things they push these ideas further just because they have the marketing budget to do so.But do you think these ideas, do they just work better in these algorithms? Do you think that that is part of it in, in some way that isn't just having money behind it?
Benny Feldman: I don't necessarily think so. I do earnestly think that it's—I don't know. It's resonating with dif- different people in the country is part of it. I don't know. I think that's simply to do with, uh, that public opinion is already so skewed previously in favor of fascism. Or just at least in comedy spaces, the idea of it's just a joke is an old idea. I can't believe that we haven't dispr- Like, like, why am I the, why am I the guy disproving that? You know what I mean? I keep looking around going like, "What are we talking about? Why do I have to make the video essay on irony? Why don't people know this?" You know what I mean?
Benny Feldman, the internet: All jokes are political. Comedy is political. Since people are persuaded by jokes and learn things from humor, it's actually very dangerous for the public to not think jokes have meaning. As you've seen, all jokes have an underlying meaning. People then think about that underlying meaning. Social rhetoric influences people's beliefs. Those ideas persuade people. That has consequences at both an individual and a wider social level. First, because individuals' beliefs determine their actions in this world. Second, because the wider public's beliefs as a collective determine public policy or literal politics. Comedy and comedy podcasts are a major part of people's media diet.
Fil Corbitt: Going back to the first thing you said about comedy triggering an internal experience of joy in some way, how does that mechanism work for you? How much of it is internal and external? And how much are you playing with those mechanisms?
Benny Feldman: We have ideas in our mind, dog, jazz, whatever, you know what I mean? You, you can play with ideas in different ways. You can like make a dog bigger. You can make a giraffe's neck shorter or whatever. And there's different like resolutions where you've got like contradictions and you've got like, um, sort of pseudo equivalents and like misdirect type stuff.
Benny Feldman: Basically, like the idea of false, the idea of something like being not true is only in the human mind.
Benny Feldman: The idea of false doesn't exist in nature Everything in reality is true, like a waterfall is just true, it's just real. And so I think that like the idea of what is aligned with reality and what is not aligned with reality or the basis- the idea of true and false fundamentally form the, like, building block, like, basics of comedy in, like, a certain problem-solving sense.And so that pleasure sensation comes from the joy of solving the puzzle. The jokes are essentially like little idea puzzles, and when you are able to appropriately figure out what is true, what is not, that is good. That's good problem-solving behavior that evolution has rewarded. You- i- it's good to be able to figure out what is true and what is not. This is all speculation. The internal pleasure sensation is meant to reward you for being good at figuring out what is true in reality, and the external part, the laughter, is to demonstrate to other people socially that you figured out the problem and how you felt about it or whatever.
Benny Feldman: The internal part is to reward us for being good at problem-solving. The external part is to let people know that we solved the problem, that we're good at problem solving— so that they have sex with us, so that they keep us in the tribe to build community bonds where it's like, "Oh, you're, oh, you also solved that problem? I also..." You know what I mean? From an evolutionary perspective, it has to do with figuring out what is true and not and developing social bonds.
Fil Corbitt: Yeah, and I… I'm just looking at the list of questions that I have written down, and a lot of it kinda comes down to that and this moment on the internet of people having a really hard time figuring out what is true and what isn't, you know? And that bleeding into our everyday lives as well. There's some weird resonance there that is fascinating to me that I think I will dig into.
Benny Feldman: No, absolutely. People always say like comedy's rooted in truth, and it's like, well, yes, but it's also like truth is fundamentally subjective. And so you got a lot of these guys doing these jokes where it's like the foundational, quote-unquote, "truth" of their joke is that like “all immigrants are rapists” or whatever.
Benny Feldman, the internet: It's just a joke, dude. It's just a metaphor about how your ethnicity is similar to rats and bugs.
Benny Feldman: And they're like, "Oh, I'm just a... It's just a joke," or whatever. But they're reinforcing these underlying ideas where it's like “this ethnic group is undesirable”… Not everybody agrees what's true.
Benny Feldman, the internet: I hope you will agree, uh, fascism is bad from most possible definitions of the idea of bad. These stupid motherfuckers are destroying America for personal gain. Hope this framework helps you see what they're doing, and I hope this helps us stop them.