Transcripts / The Darkness

Part One: Hello Darkness 

Hello children. It is I, the darkness within! So, you know how life is like… kinda bad? Well what are you gonna do about that hmm? I mean there's a few things you can do. First you could work to improve yourself and make the world a better place. That's probably the most effective approach eventually, but the problem is that it's hard. And I don't like things that are hard. 

Because when you do things that are hard, you have to feel bad now so that you can feel good later. And I don't want to feel good later, I wanna feel good now. And if you want to feel good now, well you have a couple options. 

The first is of course to do drugs. And I've tried that, I spent most of my 20's on the threshold of alcoholism, but it turns out that's not a cute look for me, it's not my vibe. So what I do now when I feel the darkness coming is what any respectable woman would do, I take a Xanax and lie on the floor for a couple hours. Is that a pea under my mattress your majesty? Or is it another Xanax I left under the throw rug? Now the problem with doing drugs is that when the drugs wear off, you feel bad again. In fact, you probably feel worse. 

So where do we go from here? Well, how about music? When you feel bad you want to listen to sad music, because sad music makes you cry and crying feels good. It's like an orgasm for sad people. And why settle for less than the official meme-song of sadness, "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel you know... I'm pretty sure there's another Xanax under this throw rug.

♪ "Hello darkness my old friend" ♪ 

But in the memes you only hear the first 10 seconds of the song, you only hear "hello darkness my old friend." And that's a very sad first 10 seconds of a song. Which is good, because if you're making songs for sad people, it's important to establish your sadness cred up front. Because sad people don't like happy songs. When you're sad, happy songs make you feel like you're being bullshitted. So we're 10 seconds into the song, "Hello darkness my old friend" the key is D# minor, the saddest of all keys. But when we get to the next line "because a vision softly creeping," something happens. Let's listen. 

♪ "Come to talk with you again" ♪ "Because a vision softly creeping" ♪ 

What was that? Suddenly a major chord, an unsuspected burst of sunlight through the clouds and every peach fuzz hair on the back of my biologically female neck stands on end. Hello light! So the song has enticed me with the promise of company for misery, and then it has tricked me into feeling good. And that's what I like about art, it takes the standard disappointments and humiliations of life and cooks them into something worth getting off the floor for. 

Unfortunately, I don't really play music much anymore because my hands are too beautiful for instruments and my singing voice sounds like a man. So all I really have left is what any aspiring artist with no talent turns to, comedy. And I especially like dark comedy. You know, comedy about the things in life that are the most painful. To me, dark humor is kind of like a sad song. It takes your worst feelings, traumas, and anxieties, and twists them into a source of pleasure. And don't all the finest pleasures come from pain? 

A lot of the time that means joking about topics that in ordinary life are considered taboo. You know sadness, fascism, sexual deviation, cults. Without the ability to joke and make fun of my own experiences of self-loathing, substance abuse, gender dysphoria, I mean I'd probably be on the floor right now looking for that Xanax. But this puts me in a kind of difficult situation, because I want to defend my sense of humor which I feel is like the core of my personality and what keeps me alive. But at the same time, I've noticed that a lot of the people in our culture who are really big on defending "provocative", "controversial", politically incorrect" comedy are kind of umm… dicknuggets? Let's discuss this, and by discuss I mean you sit quietly and I'll tell you what to think.

Part Two: Dicknuggets

So the year 2016 had just begun, and already the most 2016 possible thing was happening. Ricky Gervais an irreverent bad boy atheist comedian, was ranting on Twitter for days and days about how stupid it is that people are offended by things. This is pretty standard for Ricky Gervais, a man whose personal branding screams "I don't care about your feelings", "I know what it's like to be persecuted for my beliefs", "I'm too much of a badass rebel to care what minorities think". 

But in January 2016 Ricky Gervais was having an extra badass, irreverent, not-caring-about-your-feelings kind of month. Why? Because he'd just hosted the Golden Globes and upset a bunch of people by telling jokes about old tranma Caitlyn Jenner: 

"But as I say, I'm gonna be nice tonight, I've changed. Not as much as Bruce Jenner, obviously."

That's cutting-edge material there Rick. Very irreverent, very rebellious, very bad boy atheist, ooh. I mean I do wish he wouldn't deadname trans people on stage, but honestly the joke wasn't even as transphobic as a lot of the stuff I've just come to expect from comics. 

Still, I'm sure Twitter had a thing or two to say about it, and Ricky spent the rest of the month tweeting about how offending people is good actually, and how he definitely doesn't care that people were offended. But clearly Twitter got to him, because two years later he opened his Netflix special with a 13-minute bit rehashing the incident and doing a series of even more... "irreverent" jokes:

"Cause I've always identified as a chimp, right? Well, I am a chimp, if I say I'm a chimp, I am a chimp. Pre-op, but… Don't ever deadname me. Don't ever call me Ricky Gervais again. From now on you call me Bobo." 

Does he also identify as an attack helicopter? Does he realize he's doing a meme from 2014 onstage in a $20 million comedy special? My issue with this joke is that apart from being extremely passe and overdone, it also doesn't make sense unless you ignorantly believe that trans women are delusional men and even then it's just not very funny. 

But am I offended by the joke? Well, I think that it's ignorant, misinformed, unoriginal, and not very funny, and as a great comedian named Ricky Gervais once said:

 "To me, an 'offensive' joke is one that's lame, badly delivered and not funny enough." 

So by that measure, yes I'd say this "I identify as a chimp" bit is pretty offensive. But I'm not bringing this old controversy up because I'm offended. I'm bringing it up because it's just an arbitrary example of a cycle that it seems like our culture repeats about once a week. Somebody makes a joke, some people are offended by the joke, and other people are indignant about the fact that those people are offended. The cycle usually gets framed as a battle in a culture war that's supposedly going on between generation snowflake– easily triggered humorless PC cucks– and badass edgy nothing-off-limits free-speech truth tellers. 

Now if this really is a culture war between two sides then I am a double agent, because I'm a generation snowflake PC cuck who loves dank edgy memes, and I've found myself on both sides of this type of conflict many, many times. So on the one hand when I see the internet roasting a comedian for some shitty trans joke, my inner snowflake wants to watch the bastard burn. But my inner edgelady knows how it feels to be dragged across Twitter over a joke. And as someone who basically writes jokes about controversial topics for a living, I appreciate how difficult it is to maintain the mildly sadomasochistic character of comedy while also keeping your moral compass from getting too jittery. 

So what I want to try to do is step away from the heat of these social media battles, and try to abstract from them some more general philosophical questions. What is the purpose of comedy? What is it that makes comedy good or bad? Does good comedy punch up and speak truth to power? Does it bring light to some aspect of the human condition?

Is it as Aristotle said "the imitation of worse-than-average men?" Or is it just anything anyone laughs at for whatever reason? Well, I don't think there's a single objective answer I mean, comedy's pretty subjective. But we can probably reach some kind of understanding by discussing this, right? And by we, again I do mean me. The rest of you can keep your goddamn mouths shut.

Part Three: Strawmen

So as a trans woman up here discussing why I don't think Ricky Gervais's trans jokes are funny, a lot of haters and losers out there are probably gonna try to strawman me. "Did you just assume the strawperson's gender?" Ugh cis people have like two trans jokes and they're both so bad. Here's the strawpersons assholes. 

Strawperson One: "You hate free speech and are trying to silence comedians''. I'm not trying to silence anyone. Comedians can say whatever they want onstage, and I can say whatever I want about them. 

Strawperson Two: "You just can't take the heat when the joke's on you". I transitioned on YouTube, making controversial political content all the while and I read the comments. My heat-taking capacity is among the highest of all time. Of course I do now have the internalized self-loathing that has damaged my psyche irreparably, but sweetie, who doesn't? 

Strawperson Three: "You think no one should be allowed to joke about trans people." I invented joking about trans people. Ever heard of the mouthfeel? I'm that tran. That's right, if I die tomorrow my legacy will be that I applied wine tasting terminology to fellatio and I accept my destiny. Look, half my job is telling jokes about trans people. I live for trans jokes. I just don't think cis people are very good at telling them, because they don't know enough about trans people to know what the funny things are. 

And being transgender is honestly the perfect topic for comedy. Like, you used to live as one gender and then you became a different gender. Every single thing about that is absolutely hilarious. But humor is in the details, and Ricky Gervais does not know the details because he's clearly never been close to a trans person and that's why he's still telling these tinkertoy 2015 Caitlyn Jenner jokes. 

And it's too bad, cause I'm actually starving over here for good trans comedy. And I mean the real dark stuff too, I'm not talking about trans Rachel on the timeline calling her hormones "titty skittles". No I like the edgy stuff, I like being on the edge. Hi, my name is Natalie Wynn and I enjoy edging. 

Now there is one recent work of trans comedy that I'd like to share with you, because when you're doing art criticism it helps to have positive as well as negative examples. And the exemplary work I have in mind is one that not a lot of people are talking about yet, but which I have no qualms placing in the same company as the works of Dante or Swift. 

I am of course referring to "My Sperm Bank Experience" by Gigi Gorgeous. If you don't know who Gigi is, first of all who even are you? Do you have no respect for legends? She's a trans YouTuber– like THE trans YouTuber– whose classic works such as "My Hemorrhoids" and "I Had Sex With a Dog" long ago cemented her status as a comedy icon. But in this critic's opinion, the crown jewel of Gigi's oeuvre is without a doubt the singular masterpiece "My Sperm Bank Experience". Let's do a close reading.

Part Four: Gigi's Sperm Bank Experience

A great work of literature is never just a text. It is also what the theorist Jean-Jacques Visage du Poisson would call "a moment within an intertextual dialectic", love that! Let us therefore place "My Sperm Bank Experience" within its proper context.

Several months earlier, Gigi had released a video about how she and her girlfriend were trying to have a child, so far without success, and so they went to a fertility specialist. Apparently Gigi was not aware that taking feminizing hormones can make you sterile which… girl they tell you like seven times before you start hormones like how??? 

We'll move past it. A few months later the notification for "My Sperm Bank Experience" shows up on my phone– cause that's right I clicked the bell– and immediately I knew I was about to experience something special. The thumbnail for this video is so much greater than anything I've ever conceived of that honestly it makes me feel like a failure, both as a YouTuber and as a woman. The sperm donation cup is labeled with Gigi's signature. The i's are dotted with hearts, and her facial expression: "eww… cum". 

The video begins with Gigi explaining that in order to produce a sample for the clinic, she had to stop taking hormones for three months:

"So I hesitantly agreed. I was like fine I will stop all of my hormones so you know, my shit can get juicy again, and I can get a good little sample up in here." 

The sperm bank day arrives, she goes to the clinic, and approaches the receptionist: 

"And I said, 'yes ma'am'. I am here to give sperm. From me, to be frozen. Now." 

The doctor arrives and leads her to the exam room, which she describes with the precision of Mama Flaubert:

"I walk into this room. Fluorescent lighting the house. I was like I can see every pore in my arm like Jesus, what do they want me to do here? And then the kicker, this like leather couch. The back is kind of like angled, so I guess like you can lean and really get into it or something."

The doctor offers her lubrication, pornography if needed, and a donation cup. Gigi closes the door and gets to work:

"I get in the mood, I get in the zone and I'm killing it bitch. I am like I'm gonna give the best sample ever, my kid is gonna be a godsent child. Before I know it the moment has crept up on me and happened, and it's been so long that it hits the wall behind me."

And it's at this moment that glam goddess Gigi Gorgeous gets up off the leather couch and attempts to scrape a prodigious quantity of Gigi-jism off the wall of a fluorescent-lit exam room in a desperate final bid to become a mother. 

"And I took the cup and I was like full-on like scraping it off the wall, because I was like I'm not gonna let any little drop go to waste. You know I'm here, this is like my moment."

I'm trying to understand why this video makes me laugh so much. It's really the contrast of style and substance, like it wouldn't be funny if a masculine person told this story. It's funny because Gigi has this peak female storytelling style and this Real Housewives diction, but then the story itself is about blasting a giant load onto the wall of a room full of leather and pornography. The dissonance between form and content is genius. And that dissonance perfectly captures the absurdity of being transgender, with a comedic incisiveness that Ricky Gervais could only dream of. 

I also really relate to this story because right before I started hormones, I decided to freeze a sample of my own so I too have had a sperm bank experience. And it was exactly like Gigi describes down to every detail. It is not a dignified moment ladies. There is just no way to feel like a woman while you're hastily rubbing one out in an overlit room designed for men to ejaculate in. I feel so fish right now! 🤮

For those five minutes in that exam room, I was a man. Now, I somehow managed to get most of my sample into the cup but there's a different absurd detail to my story. The receptionist at the sperm bank saw on my paperwork that I was depositing because I was going to start feminizing hormones, and he asked me if there was a name I preferred he call me. 

In retrospect he was actually really sweet, and really cute, not that anything was gonna come of that at the time since I was pre-everything and rough around the edges. Be honest, I was all edges. But he asked me for my preferred name and I just blurted out Natalie. And so this was actually the first time anyone ever called me by my biological name, and it went like this. The receptionist at the sperm bank turned to me and said "right this way Natalie, here's a cup for you to bust a nut in". And that's how my life as a woman began. 🤮

Now in the end, Gigi's story is actually pretty tragic. Her sample wasn't usable. She wanted to have a child with her own DNA, but she's been on hormones too long and she just can't. And that revelation at the end of the video kind of recontextualizes how you see the whole story. In this ridiculous image of Gigi scraping ejaculate off the wall, I now see this primal maternal urge to produce and protect children, I see a mother bird whose chicks have fallen prematurely from the nest, I see the Virgin Mary cradling her child:

"I really really thought that I was gonna have a good sample and I was gonna be able to participate in having a baby with my DNA. But it's just not in the cards for me, and I really wanted to make this video more positive and funny because there's nothing I can do."

 And that's exactly it. That is the darkness. 

Part Five: The Darkness

The darkness is my name for what I consider the highest form of comedy, where you take your own worst feelings, traumas, and anxieties, and twist them into a source of pleasure. The darkness is Richard Pryor running down the street in flames because he set himself on fire in a coke-fueled psychosis. The darkness is Gigi Gorgeous scraping her own prodigious jism off the wall of an exam room in a desperate bid to save her chance at motherhood.

If you can make these low points funny, then you're gonna be okay. You're gonna survive. You're gonna make it through life. And I need that now more than ever, because trans experience is– in a lot of ways– pretty dark. But trans people make it through, because we're good-humored and strong as fuck. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to stop hormones before an operation, and I'm terrified of that. What's gonna happen to me when I stop hormones, am I gonna become a man again? Cause I don't know if I can handle that. I am thinking about names though, like maybe Nathan? Or Jayden? I can see myself as a Jayden. See I've gotta have my little jokey-jokes or I don't think I could make it through this. Like when I have bottom surgery, I am absolutely going to constantly refer to it as "my sex-change operation" cause it makes me laugh, it brings me joy. Calling it "gender confirmation surgery" brings me no joy.

Now it's important to notice that just because it doesn't make me laugh doesn't mean it's a "politically correct" euphemism. "Gender confirmation" is a more accurate term than "sex change" cause you're literally not changing your sex, that's not what surgery does. But edgy people have their own kind of political correctness, where they mistake edginess for honesty, accuracy, and directness. But these are very different things. 

For example George Carlin has a classic bit about euphemisms that has some great moments, but also some moments that are way off base. For example– content warning ableist slur:

"They say they're going to pre-board those passengers in need of special assistance. Cripples! Simple, honest, direct language!"

So look, I understand the aesthetic preference for simple, honest, direct language, and the repulsion toward verbose, bureaucratic jargon. That's why so much of the rest of this bit is so good. But the word he just used is literally a slur, so I wonder if what you're being honest about is your feelings toward disabled people. Because the phrase "passengers in need of special assistance" is a little wordy, sure. But in this situation it's actually more accurate since it also includes the elderly, the pregnant, anyone in need of assistance boarding. 

So I call my gender confirmation surgery "getting a sex change", not because it's more direct and honest but specifically because it's inaccurate and outdated, and that makes me laugh. Not because I'm a fearless truth-teller, but because I'm a bad person. And I get to call it "my sex-change operation" but cis people don't get to call it that, because it's my darkness not yours. Get your own darkness. 

When Ricky Gervais jokes about trans people, he's being a hack because he knows nothing of our darkness. And when someone tries to joke about something that they're totally ignorant of, the result is usually clumsy, awkward, and not very funny. What I'd really like to see is if Ricky Gervais took that irreverent bad boy derisiveness and turned it within. Because within is where the darkness lies.

Part Six: Self-Deprecation

Self-deprecating humor is my personal favorite because as a lazy, selfish, preening attention whore who looks like a slightly more passable Ann Coulter with the voice of a tropical bird, there's a lot of material here to work with. But especially when it comes to these trans jokes, there is a faction of the trans community that is not amused by the buffoonery that goes on on this channel. 

I think the objection to it is best summed up by the comic Hannah Gadsby, who in her stand-up special "Nanette" said that when self-deprecation comes from someone who exists in the margins:

 "It's not humility, it's humiliation."

And to be honest, I felt a little called out by that. 

"I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak."

And she's not wrong, like that is how this works. In order to gain an audience as a trans person, you have to demonstrate what cis people call "self-awareness". That is, you have to signal that you see yourself the way the audience sees you, which can mean looking at yourself with a pretty merciless gaze. And of course I'm happy to do that because I have no self-respect and laughter is the only way to numb the pain. 🙃

But the terrible thing about being a "not-normal" with an audience is that don't you don't just get to be yourself, because whether you like it or not, people will see you as a representative of the community. So because of that responsibility which I never asked for, I have to balance out the self-deprecation with a lot of positive messaging about my people. And that way, the dark jokes function as a spoonful of sugar to help the feminine penis go down.

But even without the group representation issue, it definitely is possible to take self-deprecation too far. As I've said, I have been diagnosed with an incurable edginess of temperament, and I sometimes do feel suffocated by the safe-space rules of a lot of trans spaces even though those spaces are there for good reason and a lot of people need them. 

But sometimes this atmosphere of everything and everyone is valid all the time, no uncomfortable questions may be asked, any self-deprecation is a sign of traumatic internalized bigotry, I just need to get out of there for a while and find a place where I can relax and be my edgy self. I need a safe-space for my edginess, where I can just blurt out whatever stupid question or joke that comes to mind without being afraid that I'm going to inflict horrible trauma on everyone around me. 

So I call up another transsexual edgelady, you know kiki, accuse each other of being crossdressers, and just laugh it all off. And it's so, so cathartic to do that. But, it has to be done in moderation, because there can come a point where you're picking at the wound instead of numbing it. And it mostly has to be done in private, because in public you have to worry about how cis people will interpret it, and so you have to find a way to be self-deprecating without abandoning all social responsibility. 

If there was ever a phrase that instantly deadens all laughter, it's "social responsibility". But since it's kind of the central topic of the comedy culture war, I should probably say something about it. Even though believe me, I'd much rather go back to jabbering about my sex change.

Part Seven: The Eternal Tension

So what is a comedian's job? What is a comedian supposed to do? I suppose my ideal comedian is one who is perfectly able to balance the tension between shitposting and snowflakery. And this is an eternal tension, and must never be resolved. It is a tightrope I have devoted my life to walking. 

See if the tension collapses into pure snowflakery, you get a moralist. Who might say that a comedian's purpose is to promote justice by punching up, by speaking truth to power, by exposing the flaws of bigoted mindsets and so on. And these are all very admirable goals, but they leave out what I think is the essential purpose of comedy, which is to be funny, to surprise, to shock, to make people laugh. 

It's kind of like how some art and media critics only ever evaluate a work based on whether or not it's socially progressive, and don't seem to really think about aesthetic pleasure very much which to me is the reason why art exists in the first place. But then again, I am a hedonistic bourgeois decadent and should probably be sent to the guillotine at once. Just let me do my makeup first so that when they hold my head up, everyone can see my beat and their wigs all fly to the Bastille. Also someone please post the video to my Instagram, cause that's gonna get a lot of engagement. 

So the opposite of the pure snowflake is the pure shitposter, who might say a comedian's purpose is to make the audience laugh by any means necessary. But that seems kind of barbaric since like, if a guard at a prison camp is torturing an inmate and the other guards are laughing, does that count as comedy? Is a war crime funny? Well according to the Geneva Convention, it's hilarious. 

The thing is, I don't think many comedians actually believe in a completely nihilistic vision of comedy. I think they sometimes pretend to when they're trying to evade criticism. I mean take even the edgiest of white guy comics and listen to the way they talk about their heroes, Lenny Bruce or George Carlin. There's always an element of admiration for bravery, risk, subversion, truth-telling. In other words there's a concern there for what is virtuous and what is true, not just for what makes people laugh. So maybe before we can even talk about what's funny, we have to have a level of shared agreement about what is true and what is morally right. 

My objection to Ricky Gervais's trans jokes is not just that they're not funny. I think he's wrong about trans people, and I think his ignorance is infectious. I think he's stirring up bigoted sentiments in his audience, which has the consequence of making the world slightly scarier for people like me. And this is edginess at its worst, just a privileged person with a platform punching down at a politically besieged group he understands nothing about. And that's what happens when the snowflake/shitpost tension collapses into pure shitposting. It's boring and immature.

Like when someone says he wants to watch the world burn. You only get to watch when you have the privilege of not being on fire. It's edgy, but it's not the darkness. The darkness is finding a way to laugh about being on fire. Edginess is always adolescent. The darkness is edginess aged by time and pain. And it's only at that full maturity that comedy becomes art, that it becomes comparable to music. 

So, those are my thoughts umm… like, comment, and subscribe uh… The End. 

Fine, I'll sing the song. 

♪"The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel ♪