Antoine Wilson’s Notes on “Hack”
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ANTOINE WILSON
Notes on “Hack”“Taste has no system and no proofs.”1. To start with comedy. There is only one unimpeachable criterion: Is it funny? But a question follows close behind: Funny to whom?
—Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”
2. Apocrypha from the world of television: A sitcom writers’ room is working late into the night, trying to generate the perfect gag to punch up a scene. Joke after joke is pitched, but nothing seems to work. The scene remains stubbornly flat. Finally, a writer pulls out a box of index cards and rifles through them. He stops, pulls out a card, and asks: “Can the floor be wet?”
3. A Hack can get a huge laugh out of an audience. And yet he can also rightly be called unfunny. When we employ Hack as a pejorative, we call into question the audience’s taste. We say, in effect: You are laughing only because you have no taste.
4. Meanwhile, to himself and to his fans, a Hack is justified by his success; he need not justify himself otherwise.
5. The comic who recycles old jokes, confirms stereotypes, pantomimes his way through his act, and makes folks chuckle without in any way threatening the established order is offensive to us precisely for failing to offend.
6. A Hack comic is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, “poking fun,” never “killing.” He is the jester who won’t risk the king’s displeasure.
