The Politics of Anti-Humor
Andy Kaufman's "Foreign Man" character embodied anti-humor by deliberately frustrating audience expectations
In the landscape of alternative comedy, few approaches are as deliberately subversive as anti-humor: the practice of intentionally frustrating audience expectations of humor, often by delivering jokes with no punchlines, purposely bombing, or presenting material designed to create discomfort rather than laughter. While sometimes dismissed as mere irony or absurdism, anti-humor functions as a sophisticated form of cultural critique that challenges not just comedic conventions, but also the social norms those conventions often reinforce.
This analysis examines how intentional comedic failure in alternative comedy serves as both aesthetic innovation and political intervention—revealing the constructed nature of humor itself and, by extension, the arbitrariness of many social and cultural arrangements we take for granted.
Defining Anti-Humor: The Art of Not Being Funny
Anti-humor exists at the intersection of comedy and performance art, deliberately violating the implicit contract between performer and audience. Where conventional humor creates tension that is released through a punchline, anti-humor builds tension that is either never released or released through means other than traditional comedic structures.
Several distinct approaches to anti-humor can be identified:
1. The "Anti-Joke"
Follows the formal structure of a joke but deliberately delivers a mundane or literal punchline that frustrates expectations of humor.
Example: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side."
This proto-anti-joke works by setting up the expectation of wordplay or absurdity, then delivering a statement of literal fact.
2. Deliberate Failure
Involves the performer intentionally "bombing" through awkward delivery, incomplete jokes, or material designed to create discomfort rather than laughter.
Example: Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby to an audience expecting stand-up comedy.
By refusing to meet audience expectations for entertainment, such performances expose the conditional nature of the performer-audience relationship.
3. Meta-Comedy
Comedy that explicitly comments on its own mechanisms, often by deconstructing joke structures or drawing attention to comedic conventions.
Example: Stewart Lee's extended routines that involve analyzing his own joke mechanics and audience reactions in real-time.
This approach invites the audience to consider humor as a constructed system rather than a natural response.
4. Excessive Repetition
Pushing a joke or premise well beyond its natural breaking point, creating discomfort that eventually circles back to humor through sheer commitment.
Example: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's use of awkwardly extended scenes or repetitive phrases that move from funny to uncomfortable and back again.
This approach challenges the economy of humor (the idea that jokes should be efficiently delivered) and reveals how contingent laughter is on timing and context.
What unites these approaches is a refusal to provide the expected comedy "payoff" in conventional terms. Instead, anti-humor offers a different kind of payoff: the revelation of comedy's constructed nature and the social dynamics that underlie it.
Historical Context: Anti-Humor's Evolution
While anti-humor has become particularly visible in contemporary alternative comedy, its roots stretch back through various avant-garde movements and comedic traditions:
Dadaist Performance
The Dadaist movement's deliberately nonsensical performances at venues like Cabaret Voltaire were designed to subvert bourgeois expectations and highlight the absurdity of conventional art in the context of World War I's destruction.
Lenny Bruce and the Politics of Offense
Though not strictly practicing anti-humor, Bruce's willingness to confront audience discomfort and challenge what could be considered "funny" laid important groundwork for later alternative approaches.
Andy Kaufman's Performance Art Comedy
Kaufman pioneered approaches that deliberately alienated audiences, blurred the line between performer and character, and rejected the easy gratification of conventional humor, establishing many anti-humor techniques still used today.
British Alternative Comedy Movement
Performers like Alexei Sayle and later Stewart Lee incorporated anti-humor elements as part of a broader rejection of conventional joke structures and politically regressive comedy.
Digital-Era Anti-Humor
The internet has facilitated new forms of anti-humor, from Neil Cicierega's "Animutations" to Tim and Eric's deliberately awkward aesthetics, while comedians like Kate Berlant and Eric André have brought anti-humor approaches to increasingly mainstream platforms.
As this evolution suggests, anti-humor has consistently emerged or gained prominence during periods of social upheaval or media transformation. This is not coincidental—anti-humor thrives in contexts where existing structures of meaning and authority are already being questioned.
Political Dimensions: How Anti-Humor Functions as Critique
Though often perceived as merely absurdist or nihilistic, anti-humor's deliberate frustration of comedic expectations carries significant political implications:
Exposing the Social Contract of Performance
By violating the implicit agreement between performer and audience, anti-humor draws attention to the constructed nature of all social interactions. When a comedian deliberately "fails," they reveal the fragility of social norms that maintain conventional performance.
"When conventional comedy succeeds, it reassures us that the world makes sense. When anti-comedy succeeds, it reveals that our sense-making is arbitrary." — Dr. Eliza Wang, Cultural Studies of Comedy
Challenging Humor's Reinforcement of Power
Conventional humor often reinforces existing power structures through shared assumptions about what is "naturally" funny (frequently at the expense of marginalized groups). Anti-humor can disrupt this by refusing to participate in expected punchlines or by making the mechanisms of humor itself the subject of scrutiny.
When Tim Heidecker performs as an incompetent, offensive stand-up comedian, he's not simply mocking bad comedy—he's highlighting how certain comedic approaches are inherently tied to regressive politics and unexamined privilege.
Rejecting the Commodification of Comedy
In an era when humor is increasingly packaged as a frictionless product for mass consumption, anti-humor insists on comedy as a potentially uncomfortable, challenging form that resists easy categorization or consumption.
The deliberately "unprofessional" aesthetics of shows like "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" reject slick production values and easily digestible content in favor of an approach that demands more active, critical engagement.
Creating Alternative Spaces for Marginalized Voices
For performers who don't fit conventional models of who a comedian should be, anti-humor provides a framework for challenging those conventions rather than trying to succeed within them.
Comedians like Kate Berlant and Julio Torres have used anti-humor approaches to create space for perspectives and experiences that don't conform to traditional comedic expectations.
In each of these dimensions, anti-humor doesn't simply reject comedy's conventions—it uses that rejection to highlight the political and social assumptions embedded in conventional humor.
Case Studies: Anti-Humor in Practice
Neil Hamburger: The Politics of Failure
Gregg Turkington's character Neil Hamburger—a hacky, sweaty comedian delivering terrible jokes with painfully awkward timing—exemplifies anti-humor's political potential. Hamburger's deliberately awful performances create a space where the audience must confront their own expectations about entertainment and their complicity in the performer-audience dynamic.
Hamburger's act parodies the entitlement often displayed by male comedians of a certain era, whose sexist and outdated material was delivered with an expectation of laughter regardless of quality. By embodying this archetype to the point of painful failure, Turkington critiques not just bad comedy but the social conditions that enabled it to flourish.
The character also highlights class dynamics in comedy—Hamburger is presented as a struggling, pathetic figure far removed from the glamour of successful comedy, drawing attention to the economic precarity that underlies much of the entertainment industry.
The Eric André Show: Anarchic Deconstruction
Eric André's talk show parody takes anti-humor to its logical extreme, creating a space of deliberate chaos that systematically dismantles every convention of the talk show format. From destroying the set to physically and psychologically discomforting guests, André's approach is both anarchic and deeply political.
The show's treatment of celebrities is particularly significant—by placing famous guests in genuinely uncomfortable situations rather than the pre-arranged "challenges" of conventional talk shows, André strips away the carefully managed personas of celebrity culture.
As one of the few Black creators in alternative comedy, André's willingness to create genuinely threatening or uncomfortable scenarios also confronts racial dynamics in comedy. His physical comedy and destructive approach reclaim a space typically denied to Black performers, who have historically been policed more strictly in terms of threatening or transgressive behavior.
Kate Berlant: Gender and Performance
Kate Berlant's improvisational style uses anti-humor techniques to explore the performance of gender and authority. Her characters often employ the confident, declarative language of TED talks, academic lectures, or wellness influencers while gradually revealing their own incoherence.
By inhabiting these modes of "expert" discourse and then subverting them through logical contradictions and performative breakdowns, Berlant critiques how certain forms of knowledge production—especially those associated with contemporary capitalism—rely more on performance than substance.
Her work is particularly effective in exposing how women are expected to perform competence, confidence, and likability simultaneously—an often impossible task. When Berlant's characters fail to maintain these performances, they reveal the constructed nature of gendered behavior in professional and social contexts.
These case studies demonstrate how anti-humor moves beyond mere absurdism to engage with specific political and cultural issues. Each performer uses comedic failure not as an end in itself, but as a means of revealing and critiquing broader social dynamics.
Cultural Significance: Why Anti-Humor Matters Now
Anti-humor's recent prominence in alternative comedy reflects its particular resonance with contemporary cultural conditions:
Response to Information Saturation
In an era of constant content and algorithm-driven engagement, anti-humor's deliberate inefficiency and refusal of easy gratification represents a form of resistance to the attention economy.
"When everything is optimized for immediate engagement, taking ten minutes to tell a joke that isn't funny becomes a radical act." — Tim Heidecker, Interview with The Guardian, 2023
Authenticity in the Age of Performance
As social media has made personal performance a constant for many people, anti-humor's deliberate "breaking" of performance offers a rare space of authenticity—even if that authenticity comes through artificially constructed failure.
The discomfort created by anti-humor often feels more genuine than the polished entertainment that surrounds us, creating a paradoxical authenticity through acknowledged artifice.
Post-Irony and New Sincerity
Anti-humor has evolved alongside broader cultural movements away from pure ironic detachment. Contemporary anti-humor often combines ironic distance with moments of genuine emotion or political commitment, reflecting a broader "post-ironic" turn in culture.
Shows like "Nathan For You" use anti-humor techniques to create uncomfortable scenarios that ultimately reveal genuine human connection, suggesting that anti-humor can be a route to sincerity rather than away from it.
Response to Political Crisis
Anti-humor has historically flourished during periods of political instability or crisis, when conventional meaning-making systems are already under strain. Its current prominence reflects a period where many institutional and cultural certainties have been disrupted.
By refusing conventional comedic reassurance, anti-humor acknowledges the genuine anxiety of the current moment rather than providing false comfort.
These factors suggest that anti-humor is not merely a stylistic choice but a significant cultural response to contemporary conditions—one that uses comedic failure to address the larger failures of our political, economic, and social systems.
Conclusion: The Successful Failure
Anti-humor's deliberate embracing of failure provides a uniquely effective form of cultural critique. By refusing to deliver the expected comedic payoff, anti-humor practitioners expose not just the mechanics of comedy itself, but the broader social dynamics and assumptions that conventional comedy often reinforces.
In a media landscape increasingly optimized for frictionless consumption, anti-humor insists on friction—on moments of discomfort, confusion, or alienation that force audiences to engage more actively with what they're experiencing. This creates space for more complex forms of meaning-making and more substantive political critique than conventional comedy typically allows.
As alternative comedy continues to evolve, anti-humor approaches are likely to remain vital tools for comedians seeking to challenge rather than reinforce existing power structures. The deliberate failure of anti-humor may ultimately succeed where more conventional comedic approaches cannot: in revealing the constructed, contingent nature of social reality itself.