Predators in Comedy: A List

Or: one road to the horrorshow.

There’s plenty of stuff that’s been written about the recent wave of revelations about powerful men abusing their power to get sexual attention from women. Many people have explained in detail how wrong that behaviour is, and others have outlined excellently how it affects women.

Tea With Alice guest Laurie Kilmartin has written one excellent article for the New York Times, which I think hits all the beats on that topic in a down to earth way. Other people have talked about how it is natural, if not laudable for powerful men to seek sex, suggesting that power is one of the things that Women find attractive about men, and asking men not to use their power to pursue sex is like asking women not to use their physical attractiveness to do the same.

This is not either of those things, nor does it touch on those arguments. This is just me trying to understand the process of self deception that might explain why some men (specifically Comedy performers) who are otherwise normal (not sociopathic or malicious) can end up taking unforgivable advantage of their power.

Let me know if this all follows, or is drawing too long a bow:

1. Comedy works well when you’re not patronising. There are different ways to achieve non-patronising, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to undermine yourself - to assert low status, play dumb, play weak or play out of control.

2. People don’t become comedians because they’re confident in their power and status. (people in general aren’t that confident, but Comedy as a job selects for people who are trying to correct for a power imbalance. #notallcomedians etc etc)

3. It’s easier to do Good Comedy if you can convey authenticity. This means *feeling* what you do.

4. in order to play the status of ‘not powerful’, ‘non-patronising’, (which helps you avoid alienating the audience or turning your performance into a lecture talk) you need to *feel* that lower status.

5. It’s hard to accept that you’re a powerful person when your job relies on your not asserting your power, which often ends up meaning pretending to sustain your low status when you’re actually dominating a room.

6. This all adds up to people with power who are unwilling or incapable of seeing themselves as anything other than *not intimidating*, which is at the least a proxy for or socially analogous to ‘low status’.

7. Someone who feels, authentically that they have been hard done by, by the world, becomes successful. One of the dangers of that combination is that they might feeling they are owed something. Success, in that view of the world manifests as access to riches long denied (in the form of money, attention, sex), but *not* in a personal reframing of your status-identity.

8. On a more existential level, it’s easier to dial up your reactions to deal with hardship and stress than it is to dial them back down to deal with ease - this is one of the factors in PTSD. There’s a survival necessity to being savage in savage situations, and not as much to calming back down in times of no threat.

9. if part of your work involves refusing to acknowledge the power you have, and much of your success relies on exploring your perceptions of the world from the position of someone who is the butt of jokes, the piece of shit, the hapless dude, it makes it hard to look clearly at how much power you have. How can you be a bully if you’re being bullied by the world

10. This all adds up to those people, when they become powerful, grabbing what they can when they can, however they can, with the narcissism of poverty and the viciousness of power-blindness, enabled by the platform of power.


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Caveats:

I’ve put aside sociopaths and monsters for the purposes of this list, because those people respond only to very particular kinds of information.

I am interested in how a more or less normal guy gets to the point where he crosses the line into treating women like a commodity, purposive to his pleasure, rather than as a human being.

Obviously there are many many excellent people who adjust their self image and self perception according to context, and behave with respect to their situational power.

But because status is one of those tricky things that can be both subjective and objective, it’s a very easy thing to call on your own perception of your identity as a measure of your position, and that’s not always wise.