At the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland (in 2010, its third year), I found myself standing next to Ahamefule in the back of a club, watching an old friend’s set. The guy was doing a bit about sex, or maybe online dating—I don’t remember the premise, but I remember that the punch line was “herpes,” and it was killing. It wasn’t a self-deprecating joke about the comic’s own herpes. It was about other people. People with herpes are gross, ha ha ha. Girls with herpes are sluts. I hope I never accidentally have sex with a gross slut with herpes! Let’s all laugh at people with herpes and pretend like none of the people in the room has herpes, even though, depending on which statistics you believe, anywhere from 15 percent to 75 percent of the people in the room have herpes. Let’s force all of those people to laugh along too, ha ha ha.
It’s a lazy joke, but a common one, and a year earlier I might not have thought anything of it. Just then, though, a friend was going through some shit—a partner had lied about his STI status, then slipped the condom off without her consent, and a few weeks later she erupted in sores so painful she couldn’t walk or sit, move or not move. She was devastated, not just because of the violation, the deception, and the pain, but because the disease is so stigmatized. She was sure she’d never be able to date again. It seemed entirely possible to her that she might be alone forever, and, she thought, maybe she deserved it. “You know,” I remember telling her, “it’s just a skin condition. A rash, like acne or hives or eczema. Are those shameful?” I rubbed her back while she sobbed in my car.
That interaction was fresh in my mind as I watched this dude—who is a funny, good person—tell his joke, and I thought about all the people in the audience who were plastering smiles over their feelings of shame, of being tainted and ruined forever, in that moment. I thought about my friend, who—unless you believe recreational sex is an abomination and STIs are god’s dunce caps—didn’t “deserve” this virus. Neither did anyone else in that room. So, did she deserve to have her trauma be the butt of a joke? Even if you could milk a cheap laugh out of the word “herpes,” was it worth it to shore up the stigma that made real people’s lives smaller and harder? Was the joke even that funny anyway?
Stigma works like this: Comic makes people with herpes the butt of his joke. Audience laughs. People with herpes see their worst fears affirmed—they are disgusting, broken, unlovable. People without herpes see their worst instincts validated—they are clean, virtuous, better. Everyone agrees that no one wants to fuck someone with herpes. If people with herpes want to object, they have to 1) publicize the fact that they have herpes, and 2) be accused of oversensitivity, of ruining the fun. Instead, they stay quiet and laugh along. The joke does well. So well that maybe the comedian writes another one.
I cycled through that system over and over in my head. It was maddeningly efficient—what were people supposed to do? More broadly, in a nation where puritanical gasbags have a death grip on our public education system, can we really expect ironclad safe sex practices in people from whom comprehensive sex ed has been withheld? Blaming and shaming people for their own illnesses has always been the realm of moralists and hypocrites, of the anti-sex status quo. Isn’t comedy supposed to be the vanguard of counterculture? Of speaking truth to power? The longer I turned it over the more furious I became. Why do we all just laugh along with this?
I moved close to Aham’s ear and said, over the boisterous crowd, “You know, I could have herpes.”
He looked at me, clearly startled. A little thought throbbed in the back of my head—how handsome Aham was, with his broad shoulders and mole-brown eyes, towering over me at six foot five. He was an incredible comedian—insightful and fearless, always one of my favorites—and I’d recently found out he was a jazz musician too, like my dad. (He’d also been divorced multiple times, like my dad, and had two kids and a vasectomy, like my dad when he met my mom.) A mutual friend had mentioned the other day that Aham was a great cook. Was this really a dude I wanted to say “I might have herpes” to? I shoved the thoughts aside. It’s just a skin condition.
“A ton of people in this audience probably have herpes,” I went on, “but they have to pretend to laugh anyway. That has to be the worst feeling. Why do that to people when you could just write a different joke?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re right. I could have herpes too.”
Aham and I had been chatting at house parties and open mics for five years, but we didn’t really know each other well. Years later, he told me that he’d always been a fan of my writing, but that moment shifted his perception of me forever. “I was just blown away to hear a woman talk like that,” he said. “I started to realize that you weren’t just funny—I’d always thought you were funny—but that you might be a really, really, radically good person.” Sometimes it pays to tell hot guys you might have herpes, kids!
We were inseparable for the rest of the weekend—we went to an arcade, played hours of Plinko, drank beer, helped Hari come up with burns in a text fight he was having with Marc Maron. Within a year, Aham and I were a couple and he and my dad were playing gigs together.
This was the life I’d dreamed of at twenty-two: hanging out with comics, falling in love, riffing all day. But, in the same moment, I felt my relationship with comedy changing.
Death Wish
Comedy doesn’t just reflect the world, it shapes it. Not in the way that church ladies think heavy metal hypnotizes nerds into doing school shootings, but in the way it’s accepted fact that The Cosby Show changed America’s perception of black families. We don’t question the notion that The Daily Show had a profound effect on American politics, or that Ellen opened Middle America’s hearts to dancing lesbians, or that propaganda works and satire is potent and Shakespeare’s fools spoke truth to power. So why would we pretend, out of sheer convenience, that stand-up exists in a vacuum? If we acknowledge that it doesn’t, then isn’t it our responsibility, as artists, to keep an eye on which ideas we choose to dump into the water supply? Art isn’t indiscriminate shit-flinging. It’s pure communication, crafted with intention and care. Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find?
The short answer, I’d discover, is “nah shut up bitch lol get raped.”
For years, I assumed it was a given that, at any comedy show I attended, I had to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about why we deserve it, about ranking us, about fucking us, about not fucking us, about reducing our already dehumanized existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. This happened all the time, even at supposedly liberal alt shows, even at shows booked by my friends. Misogyny in comedy was banal. Take my wife, please. Here’s one I heard at an open mic: “Last night I brought this girl home, but she was being really loud during sex, so I told her, ‘Sssshhh, you don’t want to turn this rape into a murder!’” Every time, I’d bite back my discomfort and grin—because, I thought, that’s just how we joke. It’s “just comedy.” All my heroes tell me so. This is the price if I want to be in the club. Hey, men pay a price too, don’t they? People probably make fun of Eddie Pepitone for being bald.
When a comedian I loved said something that set off alarm bells for me—something racist, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise—I thought: It must be okay, because he says it’s okay, and I trust him. I told myself: There must be a secret contract I don’t know about, where women, or gay people, or disabled people, or black people agreed that it’s cool, that this is how we joke.