How Joking About Life Turned Life Into A Joke

Stand-up comedy became conscious of itself in the early 1980s when Martin Scorcese directed The King of Comedy, which he found so unpleasant and disturbing that he struggled through the filming and avoided seeing it in the theater. Today reviewers of Joker claim that director Todd Phillips’ appropriation of Scorcese’s material makes Scorcese look empathetic by comparison. The nihilism of modern stand-up comedy saturates Joker, which is the unfunny culmination of years of attack on societal mores, morals, and the sacred that leaves people isolated, alienated, and prone to porn and violence, causing the claim that we live in a clown world. How Joking About Life Turned Life Into A Joke, traces and explains how and why we came to this juncture, and what can be done to counteract it.