By the Joan Rivers of Babylon

The way Hacks portrays things isn't as they are, but maybe ought to be

Barn unforeseen circumstances, we’re headed for season three

Ava, the young sort-of protagonist (but not star) of the acclaimed HBO Max series Hacks, is demographically and politically the kind of person who in real life would say there is no such thing as “Cancel Culture.” She doesn’t say this on the show — despite being its avatar for all late-Millennial/early-Gen Z social justice and anti-oppression opinions; if we’re being lazy, for Wokeness — because the entire series is premised on the idea that her promising career as a Hollywood comedy writer was derailed by a handful of ill-considered tweets. Her being consequently frozen out of all work in Los Angeles is how she comes to find herself in Las Vegas, writing for Deborah Vance, the show’s stand-in for Joan Rivers, played brilliantly (except arguably in the stand-up sequences) by Jean Smart.

Hacks is impossible to imagine without two pieces of sometimes funny, often heartbreaking non-fiction films centred on female comedians. The first is 2010’s Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg. When it came out, A Piece of Work felt like a revelation; full coverage of a household name celebrity, but not for a reality show that they controlled. Two years into the post-Lehman global economic meltdown, the documentary somehow made a cosseted multimillionaire leapfrog past our empathy to land directly in our sympathy; as she sat in sparkling ancien regime grandeur going through index cards of meticulously catalogued but aesthetically creaky jokes, or explained how much sitting through a celebrity roast actually broke her heart but that the money was too good to pass up, the main feeling the documentary left one with was sadness.

Rivers was also, even by that time, out of step with the changing mores of North American comedy. Her jokes were too mean; self- and other-hating, fat-shaming, culturally parochial and even racist. This is one of the tensions that Hacks mines to greatest effect: the audience’s contradictory instincts to root for a talented woman who won at a toxic male-dominated game playing by all of its worst rules. Vance, the show’s version of Rivers, is indebted to the way the latter was seen in A Piece of Work more so than in any of her stand-up or red carpet specials, or even shopping network shilling.

The second film without which Hacks is inconceivable — with which, in fact, nearly every scene of it is in quiet dialogue — is 2018’s Nanette, written and starring comedian and monologist Hannah Gadsby and directed by Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry. Nanette’s famously counterintuitive premise was that it was a comedy special about the hard limitations of comedy, suggesting that comedy couldn’t properly express people’s deepest pain, hurt, or outrage without falsely resolving it.

For the general public, Nanette was something like Tiger King or Squid Game — a show on Netflix that was briefly all that anyone was talking about at all, before quietly falling back into the unfathomable ocean of content. But the effect that Nanette had on the tastemakers and gatekeepers of the entertainment industry — whose current fashions involve at least feigning distaste at the very idea of gatekeeping — was much longer lasting. Gadsby’s special kicked off a time when comedy writers would be encouraged or instructed to scale back the joke-density of their scripts; stand-ups would be urged to say more about themselves on stage, about how they felt, even if it came at the expense of a few punchlines.

Or, as my aunt said when she told me about Hacks, “Nothing can just be funny anymore.”

The relationship between Nanette and Hacks is complicated. The overarching show itself, as a dramedy toggling between laugh lines and wacky characters and genuine pathos and sadness, is a vindication of Gadsby’s thesis. But over the course of the second season, as Deborah is putting together her more honest, raw, “real story” comeback show with Ava’s enlightened 21st century help, she explicitly comes to reject the po-faced confessional comedy of Nanette for something more self-deprecating, sharper, funnier, and tougher.

In other words, Hacks wants what most people who aren’t on Twitter or aren’t full-time far-right YouTube comment trolls seem to want, and keep telling pollsters they want: a world that is generally kinder and less hateful, and also knows how to make and take a joke. But where Hacks wants to have its cake and eat it is in never challenging Ava’s understanding of the world.

The least realistic season two story arc involves Deborah being booked for a show on a gay cruise ship — perfect, her home turf demographic. Only it’s a lesbian cruise, not one with gay men. After first finding, to her surprise, sisterhood and acceptance among the passengers, Deborah’s show stumbles when she delivers a miscalculated lesbian golfer joke, then veers into total catastrophe when she goes off script trying to save the set with crowd work which descends into quasi-homophobic recrimination. She is booed, hissed, and voted off the ship by a quorum of passengers.

And that’s it. The story doesn’t then leap from there onto social media, as it inevitably would in real life. There are no TMZ follow-ups, as there would be without question if something like this ever actually happened. She endures a localized humiliation, learns from it, and moves on to become a better person.

It’s a fantasy version of making a mistake, rooted in a bygone time. Through Ava’s gaze, Hacks takes more or less as given that anyone who wants to retrieve that bygone time is a reactionary.

More and more in our culture war flare ups, comedy repeatedly comes to our attention as the torn seam where the stuffing keeps coming out; nobody can sew it shut (especially when we’re in stitches), and the very things we love about it — its anarchy, chaos, insouciance, its unpredictability and ill-discipline — are some of the particular things that make it a problem in our current cultural context.

The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote that “comedy embraces roughness and imperfection from the outset, and has no illusions about pious ideals. Against such grandiose follies, it pits the lowly, persistent, indestructible stuff of everyday life.” Not a great fit for an era more or less defined by its pious ideals; or maybe a perfect fit.

Gadsby was wrong; comedy can address pain, hurt, and outrage without resolving them — but it means being willing to still be uncomfortable after a joke is finished. The progressives’ case against joking is self-contradictory: in their view, comedy is both unsafe and not safe enough.

But the fantasy world laid out by Hacks is worth fighting for in reality: one where power discrepancies as well as historical and contemporary oppressions and exploitations are understood and acknowledged (and in which we work to overcome them); where genuinely hurtful mistakes have proportionate consequences which allow their perpetrators time and room to learn, make amends, and grow; and where comedy, premised on the paradox that people are both a lot less formidable and yet a lot tougher than we tend to give them credit for, is allowed to be funny.

You are invited to my book launch tomorrow (Thursday June 23rd) at The Lido on Boradway, 518 E. Broadway, Vancouver — I hope to see you there!