The Last Laugh: Why Self-Deprecation Is Dead | Cramped Composting

These performers will no longer make fun of themselves just for laughs. And they’re transforming comedy across the globe.

When Cameron Esposito was in college, she had a friend who would memorize her class schedule, hide behind a nearby tree, jump out and tackle her to the ground. His behavior made her uncomfortable, but she didn’t know how to deal with it. So whenever they hung out, she would drink. One night, after heavy drinking, they went back to her dorm room. “I know that I didn’t say yes,” Esposito says. “I also know that I couldn’t have.” She pauses. “This is the shit I think we’re not talking about — we’re just at the edge … and I want to push it further.”

Esposito isn’t delivering a talk on sexual assault. This is part of her new stand-up comedy special, Rape Jokes, performed live at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) in Los Angeles.

And she’s not alone in taking this counterintuitive approach to comedy. For decades, self-deprecation has been viewed as the essence of successful comedy, the ability to laugh at oneself a vital part of any comic’s toolkit. But a growing band of comedians is flipping the script on modern humor, using comedy specials and stand-up routines to vocalize marginalization and injustice they’ve faced — while making the audience laugh.

Care workers in Denmark are reporting increasing rates of harassment, raising thorny ethical questions.

Imagine you are a female caregiver, tending to an elderly client with dementia in his home. It’s just the two of you in the house, and as you help your client get into the bath, he squeezes your backside. You ignore the gesture, knowing he probably doesn’t mean it, but then he grabs at your chest — this time, with force. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but as he comments on the shape of your body, you become acutely aware of how isolated you are. You desperately want to leave, but you can’t abandon this elderly man alone in the bath.

By 2060, 155 million Europeans, 30 percent of the population, will be 65 years or older, according to the Global Coalition on Aging. The number of Europeans living with dementia will jump from 10.5 million in 2015 to 18.7 million by 2050.

While there’s been some public dialogue about elder abuse — when adults over 60 are abused, neglected, or financially exploited, sometimes by their caregivers — there’s little conversation about what happens when the roles are reversed.

Vin Weber, a Washington super-lobbyist for clients sympathetic and not, is in the crosshairs for his work for Ukraine.

After a decade in Congress, Vin Weber was drummed out for, in effect, not having enough money in the bank. The Minnesota Republican wrote more than 100 bad checks from his House bank account, one of dozens of members who were roasted for a perk that came to define an out-of-touch Congress in 1992. Weber went on a farewell apology tour of his sprawling district, where one local newspaper memorably printed a constituent’s call for his jailing.

But this was just the first act of Weber’s Washington tale. In the past quarter century as a lobbyist, Weber’s checkbook has been flush as a power broker respected on both sides of the aisle. The question hanging over Weber now is whether he will be felled once again by scandal — this time as a side player in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe that has exposed the shady world of overseas lobbying via Paul Manafort, former Donald Trump campaign chairman and Weber business associate.