What Is Comedy For?

The question has never been harder to answer.

- By James Parker

What do you get if you give a whale a cellphone? Moby Dick pics.

I made that one up. Is it funny? I don't think so. Nonetheless, it's a joke. Or what Jesse David Fox, in his compendious, deeply considered, provoking, and rather dizzying new Comedy Book, calls a "joke-joke." A verbal-conceptual circuit, an abstract frivolity. "Jokejokes," Fox writes, "are jokes you find in joke books. They're freestanding, authorless, utilitarian tools to produce laughter." Or if not laughter, then perhaps just a faint tickle in the forebrain, as of a very tiny problem, solved.

Fox, a comedy critic at New York magazine, is explaining joke-jokes to distinguish them from what comedians mean when they say "jokes"-comedy jokes which are bits, stories, ideas, images, moods, themes, words, basically anything that produces the comedy feeling, that does the thing that comedy is supposed to do.

Which is what, exactly? What's comedy for? Ah, well, now we're in it. Comedy is for jabbing us in our pleasure centers. For being nice by being nasty. For puncturing grandiosity. For relieving tension, creating tension, living in tension. It's for making us laugh, but then again-is it?

We are in a moment, comedywise. On the one hand, there's never been more of it-more specials, podcasts, comedy-generated discussions and debate and cultural flare-ups. There's a rhythm and an expertise about comedy criticism right now (Fox's very much included) that reminds me of good jazz writing from the '50s and '60s: savvy, insidery, immersed, excited, with its own developing vocabulary.