Laughs as Black as Death

Larry Charles’ comedy credentials, if there is such a thing as comedy credentials and his new Netflix docu-series Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy makes a fairly strong argument that there isn’t, are impeccable. Working as a jokesmith and filmmaker for four decades, he’s been writer for Fridays, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the director of three of Sacha Baron Cohen’s films including Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a movie that was not only a huge critical and commercial success but will also be forever remembered fondly by critics for allowing them to pad out their word count with minimal effort.

Lately, though, he’s been disillusioned with the direction comedy has been taking. A late-in-life comedy crisis isn’t unusual, but instead of more typical choices like cranking out one more celebrity vanity project just for the cash or making a movie in which he plays a wise but burned-out comedian who finds joie de vivre by dating a beautiful young woman old enough to be his granddaughter, he pitched Netflix on a documentary series in which he would visit some of the most devastated regions of the world, talk to people completely traumatized by war, hang around with racists and hatemongers and mass murderers, and visit countries where comedy not only won’t get you your own sitcom deal, but will likely get you killed. The point of all this is not to trivialize or goof on these experiences — although Charles is obviously keenly aware of the often crushing absurdity of the situations in which he places himself — but to illustrate how laughter is a universal coping mechanism for people who have suffered unspeakable pain.

Dangerous World of Comedy is a four-episode series, each built around a particular theme. The first, set largely in Iraq and Liberia, is centered around the victims of war in these violence-plagued countries; the second deals with warriors themselves, including American veterans, Liberian and Somali child soldiers, and left-Twitter darling Brace “PissPigGrandad” Belden; the third focuses on racial issues, including alt-right comic Baked Alaska and kleptomaniacal Instagram star Boonk Gang; and the fourth concentrates on gender, with a particular focus on the perils of being a female comedian in Nigeria, where the thriving stand-up scene is highly male-centered and misogynistic. Charles is neither judgmental nor neutral, and while he usually has an obvious sense of empathy for his subjects, he usually lets them speak for themselves, counting on his audience to make their own moral decisions.

But a funny thing happens on the way to Fallujah. Charles has a comic’s appreciation for what’s funny and what isn’t, and he recognizes that it’s not his place to calculate the political correctness of the content of other countries’ humor. However, he’s clearly uncomfortable in several situations, even ones of his own making. Determined to find out what makes people laugh even when those people are monsters, he interviews white supremacists in America, ISIS terrorists in Iraq, and Al-Shaba’ab militants in Somalia. Perhaps his biggest get is Joshua Milton Blahyi, the mass murderer formerly known as General Butt Naked; during the Liberian Civil War, as a field commander for the warlord Roosevelt Johnson, he carried out countless atrocities, including — by his own admission — cannibalism and child sacrifice. In perhaps the series’ most surreal moment, he meets Blahyi on a dark street in the nation’s capital and listens to the war criminal explain how he really enjoys watching reruns of Bill Cosby on Kids Say the Darndest Things.

This would be a great moment in itself, the accounting of a once-infamous figure of his own past as he stands nervously under a camera light and jumps at every sound, telling a stranger that human meat tastes like pork ribs and that he grew up loving The Jeffersons. But something — instinct? a filmmaker’s skill? a moral imperative? — won’t let Charles stop there. He returns to two women he’s interviewed before, Liberian comedians who suffered rape and abuse at the hands of General Butt Naked’s forces, and asks them if they believe that he is, as he claimed, reformed and is trying to lead a life of Christian devotion and help rehabilitate the child soldiers destroyed by his own actions. The older of the two recounts having seen him preach and being shocked that the audience didn’t rise as one and murder him; she then wishes that he would kill himself. The younger nods, then says she wishes he was there so she could kill him herself.

It’s a shocking moment in what’s putatively a show about comedy, but it’s not the first or the last. Another chilling moment in Liberia occurs when Charles and his crew encounter a street performer who makes pocket change by enacting elaborate and all-too-real pantomimes of a soldier carrying out his deadly tasks. It turns out the man, who goes by the name “Special Forces”, was a soldier himself — a child soldier, forced into service at the age of ten in 1983. His soul has been shattered by his past, and this is all he can think to do to cope with his trauma; Charles asks him what he might want to do someday instead of clowning his bloody past for pennies, and he hangs his head in shameful tears, unable to even conceive of a future for himself that isn’t just a replay of his past. As a human being, Larry Charles is clearly devastated by this and reaches out to him helplessly trying to ease his misery; as a filmmaker, he closes the episode with footage of Special Forces doing his act seamlessly intercut with nearly identical news footage of child soldiers during the civil war performing identical motions, scored to “Vesti la Guibba” from Pagliacci. In the hands of someone less talented and committed to the premise, this would be alarmingly corny; Charles makes it into something surprising and nearly transcendent.

The show is full of little moments like this, from desperate neo-Nazis pretending that they’re just in it for the LOLs to Charles admiring the craft of a comic who specializes in deeply disturbing skits to help veterans avoid suicide. But it’s also the Larry Charles we know, and so there’s no shortage of genuine laughs and hilarious humor — and even when he presents us with styles of comedy that are entirely foreign to western sensibilities, he makes it clear that even if they don’t speak to him, they speak to someone, and that gives them value. It’s all over too soon, but it’s a real rarity in the Netflix era of disposable standup specials and throwaway documentaries: a series about comedy that both tells us something meaningful about the art form and manages to explore some very dark corners of the world without a whiff of cheapness.