Ask A Genius 1161: Hack Comedy
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/11
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are you defining and presenting hack comedy?
Rick Rosner: Let me answer the question, then I’ll talk about hack. There’s a hack stance that, of course, American men, the kind who hang plastic testicles off the back of their pickup trucks, are cooler with lesbians than with gay men. Because bros, frat bro types, they’re regular, rednecky, or bro-ish guys who love a pair of hot college girls making out with each other.
There might be a reality behind that hack joke—that Americans maybe don’t mind women experimenting with same-sex sexual activity the way they’d freak out if they found out their male partner had engaged in same-sex sexual activity in college. Now, if you want me to define hack, hack comedy is relying on easy and often obsolete stereotypes to make jokes off of. Or leaning into jokes that have been “fucked out”—jokes made 20 years ago. Everybody who’s familiar with comedy knows those jokes, but the hack comedian still builds off of them. It’s a desperate way to try to be funny—going into your file of hack humor because you don’t know any better, and trying to make shitty jokes. Shitty because they’re used up.
You can do decent humor, good skilled humor, building off hack stuff if you acknowledge the hackiness of what you’re building from. But a hack comic has trouble coming up with new material and leans into old, easy stuff, especially if their target audience is unsophisticated or hasn’t seen much humor.
I know you could argue that Leno on The Tonight Show was hackier than some of the other late-night hosts because his jokes were simpler and more obvious. So there you go. There’s also some people who view that as a minor tragedy of Leno. He came up in the ’80s with Letterman and all the other innovative comedians. His stuff was original and clever. He came from that generation of really inventive comedians.
Then he took over The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show in 1992, which I guess means that’s when Leno took it over. Carson’s stuff in the last 10 years of his show was pretty lazy, and you could argue it was hacky. Maybe his monologue was weak, and what people liked were his interviews, where he was sharp and funny with his guests. Leno kind of followed that tradition—easy jokes for a huge audience of unsophisticated consumers.
He had mass appeal, but it wasn’t pushing any boundaries. Having worked in this space, I can tell you that one key to avoiding hackiness is not being satisfied with your first batch of ideas. When Judd Apatow makes a movie, he does table reads with all the funny people he knows in town, and they all throw out a ton of jokes for every little scene. So you have dozens of jokes to choose from.
That’s the way to get a good joke. You don’t stop at your first idea for a joke on a topic. You keep going until you’ve run through a bunch of jokes, and you choose the best one after working at it for a while. Sometimes, you do multiple batches on a subject until you get a joke that’s good enough. A hack will stop after one or two ideas.
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