Fair game

Jordan Peterson has argued that comedy is like a canary in a coal mine — the less freedom comedians have to make jokes, the less freedom there will be in society at large. Kat Timpf makes the same point in her book You Can't Joke About That (2023).

Timpf, best known as a witty regular on Gutfeld! weeknights on FoxNews, struggled as a standup comic early in her career. Many of her jokes were about the most difficult parts of her own life — the death of her mother, her many health issues, her poor choices in men — and she says laughing at such trials actually helped her cope with them, even though others sometimes thought her humor insensitive. "How can you joke about that?" they wondered. She defends the right to joke about anything — death, rape, disease, natural disasters, corruption in your own political party, whatever.

"Actually, I've found that the harder something is to talk about, the funnier the jokes about it can be," she writes.

Her personal trials have continued since the publication of this book. She says that she once "joked with friends that my bra size is 'Double Mastectomy.'" Since writing those words she gave birth to her first child, but then was diagnosed with breast cancer — and had a double mastectomy. She has not yet returned to her TV program, but it will be interesting to see if she can joke even about that.

Timpf goes beyond the personal into the political in her book. That is the real coal mine. Are comics free to joke about the government? During the Biden administration most of the late-night comics avoided joking about President Biden, apparently out of fear for their careers, focusing their humor on Donald Trump instead. But the canary remained very much alive on Gutfeld!, where anything and anyone is fair game, thanks in part to Timpf.