What Are the Rules for Jokes About Someone’s Appearance?

Assuming that there are rules (which there clearly aren't)

How does a comedian know when a joke crosses a line? In my experience, you don’t; you just write the joke and wait to see how many people call you Hitler and how much they seem to mean it. Comedy exists in a pre-Hammurabi’s code environment: Nobody knows the rules, and justice is brutal and uneven. Comedians discuss what’s in-bounds and out-of-bounds and why, but those conversations typically happen in isolated writers rooms, and if lunch arrives mid-conversation, then the whole thing gets dropped.

And I think that’s how jokes like this one from The Onion end up getting published:

For reasons I’m about to discuss, I think this joke is in-bounds. But there’s also little doubt in my mind that The Onion would not have made this joke if Noem’s politics were different; if Noem was progressive, this joke would cause BlueSky to take corporeal form and go on a Godzilla-like rampage. It is, after all, a joke about a woman’s appearance; it only got through because Noem is one of the Bad People. The rules are highly variable, which means that they’re not really rules; they’re vague notions with unknown parameters enforced by the bands of high-energy morons that dominate social media.

But what might the rules be? Let’s talk about that. In my opinion, there absolutely should be rules about what is okay and not okay to say about a person’s appearance. Surely, none of us want to live in a world in which comedians torch people for how they look, because 99.8 percent of us believe that we’re unfuckable trolls, and a small percentage of us are right.

It’s tempting to say that the rule should be “never make fun of someone’s physical appearance.” Unfortunately, that violates another important comedy rule: “Be in the room.” “Be in the room” means that if you’re on stage, and a clumsy French waiter yells “Sacré bleu!” while falling face-first into a huge plate of linguini, don’t just soldier on like nothing happened. Address what’s going on, react to what your audience is reacting to, comedy is pointing out absurdity, and when you ignore absurdity, you seem dense. If someone’s appearance is the elephant in the room, you kind of have to tear that elephant a new elephant-sized asshole.

The archetypal case of this, of course, is Donald Trump. These days, “orange man” jokes are hack, but imagine if no-one had ever mentioned that Trump wears ridiculous, Home Depot Orange bronzer and has a combover detectable from space. You have to address that at some point. Another example: When I was at John Oliver, we once had a bit involving a celebrity’s picture, and this celebrity had had so much plastic surgery that when we put their picture up, the audience laughed. It made it impossible to continue; we had to write a joke acknowledging the person’s appearance just to say “yes, we see it, too” so that we could get to the joke that we wanted to tell (which wasn’t really about that person). Sometimes, a person’s appearance is so absurd that a comedian’s hand is forced.

So, open season, then? No, I don’t think so. The key distinction, in my mind, is that you can make a joke about someone’s appearance if they made themselves look that way. Nobody put a gun to Trump’s head and forced him to slather his face with pumpkin pie mix and make his hair look like two Pomeranians 69ing; nobody forced that unnamed celebrity to walk into the lowest-rated plastic surgeon in Kazakhstan and say “what’s the most you can do to me in one hour?” The agency is key; you’re not making fun of the person’s appearance so much as you’re making fun of their ridiculous action, which is how mockery typically works. And FWIW, in my opinion, all rules about who deserves to be mocked — which is a whole other conversation about power, relevance, and the extent to which a person has made themselves public — still apply.

Should there be an exemption for women? That seems worth considering, because women’s appearances get scrutinized more than men’s. “Ugly woman” was a stock comedy character for the first 4,985 years of the form, finally falling out of favor around 2010. Expectations of physical attractiveness for women and men obviously have been and still are vastly different, as proved by all Spanish-language television, in which the guys looks like the Standard Issue Schmo and the women are so hot that they should be seen through one of those cereal box viewing devices that you use during an eclipse.

But my two cents is that I don’t think there should be an exemption. Though less common, men get ugly-shamed, too, and it’s bad. Making different rules for different groups causes problems; it can turn into a tribalist exercise in which groups try to make the rules apply to everyone but them. I think it’s better here for everyone to be subject to the same rules, partly due to my strong preference for universal rules and partly because if I have to ponder what separate rules would mean for trans and nonbinary people, then my brain will throw itself in front of a city bus.

And that’s why I’d rule The Onion’s Kristi Noem joke in-bounds. But I wonder how many people follow my same logic; specifically, I’m wondering how many break off at the “different rules for women” point on the decision-making process. And I wonder how many of those apply that standard to female figures they like; there seem to be a lot of comedians these days who consider their subjects sufficiently evil that no rules apply.

I’ve probably violated these rules dozens, if not hundreds of times in my career — I am, after all, a sputtering, clattering joke machine with smoke shooting out of its joints. But I haven’t been helped by the rules’ vagueness; the find-out-if-you’ve-crossed-a-line-when-your-career-is-being-burned-at-the-stake system is not optimal. I think if we carved “He who mocks another’s butt-ugly visage shall have their pig’s-asshole-lookin’ face mocked in turn” on an onyx obelisk, that would be major progress.

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