Tragic Comedy

With a carved jaw line, blue eyes and impeccably level hair, Anthony Jeselnik could be modeling a thousand dollar sweater in a ridiculous black and white photograph for a brand you or me could never afford. He doesn't, at least, not yet. He makes comedy instead. Bleak comedy. Ruthless, dead-baby-in-toilet-bowl comedy. Comedy that has proven so popular, in fact, that he was invited by Comedy Central to publicly humiliate no less than Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, and David Hassellhoff in Roast episodes on live television. “Oh boy, Donald Trump? He was my favorite Roast,” Jeselnik confesses, sounding immensely satisfied. “Charlie Sheen had just come out of a complete train wreck, and he needed to go on the Roast to show that he could still be funny and human: whereas Trump was just there to say 'bring it on'. There's no way you can hurt Donald Trump.”

Evidentially thrilled by the experience, the comedian can readily justify his role in the network's cathartic, semi-gladiatorial marathons of humiliation. “You could hurt Charlie Sheen. But Trump was just a machine that you could… peel layers off. You knew he was going home to a beautiful wife, and a giant pile of money,” Jeselnik concludes. The glee in his voice is infectious. Jeselnik cracks bones to get at the marrow. As for Sheen himself? “You've made more women have abortions than the test for Down Syndrome,” Jeselnik slung at the disheveled actor with a grin in front of 6.4 million viewers. If popular comedy didn't know who Jeselnik was before the Sheen Roast, it did afterwards.

It's quite an evolution for a man who graduated high school wanting to be a writer and studied classical Shakespeare. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, majored in English Literature at Tulane University, where he shed his earlier literary ambitions and discovered comedy. “Oh, I've always loved Shakespeare. I'm a big reader,” he explains, in a more restrained tone. “I feel like if I'd been born 50 years ago, I'd be a writer. I feel like the novel's almost gone away, it doesn't pay like it used to. I studied a lot of Shakespeare in college and high school. I worked shitty jobs to help pay the rent while I worked on stuff. The comedy started up like that, a way to write and pay rent. But eventually, I found my work getting in way of comedy. So I had to make the call, and get into comedy full-time, so I could develop my material.”

From this point, it wouldn't be hard to assume that as a comedian Jeselnik was drawn to classical comedies, but the comedian denies the connection. “It's funny, because I'm not really attracted to Shakespeare's comedies, I like more the jokes he includes in his darker plays,” Jeselnik admits. “Macbeth. Hamlet, of course. Romeo & Juliet. The fact that there are these young people just… killing themselves,” at which he laughs. “With Romeo and Juliet, there's nothing almost romantic about it, they're just too dumb to know about it, they're just kids. Shakespeare was writing at a time when life was pretty horrible for everybody. People could identify with that stuff,” argues Jeselnik. It's a morbid take, but a valid one.

Audience's craving for cruel humor is older than the Coliseum, and Jeselnik is happy to oblige it. As such, there's more depth to Jeselnik's standup material than the simple reduction of overexposed celebrities. Jeselnik's succinct and brutal comedy has just earned him his own, hour-long show on Comedy Central, and he is evenly ruthless about everything to almost everyone. “Every joke I have, something awful is happening. I've jokes about suicide, child molestation, abortion – every terrible thing. Every joke offends someone in my act,” Jeselnik rationalises. Rape, murder, suicide, substance abuse and random acts of violence are essentially the fundamentals of his act. “I try and give the audience a relief of tension. If I have a joke about something horrible, and that builds the tension up that much more, so the laugh is bigger. In essence, I'm making people laugh at the worst things in the world,” he admits, with the glowing pride another artist might take in admitting they'd studied classical theatre.

Naturally, Jeselnik's position is that comedy is, by nature, brutal. It's difficult to argue otherwise; Schadenfreude is at the heart of most comedian's routines. Laughter is an empathetic biological release with a cryptic and largely unexplained evolutionary role. But making people laugh at sexual assault and death can understandably get a comic into a world of pain. Since Daniel Tosh tried to silence a female heckler by telling her it'd be funny if she got gang raped, there's been a hurricane of press scrutiny and public opining in the United States about comedy's parameters.

Unsurprisingly, Jeselnik is clean-cut about where he stands on the matter. “Rape is never going to go away. Death is never going to go away. These horrible things that ruin people's lives are always going to be there, and all I'm doing is making people laugh at them, which I think is a very noble thing,” he insists. “The [Tosh] debate kind of came from people who don't understand comedy. Everyone thinks they have a great sense of humor, most people don't. So when they hear a joke they don't like or a topic they don't like, they feel like they deserve an apology, because they're being attacked personally – but that's not the case.

“But I think with things like a rape joke, which I have several of…” Jeselnik pauses, considering his position, before adding, “in fact in my new hour, I open with a rape joke, just to prove a point. To say 'I can do this'. I'm not your friend on stage. I'm just this guy on a stage saying awful things. If you want to laugh, great. If you don't want to laugh, the last thing I owe you is an apology,” he concludes sharply.

As his Comedy Central Roasts testify, the man can spit acid. But the malignant ex-girlfriends, abusive fathers and pedantic mothers that provide the engine of his routine are completely manufactured, a concession he makes immediately. Jeselnik's personal circle of friends and family are spared in his material. “They all know it's an act,” Jeselnik explains, keen to emphasize the distinction. “Nothing in my show is autobiographical. My family's actually relieved when my dad hears a joke about him being a heroin addict that cheated on my mom. He's relieved that I'm not telling a story about family Christmas. A lot of comics will talk about their families in a way that says, 'Here's how screwed up my family is, hey, everybody laugh at me',” Jeselnik adds, sounding perplexed.

Do people resent him for his brutality? “If people get upset, I'll sometimes get emails, where people say 'That crossed the line for me, my uncle went through this'…'My mum had breast cancer, she went through this', and I say to them, I'm a comedian, I'm not doing these things. I'm helping people laugh at them. If that doesn't make you happy, I have no problem with that,” Jeselnik concludes. Not many comics can pull laughs routinely from material that normally makes for angry, bold-fonted, front-page newspaper headlines. Life can be cruel, but it's a relief to have a comedian like Jeselnik drawing comedy from the cruelty.