The Joke’s On You, Especially in Academia
Higher education is not really a laughing matter, but let's try anyway
So, a university president, a corporate senior vice president, and nonprofit senior program officer are all sitting at a bar off East 59th Street, after a long decision-day Thursday. Gus, their bartender, asks in his Hollywood-exaggerated New Yorker accent, “Hey jerks, what is it that youse all dos for a living, anyway?”
Damon, the university president says, “I kneel and grovel for money.”
Steve, the senior program officer says, “I do cartwheels, somersaults, and floor exercises for money.”
After a brief pause, Alan, the senior VP says, “I use ad spots to hold up people for money,” while gesturing with his right hand in his blazer pocket. “Now give me your wallets!,” he says.
Gus pulls out his Saturday night special, and points it at the senior VP. “You mean like this?”
The senior VP says, without batting an eyelash or turning away, “I work for a trillion-dollar company. We get a billion people to sign their lives away every day. Hell yeah, it’s like this!”
The other stooges and Gus laugh. The bartender started to put away his gun. But then his rage got the better of him. He took one more look at the balding simp Damon, with his fake, obsequious cackles, and blew a hole right through the center of Damon’s dome.
Steve asked shakily, “W-Wh-Why him? Why not me or my friend Alan over there?” Alan was busy wetting his boxers, his shaved, deep-bronze head bent down as he stared at the trickle on his shoes.
“Because, jerks, youse wouldn’t be where you are without some university lying about education changing youse lives. Without him, youse assholes ain’t here, robbing the world blind!”
The toxicity of higher education, for all involved, is nothing short of a cruel mockery of the idea of merit, if one can find anything funny about academia at all. If my years of being in college classrooms and on university campuses could help me into any still unexplored career, though, it would be stand-up comedy. I’d dream of having the confidence of Eddie Murphy, the knowledge and biting edge of Richard Pryor, and the sexiness and witticism of Sommore. And end up failing miserably in delivering lines and in messing up my material.
Actually, I don’t think I would fail. I could gradually move from trial runs at dive bars on Karaoke night and Laugh Shacks and Improvs during Saturday matinees to sleepy college towns. There, I could draw maybe 120 people with my sarcasm and musings about life as a successful itinerant minister of education.
I could get good at this, but I doubt there would ever be an HBO, Showtime, or even Netflix special in my future. Academia is funny in the range of the macabre and sardonic, and rarely the obvious “Look at this stupid muthafucka!” kind of funny. To be an even minimally successful stand-up comic working with material from the higher education universe, it would be a must to make light of the pettiness of academicians, the stupid rules about becoming a tenured professor, and the toxic hypocrisy of most colleges and universities. And yes, I’d have to make fun of some of my former students, too, because so many of them deserve it.
I’d start something like this.
“Folks. Listen. I got passed over for a job again.” Someone in the audience yells, “Oh no!”
“You mean, ‘Oh yes,’ right? Yep, yep. This dude at Loyola University Maryland told me they weren’t even gonna interview me for the job.” More in the audience moan.
“He said, ‘Your scholarship is outward-facing. We want someone who does traditional scholarship’.” The audience now looks like they all have question marks hanging over their heads.
“I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck does that mean? You don’t want me because people actually read my stuff? Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me right now?’” A few in the audience chuckle as they hear the laughter in my own voice.
“But what I’m really thinking is, ‘Do you even fuckin’ know what scholarship is? This muthafucka has put out one article in one sleepy academic journal that maybe 300 people have read in six years, but other professors praise him for being thoughtful. Every time I publish anything, thousands of people actually read it. But I hear crickets from those same profs. These muthafuckas wouldn’t know scholarship if they was named Scholarship!” Some laugh. A few academicians in the audience groaned like I punched them in the balls.
“I didn’t get the job. But I’m happy to not take a job not offered to me. Why would I wanna work with these backstabbing muthafuckas? They haven’t published a damn thing that normal people read, passing judgment on my work. Heck, most of them haven’t published anything they would read at a doctor’s office or in a cabin in the woods themselves. Oh yeah…By the way, most of these profs are white, so you know they love themselves some woods and shit!” That last part always gets the room in laughter.
“But you know what’s the dumbest thing about academic life? You know what’s the worst damn thing about academicians and their rules for getting and keeping a job? You know why academia sucks worse than leeches killing George Washington on his deathbed, suckin’ up that slaveowning muthafucka’s last drop of blood? They do most of this shit for free!” The room roars with hilarity, with about a third of the room — mostly grad students — clapping.
“You heard me right, folks. For. Free.” I am pacing back and forth, now, with a fuchsia face towel in my hand, as sweat from my scalp starts pouring down my forehead and the sides of my temples.
“It’s such a fuckin’ Ponzi scheme! Even the highest paid prof ain’t making what they should. They give you a contract to teach, like, four or five or seven or eight classes a year, maybe with a line like ‘with other additional duties’ thrown in. They pay you maybe $70,000 or even $100,000 a year. Sounds great right? Wrong! Because from that point on, everything else is free labor! Everything!,” I yell. The older folks in the crowd, mostly long-tenured white guys, start squirming in their seats. The middle-aged set and grad students are all waiting for more to laugh about.
“Like you’re not paid to do research and to write books and articles, but you can’t earn tenure as a prof without doing these things — how fucked up is that?,” I rhetorically ask. “Heck, some of y’all are paying journals to publish your research, upwards of $3,000 per article. Now I understand why science and technology profs make so much more than us dumbass humanities types!” More a few oohs, ahhs, and gasps went up in the crowd.
“I’m tellin’ you, the whole damn system is a scheme. Take teaching at some elite school like Georgetown, or Johns Hopkins, or Princeton. Students are paying $80,000 a year to take eight or 10 classes, about $9,000 per class. If you or I as a prof teach 30 or 40 students in a class of first-year students, the university makes between $270,000 and $360,000 off just that one class! You hear me! If you’re the lucky tenured dickwad, you’re making maybe $25,000 per class while teaching four classes a year. Dumb muthafucka, you ain’t even gettin’ a 10-percent cut!,” I yell, and even the stodgy old white guys laugh, one so hard they let a tear drip.
“So much of this shit you do for free and you think is normal, but this shit ain’t normal! Giving up 10 or 20 hours a month to sit on committees or to consult with filmmakers and museums? Taking students on tours of subways or shopping malls? Spending spring break after summer vacation doing research for your next book? Going to conferences that each cost $2,000 in airfare and hotel stays to attend? All for zero dollars? All y’all muthafuckas’ crazy!”
By now, everyone was laughing it up. The hard part about turning the crushing reality of academia into comedy was still to come, though.
“But what if you’re not like the quote-unquote ‘leading expert in your field,’ a full-time prof with tenure and a halfway decent salary?,” I asked. “Well, my folks, y’all’s pretty much fucked.
“You see, the dirtiest part of this scheme is that academicians are encouraged to blame themselves for their rotten luck. Everything is, ‘You don’t have a job because you fuckin’ suck. You don’t have a book because you suck like shit. You don’t have a future because academia has told you from day one that you suck unless they approve of you.’ You suck so much that you think they lettin’ you suck on a chocolate milkshake when you get a job, any job. But really, you’re suckin’ down all their shit because you believe that if you research hard enough and publish hard enough, somehow, you’ll live as an equal in that world. But you don’t realize, academia is a trash heap that runs on bullshit!”
The whole room of 120 is laughing and clapping and cheering me on, like I have discovered some sort of divine truth. Some are shouting, “Fuck academia! Fuck academia!” Grad students are chanting, “Uni-on! Uni-on! Un-ion!” After half a minute, I yell. “Thank y’all for that. But it’s too late. As far as academia is concerned, we are all fucked!”
That’s the dream. But the truth is, I descend from families of lame-ass joke tellers, the Gills and Collinses by genetics, the idiot Washingtons because of my mom’s hellish second marriage. My best quips are biting, sarcastic, off-the-cuff, and mostly unplanned jabs at the farcical nature of human life and human nature. All of that happens because I am a quirky person who has accepted my quirky goofiness, with laughter in my voice for every joke I chirp, no matter how bad or lame.
Not so with my parents or one-time legal guardian. I have endured physical abuse, psychological abuse, poverty, neglect, and malnourishment at their hands, and untreated PTSD from sexual assault because of their deliberate ignorance. Yet the lack of any sense of humor is at the top of my list of the most abusive aspects of having parents who often refused to do better even when better was within their grasp. Watching my mom quip to my stepfather that he was a “pea-bos, pea-brained idiot” after he called her “a pea-brained idiot” passed for comedy on my home front in the 1980s. It was about as comedic as watching the two of them engage in an after-dinner farting contest the summer after my first year of college at the University of Pittsburgh. They stood at either end of the apartment living room. They lifted their left legs to expel their methane as loudly as possible. To my four younger siblings, between nine and four years old in 1988, it might as well have been Def Comedy Jam with Bernie Mack and Cedric the Entertainer. And I thought going from Pittsburgh to New York to Mount Vernon in four hours was culture shock enough!
Otherwise, this is the best any of them could do in stand-up comedy. “You know, you were in school so long, you could've had another high school diploma.” That’s what my mom said to me the morning after she received her associate’s degree, and four days before ruining my PhD graduation at Carnegie Mellon. It was out of the blue, and caught me completely off guard. It was quiet for a moment, with me in a deep frown, and my Mom sitting there for a few seconds. Then she forced a laugh. "It's a joke," she said, as if I was supposed to be oblivious to the nonverbal displays of disdain for nearly a decade's worth of my work. My mom had told the lamest of jokes over the years — like about how diarrhea "was like 'dying in the rear' — you get it?” But this clunker wasn’t an attempt at joking at all. What was the joke? My degree, or the amount of time and energy I spent in earning it?
For my wayward, alcoholic dad, his best was “Look at dis po’ ass muddafucka. Po’ ass muddafuckas cain’t do shit fo’ me!” He yelled this at patrons at hole-in-wall bars from East 241st Street in Wakefield in the North Bronx to joints in Midtown around 43rd Street in Manhattan. His jokes would lead to “Who the fuck you think you talkin’ to?!” from Black, Latino, and white patrons, with folks threatening to kill him and the occasional fist in the face or bottled busted on his head. I must have pulled him out of bars and potential fights between 15 and 20 times from the time I was ten until the summer before I started college in 1987.
My stepfather’s jokes were always about putting down people, too, and always with a bigoted and violent edge. “You and your brother are gonna be my brown-skinned servants.” That was his non-joke joke to me when I was seven, just months removed from seeing Roots in its debut on ABC in 1977. The colorism was real in his stupid bullying ass. He would also sometimes sing his threats as jokes, bellowing “'I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,'” adding, “'And ya KNOW that!'” at the end. That last part was something he pulled from the disco group known as The Jammers. Like most bullies and abusers, my one-time stepfather didn’t develop his own original material, this despite his writing aspirations. It was all about exploiting and breaking people. His idea of a punchline was me or my mom at the receiving end of his fists and kicks.
I wonder what it would have been like if I had been really honest with myself while enduring my two stints in academia. I wonder if my first foray into academia, from potential graduate student to young academician between 1990 and 1999, could have been different. That is, if I hadn’t compartmentalized the parallels between the psychological abuse I endured growing up and the petty abuses and hazing so typical in academia. I wonder if my struggle to maintain a middle-class-level income as an adjunct or term faculty member, consistently in academia between 2007 and 2024, could have worked out better. That is, if I had done my lectures and small group discussions in the form of stand-up comedy and comedic skits.
Academia itself is a terrible, terrible joke, a belief in a meritocracy that has never existed, not in the US, and certainly not in USian higher education. With the exceptions of Black/African American/Africana/Ethnic Studies, there isn’t a single field in academia that isn’t white (and often male) dominated. Even in African Studies, most of the leading scholars are white guys. Most folks who end up with doctorates and tenure-track jobs and tenure and published books come from affluent families. Eighty percent of those who publish articles and books — scholarly or otherwise — either earned their degrees from an Ivy League or an elite institution or teach at one. The US higher education system is one with built-in affirmative action for white men possessing educational and socioeconomic advantages. Yet it runs on the lie that is merit, and that assumption dominates all thinking in the US. So much so that anyone who ends up crushed in this system blames themselves for failures not their own, for bad choices that they never controlled to begin with.