: Big dudes crying
As I said a few days ago, Jason Isbell has a mystifying ability to speak to “man pain” and provoke a compassionate response in even the most stoic of listeners. I recently watched an interview (relevant part begins at 8:40) with Desi Lydic on The Daily Show where Jason—yeah,we call him Jason) remarks that he is moved when he sees repressed southern men like him crying at his concerts: “I see a lot of big dudes crying at the shows and it makes me really happy.”
In response, Desi makes a little joke about how even some of the guys in the live audience might be breaking up, and Jason reassures them that it’s OK: “Don’t cry big dudes—you can do it. This is a safe space, big dudes.”
Let’s look closely at this joke, because it reveals something about Jason’s technique for “getting through” to an audience that might not be ready for it. The political connotations of the term “safe space” are a bit of a moving target, but I associate the term with those on the right who use it to deride liberals as being too soft. A typical context would be: “This is a marketplace of ideas, not a ‘safe space’; consider that your ’trigger warning,’ liberal.”
So, if you are used to hearing “safe space” as a term of mockery, then Jason’s joke is clearly at the expense of the big dudes. And yet, it is not directly at their expense: he is not mocking them for crying. Rather, he is teasing them because the fact that they are crying is itself a repudiation of their stereotypes about masculinity. The subtext is something like: “That’s funny how you mock liberals and soft boys for needing a safe space, but now look who’s coming to the concert to cry his eyes out?”
Jason is speaking the manly man’s language here—facts and logic—and showing, not telling his audience that needing a safe space doesn’t subtract from their manliness: an important realization. Jason’s banter is carefully calibrated to cut through the listener’s layers of repression and self-hatred. He is showing rather than telling, chiding rather than scolding. And we trust Jason because he is speaking to his own experience (the joke wouldn’t land if Desi made it).
I think this is good communication at work, an example of meeting the audience where they are instead of where you want them to be.