"It's the teenage and university crowd, so we give them lots of sex jokes and gross humour"
About this Quote
A little too honest for the respectable version of comedy, this is Wayans admitting the quiet deal behind a lot of mainstream laughter: audience targeting is aesthetic targeting. The line isn’t apologizing for sex jokes and gross-out gags; it’s framing them as a practical response to who’s in the seats. “Teenage and university” signals a demographic in the sweet spot of disposable time, social bonding, and boundary-testing. If your goal is to pack a room and keep the energy high, you reach for material that lands fast, travels easily, and doesn’t require a shared bookshelf.
The subtext is cannier than it looks. Wayans isn’t saying young audiences are shallow so much as he’s describing comedy as a technology of permission. Sex jokes and bodily humor work because they let a crowd rehearse adulthood without consequences: you get to flirt with taboo, perform sophistication, and laugh off embarrassment as a group. Gross humor is also aggressively egalitarian; everyone has a body, everyone gets the reference, nobody has to decode the premise.
Context matters, too. Wayans came up in a period when mass-market comedy was built through clubs, TV sketch, and studio films that needed broad, immediate hooks to cut through noise. The Wayans brand often toggled between sharp parody and deliberately lowbrow spectacle; this quote pulls the curtain back on that calibration. It’s not cynicism so much as craft: know your audience, then meet them where their taste is still forming and their limits are begging to be tested.
The subtext is cannier than it looks. Wayans isn’t saying young audiences are shallow so much as he’s describing comedy as a technology of permission. Sex jokes and bodily humor work because they let a crowd rehearse adulthood without consequences: you get to flirt with taboo, perform sophistication, and laugh off embarrassment as a group. Gross humor is also aggressively egalitarian; everyone has a body, everyone gets the reference, nobody has to decode the premise.
Context matters, too. Wayans came up in a period when mass-market comedy was built through clubs, TV sketch, and studio films that needed broad, immediate hooks to cut through noise. The Wayans brand often toggled between sharp parody and deliberately lowbrow spectacle; this quote pulls the curtain back on that calibration. It’s not cynicism so much as craft: know your audience, then meet them where their taste is still forming and their limits are begging to be tested.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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