What Killed Humor?

By Joseph Epstein

Thursday, February 04, 2021

 

If you know of any working comedians, or television sitcoms, or comic writers you think genuinely amusing, please don’t hesitate to let me know about them, for I have in recent years been suffering a fairly serious humor deficiency. I cannot remember the last time I smiled even faintly at a New Yorker cartoon. I cannot get through most current stand-up comedy routines. Seinfeld was the last sitcom I enjoyed. Something has happened to the GNH, or Gross National Humor, which for a long while now has been plunging steadily downward.

 

Perhaps the “gross” in GNH is a mistake, for much of what’s passed for humor over the past few decades has not wanted for grossness. In the standard choreography of progress — one step forward, two steps back — the removal of censorship has put a serious dent in comedy. In an earlier day, when jokes about masturbation, fellatio, and menstruation were not allowed on public stages, comedians were forced to be more inventive and relied on social observation, irony, timing, language artfully deployed — all qualities that comedy shared with good writing. With so many comedians now working blue, no longer, and distinctly not for the better, is this so.

 

Not that a touch of grossness, artfully applied, isn’t funny, or even sometimes appropriate. On November 29, 1963, I was in the audience at a New York movie theater for a performance by Lenny Bruce. Bruce had to work in the movie theater because he had lost his New York cabaret license over an obscenity-law violation. November 29, 1963, of course, was one week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Without introduction or musical fanfare, Bruce walked out from behind the curtain, paused briefly, and, in a conversational voice, said: “ ‘Oswald,’ it’s a f***in’ rabbit’s name. And who doesn’t know a putz like Jack Ruby.” He then went on to register the shock of a now long-forgotten comedian, Vaughn Meader, whose chief stock-in-trade was a Kennedy impersonation and who, Bruce claimed, when told of the death of the president, said: “But I’ve had 50,000 T-shirts printed!” Bruce then shifted smoothly into a skit about a Jewish nightclub owner offering one of his Puerto Rican busboys $50 to have sex with Sophie Tucker, the singer then appearing at his club and who in the skit is assumed to be an insatiable nymphomaniac. The punch line, delivered in a strong Spanish accent, was: “I don’t care what you say, Mr. Rosenberg, I’m not going to schtup her!”

 

More comedians seemed to be at work in that day. But, then, there were more places for them to display their talents. Television no longer offers what were once known as variety shows, the most popular of which at the time was The Ed Sullivan Show, which ran from 1948 to 1971 and introduced innumerable stand-up comics, among them Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Flip Wilson, Alan King, Phyllis Diller, Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, and others. So big was comedy that some comedians had their own shows — Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Carol Burnett, Steve Allen, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis — on which still other comedians appeared. Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, was so popular and so amusing that people stayed home on Saturday nights to watch it. Johnny Carson was known for introducing new young comedians on his late-night talk show and having older established comedians — Jonathan Winters, Don Rickles, Shecky Greene, Dangerfield — as fairly frequent guests.

 

The range of comedy was in itself fairly impressive. Rickles did insult humor, Winters went off on wild imaginative flights, Burnett did pleasing physical humor, Mason did heavily Jewish material, and Wilson riffed on black culture, while both Rivers and Diller worked the veins of female vanity, sensibility, and resentment, and Steven Wright played off the comedy of literalism (“Went into a restaurant whose menu said ‘Breakfast Anytime,’ so I ordered French toast in the Renaissance”). The Dick Van Dyke Show and, later, The Mary Tyler Moore Show were what today would be called “must-see TV.” I’m not sure anyone noticed at the time, but it was a golden age of comedy.

 

An entire branch of comedy, now quite gone, was that done by (mostly) men known as “impressionists.” They did imitations of famous movie stars and occasionally of politicians. Two of the better known among them were Frank Gorshin and Rich Little. Gorshin’s caricatural impressions of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster made it impossible for me ever again to watch the movies of either of these actors without inwardly giggling. The standard repertoire of the impressionists included imitations of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, John Wayne, and others. So far as I know, no impressionists are at work today. Of whom, after all, could they do impressions? Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Adam Schiff, Leonardo DiCaprio? Personalities, whether in movies or public life, no longer exist who seem worth imitating.

 

In the private realm, there is joke-telling, the act of friends telling friends jokes they have heard. When I hear what I take to be a good joke, I am eager to pass it on. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud was quite wrong in thinking that jokes are inherently acts of unconscious aggression, but he wasn’t wrong when he called jokes “good news,” by which he meant that the creation of a joke meant someone was thinking.

 

Joke-telling may be generational, ending perhaps with my own generation (I was born in 1937), and heavily favored by certain Jews, or, as I think of them, Jokey Jakeys. I happen myself to be such a Jokey Jakey. On the first day of the one creative-writing course I taught, I asked the students to tell a joke. My reason for asking was that a joke is a mini short story. Not many of my students knew any jokes. The only one I remember from that class was about a mushroom coming home in tears to tell his mother he wasn’t invited to a party of the vegetables. His mother, attempting to comfort him, asked whether he had told the other vegetables he was “a fungi.”

 

Here are three jokes I have told recently:

 

(1) Malcolm Brown, age 98, at his annual physical, tells his physician he thinks he is slowing down sexually. His physician, astonished that a man of 98 would have any sex life at all, asks him when he first noticed this. “Last night,” Brown replies, “and then again this morning.” When his physician notes how remarkable this is, Brown answers, “If you think I’m remarkable, you should know that my father, at age 126, is planning to get married next week.” When the physician asks, “Why would a man who’s 126 want to get married?,” Brown replies, “What do you mean ‘want to’?”

 

(2) The police call on Mrs. O’Leary to tell her the sad news that her husband Paddy has fallen into a vat of dark beer at the local brewery and drowned. “I hope his death was at least a quick one,” Mrs. O’Leary, in tears, says. “I’m afraid it wasn’t,” the policeman replies. “How do you know?” Mrs. O’Leary asks. “Because,” the policeman replies, “he was seen three times leaving the vat to urinate.”

 

(3) Goldenberg, in his strong greenhorn accent, says to his friend Glickman: “I just bought a new hearing aid. Wonderful! Look, you can’t even see it in my ear. State of the art, state of the art! Cost $5,000. Magnificent! Untoppable! Like I say, state of the art.” Glickman asks, “What kind is it?” Goldenberg looks down at his wrist and says, “A quarter to three.”

 

***

 

None of these jokes is in especially good taste, but then I’m not sure that humor has much to do with good taste. Yet all three jokes, in the current political atmosphere, might be disqualified, their teller written off as crudely insensitive. The first is after all an example of what is called “ageism,” and what about the poor young woman that Brown’s aged father has made pregnant? The second plays on the old stereotype of Irish drinking and can be ruled out of bounds on the grounds of ethnic prejudice. The third, because of the name “Goldenberg” and the reference to his accent, just might be considered anti-Semitic while also mocking the disability of deafness. A more virtuous person, surely, would do well not to tell any of these jokes.

 

Make that “would do well not to tell any of these jokes during the current reign of political correctness.” In fact, under this reign he would do well to steer clear of any humor whatsoever. Whole categories of jokes must be forgone. All the old mother-in-law jokes would now be scored off as obviously sexist. Lenny Bruce’s joke about the Puerto Rican busboy and Sophie Tucker would be considered racist. All ethnic jokes are strictly verboten. Just about every other category of joke would be awarded one or another of the current day’s non-union labels: misogynist, elitist, or just generally offensive.

 

A shame that George Carlin, who died in 2008, isn’t alive to take on, through his attacking humor, the grave humorlessness of political correctness. Carlin it was who said that “there’s a different group in this country to get pissed off at you for everything you’re not supposed to say.” Political correctness, with its comfortable home in our universities, would make a lovely comedic target for any comedian with the courage to engage it. Doubtless it is an indication of PC’s threatening power that no comedian yet has. Comedians steer clear of it. Jerry Seinfeld, the most apolitical of comedians, no longer plays campuses because he feels that nearly every bit he does is likely to trigger anger in a university audience.

 

What passes for humor instead, or has for the past four years, are the late-night talk-show hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, et alia — taking potshots at the ignorance and general repulsiveness of Donald Trump. Talk about an easy target. Because it is so easy, none of these men is especially funny, unless one has an advanced case of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, and so feels one’s disgust reinforced by their relentless mockery. One wonders what these men, these half-wits — “half” in that their wit is likely to appeal to only half the country — will do now that Trump has departed the presidency.

 

Politics can be death to humor, at least if the comedian takes a political side. Even so beloved a comedian as Bob Hope lost a good share of his audience when he came out in favor of Richard Nixon’s position on continuing to prosecute the Vietnam War. During the 2008 election, Sarah Silverman lost some fans when she did a bit encouraging children and grandchildren to threaten not to visit their elderly relatives in Florida if they didn’t vote for Barack Obama against John McCain. Too much of the current version of Saturday Night Live is political, and as for the cable channel Comedy Central, I watch it so seldom that I think of it as Comedy Peripheral.

 

Mort Sahl did political humor, and for all I know — he’s 93 and occasionally working — may still be doing it. But his political humor was without rancor. He found politicians generally, without distinction of party, worth mocking. I ran into Sahl one night in 1956 on Rush Street in Chicago, when he was playing the now long-gone nightclub Mr. Kelly’s. I told him that in Arkansas, the segregationist governor Orval Faubus was planning to run against J. William Fulbright for the U.S. Senate and wondered, if he won, would students henceforth study abroad on a Faubus? Sahl was mildly amused and, in the spirit of an eye for an eye, a joke for a joke, told me that a pre-presidential-election-campaign meeting between President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson had had to be canceled because they couldn’t find a translator.

 

Which brings me back to the old television variety shows, on which I first saw Mort Sahl. An episode of The Ed Sullivan Show might include an opera singer, an animal act, acrobats or jugglers, one or two comedians, and a popular singer. These were shows — The Garry Moore Show, The Perry Como Show, The Carol Burnett Show, and others — that three generations of the same family could amiably watch together. The reason is that the United States in those years had a more unified culture than it has now, or at least the dominant culture was not itself under attack.

 

This unified culture began to break up when a separate youth culture arose in the 1960s. Later, the black-power movement, forgoing integration, formed another, separate strand of American culture. The 1970s saw what is now known as the second wave of feminism, and this was closely followed by the gay-liberation movement. America was still one country, but now a country made up of several different strands of culture, and many within them feeling deprived, depressed, and mad as hell. None was in a mood for joking. Humor was out, anger in.

 

Is humor likely to make a comeback in that exasperatingly indeterminable stretch of time known as “the foreseeable future”? “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” as Hemingway’s hero Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises. But humor may have to await a less divided country, whose arrival no one can predict. Which is a shame. For a country without humor, one that cannot laugh at itself, one in which ample segments of the population go about ticked pretty near the max, doesn’t, let’s face it, figure to be much fun.