By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 24,
2024
“I was raped by my doctor, which is so bittersweet for a
Jewish girl.”
Sarah Silverman’s most
infamous joke is a very nearly perfect modern specimen of the form:
economical, in the form of a single sentence, with a whiplash turn in the
middle that escalates to the climax. What raises the joke to the state of art
is that it feels like a joke about rape but is, in fact, a joke about jokes.
What begins as alarming and discomfiting (the report of a rape) ends up in that
most familiar, traditional, and comfortable territory of humor: unthreatening
jokes about the traditional ethnic stereotypes that have long been a mainstay
of American humor. The nice Jewish girl and the doctor–but horrifying.
Silverman’s joke begins in the back alley and ends in the
Borscht belt. There is always a background of economic and social anxiety in
Jewish American humor—there was a reason that the protective mothers of an
excluded minority wanted their sons to become doctors. You know how that works
in jokes: An old Jewish pedestrian gets sideswiped by a taxi on 42nd Street. A
woman who witnesses the accident runs to his side, yells for someone to call an
ambulance, and then takes off her jacket and folds it up as a pillow to put
under his head. “Just relax,” she says, “help is on the way.” “Thank you,” he
replies. “Are you comfortable?” she asks. He considers the question: “Eh. I
make a living.”
The case of Jewish humor tropes is distinct from, but not
entirely unrelated to, the case of African American humor tropes: Richard Pryor
did not tell jokes about poor black people who were counting on their daughters
to marry a doctor. One longstanding line of criticism of African American
comedy has been, in effect, that black comedians often make black Americans the
butt of jokes that white people would tell if it were socially acceptable:
black jokes about black dysfunction, as opposed to Jewish jokes about Jewish
comfort. It is worth noting here that those Jewish ethnic stereotypes came into
play during a period in which American Jews had, as a whole, slightly lower average
incomes than non-Jewish Americans, as opposed to today’s significant income
advantage for Jewish Americans. (There are conflicting accounts, but it
probably was well into the postwar years before Jewish Americans altogether
attained a relatively high average income.)
It is tempting for a comedian, or any performer, to
comfort the audience, to flatter the audience, though it also is the case that
the comfortable sociological background of so much conventional humor gives
comedians something to disrupt. In his golden age, Eddie Murphy told a lot of
jokes about surly
drunk uncles and children chasing ice-cream trucks—jokes
that assume for their context functional families, or at least cohering ones,
families that celebrate holidays together and that have cookouts and live in
neighborhoods in which the children can play outside and turn manic at the
sound of the ice-cream truck. In his Raw and Delirious era,
Murphy was a kind of inverted Silverman, so deeply marked by the conventions of
American domesticity that he was delighting his audiences with his Jackie
Gleason impersonation and (wildly homophobic) jokes about The
Honeymooners, an Eisenhower-era cultural totem that had been off the air
for 30 years by the time of Murphy’s apex in the 1980s. Murphy’s old material
probably would not fly today, but meditate on Mel Brooks’ response when an
admirer observed that Blazing Saddles is a “movie you couldn’t
make today.” Brooks scoffed: “You couldn’t make it then!”
Comedians pretend to be social outsiders who (odious
phrase) “speak truth to power,” but, in the main, comedians serve convention
and power—they comfort the comfortable. Most of those old Jewish jokes are
about Jews who are—in the joke’s word—comfortable. We tell jokes about Jews who
have made it, who have achieved some kind of middle-class security (or real
affluence) and who have enough social and personal capital to have a reasonable
hope that their children will become doctors. We don’t (and didn’t) tell as
many jokes about poor Jewish immigrants living in poverty in
Chicago.
Silverman, at her best, did not tell the comfortable kind
of jokes. She took those old comforting stereotypes and tropes and did
something wicked with them, leaving audiences—mainly and especially Gentile
audiences—in the position of wanting to laugh at a joke that references safe
and familiar forms but unsure whether that was still permissible. At her best,
Silverman is a deft and intelligent enough comedian that her jokes are free of
rhetoric. She raises the question but does not put it explicitly in the form of
one, and she is safe from the error of amateurs and hacks: trying to answer the
question she raises. That’s at her best.
At her worst, Sarah Silverman could pass for an American
talk show host. Which, of course, is something she was for a while, with her
short-lived I Love You, America.
***
The hackery and general unfunniness of contemporary
American political humor is—well, yikes: the husk
of The Onion, the decaying Babylon Bee, most of the
late-night hosts, Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” when Colin
Jost isn’t making jokes about how much fun it is to be Colin Jost, etc. There
is plenty of comedic potential in a period during which the most striking
political image is not that uniformed busboy standing over the dying Robert F.
Kennedy but the specter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s entombed brain-worm—an era
in which the Republican Party is best symbolized by the bark-at-the-moon visage
of the QAnon shaman preparing to storm the Capitol. But our comedians make less
of the available material than their antecedents did. Gerald Ford was Solon
compared to Joe Biden, but Chevy Chase figured out how to wring a great deal of humor out
of him. And then there’s Donald Trump, whose main challenge to comedians is
that he already is a caricature whose grotesquery is difficult to exaggerate.
Perhaps the fact that I went so immediately to the
presidential candidates is illustrative of the problem: The sports-mascot
aspect of contemporary American politics has made political identitarians of
many Americans, and, especially, of many comedians, who have become
pundit-adjacent thanks to the style of comedian-pundits such as Jon Stewart and
pundit-comedians such as my old friend Greg Gutfeld. Phil Hartman’s celebrated SNL account of Ronald
Reagan—goofy grandpa in public, merciless Machiavelli behind closed
doors—was not meant to flatter the president, but it wasn’t a partisan
indictment, either, nothing for a campaign commercial. Many Republicans,
including those close to Reagan, nodded along with the performance, recognizing
the truth of it.
(Hartman might well have despised Reagan, as so many
other entertainers did at the time, but his comprehension of him as a comedic
subject was larger than parochial partisanship. That wasn’t a case of “it’s
funny because it’s true”—it was a case of “it’s funny because it’s whole.” The
contradictions and tensions that make good comedy work require a capacious
taking-in of the subject that our current partisan sensibilities—which are
hysterically moralistic—do not permit.)
Michael J. Fox’s star-making sitcom turn as Alex P.
Keaton wasn’t meant to flatter young Republicans, either—the writers’
sympathies clearly were with Keaton’s champagne-hippie parents and their
progressive pieties—but it was funny, and it was funny in large part because
the funny lines given to Alex P. Keaton (you really do have to write the whole
thing out, like J. Alfred Prufrock—it’s part of the joke) were the kind of
things a reasonably witty and self-aware young Republican in the Reagan years
might have said or thought. The character of Alex P. Keaton was, like Sarah
Silverman’s joke about Jewish jokes, a kind of rondeau redoublé, satisfying the
formal requirements of the art while also turning back in on itself in a
self-referential and complicating way. Alex P. Keaton was both an accurate
representation of the political and social aspirations of a certain kind of
young American of the time and a skeptical look at the real worth of those
aspirations. Of course, it ended up being a one-note performance: When you use
a microscope instead of your naked eyes, you see a great deal more of a good
deal less.
Political tribalism hurts comedy in part by making
cowards of comedians. Sarah Silverman’s perfect joke is not the kind of thing
you say if you desperately want people to like you. But practically every joke
Jimmy Kimmel tells now comes with an invisible footnote reading: “I am a good
person and I think you are a good person and please, please, please like me.”
Even when contemporary comedians make jokes about progressives or Democrats,
the jokes (typically)
end up being a kind of furtive progressive self-celebration.
That’s not new. “I’m not a member of any organized
political party,” Will Rogers’ famous joke goes. “I’m a Democrat.” That isn’t
a criticism of Democrats, of course, but a celebration of
their supposedly freewheeling and liberal ways. (Never mind that when Rogers
made that joke in the mid-1930s, the Democrats were the most ruthlessly
organized and disciplined political organization in the United States, with
Franklin Roosevelt remaking the American state, radically expanding the power
of the presidency, and doing so while maintaining a coalition that included
both agrarian segregationists in the South and Catholic union bosses in the
North.) Contemporary progressive comedians end up being the equivalent of the
candidate in the job interview who says his greatest weaknesses are that he
works too hard and cares too much.
***
The problems of progressive comedians are different from
the problems of conservative (which isn’t quite the right word anymore, but you
know what I mean) comedians because of the very different places progressives
and conservatives occupy in the entertainment industry, the media, and the
wider pop-culture apparatus. But conservative-ish humorists are entirely
capable of making themselves hostage to the same kind of tribalistic cowardice:
Witness the degeneration of the Babylon Bee in the Trump years
and, especially, under the influence of figures such as current managing editor
Joel W. Berry, one of those humorless (that
they are humorless would be news to them) dorks who go in
for trad-chad posturing on social media, boasting about how
happy his wife is being “barefoot and pregnant, feeding chickens in her flower
garden.”
That kind of mind doesn’t produce very much in the way of
real humor, because all it knows how to do is to sneer. Sneering
can work—goodness knows George Carlin made a splendid fortune by saying largely
unremarkable things with a remarkably effective sneer—but it works only within
the limits of the relatively small theater it can fill. (There are niches and
there are niches: Sure, you can get 55,000 people at the Westminster Kennel
Club show, but that’s pretty much the whole world as far as that kind of thing
goes, and it’s still 100,000 fewer people than came out to see Tennessee
play Virginia Tech in 2016.) The Babylon Bee’s sneering
Trumpiness has intensified over the years, and, of course, it has grown less
funny. One might read a simple cynical motive into that: The dopey tribalism
may not produce particularly interesting humor, but it is pretty good for web
traffic. The Babylon Bee has indeed experienced significant
growth: It had substantially
more traffic in April than, say, National
Review, but a good deal less than the Daily Wire.
(And, yes, these are the proper points of comparison.) The site’s 11.2 million
visitors last month ain’t nothing, but that’s a rounding error on Fox News’
website, which draws
nearly 400 million visits a month. But the financial explanation isn’t
the only possibility.
One can admire a true believer, even one who believes in
batty and implausible things. (I recently overheard a group of young,
college-age men talking about conspiracy theories, and one of them stated, as a
self-evident fact, that Amelia Earhart is still alive. She was born in 1897.)
One can laugh at the true believer, but rarely with the
true believer. True believers are almost never funny, even when they are not
tedious fanatics. I tend to agree with David Foster Wallace that irony is
overrated, but so is crushing earnestness.
Greg Gutfeld used to advise guests on his old show, Red
Eye, not to try to do comedy. That was good advice. It was a funny
late-night show, meant to be irreverent, but when the producers wanted a
comedian, they booked a comedian, on the theory that this worked as a kind of
leavening: The show could be funny without everyone on the show trying to be
funny. But the catastrophizing habit—everything is so very important right now
that we have to be very angry about it all the time!—makes anything but the
most shallow kind of humor impossible. Humor requires emotional distance rather
than emotional urgency, dispassionate observation rather than cheerleading and
sermonizing, cool wit rather than scalding rage. Wit is almost always
ultimately self-deprecating—Oscar Wilde, Lytton Strachey, and Noël Coward were
very serious men who went out of their way to emphasize the shallow and trivial
aspects of their artistic personalities—but the modern political partisan
cannot afford such self-deprecation, because he understands the entire political
contest to be a matter of raising or lower the relative status of one social
group in competition with another. In this view, a Jon Stewart or a Jimmy
Fallon is interchangeable with a Rachel Maddow or a Dana Bash, because the
pundit and the comedian serve the same function.
When humor is instrumentalized for political
purposes—when it stops being art and is degraded to the state of rhetoric—it is
used for one thing only: lowering the relative status of disfavored groups. In
fact, much of the humor targeted by progressives at their cultural and
political enemies isn’t comedy at all, in the formal sense, but only an attempt
to associate hated rivals with low-status people and low-status communities.
Some of you will remember sneering reports on the Tea Party movement (RIP)
that made a point of focusing on elderly, obese, not-obviously-well-off people
using mobility scooters—a trope that has become a standard part of progressive
humor that grew
and mutated in the era of Trump rallies. It isn’t that there aren’t jokes
to be made there—mobility scooters, as any Walmart shopper can tell you, have a
very considerable built-in potential for hilarity. But they don’t actually make
the jokes: It is enough to simply point to unattractive people and declare,
“Ecce, homo!” The gleeful cruelty in the comedic (in theory) targeting
of figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene reminds me a little of the pro-death
penalty demonstrators I used to see celebrating outside of executions in Texas:
It isn’t that the condemned doesn’t have it coming, but the exercise does not
seem to bring out the best in those doing the condemning. And though it may be
useful as political rhetoric, it does not often succeed as humor.
“Oh, but don’t you know what time it is?”
comes the response from either camp. I know, I know, I have heard: We are
living in extraordinary times, the next election presents an existential threat
to democracy and liberty and goodness and decency, etc. In such an
environment—so goes the argument—it doesn’t matter whether humor succeeds as
humor: All it needs to do is to be useful as political
rhetoric, and, if it helps to secure the victory in November, then it has done
its job. That is pure philistinism, if our old friends at Hamas will permit the
use of the term. It constitutes a denial of the proposition that anything is
worth doing for any reason other than the pursuit of power and advantage.
“We make out of
the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
ourselves, poetry.” So wrote William Butler Yeats, who might accurately
have said the same thing about rhetoric and comedy, which at its best is a kind
of poetry. He went on:
Unlike the rhetoricians, who get
a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing
amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty
by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no
fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life,
had pleasure for his end. … Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met
with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical
self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer
deceived, whose passion is reality.
Reality is that thing humankind cannot bear
very much of. The old comic tradition held that the court jester, or fool,
was the one man who could say what everybody is thinking, who could present an
unpleasant reality even to the king. In our time, we have more forums for
political speech and political comedy—and less censorship—than ever. The
problem isn’t in saying what everybody is thinking—it is in thinking what
everybody is thinking, which a good comedian cannot afford to do. Comedy
clarifies. It sheds light on assumptions and relationships and fears that might
not have been apparent to the audience before. Rhetoric can clarify—or
it can make things more opaque. It is merely instrumental and can be put to any
use those with some skill in it choose.
We have chosen muddiness, mushiness, and intellectual and
moral flabbiness. Tom Wolfe might have done magnificent things with the
material presented by these few years after his death, but one wonders whether
he could have found an audience. We know what audiences want right now: Fox
News, pornography, Trevor Noah—the creature comforts of the already
too-comfortable mind.
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