By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 22, 2026
How has American culture changed since the 19th
century? Consider this: John Wilkes Booth was a handsome celebrity whose career
came to an end when he became an assassin, while Luigi Mangione is a handsome
assassin whose career as a celebrity was launched by the assassination. It is,
indeed, an upside-down world.
When I tell people about Luigi: The Musical—a
current off-Broadway production about the handsome young prat who gunned down
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—I get the same reaction from both sides of
the political aisle and especially from the fundamentally apolitical: surprise
that such a thing is permitted.
In the real world, Luigi Mangione, a morally illiterate,
manifesto-writing child of privilege, presented his crime as an act of protest
against the domination of the U.S. healthcare system by for-profit private
insurance. Incarcerated for a time in the same facility as other high-profile
prisoners such as Sean Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried—the situation in this
situation-comedy musical—Mangione has become a sort of folk hero among a slice
of the Bernie Sanders-aligned left, the intellectually vacuous foot soldiers of
which enjoy having the itch of their free-ranging and bloodthirsty resentment
scratched by a photogenic if callow young man. Luigi: The Musical aims
to scratch that same itch in the pursuit of one kind of profit or another, and
many people are understandably scandalized by this.
How are they even allowed to do that? people ask.
Even here in the United States of America, the land of the First Amendment, the
notion that people need permission to speak, to write, and to perform is
deeply implanted. Can’t his family stop them from doing that? Aren’t they
going to get sued? Who let them do this? Implicit in most of these
responses, though not in all of them, is a belief that this performance should not
have been allowed.
I myself am a partisan of free speech, as close to an
absolutist on the issue as you will find. God bless America even if I don’t
love the ubiquitous incest porn, etc.
So I do not have very much time for the question of
whether this sort of thing should be allowed as a matter of law—of
course it should. (There’s your line for the poster: “Probably should not be
banned outright!” Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch. You’re welcome.)
Americans do not need anybody’s permission to offer commentary—including stupid
and distasteful commentary—about public events, and the assassination of Brian
Thompson was a public matter and remains very much a live public controversy:
The trial of his killer and the hero (yes, hero) of the new musical is
under way even as I write.
You can go to the internet and find the worst sort of
people making the worst sort of arguments about why Mangione’s murder of
Thompson was not only morally permissible but morally necessary. Some of those
imbeciles—many of them—are buying tickets to the new show, ensuring that its
performances are generally sold out. Some of them wear T-shirts depicting
Mangione as a Catholic saint; one fellow, sitting at my table in the
cabaret-style (and Cabaret-style) venue wore a T-shirt emblazoned with
Mangione’s image over the caption: “But, Daddy, I Love Him!” The number of
occasions when a grown man should deploy the phrase, “But, Daddy!” is, in my
admittedly conservative view, somewhat limited.
One step down from the question of whether such a
performance should be allowed is the question of whether staging such a thing
at all is in bad taste, which is itself separate from the question of whether this
particular work is in bad taste.
Luigi: The Musical itself considers the question
of whether such a performance might be in bad taste: Informed by a prison guard
that he has become a celebrity and that there is even a musical about him,
Luigi is offended and incredulous, demanding to know what kind of monsters
would buy tickets to such a travesty—a line delivered with an accusing glance
at the audience, which, unless I am very much mistaken, was disproportionately
peopled by middle-aged gay men of the Very Online variety. There were moments
when the mood was very much that of a strip club (there is a fair bit of skin
on display, though nothing obscene in that particular sense) and it seemed to me that the jeering, leering
members of the audience were not entirely in on the joke—that they are at least
as much an object of criticism here as is the role of for-profit insurance
companies in our healthcare system. But, then, people with bad taste rarely are
aware that they have bad taste—and the worst of them do not have anybody around who loves them enough
to tell them so. There is a reason dictator chic is so tacky.
In a similar way, moral monsters always believe that they
are the heroes of the story, not the villains. John Wilkes Booth thought he was
a patriot and a hero. So did Timothy McVeigh. So, presumably, does Luigi
Mangione. Mangione will always have his admirers. So does McVeigh. So does
Booth.
My instinctive reaction to the question of whether
staging such a performance as Luigi is in bad taste was: Yes, of
course it is, and this is an example of the sort of thing that should not be
done even though it may be, and must be, permitted. But I think my instinct
there probably is wrong. There is a long and mostly proud tradition of offering
humorous commentary, often dark and satirical, about horrifying events, often
published before the blood is even quite dry and with no thought of waiting
until the matter is legally resolved or for whatever we might judge to be a
decent interval. The Roman pasquinade is one of the foundation stones of
modern journalism, and no one seems to be very much upset by headline-driven
humor such as Saturday Night Live’s beloved “Weekend Update” feature or
the old Colbert Report—we do seem to very strongly prefer that such
commentary be packaged as ersatz television news programming, for some reason.
Perhaps we find the form psychologically reassuring.
But, if you will forgive such obvious and elevated points
of comparison, Virgil surely had current imperial affairs in mind when he was
writing the Aeneid, and Shakespeare was keenly aware when writing such
works as Richard III that his characters represented near relatives of
his sovereign and sometime customer, Elizabeth I, some of whom died badly.
(Virgil and Shakespeare were involved in broadly identical political projects: legitimizing
the regime.) Somewhere between the Aeneid and Luigi we might
look to the œuvre of Mel Brooks, who was very bold in his treatment of
racism, antisemitism, and the career of Adolf Hitler, among other subjects.
(“You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today,” an admirer once told Brooks,
who retorted: “You couldn’t make it then.”) The murder of Brian Thompson is not
funny, and the Holocaust was not funny—but The Producers is funny.
Which raises the real question: Is Luigi: The Musical
any good?
***
Luigi: The Musical has been so roundly denounced
as a moral failure that someone must point out—and I suppose it falls to
me—that it also is an artistic failure.
That isn’t the indictment it might sound like: Most plays
and musicals are artistic failures. Even the masters only rarely strike gold.
Bob Dylan has written, by some counts, around 1,000 songs, and there’s a reason
you know only four of them. Luigi offers several moments of real
intelligence, wit, and charm. Unfortunately, these are too few and too far
between, the dried cranberries in some otherwise pretty bland trail mix. Every
show of this kind is a blend of the real stuff and filler, and the better ones
are the ones with the better proportions in the mix. Comedy is very hard
to write and harder still to write quickly—there is a reason that so little
humor stays funny for more than a few months. And I tip my hat to the authors
here for even attempting to write satire in times such as these, which seem to
me to be quite beyond parody. I don’t know that even Tom Wolfe would have been
up to it.
So, a failure. But how and why?
T.S. Eliot famously argued (in “Hamlet and His Problems”)
that Hamlet is an artistic failure, a result of Shakespeare’s having
taken on a theme that he was not capable of adequately treating on stage:
maternal sexual guilt. Hamlet the character may be a psychological puzzle,
Eliot argues, but Hamlet the play is a dramatic mess, particularly in
its treatment of the prince’s neurotic inability to act, which is treated more
straightforwardly in the material Shakespeare borrowed from, notably Thomas
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. (Eliot is among those who hypothesize that
Kyd wrote a lost ur-Hamlet.) Luigi: The Musical may not merit so
rarefied a line of comparison, but it exhibits much the same problem: The
authors are so bewitched by Luigi the character that they treat him as only an
object of fascination (albeit a fascination that alternates between admiration
and revulsion) rather than as a part of a dramatic whole. There is very much a
sense that this is Luigi vs. everybody else, that Luigi is not only the star of
the show but effectively in a different show from the rest of the characters.
That leaves his sudden final descent into sympathy-forfeiting, plainly stated
homicidal megalomania disconnected from the wider arc of the story—which, I
probably should mention at this point, contains two musical numbers about
McDonald’s hashbrowns, the greasy treat that was the proximate cause of the
murderer’s falling into the hands of the law.
Our story picks up when Mangione is incarcerated in a
special New York facility for high-profile prisoners: a celebrity wing, in
effect, where Mangione was, in reality, held for a time alongside crypto
fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and entertainment mogul Sean Combs, aka Diddy. In
the real world, Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and currently is
campaigning for a pardon from Donald Trump, who previously pardoned
crypto-criminal Changpeng Zhao after firms controlled by the Chinese
billionaire went into business with firms controlled by Trump’s family. Combs
was convicted on relatively minor sex crimes (Mann Act offenses) and acquitted
of the more serious charges he faced. Combs also is campaigning for a
presidential pardon, but Trump says this would be “difficult” given that Combs
has said things at times that have hurt the president’s feelings. (Like I said:
beyond parody.) In the musical, both
Bankman-Fried and Combs end up pardoned by the president, which is, if
unlikely, far from beyond imagining.
Mangione is forced into an awkward three-way relationship
with Bankman-Fried and Combs, in whom he sees both that which he hates (greed,
corruption, exploitation) and that which he is becoming (a celebrity). Mangione
is played by Mike Cefalo, who sings well enough and whose comedic gifts are
considerable. He begins with a song in which he rehearses, in a musical litany,
all the ways in which he is an incompetent criminal: “I shouldn’t have pulled
my mask down,” “I shouldn’t have had those hashbrowns,” “I shouldn’t have
driven around the country with a backpack full of guns and my manifesto and
fake IDs,” etc. It is the best and most memorable song in the show, marked by a
pleasing sort of Jim Steinman grandiosity that composer Arielle Johnson
applies to most of Luigi’s music—appropriate inasmuch as one of Cefalo’s main
jobs in the show is to stand there shirtless as a hunk of meatloaf while the
audience hoots and slavers.
By contrast, Bankman-Fried’s big number, “Bay Area Baby,”
is too long and repetitious. Diddy sniffs at the notion that Bankman-Fried is a
celebrity at all: “There’s a reason you have so much more exposition than the
rest of us!” he sneers. But it seems to me that the more likely reason is that
the character is played by Andre Margatini, one of the show’s principal
writers.
Cefalo, as the characters in the play observe in a moment
of meta-awareness, resembles Mangione. Combs, on the other hand, is played by a
woman, Chine Ikoro, while Bankman-Fried is played by the aforementioned Andre
Margatini, who uses male pronouns and boasts of being “mid-transish.”
Margatini’s Bankman-Fried is a sexless social incompetent whose irritating
disquisitions on crypto and repeated rhetorical flights into business-school
jargon are announced by the band’s vamping on the soft jazz chords of classic
elevator music. One of the show’s (excessively) repeated jokes is his going on
about “effective altruism” only to be misunderstood by Combs, who thinks he is
talking about autism—“They can test you for that!” Ikoro is pretty good
as a louche Combs—whose ecstatic fantasy about a post-prison party with flowing
champagne is suddenly sidetracked by a sharp turn into “a room full of
goats”—but her role is underwritten, the jokes are superficial and a little
obvious, and it is especially disappointing that the only genuinely musical
figure in the show gets so little in the way of memorable or inventive music.
By contrast, there is a bit too much Bankman-Fried, and his songs could use some
merciless editing by someone who is not in love with them.
So: Pretty good, at least in spots, but not very good.
It is necessary to keep separate the question of the
show’s merits as a musical and the question of its morality or propriety. There
were many objections to The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’ opera
about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestinian
Liberation Front, during which the terrorists murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a
partly paralyzed Jewish American who relied on a wheelchair. If you would like
to hear a preview of those who justify Luigi Mangione’s actions, Klinghoffer’s
real-world murderers can oblige: “I chose Klinghoffer, an invalid, so that they
would know that we had no pity for anyone,” the leader of the group said, “just as the Americans, arming Israel, do not take
into consideration that Israel kills women and children of our people.” The
complaints about The Death of Klinghoffer were complaints about its
propriety and decency, not complaints about its music.
My own view is that, in general, there isn’t any point to
trying to apply a social or moral criterion to works such as this. What happens
in a play or a musical happens within the four corners of the stage just as
what happens in a film stays within the four corners of the screen; it may
refer to events and people in the real world, but it has no bearing on these as
a dramatic work. Oliver Stone’s Nixon is probably the best film to have
been made about American politics, but it has nothing to do with the life and
times of Richard M. Nixon. Richard III probably was not the kind of villain he
is in Richard III, but Shakespeare worked in drama, not in history or in
political philosophy.
Luigi: The Musical may be different in that it
takes as its material events that are still unresolved—as noted, Mangione’s
trial is in the news, and the accused recently withdrew his plans to offer a psychiatric
defense—and it takes a particular kind of cruelty (cruelty here understood
as a species of indifference) to offer up a series of gags based on the
assumption that Brian Thompson, husband and father of two sons who were
teen-agers at the time, had it coming. And Luigi does lean into that
notion when it is convenient, with the audience lustily cheering Luigi’s series
of “Dear Manifesto” songs, in which his rationalizations and justifications for
the murder are offered as self-evidently legitimate. The show also offers a
critique of that notion when convenient, especially in the show’s closing
number. That is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but there is a world of
difference between emphasizing and exploring that kind of tension and simply
trying to ignore or evade it, which is what it seems to me the authors too
often do here.
Luigi: The Musical, being dramatically incoherent,
wants to have it both ways, offering the murder of Thompson as justifiable
and justified while simultaneously presenting Mangione and—especially—his
leering admirers as stunted grotesques.
The show grows up all of a sudden in its final number,
with Bankman-Fried and Combs turning into a kind of AEI-pundit chorus singing
about the complexity of policy trade-offs and the difficulty of reforming
institutions in meaningful ways while Mangione sings about his plan to shoot
people until there is peace and justice and equality upon the land. Why join
a movement that is about other people and their boring policy papers when I can
do something exciting that is all about me? he asks. The authors of Luigi
are not obviously fools, but they do not have the sophistication or the
intellectual courage to apply the emotionally organizing wisdom of the climax
to the rest of the proceedings, which makes a mess of things.
There are those bits of self-awareness, of course: The
show has them even if the audience does not. As the people who were seated next
to Shia LaBeouf at Cabaret can tell you, it sometimes
is the case that the audience is even more disconnected from reality than are
the actors on the stage. If I could have waved a wand and disenfranchised the
entire audience of Luigi, it would have been an act of democratic
hygiene. Unlike the authors of Luigi, they did not seem to have the good
sense to be half-ashamed.
A little bit of shame is a good thing for moral
development, but it is deadly to comedy.
***
Can one joke about a murder? Can one joke about a murder
before the corpse is even cold?
Yes. But the joke has to land.
Readers of National Review (which was my
journalistic home for about 15 years) will know that the magazine begins with a
section called “The Week” (a holdover from the brief period during which National
Review was a weekly magazine) and that “The Week” begins with a short joke.
But the news does not always put one in a joking frame of mind, and that was
the case for the issue of December 17, 1963, following on the heels of the
assassination of President John Kennedy.
The murder itself had caused a great psychological
convulsion throughout the country, and the editors of National Review surely
were acutely aware that there already was under way an effort to lay Kennedy’s
assassination—by a communist—at the feet of the American right, with
Dallas—“the city that willed the death of the president”—standing
in for anti-Kennedy conservatives at large. Earl Warren, then the chief justice
of the Supreme Court, insisted that Kennedy had been killed by “the hatred and
bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots,” while
Mrs. Kennedy is reported to have refused to change out of her blood-stained
clothes, insisting: “I want the world to see what Dallas has done to my
husband.” Crackpots such as Oliver Stone still insist that the death of Kennedy
was a right-wing plot. Making a joke out of that material was a very delicate
thing, and the editors settled on what is now one of the magazine’s most famous
lines: “The editors of National Review regretfully announce that their
patience with President Lyndon B. Johnson is exhausted.”
That was, in my judgment, just about perfect. It
acknowledges that National Review was a critic of Kennedy and would
continue that line of criticism rather than being dishonestly shamed into
self-censorship; it invokes the image of Lyndon Johnson, an inherently comical
figure; and, like the best of such jokes, it provides a kind of Platonic
catharsis, acting to drain the tension out of an emotionally difficult
situation.
Sarah Silverman’s famous joke about being raped by a
doctor—“so bittersweet for a Jewish girl”—works only because it is shameless
both in composition and in delivery: economical, shocking, ruthless. Silverman
wrote and delivered the line with perfect artistic confidence; for a point of
contrast, consider Pete Davidson’s half a dozen never-quite-there attempts
to come up with a good joke about the death of his father, a fireman, in the
terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Davidson never really lands that one,
because there is always a palpable sense—entirely understandable—that he
himself thinks it isn’t really funny. National Review’s joke after
Kennedy’s death was both a good joke and an announcement that the editors would
decline to be blamed for Lee Oswald’s crime.
Oswald would go on to become a kind of literary figure.
In the early 1990s, there was a play (which even the internet has forgotten)
performed in Austin called Texans and Their Guns, a purgatorial
conversation among three famous marksmen from the Lone Star State: Oswald, his
epigone John Hinckley Jr., and Charles Whitman, the sniper who helped to usher
in the modern age of theatrical mass murder from his perch atop the Paul
Philippe Cret’s famous clocktower at the University of Texas. (Trivia: It was
not Whitman’s homicidal spree that caused the tower to be closed to the general
public, a decision that was taken nearly a decade later in response to a string
of suicides.) Three horrible men trapped together, each of them forced to see
the worst of himself reflected in the others: The structural similarity to Luigi
is obvious enough, and the form is not uncommon—No Exit is the textbook
example, and few plays have produced an epigram so memorable—or so true—as
“Hell is other people.”
Oswald is, in the right hands, a character with a good
deal of comic potential: See, for example, Don DeLillo’s Libra. (Not a
comic novel, but very funny in places.) But I imagine that a jokey play about
Oswald looked different to, say, Mike Quinn, who taught media law at the
University of Texas when Texans and Their Guns was being performed and
who had been present at the assassination as a reporter for the Dallas
Morning News. Richard Linklater’s Slacker, a love letter to Austin,
contains a comical manic reverie about the Whitman massacre, and surely the
1990 film was seen by at least a few people who had been personally present for
that event. I thought the scene was hilarious—maybe those who witnessed Whitman’s
murders felt differently.
Or maybe they appreciated it all the more.
My former National Review colleague Kat Timpf has
a book about this subject, titled You Can’t Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing
Is Sacred and We’re All in This Together. She has been through some
grisly stuff and has written some good jokes about it. Being a comedian
herself, she gets to the heart of the matter: You can joke about anything—but
make it a good joke.
***
The tricky part in keeping the moral questions separate
from the aesthetic questions is that they are not entirely separate. I do not
take very seriously the notion that forms of entertainment such as popular
music and video games are morally consequential at the social level—the dumbest
version of that argument is that we have so much crime and sexual misbehavior
and drug abuse because of music or video games “glorifying” that sort of thing,
when the truth is that the music and the video games are the result of the same
deep culture that produces the real-world social dysfunction, with
entertainment having relatively little power to shape that deep culture. He
would never have done that awful thing if he hadn’t seen it on television, or
if he hadn’t played at doing it in a video game first, or hadn’t talked to an
AI chatbot about it—these are principally psychiatric propositions, medical
claims, not moral claims. Even the less dumb versions of the argument do not
seem to me very persuasive.
But moral tension, moral complexity, and moral coherence
are artistic and literary considerations as well: A story that relies on being
situated in a particular moral universe has to respect the rules of that moral
universe in the same way that a work of science fiction has to follow the
relevant rules of science in order to succeed on its own artistic terms. That
morality has to be legible enough that characters’ interactions with it—and
violations of it—make dramatic sense. Some people will argue that such
considerations may be set aside when it comes to light entertainment or to
comedy at large, but that gets it exactly wrong: The lighter the entertainment,
the more need for sturdy and reliable foundations. The classic comedy of
manners, for example, can only succeed where the authors have the necessary
moral lucidity to represent the hypocrisy or dishonest social conventions that
they are writing about—it is a question of control, the difference
between chasing an emotional effect and summoning one. There is a lot of
chasing in Luigi. It is uneven in the way sketch comedy shows are
uneven, being the work of too many authors with too much time to fill and not
enough good ideas to go around. Its occasional slides into didacticism—the smug
moral preening about the healthcare industry—are the worst bits, which is no
surprise: The authors and their critics predictably fall into the same kind of
clumsy moralizing.
All that said, I am pleased in a sense that Luigi exists.
(Another line for the poster: “Does not merit total ontological erasure!” Kevin
D. Williamson, The Dispatch.) It will contribute nothing at all to the
debate about healthcare financing in the United States and may very well make
that debate a little dumber and angrier, if such a thing is possible. But it is
something I would like to see more of: It is, among other things, a work of
theater that is not written for theater critics or for theatrical writers, its
ambitions being instead genuinely popular. God save us from “relevance” in
these things, but, at the same time, it does seem as though the only books of
poetry that are bought and read in the United States are bought and read by
people who write books of poetry or want to write them, the poets having become
a kind of guild and consequently having lost the ability to connect with
general readers along with the sense that doing so is either necessary or
desirable. There is a liveliness at work in Luigi that I hope will find
its way into other, better work.
I do not have much hope for the political conversation,
such as it is, in the United States. At the risk of sounding as though I have
gone Marxist, this is a case in which the means of production is truly the
controlling cultural force: As long as social media continues to be the
dominant mode of communication and debate, the conversation is going to be
stupid. Brevity and immediacy are wondrous weapons for the witty and the wise,
but for the demos at large the unfiltered and unconsidered nature of
social media discourse makes it the rhetorical equivalent of a crate of hand
grenades in the hands of a methed-up chimpanzee. Coriolanus, probably
completed sometime in 1608, supposedly was written in part as a response to the
Midland Revolt of 1607. Shakespeare was a fast writer, but he probably spent at
least a few months working on the great play. Many pasquinades were written in
the form of Petrarchan sonnets, which even for the deftest versifier take a
little bit of time to write. A half-assed musical is a more considered thing
than the typical Bluesky post. It takes a little work.
And taking our time, putting in a little work—not the
worst thing to do in times such as these, no?
