One of the things missing this holiday season, other than the once time-honored socializing in person with others not part of one’s pandemic pod—again!—is what has been, for a number of years, an annual holiday tradition on social media.
For me, anyway.
I speak, of course, of the delight and frustration I feel in equal measure, standing pat against the foaming wave of inchoate rage directed at BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, by the willfully ignorant, the cultural amnesiac, the morally performative opportunist, and the garden variety shmuck.
Frank Loesser’s party favor was originally performed at Hollywood parties with his first wife, when entertaining at home meant exactly that.
Lynn Garland and Frank Loesser / image via
“Sing for your supper…” wasn’t just a song from THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE. As difficult as it might be for some of you to accept as fact, social gatherings in bygone times often actually featured people entertaining other people with varying degrees of success, running the gamut from excellent to embarrassing.
But I digress. Shocking, I know.
This know-nothing outrage has been fostered primarily by a deeply and certainly easily offended coalition of the contemporarily clueless class of Panglossian presentists, who wouldn’t recognize fun and its occasional accomplice, the mischievous pleasure derived from interpersonal relationships unfiltered by keyboards and screens, if it took them hostage, Stockholm syndrome be damned.
For those of you who might have forgotten, a refresher.
Just because this duet sung by two adults mentions cold, and its seasonal delivery system, snow, this is not and never has been a Christmas song. (“PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION,” another Loesser composition, mentions God, but it isn’t a Christmas song either. Just an observation.)
And just because this call and response duet alludes to the implicit potential of sex and flirtatious faux innocence playfully masking itself as denial, and just because it makes you feel creepy about your parents or grandparents fucking, not to mention your ignorance of the social dance required in the lead up to that experience in their time, it’s not about date rape.
It’s about, as noted, the mating dance imposed by White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/American social culture at the time, a dance I have come to suspect was as much, if not more, for public display than it was for actual private activity.
Spoiler alert—people were fucking, and the sort of concerns she expresses here might very well have been part of a conversation, but were just as likely an inner monologue as she considered her options, having all too likely already made her decision.
And to be even clearer, there are options. The duet is about flirting, between two completely self-aware adults, who don’t need new lyrics reflecting a mind bogglingly fatuous ignorance to remind us about consent, despite the modern popstar providing of those insipid and staggeringly condescending alternate lyrics in seasons past.
And, like so much of Frank Loesser’s output it’s about playfulness, it’s about cleverness, it’s about wit, it’s about sophistication, and it’s about humor, and having a sense thereof.
Which, sad to say, in today’s neopuritan culture, are likely all the exhibit A to Z evidence required for the drowning of a witch.
And before you pull out a tiresome “Ok, Boomer,” or “Fuck off, you old curmudgeon,” relax. If only it were generational as opposed to cultural, and mass cultural at that, I’d just laugh this shit off as something time and reality will deal with in good time.
If only.
You don’t have to be young and inexperienced in actual life to suck that life out of the room. The prissiness of which I speak may have found its origins in the youthfully inexperienced, but just as those middle-aged men and women chased the hip back in the sixties to comical effect with misbegotten haircuts and inappropriate miniskirts, there are those out there with enough mileage who should know better, falling all over themselves to ingratiate themselves with this pack of all age ninnies who mistake chastity for virtue and prissiness for moral clarity.
And while I was mulling this over, dealing with my multiple disappointment in a culture that’s forgotten what pleasure is, and in that culture’s apparently moving on to other things to be pointlessly offended by, denying me the opportunity to indulge in the joy of scorn, another song, by another songwriter committed to sophistication, wit and flirtation came to mind…Johnny Mercer’s 1945 hit, PERSONALITY.
The first verse of Mercer’s song goes,
When Madame Pompadour, stepped on the ballroom floor,
Said all the gentlemen, obviously…
“The Madame has the cutest…
…Personality.”
And think of all the books about DuBarry’s looks
What was it made her the toast of Paree?
She had a well-developed…
…Personality.
What did Romeo see in Juliet?
Or Pierrot in Pierrette?
Or Jupiter in Juno?
You know!
But to be honest, many of you, too many of you, don’t. Sure, Romeo and Juliet you recognize, and maybe, just maybe, something about Jupiter and Juno might ring a bell. But the rest?
Highly unlikely.
It might be worth pointing out that I had to correct the lyric when I transcribed this, modern ears mistaking “Figaro” for “Pierrot,” and a few other misreadings, too. The defense rests.
And remember, to establish context, this was a pop song, intended for jukeboxes, for an average American audience, equipped with, for the most part, and in many cases at best, a high school education. We’re not talking about the era’s pinkies up equivalent of the 1%.
Despite all this, those long dead romantics knew something you don’t. And then some. The sexual and social mores of that rather sexually and socially conservative time trained those people to read between the lines, to bring nuance and understanding to implication and innuendo.
Of course, that conservatism was attended to by a rampant hypocrisy—much like all eras in which public mores are put on hold once the bedroom door is closed.
That said, we find ourselves once again in a curiously sexually and socially conservative time, unfortunately bereft of that training, that understanding, that appreciation of implication, of nuance. This is, of course, the result of a number of factors.
Cultural amnesia, cultivated by a dismissal of an understanding of the past as a different country. Then there’s the willful ignorance of any experience outside one’s own purview and experience. “Lived experience,” “my truth,” anyone?
And by contemporary chauvinism, which seeks to impose a misbegotten idea of the modern world as some gleaming pinnacle of cultural awareness, this simultaneously contradicted by the self-loathing of those whose self-esteem glows with the arrogance of shame attached to privilege on the left, and the nostalgically desperate for the return of a fantasy past on the right.
And without that training, minus that understanding, there is now an oddly universal assumption that what I don’t immediately understand has a buried toxic offense aimed at me, or at whatever oppressed group I choose to identify with, or adopt as one’s own cause celebre.
This ignorance has taken its toll on social intercourse, to create a universe that consistently mistakes facetiousness for wit, and that in its chickenshit fear of the transgressive nature of uncontrolled laughter, rewards the merely clever adjacent, misidentifying it as hilarious, while the transgressive is almost always shouted down as “problematic…” a word the linguist John McWhorter wittily identifies as the modern self-loathing progressive’s version of “blasphemy.”
I’ve been taken to task by a colleague for misusing the neologism “clapter” to describe the reaction to the ostensibly comic as “That’s funny.” Of course, he’s correct—clapter is actually a form of performative morality by the tragically in the know to let the world know they’re in on the joke, and thus hipper than thou.
All that agreed upon, we now find ourselves in a culture that seems to be so uncomfortable with the potential of losing oneself in laughter at the expense of, well, any sacred cow we might worship, that such a reaction is deemed the only safe route to avoid damnation by one’s fellows.
To quote my friend Ivy Mike, a woman some twenty odd years my junior and thus in the thick of it more than I will ever be again, “It’s odd to watch (people) checking themselves to see if it’s all right to laugh at something. Laughter, to these people, is violence.”
This leaves us with an ostensibly liberal culture unavailable to nuance, to implication, to metaphor, obsessed with the delicious anticipation of being offended by comedy, which weaponizes those feelings of offense with the skill and daring called for by a spear and magic helmet.
And just in case you think this oversensitivity to feelings is solely a province of the Prog Eloi, rest assured, the Trog Morlocks on the other side of the trench have their issues with heart and butt hurt, too.
The right, of course, engages in the comedy of cruelty with no let up at all, White boys and girls doing the dozens, culturally appropriating with the kind of energy only available to those who seem to have peaked, and in some cases that barely, in high school. In this regard, they have made an art form of the above-mentioned mistaking of sneering facetiousness for caustic wit.
And yet, despite all that scornful cruelty, despite all that “Snowflakes” nonsense, all the “Libtard” canards, one would be hard pressed to find a more emotionally stricken bunch than those who were deeply insulted by the insensitivity of those on the left who were less than charitable in their reactions to the death of what the right has apparently regarded as their modern Jonathan Swift, Rush Limbaugh.
The outrage, the caterwauling and the hurt feelings from the manly men and traditional women of the Ditto Head universe in this regard were right up there with all those Libtards and Snowflakes whining about their microaggressions and trigger warnings.
You’d think that those who dish it out can take it, but get over that delusional bullshit right here, right now. And really, is there anyone who looks more like a laugh might prove fatal than Jordan Peterson?
No to mention the witless glee these shmucks take in “Let’s go, Brandon!”
Honestly. Fuck off. Please.
The Eloi are afraid to laugh, in fear of accidentally finding amusement at the expense of someone else’s sacred cow and thus being branded as a heretic and excommunicated.
The Morlock laugh at anything as long as it’s at the expense of someone else’s sacred cow, because nothing is as comical as cruel ridicule, and damn any pretense of self-awareness.
And despite the metaphor of the horseshoe bending, the real common ground between these two humor-challenged mindsets is the perverse delight taken by both sides in the murder of pleasure in the name of ideology. Drowning witches, and burning their books, too, seems to have found a footing in both sides of the ideological toilet trench.
I thought twice—who am I kidding, a lot more than twice—about even bothering with this piece.
I mean, from my perspective, since the twin towers came down, we’ve been on a trajectory arcing us toward an abyss, a black hole that I can almost see swallowing us up in the not-too-distant future. Thanks in no small part to the accelerated speed of modern communication, this interregnum between disasters will be far shorter than that which separated World War parts one and two.
So, who gives a shit about culture making cowards of us all in regard to what we find funny?
That would be me. Call it transgressive, call it perverse, but I refuse to sacrifice actual laughter on the altar of cultural acceptance.
And speaking of the twin towers, late in the morning of September 12, 2001, after driving to my office down Ventura Boulevard, the street packed with every possible emblem of terrified whistling in the dark performative jingoism, an expression of nationalism that chilled me to the bone, I sat at my desk, with the jitters of expectation.
A few minutes later, my number two, a dour looking guy who is in reality an engine of comic mischief, came tearing into my office, waving that days New York Times front page, with its continuing coverage of the previous day’s murderous terrorist assault on our sense of well-being.
Eyes ablaze, he shouted at me, “HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS?”
And then turned and raced out, leaving me laughing, admittedly a tad hysterically, but with a palpable relief.
For the record, I’ve never believed in “Too soon.”
But, considering the impending grim darkness, a return to medievality that almost inevitably lies in store for us sooner than we might like, “Too late” has a certain resonance and ring of harsh truth.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin,
A Prince, laughing on the outside and crying on the inside. But laughing too, despite myself.
