I have been party of late to talk about the decline of the American sense of humor. This situation is of course wide open to interpretation, since, as anyone with a half-ounce of sense knows, humor, and reaction to it, is completely personal, wildly unpredictable, and wholly subjective.
“Hey—that’s not funny!” is frequently as common a reaction as uncontrolled hilarity, to what some might regard as only mildly amusing. I often describe myself as a tough audience, but this applies primarily to what might be called institutional/corporate humor—situation comedies, the majority of stand-up comics, and such.
This also includes memes, easter eggs, bumper stickers, inside jokes, and all the other smarmy bullshit passing itself off as good-natured spoofery our oligarchic masters have deemed safe for us to be amused by.
That said, when I laugh, I don’t fuck around. None of that clapter, “That’s funny!” bullshit for me, see. I lose it.
The comedy, the humor of my generation found its germination in MAD magazine. I’m too young to have experienced its original iteration as a comic book—like most of my contemporaries, we discovered those subversive comics in the Ballantine paperbacks—but the Harvey Kurtzman edited issues of the magazine, and the first few years that followed under Al Feldstein, set a tone for my crowd that was as corrupting and coercive as it was nearly intangible.
For those of you who came to the magazine after it had become a comfortable, if not downright comforting institution, those late 1950s, early 1960s issues could best be described as transgression tailored with the adolescent in mind. There was a greasy, discomfiting and disturbing quality to the graphics and the text, as if both were potentially going to adhere to a reader’s fingers.
I realize now that what Kurtzman and yes, even Feldstein were doing back then was a reflection of the contemporary work being aimed at urban adults, a transliteration of the sensibilities of night club comedians as distant from each other as Lenny Bruce and Nichols & May, of comic satirists as different as Jules Feiffer and Jack Douglas.
And despite the fact that MAD called itself a satirical magazine, most egregiously misrepresenting parody as satire, thus muddying the waters in this semantic regard on a permanent basis for my generation and generations to come, finding the way to dumb down the sophisticated ideas that were amusing the more literate and willing to be challenged among our parents was a triumphant choice, intentional or not.
That eight-year run of MAD was an educational foundation for my contemporaries, as much a reason for the mindset of that postwar generation as rock and roll and smokable dope. It was the “everything is bullshit” relativist attitude of MAD that was likely a big part of its appeal to my cohort, and it was that nihilistic and chaotic rejection of everything that got it slammed, in ESQUIRE, as I recall. And even if Dwight MacDonald, that great critic of culture high and low, wasn’t responsible, his presence hovered over that magazine’s dismissal of MAD.
By this time, it has to be said that MAD had become toothless and silly, that discomfiting greasiness long gone, replaced by slick repetitious gags that were more a reflection of the kind of corporate humor delivery systems I mention disdainfully above, as opposed to anything challenging, transgressive and odd.
What was also gone was the subliminal Jewishness, that which has always been euphemized as “That New York sense of humor—” hey, even the Catholics and WASPs at MAD were Jewjacent—to be replaced by a generalized nonspecific blandness, a jokiness reminiscent of situation comedy.
This left a gap, a chasm of which it’s worth noting no one was aware, to be filled by THE NATIONAL LAMPOON.
After a briefly rocky start, a temblor put to end first by the hiring of the brilliant Michael Gross, whose impact on the look of the book remains of profound significance, and then by the time honored in that time expedient of good word of mouth, Doug Kenney’s transliteration of a college humor magazine to a newsstand staple was a gift to my contemporaries, now in our early twenties, and available for what seemed like a perfect vehicle for harsh and brittle no nonsense nonsense.
We—by which I mean both the anarchically inclined comedy fans of my upbringing, as well as my newly minted comic book colleagues—loved the LAMPOON. To this day, we still reference business from nearly a half century ago.
There was, to be sure, an unmistakable measure of cruelty in the magazine—Ed Bluestone’s “IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS MAGAZINE, WE’LL KILL THIS DOG” cover should have been included on the Voyager1 disk, for fuck’s sake—but we were pretty cruel and Hobbesian ourselves, so punching up and punching down with equal enthusiasm seemed perfectly natural to us.
It wasn’t until I started freelancing at the magazine that I came to realize that the racism and antisemitism in much of the Lampoon material wasn’t just a snide comic equal opportunity offender pose, but a clear, steady and genuine representation of the belief system of the predominantly Catholic, occasionally Canadian, usually Ivy League educated men often resentfully working for and maintaining an unabashed contempt for as perfect a modern day equivalent of Sammy Glick as might have been found in those days.
Anecdotally, the first words Ted Mann, a second-generation mainstay and regular at the magazine, said to me after I’d introduced myself, were “Oh—you’re the little Kike.”
Credit to the guy for feeling as comfortable as he apparently did to express himself so freely. But hey, fuck that. This experience was a contributing factor to my decision to avoid self-deprecatory Jewish gags at my or any other landsman or landswoman’s expense.
All this was delivered in that “Just kidding” presentation by the aging frat boy editorial claque. And if you accept the fact as I do that loathing can be delivered as a joke, sure. I am told that Hitler’s favorite joke was, “Hey Hermann—what’s a Jew nightmare? Free ham!”
Like Red Skelton, apparently the Fuehrer never worked blue.
The Lampoon went after MAD’s scalp, too, delivering a parody—not a satire—of the magazine, focusing on how it had lost its mojo after Kurtzman. Some of this, in particular the shitting all over Dave Berg stuff, was pretty funny…but hey, THE LIGHTER SIDE OF… was dreadful from the start, and low hanging fruit of the most specific and accessible variety. And of course, going after the magazine for not being by Kurtzman was in the low hanging fruit orchard too, but nobody remarked on this back then.
The magazine began to slide when it lost a lot of its better contributors to television, becoming more dumbassedly sexist while keeping up the racism, precipitously devolving into flagrant stupidity as SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE replaced the LAMPOON as the counter cultural comedy delivery system du jour.
If you can get past the barely subtextual “How the fuck did everybody from the Lampoon get hired for Saturday Night Live but me?” resentment fest that informs and festers throughout Tony Hendra’s GOING TOO FAR, he makes a fair and valid point in regard to the elevation of what is now a network institution that just won’t die—that point being that the show wasn’t the birth of something but rather the end of everything.
It might be worth noting that Hendra was a raging Jew baiter in his own right, so maybe Lorne Michaels got a whiff and thought better of it. Who can say? One of them is dead and the other one couldn’t begin to give a fuck, I’d be willing to bet.
Needless to say, I have to agree with Hendra, despite his utter loathsomeness, as what was the province of transgressive comedy had been kidnapped and neutered by the people who brought you decades of laugh track filled half hours of unfunny comedy adjacent bullshit. See above in re: good-natured spoofery.
Concurrent with this was the rise of the comedy club, spawning a new generation of desperately needy and hostile men and women willing to put their self-loathing to work for them publicly. The ongoing popularity of this new breed earned my eternal dismay when Phil Berger, for reasons which remain a mystery, upended the structurally bookended beauty of his brilliant book on standup comedians, THE LAST LAUGH, by adding a chunk of material on the modern comics, I would assume to widen its appeal.
I would hope that Drew Friedman, who cares about the specific personalities who make up the cast of this book far more granularly than I do or ever could, would agree with me.
For the record, the Nesteroff book of a few recent years back owes a great deal to THE LAST LAUGH. If you can find a copy of the 1976 edition of Berger’s book, grab it. It’s gold.
At least the movies had Mel Brooks, who moved past the wildly overpraised THE PRODUCERS to make two of the best film parodies ever, to be followed by exponentially diminishing returns…until his musical version of THE PRODUCERS rescued him in my eyes—but that was decades away.
This fallow situation of broadening of interest in hand with quality decline, best symbolized by the short arc from ANIMAL HOUSE to PORKY’S, obtained for a few years, until SPY MAGAZINE appeared in the mid-1980s, as if, to my eyes at least, from nowhere.
And whereas MAD, trucking in the mockery of parody, had been a reflection of its editorial staff’s New York Jew sensibility, and THE NATIONAL LAMPOON was a wellspring of Irish lapsed Catholic frat boys translating their prep school snideness to a national stage, SPY, taking a cue from the old days of blind items but naming names, picked a bit from both those wellsprings, adding a gay or at least gay adjacent theory of spite and scornful cool taken right from Susan Sontag’s NOTES ON CAMP to make the zeitgeist its own.
That sensibility, that zeitgeist, came along at the twilight of a sort of cultural awareness that didn’t yet boil down to the equivalent of navel gazing and self-contemplation despite all that “Me Generation” spew thrown at the post war generation by their parents. SPY was cruel, and occasionally fair, but not always and certainly not often.
And because much of the magazine’s content was, as noted, spiteful scorn aimed at the rich and powerful, SPY was a repository of occasionally sharp, often bludgeoningly obvious irony. One issue even featured the even then already insufferable Chevy Chase providing a set of the nimbly named “air quotes” over the words “Isn’t it Ironic?” delivered to a culture that was all too primed and ready to collude in the torture murder of that selfsame irony.
Not insignificantly, one of the frequent targets of the magazine was, as he was often referred to, the short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump, whose transformation from eminently risible figure to eminently risible figure with nuclear strike capability might have been the last and greatest testament both to irony itself, and to its lingering death as well.
For as long as I’ve been aware of such things, and long past the time I stopped giving a fuck, the plaint at awards time has always been that comedy doesn’t stand a chance against the self-serious product aimed firmly at the middlebrow. Of course, since as a culture we are always all too willing to mistake gravity for enormity, this will always be the way. But as the always mistakenly attributed crack goes, “Dying is easy-comedy is hard.”
Recently, in addition to the sad eyed suicide poet inspired grandiosity resulting from all that posing and posturing, all that gravity acting as if it were enormity, I’ve read a number of chilling reports in regard to the cultural identification of irony as a socially destructive idea, calling it innately cruel, a weapon of oppression and that old bogey man, the patriarchy.
I have spent years convinced that irony had been surgically removed from the culture at large. What else could account for the attention paid to the likes of internet influencers, both the small-time Tik-Tok hustlers and the massively rich shitheads, too, the very icons of self-regard trumping self-awareness. These are the people who should be considered seriously when it comes to voter suppression.
Irony? I’ll leave it to you.
Only a few years ago, we were surfeited with what various members of various tribes deployed as irony, but was actually what might be called fatuous diffidence, goofy and silly with a pose, and at worst witless, stupid and meaningless bullshit mistaking itself for insightful cleverness. The Dunning-Kruger effect is as much a pandemic as Covid-19, and wrapping a vapid remark with air quotes doesn’t transform inanity into irony.
I have to assume the ongoing resentment of the very idea of irony draws its energy from a broad-based cultural fear from a willfully ignorant cohort sprawling across the often-incoherent ideological divide, afflicted with historical incuriosity and cultural amnesia, men and women convinced that they don’t only not get the joke, but in their heart of hearts resent with terror that they might be the butt of the joke, too.
And, to be sure, in this regard, they might be on to something.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince—of, in this case, cartoon comedy.
A POST SCRIPT…
I am embarrassed to admit that I neglected to indicate the genius of Steve Allen and the impact he had on me and many of my contemporaries—and on comedy, most specifically television comedy, in a way that is all too often barely acknowledged, and frequently simply ignored.
For all the wistful fondness of nostalgia directed at Ernie Kovacs, a clever, visionary and intelligent talent certainly, it was Allen who was far more the godfather of modern television comedy, extant, separate and distinct from the sitcom stuff.
Allen was, in a very real way, as influential on all comedy that came after him as Orson Welles was with CITIZEN KANE. Like Welles, Steve Allen represented a bifurcation, a dividing line between two streams of creative thinking.
It became next to impossible to regard what had preceded him in this realm in any way other than via an ironic perspective, certainly for an audience gifted with cultural awareness.
In his later years, he became a scold, frequently dismissed by lesser talent and an indifferent audience. I wonder if that persona derived from bitterness as he watched, sidelined, as several generations of comic talent built careers and personas on an anarchic and brilliant sensibility Allen had demonstrated decades earlier, with no acknowledgment of those blazed trails.
