The Laugh's On Us
by Wentworth Sutton,assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto.Dr. Sutton thanks Shawn Moore and Gerry Tsuji for their help in clarifying his thinking about the issues discussed.
By their jokes shall ye know them. The psychological concerns of every generation are expressed by its comedians.
We laugh not at the ridiculous but at that we wish to ridicule. The clearest examples of this are racial and ethnic jokes. Racial and ethnic jokes are often devoid of humour; people laugh at them not because they're humorous but because they imply that certain other people are not as worthy as they themselves are. It is hard to believe that anyone could find David Letterman's nightly joke about cab drivers in turbans funny, yet people laugh all the same.
Professional comedians offer us a range of subjects to ridicule. Our choices reflect our deepest concerns. The history of cinematic and televised comedy illustrates the changes in the psychological concerns of society during the twentieth century.
In the earliest days of the movies, comedy was found in the ridiculous antics of authority figures. The Keystone Kops, for example, were charged with the noble task of maintaining public order but their incompetence in discharging their duties made them laughable.
Most early screen comedy involved in some way the theme of questioning or belittling authority, and this emphasis continued for decades. Chaplin's little tramp had an amazing ability to frustrate the intentions of duly constituted authority. The Marx Brothers appeared in one prestigious setting after another (a college, an ocean liner, a royal palace) blissfully and successfully heedless of the impassioned demands of authority. The Three Stooges were inevitably led into catastrophe by the authoritative Moe. Stan Laurel confounded the authoritative Oliver Hardy, Lou Costello confounded Bud Abbott, W. C. Fields confounded everybody, and so on.
In this early screen comedy authority was depicted as ridiculous (for example, in the character of Moe Howard) or as an unnecessary restraint on the freedom of the creative individual (for example, in the character of Bud Abbott). In those bygone days people felt that their lives were too regimented and controlled, and for relief they sought comedy in which those who regimented and controlled were exposed as unworthy and incompetent.
This generalization is confirmed by the empirical observation that the greater the regimentation and control in society, the greater the liking for this type of comedy. The class system of the United Kingdom, for example, was still rigid in the 1970s and still producing such classics of the genre as Monty Python's Flying Circus (which, John Cleese has said, made fun of authority figures simply because that was the easiest way to get laughs), On the Buses, Rising Damp, and Fawlty Towers. Even today, the still colonial culture of Canada is producing This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Royal Canadian Air Farce, and the truly great (at least in the version produced for the CBC) Red Green Show.
After the second world war, though, another genre started to grow in strength. The first sign of the increasing popularity of this genre was the appearance of the solo stand-up comedian in the topmost ranks of entertainment. Certainly there had been stand-up comedians before the war. However they appeared in movies or on radio only as members of troupes of performers. For example, the great Bob Hope appeared with Bing Crosby and with other performers, and again a large part of the byplay concerned the exposure of authority as illegitimate.
After the war, though, stand-up comedians began to appear as solo acts on network television. The Ed Sullivan Show, The Steve Allen Show, and The Tonight Show all encouraged this development.
Of course a solo stand-up comedian can question authority. The important point, though, is that when we laugh at this questioning we are laughing at the comedian and not at the authority. It is the questioning of authority that is funny and not the authority.
The difference between the two approaches can be demonstrated by comparing two roughly contemporaneous acts, the Smothers Brothers and Steve Martin. The Smothers Brothers exploited the traditional tension between the rebel (Tom) and the authority figure (Dick, whom, significantly, Mom liked best). On the other hand, Steve Martin, perhaps the first fully realized exemplar of the new approach, was like the Smothers Brothers without Dick Smothers. Without authority (the straight man) to undermine, the comic suddenly looks, well, comic (it might be argued that Harry Lauder embodied this approach before the war, but his impact on the mass media, as opposed to the friendly family gathering of vaudeville, was extremely limited).
The essential ridiculousness of the individual comic was quickly realized, and we saw, for example, public protest against Bill Dana's impression of a Hispanic character in his act. Today the continual upward mobility of stand-up comedians into situation comedies in which they portray abject doofuses demonstrates how the comics themselves have become objects of ridicule. The superb hostility of Drew Carey's stand-up act has been abandoned in his situation comedy, in which authority always gets the better of his character. Norm Macdonald's wry wit has failed to put in an appearance in his situation comedy, in which he portrays a character who is simply clueless and worthless.
That is, the true meaning of Carey's and Macdonald's stand-up work is that their audience did not treat it as satire but as laughable inanity. Their situation comedies also are examples of the subversion of ensemble comedy, previously devoted to the questioning of authority, by the new ethic of questioning the value of the individual human being. The incessant talk of contemporary comedic irony is simply a way of reminding us that we are not to take the intellectual content of comedy seriously, but instead to concentrate on the humour of the comedian's irrelevance and powerlessness.
The meaning of comedy today is that comedians are funny because they are individuals. Their jokes are funny not because they express some truth about life or society, but because anyone with his or her own opinions is ridiculous. That is why people can read Dilbert every day, laugh, and then do nothing about the ridiculous goings on at their own ridiculous offices. Dilbert is funny because he is a boob, not because Scott Adams has exposed the fraud of modern work life.
This meaning of comedy has developed because since the war authority has been reasserting itself. Where tradesmen, for example, used to run their own businesses, now many depend for their livelihood on contracting for large maintenance services. Mom-and-pop stores are being replaced by branches or franchises of large chains, and the chains keep getting larger as the big chains eat up the little ones. And of course the vast army of systems analysts and computer programmers, many of whom work as contractors, is almost entirely dependent on huge corporations.
Today more people depend for their livelihood on the benevolence of large undemocratic organizations. They cannot afford to laugh at authority, because if authority became laughable they would quickly be out of jobs. So they laugh at those who question authority. If Lenny Bruce were alive today, he would probably have his own sitcom, a battalion of Emmys on his mantelpiece, and the professional persona of a lovable loser.
The truth of this analysis is confirmed by the cinematic blacklisting of the great Rodney Dangerfield. Mr. Dangerfield made some very funny and popular movies which employed the old dynamic of outwitting authority. For his pains he was blackballed from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and hasn't made a picture in years.
Perhaps it is because he has been enlightened by Mr. Dangerfield's fate that Robin Williams has opted for roles as inspirational authority figures (Dead Poets' Society, Good Will Hunting, Patch Adams) or, as in Jakob the Liar, roles which trivialize and sentimentalize vicious social oppression (luckily Jakob the Liar came out at the same time that British television was showing previously unseen film of the Warsaw ghetto).
Even the broad burlesque of the police in the Naked Gun series has proven too rich for the blood of the mighty transnational media corporations who now control the so-called entertainment industry. Over the last few years they have redefined screen humour: their idea of glittering comedy is an orgy of product placements and tie-in promotions like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a movie based on ridicule of the Sixties ideal of liberation from the constraints of society. Liberate ourselves? – what a comical idea.
Vestiges of anti-authority feeling have been diverted (and perverted) into gross-out humour. A large portion of the adult or near-adult population now finds peepee doodoo humour wildly amusing. What better sign could there be of the infantilization of modern society? Instead of opposing social authority, we take naughty delight in things Mummy and Daddy wouldn't like – the leading practitioner of this form of comedy, Tom Green, even features in his shows nasty tricks he plays on his parents.
Real anti-authority humour is not yet extinct, but its audience is growing older. Most people today cannot remember a time when they were not watching television. They have grown up in a society dominated by electronic media and regard the typical fragmentation of society and consciousness produced by electronic media as the natural state of affairs.
Older people, who grew up in an era when the mechanical conception of society was not yet dead, learned to conceive of society as a machine which attempts to wipe out human individuality for its own purposes and is therefore oppressive. Younger people, raised in a society more obviously dominated by electronic technology, conceive of society as a giant television where anyone can watch whatever channel he or she wants. They justify their own choice of channels by ridiculing those who watch other ones.
In the 1950s and 1960s, progressive opinion held that we were all brothers (sic) under the skin. Today, progressive opinion holds that we are all diverse and should be proud of our differences from other people. The logical consequence of that belief is that we should all find people who are different from us ridiculous.
So who is right? Of course the correct answer is no one. Society is not a big machine, nor is it a big television set. People from different groups are not identical with each other, but there is no way in which their differences from each other can be considered to be intrinsically meritorious.
Nevertheless, people seem determined to believe in one myth or another, and the myth of diversity continues to gain ground. Within ten years we can expect the minstrel show to return, and for it to be justified as ironic.
The Laugh's On Us © Coolth, 2002
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