I can’t decide whether this is a manifesto or a broadside. Perhaps only time will tell.
In the Trump era, we’ve entered a kind of Dark Ages. It didn’t begin with Trump, of course. Just as the McCarthy Era didn’t begin with Joe McCarthy’s brief and odious time in the spotlight, the Trump Era really started brewing a while back. I don’t know exactly when or where; I’m like the sheriff of Normal Bluffs, Iowa, trying to figure out if this is just a few hopped-up teens during a full moon, or if we’ve got a real vampire/pod people/bug-eyed alien crisis on our hands. Perhaps that glowing meteorite that appeared a week ago outside of town has something to do with all the weird things a-goin’ on around these parts.
But I’m here today to raise awareness about an epidemic that has swept the land. Just as a big rain confuses a wandering dog, and throws off his directional compass, several big rains have fucked up our collective ability to process humor.
It’s not just about unchecked political correctness. I’m not among the enemies of political correctness, incidentally. I recognize, as anyone with some remaining human decency would, that the racist and homophobic jokes my generation used to tell are best characterized as examples of ugly prejudice rather than examples of great, or even good, comedy. And despite the many small and large instances of PC overreach we’ve all seen, or lived through, the noble intentions that jump-started that phenomenon continue to be noble.
But it’s time to recognize that we’ve walked pretty far away from those intentions. Just as Dylan led amiably and organically to Springsteen and Tom Petty, but then eventually to Huey Lewis, things have gotten seriously off track.
Moreover, it’s not just about the left. Not at all. It’s everybody on all sides of the equation. As one commentator observed a few months ago, Republicans were angrier than ever during the two years that they controlled every branch of American government. Why should this be so?
It’s because we’ve collectively decided to recalibrate our humor receptors. I see humor as a way to help us see our own ridiculousness. Even though I’m angry about the GOP’s recent attempts to surpass in mendacity and perfidy even the most cynical assessment one might have lobbed at them in an earlier and quainter era, I’m more disgusted about this plague of humorlessness.
It’s not that people don’t laugh anymore. They do. But humor now— particularly the social criticism variety— is expected to follow a numbing protocol.
It has to be telegraphed.
By this I mean it has to be presented in a forum where nobody can possibly be confused about is humorous nature. It has to be delivered with attendant facial mugging and a tone of voice that is a step away from literally saying, “just kidding.” (That phrase is the one I’d like to banish from our culture. It’s the canary in the coal mine, that some of us identified as evidence of a dangerous level of toxicity when a generation started using it all the time some years back.) In short, to be recognized as humor, it has to be on television.
Failing that, it has to be larded with qualifiers and emojis, and even apologies. Or it simply has to be so blindingly obvious who the object of mockery is that even a rain-befuddled dog will get it.
So it’s partly about oversensitivity. That’s what it was about when I made fun of the various political camps in the election cycle that eventually brought us our current leader. It wasn’t enough for Bernie supporters to disagree with my mild criticisms; I had to be accused of gaslighting them. It wasn’t enough for Hillary supporters to disagree with my take on her; I had to be accused of misogyny. It wasn’t enough for a Trump fan to disagree with my view that his hero’s rise had similarities to the rise of Hitler. The Trump fan had to fume that I was unforgivably disrespecting his grandfather who had fought in WWII.
And to be fair to these people, much humor today is in fact crass and insulting, in the manner of the racist and homophobic jokes we used to traffic in. I’ve talked in the past about how much I hate the habit of making fun of Donald Trump’s name, or appearance. Aside from being ugly and indefensible, in a way that we’d all recognize instantly if it were directed at an African-American woman, it’s just fucking weak. (I prefer the word “lame” there, but lately I hear objections to the use of that word because of its association with physical infirmity.) I’ve been told, multiple times, that it’s ok to use this approach to mockery if the mockee is a bad enough person. In fact, some people have told me that it’s all part of the noble resistance effort.
Not so, I suggest. The noble resistance effort is indeed noble. But, as with political correctness, and with the laudable goal of treating WWII vets with respect, these well-intentioned ideas aren’t enough to justify making fun of someone for being unattractive, and they’re also not enough to make me guilty about using humor to puncture and deflate our many human flaws.
I’m not going to pretend I’m always the best spokesman for humor, or the best demonstrator of its power. As many before me have opined, as soon as you start talking about humor, you ruin it. Beyond that, I don’t hit the bullseye every time.
But I do believe, as few do today, that humor in its largest and deepest sense, is the best tool we have for what is apparently the hardest job ever for a human; the job of recognizing that we are all of us snakebit by the real original sin. And I’m not talking about the Christian mythology with the fig leaves and the poison apple and so forth.
I’m talking about the honest truth that humans, our better efforts notwithstanding (Beethoven’s symphonies, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Duke Ellington’s 78s, etc.) are just not that great.
Sure, we did some amazing stuff. But we can’t forget ethnic cleansing, slavery, or prop comedy.
The circumstantial evidence is everywhere in history, and spills back into pre-history, when Homo sapiens were even less verbal than we are today. Back then, it was impossible to misunderstand a joke because irony didn’t exist yet. I assume humor didn’t exist at all, except in the form of cruelly mocking the unfortunate. Perhaps this is wrong, and there were prehistoric flashes of humor that is used to subvert hierarchy. Maybe a cave wife would put on the leader’s lolncloth and strut around, grunting pompously, to get laughs while the men were out hunting and gathering. Nobody really knows.
But the point is, we aren’t so good. We mostly operate out of self-interest, and then use our rich spoken language to justify our actions after the fact. There was a time when a statement like that would be seen as innocuous and devoid of controversy. Now it makes collective hackles rise, as right and left alike prepare to accuse me of using false equivalency.
You can’t criticize anyone or anything on the right, without an outsized response. Trump likes to suggest that liberals are inherently evil and corrupt, which is why he (an entirely admirable accomplisher of daily miracles) has to endure any criticism at all. And on the left, even the mildest of criticisms trigger outrage that never seems to be leavened by even a molecule of empathy or humility. Nobody’s ever a little bit wrong anymore. Every difference is said to be undeniable justification for obscenity-laden abuse and a level of self-righteousness that would be appropriate for dealing with truly heinous utterances. I don’t believe that kind of response is remotely justified, for example, if I observe that a Democratic candidate is less liberal than I’d like them to be.
Here’s something it would be good for people to recall, if they are going to be reading my writing. Maybe they can put it on a little card and keep it in their pocket.
Humor is saying something that isn’t exactly true, in order to get at something we’re not exactly being honest about.
Our flaws are universal. That doesn’t mean that our two political parties, at any one moment, are literally equivalent in moral terms. THEY ARE NOT. I doubt they ever have been. It just means that I see things through the lens of human history, and not through the lens of whatever’s going on today. I doubt any living American is more acutely aware than I am of the morass of nihilistic and self-indulgent words and acts now playing on our right flank. But every time I say anything even slightly critical about a Democrat, a bunch of liberals feel the need to remind me of it. Please stop doing that, liberals.
We’ve all become like tweens who think a pop star they’ve known about for three months is the greatest musician of all time.
I didn’t sign a contract agreeing to never say anything bad about liberals while Trump is president, and that’s for the same reason that when 9/11happened, I didn’t sign a contract agreeing to put my ambivalence about America in a drawer while we all came together for two minutes.
Demanding those levels of loyalty from me is a kind of bullshit that I abhor. While not being equivalent, falsely or otherwise, the bullshit from the right and the bullshit from the left are both bullshit. They are, at best, well-intentioned, but I don’t care about that. When you tell me that we’re in the middle of an emergency, or a war, and that means I have to stop using humor and social criticism, here’s my response.
I’m not going to do that, and neither should you. And if this causes someone to wax apoplectic when commenting on my Facebook post, I cordially ask them to simply stop reading what I write. If you need me to think and talk like you, or else you’ll be angry, aggressive, and abusive toward me, please stop reading what I’m writing. I don’t like to block people, and I rarely do it. But lately I’ve been rethinking that policy. I welcome disagreement, even though like most people, I much prefer the warm and fruity breath of the yes-man. But I don’t welcome abuse, and I don’t welcome self-righteousness. And I’m getting weary of being accused of disingenuousness, or worse, when I don’t accept these things from people on my Facebook feed.
It’s as if I’m asking people to take off their shoes in my house. You don’t have to understand my reasons for it. You’re free to privately judge me for pretentiousness, or squeamishness, or whatever comes to mind. But I’m just asking for people to respect my request.
If you can’t do that, I don’t see the value of us continuing our relationship. Go track mud in the house of a person who’s just like you. I’ll be over here, playing host to a wide variety of shoeless people. And anyone who takes off his or her shoes might just manage to then teach me something about their perspective. I hope so. It’s happened before, many times. But the shoes need to come off first.
