Americans long ago lost their sense of humor. Oh, it is true, they can guffaw for hours over toilet jokes or Comedy Channel monologues on sexual acts our ancestors had never heard of or jokes about someone else’s ethnic group. Just to be scientific, I did a little research: There are almost as many Google results for “race jokes” and “ethnic jokes” (15,000,000) as for “sex jokes” (21,500,000). But a sense of humor is not like a sneeze or a jerked knee—responses triggered deep in the reptilian recesses of the brain—but an appreciation for the comic side of everyone’s life including our own.
Yes, we can all laugh at someone falling down the stairs or at a Stooge who takes the piece of pie in the face. Democrats can laugh at President Bush, Republicans at Al Gore or Nancy Pelosi, but how few of us can rise above our party or self-declared identity to laugh at a joke at the expense of ourselves or our heroes. As Horace says in one of is satires, “What are you laughing at? The joke’s on you.”
Take poor Kinky Friedman, the Texas comic songwriter who is running for governor of Texas. Not that poor Kinky ever had a chance of winning. Over the years, he has managed to offend nearly everyone in Texas. As leader of the band “Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys” and author of such hits as “Ride ‘em Jewboy,” (Friedman’s tribute to holocaust victims), he offended his own father, a Jewish doctor in Chicago, and white Christians, blacks, Greeks, and every imaginable whining minority, as well as their enemies, has also been the butt of his sarcasm. Now in the closing days of the campaign, black democrats have unearthed the terrible fact that he once told an interviewer that “sexual predators should be thrown in prison and forced to “listen to a Negro talking to himself.”
Friedman’s response was surprisingly mature: anyone who is offended by his remarks shouldn’t vote for him. But professional Negroes share Dr. Friedman’s inability to see themselves as others might see them.
A more frightening example of this unlovely and undemocratic quality was provided by President Bush’s defenders in both parties. They were horribly offended by President Chavez’ jokes at President Bush’s expense. You see, it is all right to beat the drums worldwide to overthrow Chavez on the very practical grounds that he is in the way, but when the clownish little Venezuelan strikes back, it’s an outrage. Charles Wrangel was disgusted that such a thing could happen in his district. Someone might inform Congressman Wrangel that he does not represent the United Nations, though the delegates are hardly more freakish and welfare-dependent than Wrangel’s constituents.
The USA press, even the Bush-haters, exulted in the counter-response, but the response in the General Assembly and around the world has not been entirely negative. Quite the contrary. It couldn’t be because many people, in and out of the Third World, actually agree with Chavez-and-Chomsky’s somber analysis of US foreign policy? It is unthinkable. To make fun of US imperialism is a sign of bad taste and bad character, as Stephen Colbert learned at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
We are nation of unreflective gluttons and buyers, eating our way into an early grave, but to combine such swinish hedonism with a pharisaic self-righteousness makes us doubly disgusting. We’re hardly better than the violence-crazed Muslims who are killing Christians because the Pope made an historical illusion their mullahs are too stupid to comprehend. Don’t laugh at the “ragheads” my friends. Our own people are no better, only more cowardly.
I used to wonder if my friend Clyde Wilson was not too sour on the American character. I now think he may be something of a Polyanna. The people who sold themselves into slavery in the days of FDR and Lincoln and the great army of journalists, propagandists, and “scholars” who extolled those heroes to the skies were cut from the same cloth as Sean Hannity and Al Franken. They were better educated and better looking, worked harder and spoke better English, but they were humorless serfs all the same.
The great difference between this generation and its predecessor is our dearth of satirists and humorists. They had Mencken and Nock and Will Rogers, while we have to be content with Stephen Colbert, Kinky Friedman, and the irrepressible Hugo Chavez. Still, I am truly grateful for the little light they shed on these dark times. In the next generation, thanks to modern schooling, there will be nothing but Dave Chappelle and no laughter in the dark.