It is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had
to invent laughter.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN adult laughs 17 times a day. Or did; it’s
reasonable to assume that this figure has dropped off over the past month.
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington,
laughter has been difficult to muster. It feels uncomfortable,
inappropriate, to be rolling in the aisles right now. As local humorist
Jimmy Tingle says, "We’re in a national wake. Do you walk up to a casket
and tell funny stories? No, you don’t. You’re respectful. You’re quiet."
Until recently, maintaining that comedy should be tempered with
funereal respect would have seemed absurd — like saying fly swatters
should come equipped with FM stereo. "Safe" comedy — the sugar-coated
quips of Bill Cosby and Bob Saget — was something your grandmother liked.
True connoisseurs of comedy demanded irreverence, edginess. Sometimes,
irreverence and edginess became substitutes for genuine humor.
"The problem with comedy in America today," says satirist Barry
Crimmins, "is that people often mistake the blunt edge for the cutting
edge. They mistake Andrew Dice Clay — who is idiotically profane — for
Lenny Bruce." The Andrew Dice Clays of this world are likely to come under
closer scrutiny now, and that is a good thing, but so too are the Lenny
Bruces. The cutting edge may just be too cutting for comfort.
Case in point: a few days ago, I was leafing through George Carlin’s
most recent book, Napalm and Silly Putty (Hyperion, 2001), when I
came across a passage that parodied the American appetite for sensational
news coverage: "Big chunks of steel, concrete, and fiery wood falling out
of the sky, and people running around trying to get out of the way.
Exciting shit!"
He continued, "Sometimes an announcer comes on television and says,
‘Six thousand people were killed in an explosion today.’ You say, ‘Where,
where?’ He says, ‘In Pakistan.’ You say, ‘Aww, fuck Pakistan. Too far away
to be fun.’ But if he says it happened in your hometown, you say, ‘Whooa,
hot shit, Dave! C’mon! Let’s go down and look at the bodies.’ "
This may have been funny a month ago. Today it seems grotesque. Of
course, Carlin couldn’t have had any idea how prescient his words would
be. And of course he wasn’t poking fun at the victims of terrorism — but
that doesn’t make the passage any less appalling. The point is that after
September 11, this sort of hard-hitting satire can no longer be lobbed
around with reckless glee the way it has been in the past. "The world,"
says veteran satirist Paul Krassner, "has been divided into before and
after." And what was funny before may not be now.
IN 1996, an Arab-American humorist named Ray Hanania published a
book called I’m Glad I Look like a Terrorist: Growing Up Arab in
America (USG Publishing). "The title is meant to be satire," Hanania
says. "Maybe it seems a little rough now, a little uncomfortable, but in
the long haul the use of the terrorist as a stereotype is wrong. So I know
I’m right, even though this is one of those occasions where being right is
not good. If you look at me and think I’m a terrorist, then you’re wrong."
Still, the sort of time-delayed faux pas committed by Carlin and
Hanania are likely to have a lot of comedians scouring past material for
stuff that might now be deemed offensive. Certainly, given the current
mood, no one is going to be making quips about fire and steel falling from
above — no matter how germane the message. There are just some things you
cannot touch now. As John Aboud, co-editor of the online magazine
Modern Humorist, puts it, "America has become a tough room."
Jimmy Tingle found this out the hard way when, a few days after the
attacks, he performed at Club Passim in Harvard Square. Tingle is known
for his political satire, and he was playing before a crowd of Cambridge
liberals, but the single, relatively mild Bush joke he threw in landed
like a sock of ball bearings. "The audience couldn’t handle anything,"
Tingle says. "There was no laughter."
In the week after September 11 — perhaps mindful of suffering a similar
fate on a national stage, or perhaps simply shell-shocked like the rest of
us — the nation’s late-night TV hosts stepped gingerly, apologetically,
into the spotlight. Leno fudged and fidgeted, Letterman was lachrymose,
and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart didn’t appear at all,
choosing instead to air reruns. When he did return, Stewart sobbed
uncontrollably during his opening monologue.
There was a similarly gloomy reticence among print humorists. The
notoriously irreverent weekly the Onion chose not to run any new
material in its post–September 11 issue. (On September 26, the Onion
confronted the attacks head-on — president urges calm, restraint among
nation’s ballad singers; dinty moore breaks long silence on terrorism with
full-page ad; hijackers surprised to find selves in hell — and logged
record traffic on its Web site.)
Modern Humorist led its first issue after the attacks with a
sort of apology: "Understandably, some of you may not want to think about
comedy right now...."
"The first question was what was appropriate," says co-editor Mike
Colton. "We decided that we had to be honest for the first time on the
site, to talk to our readers directly." Modern Humorist,
too, came back with a bang the following week, posting a list of "new
entertainment guidelines for a changed America": "Any stand-up comic who
does a routine about airplanes is to be accompanied onstage by a federal
marshal"; "Comedy about violent Islamic extremists should not impugn all
of the innocent violent extremists of other faiths."
This kind of take-no-prisoners humor, says Colton, was exactly what his
readers had demanded. Though Modern Humorist received hundreds of
messages thanking the editors for their sensitivity following the attacks,
many more letter-writers seemed eager — even desperate — for some return
to the status quo. The overall mood was captured by a short e-mail from a
guy who called himself Jim:
When will it be again ok to laugh?
I’ve been wondering.
WHEN WILL it be again okay to laugh? A well-worn adage has been
making the rounds lately: "Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy." But whether
this formula can be applied to recent events remains to be seen. "I don’t
think things will ever return to normal," says Colton. "I find it very
hard to imagine that in 50 years we’ll be going to the Broadway musical
about the World Trade Center collapse."
Despite his publication’s satirical tone, Colton believes the type of
humor Americans crave right now is escapist, absurdist. Indeed, frivolous,
oddball movies like Zoolander and Legally Blonde have been
doing a roaring trade. And yet the most popular show in New York right now
is Mel Brooks’s The Producers, a Broadway musical spoofing the
Nazis. Steve Lippman, a reporter at New York’s Jewish Week,
believes this is no accident. "This is a comedy about the Holocaust," he
says. "It’s not only making people laugh, it’s providing them with a
morale boost. If we can laugh at that terrible tragedy, we can laugh at
the hell we’re going through now. It says we will outlast this. We will
outlast these mamzers who did this to us."
"We’re a hardy people," says John Aboud. "It’s part of our nature to
laugh." True enough. But what are we — and aren’t we — supposed to laugh
at? The World Trade Center carnage has already distinguished itself
as one of the few disasters that haven’t provoked an immediate slew of
sick jokes. (This may be due in part to the fact that many disaster jokes
have traditionally originated on Wall Street, but it also points to an
increased sensitivity among the joke-tellers.) "What I’ve been telling
writers is that what happened is so unspeakably awful that it’s hard to be
funny about it at its core," says Colton. "But at the periphery there are
ways to be funny. We’ll chip away at the periphery without touching the
center."
Colton may be right, but his advice leaves unanswered the question of
precisely how close America’s humorists can get to the core of the
atrocity without hitting a raw nerve. And the bottom line is, the only way
they’ll get the answer is through trial and error. "My reputation is that
irreverence is my only sacred cow," says satirist Krassner. "But the
elements I want now are compassion as well as humor. If I do that and
still the audience doesn’t laugh, then I’ll have to rethink why something
struck me as funny and not them. What did I fail to communicate?"
"I don’t know what the policy is yet," says Lizz Winstead, a co-founder
of The Daily Show who now performs stand-up comedy in Los
Angeles. "I’m not the type to do Osama-what-an-asshole jokes — I can only
do things that feel important for me to say. The real question is, when
are you ready to deliver the best material you have, the best way you know
how? If you treat this in the same way as you treat a 14-year-old baseball
player who’s supposed to be 12, then fuck you. If you’re going to give
your opinion about this, it had better be thought out. You do your best
work and know there are consequences to that."
Of course, as comedian and actor Al Franken points out, "You have to
have respect for the people who died and who lost family members." For the
satirist, however, the trick is knowing what’s respectful and what’s
wishy-washy. To be sure, there are public figures who are just begging to
be lampooned right now — like Jerry Falwell, who recently blamed "the
pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians"
for the terrorist attacks. "He’s a comedy savior," says Colton. "He’s home
base. He’s a safe haven. You can’t make jokes about the World Trade Center
falling down, but thank the lord you can make jokes about Jerry Falwell."
Quite — but can you make jokes about the president?
"I think it’s a good idea not to touch the president right now," says
Colton.
"I would say it’s critical that no one criticizes the president," says
Franken, who then adds, "in public."
But many satirists shudder at this behind-closed-doors policy; they
consider it not only their right to publicly criticize and question the
nation’s leaders at the moment, but also their responsibility. "To me,
it’s scary that there are things you can say in your home but not
outside," says Mark Bazer, a Malden-born, Chicago-based humor writer (and
Phoenix contributor). "But isn’t satire especially important
in difficult times? Didn’t Swift write satire concerning some pretty bad
things in his day?"
Yes, but Swift didn’t have the Bush administration to answer to. On
September 17, Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher raised the
question of whether crashing an airplane into a building was more
"cowardly" than lobbing cruise missiles at an enemy from afar — and was
all but tarred and feathered for his comments. Sponsors, including Federal
Express and Sears, yanked funding. There was even talk of taking the show
off the air. On September 26, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer gave
Maher a public telling-off, saying, ominously, "Americans ... need to
watch what they say."
"[Fleischer’s] behaving like a national nanny — we have to watch what
we say, otherwise he’ll put pepper in our mouth," says Arianna Huffington,
a political commentator and frequent guest on PI (and a guest on
the show in question). "This goes way beyond Politically Incorrect
and Bill Maher. This could be the beginning of a slippery slope." If so,
then Maher was the first to go sliding down, eventually making an on-air
apology for his remarks — a humiliating defeat for a political satirist.
"There are people I know who think Maher’s a wimp for apologizing," says
Krassner. "They say he got wimpy and scared. Well, I can understand his
being scared."
Not everyone, however, will be so easily cowed. "I may choose my words
more carefully than usual," says Barry Crimmins, "but I will not censor my
questioning of policy or the people who are supposed to implement policy.
I will not censor my criticism of Bush. Everyone still knows that he’s an
idiot, but now we’re supposed to convince the rest of the world that we
can’t tell he’s an idiot? And that’s supposed to make us scary? How can I
not make jokes about that? There’s humor there."
There is, of course, the matter of national unity to take into
consideration. "It may be that an important part of that," Crimmins shoots
back, "is taking things apart first so we can put them back together the
right way."
Despite his palm-thumping dudgeon, Crimmins insists he’s not
insensitive to America’s collective pain. "I don’t feel much like dancing
myself at the moment," he says. "I can say all this stuff and still feel —
I’m crushed. I’m just heartbroken about this. Everyone’s emotional, and
for very good reason. But we have to pay attention."
Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive science at MIT and author of
How the Mind Works (Norton, 1999), probably wouldn’t approve of
Crimmins’s acerbic brand of humor — at least in light of the current
crisis. "This is a way of lowering someone a few pegs," he says, "of
countering claims to dignity. It’s a deflating tactic, which is why so
many kings and presidents and gasbags and prima donnas are its target. I
call it ‘dignicide.’ It punctures dignity. But this is a situation where
dignity is called for. A lot of lives were lost."
For Pinker, laughter has its roots in aggression. But as the past few
weeks have shown, humor can have a consoling, unifying effect. On
September 29, Saturday Night Live kicked off its 27th season with
its first show since the attacks — a prospect that for weeks had given its
writers and performers sleepless nights and peptic twinges. At the
beginning of the show, SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels stood
before the audience and asked, "Can we be funny?" New York City mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, a guest on the show, chipped in, "Why start now?"
Of course, Giuliani wasn’t really implying that SNL has never
been funny before; he was giving the show the go-ahead to be funny now
— indeed, he conveyed his assent through a joke of his own. If satire is
the comedy of recrimination, then Giuliani’s good-natured ribbing was its
opposite: the comedy of identification.
Certainly there was no underlying malice when some World Trade Center
workers, frantic to make their way out of one of the towers on September
11, reportedly made light of the situation by reeling off the flights of
stairs they were descending as if they were counting down to the New Year:
"10, 9, 8, 7 ... " When fans at a Chicago Cubs game expressed concern that
they might become a terrorist target, a wag in the crowd remarked that
this was highly unlikely, as no self-respecting terrorist would put
Chicago out of its misery by bombing Wrigley Field. Humor doesn’t deflate
only dignity; it can deflate fear.
Sandy Ritz, a "humor consultant" who specializes in survivor humor,
spent a good part of the 1990s visiting disaster sites around the world.
The one constant, she says, was that people demonstrated the need to laugh
at their predicaments. Much of the humor Ritz encountered took the form of
handwritten signs. There was the one next to a Los Angeles freeway
following an earthquake: welcome to la, some assembly required. The one on
the Oklahoma house that had been devastated by a tornado: for sale,
fixer-upper. The one in a flooded Midwestern field: corn sold by the
gallon. To the outsider, these kinds of jokes might border on the
offensive, but for survivors, says Ritz, they are a "coping and hoping"
mechanism.
"Laughter is a positive adaptive response to disaster," Ritz explains.
"Making fun of a disaster situation relieves stress, boosts morale, and
promotes social bonding. It helps you master anxiety and serves as a
safety valve for letting out aggression and tension. It can be a means of
displaying self-reliance and strength, of maintaining dignity and
providing a palatable method of communication. Humor is the currency of
hope. It says, ‘We are in this together. You are not alone.’ "
There’s a paradox at work here. We tend to think of humor as something
that becomes easier with distance — temporal, spatial, or emotional. But,
as Ritz and others have discovered, humor flourishes at Ground Zero —
particularly among emergency-room personnel and rescue workers. "I would
bet my paycheck that there’s a lot of humor at the [World Trade Center]
rescue site," says Patty Wooten of the Association for Applied and
Therapeutic Humor. "We might not understand this, but we haven’t been
pushed to the edge like those people; we don’t need to laugh like they
need to laugh."
In his book Laughter in Hell (Jason Aronson, 1993), which
examines how victims of the Nazi death camps used humor, Steve Lippman
demonstrated that those who found themselves at the center of possibly the
greatest tragedy in human history still found it within themselves to
laugh. As one Auschwitz survivor put it, "Without humor we would have all
committed suicide. We made fun of everything."
"There’s a belief in Judaism that before God creates an illness, he
creates the cure," Lippman says. "We had humor built into us as a healing
mechanism. If a person can’t laugh, there’s something wrong. And if
there’s no humor in a society, then we’re really in trouble."
Steven Sultanoff, a clinical psychologist, says he uses humor to help
his patients restore not only their mental health, but their physical
well-being, too. "Laughter does a lot of things," Sultanoff explains. "It
reduces stress hormones. It stimulates respiration. It gives us a physical
sense of relaxation. A few studies have found that laughter increases the
production of T cells and [produces] a decrease in cortisol. There appears
to be an increased tolerance for pain. But laughter is also a diagnostic
tool — the use of humor indicates that someone is healing."
But is America ready to be healed? John Morreal, a humor researcher who
teaches at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia,
believes that laughter is a mechanism for disengaging the fight-or-flight
response — and he isn’t sure that America should disengage just yet. "When
a moment of danger has passed," he says, "laughter is a signal to the
group that we can all relax. We laugh at the issue and therefore dismiss
it. But right now we are in a time of incredible urgency. We could have a
huge part of the world turn against us. We’re still in danger. This is a
situation where humor may not be appropriate."
For many Americans, this is not a time for laughter; it’s a time for
grief, for anger — righteous, retributive, fire-and-brimstone fury. And,
as Morreal puts it, "You can’t be laughing and angry at the same time."
But this, says Ray Hanania, is precisely the point. "I believe
laughter is a good antidote for trouble," he says. "That’s one of the
problems — there’s not enough humor in the Middle East. Humor is the
contradiction of fanaticism. I just cannot see Osama bin Laden telling a
joke. You cannot be a fanatic and be funny. There’s never a good reason to
give up laughter, even in the worst tragedies, even in the worst moments.
Every night I listen to this terrible news and there’s no place to go to
get away from it. If we don’t find something to laugh at, the next thing
you know, we’ll be fanatics too."
Chris Wright can be reached at
cwright@phx.com
