The Guilty Pleasure of Humor

The latest edition of The Atlantic, a magazine I don’t usually read unless confronted in the airport by a layover of three hours and a bookshop stuffed with paperbacks dealing with spies, politicians, murderers of the worst sort, and rapturous virgins wishing to be otherwise (you can learn a lot about a city’s intellectual climate and reading habits by checking out the airport bookshops), contains an article called “Cheap Laughs: The Smug Satire of Liberal Humorists Debases Our National Conversation” by a Mr. Christopher Hitchens.

This article, which I shall call hereafter as Cheap Laughs, reminded me somewhat of the Puritan take on the maypole and the achingly self-important banning of all forms of frivolity and pleasure lest anyone be happy. I know there are scholars who study humor in all forms and I don’t want to create a maelstrom of indignant accusations about whether I have any background to justify taking on the topic. But what the hell—I’ve got my own opinion and I value it as much as Mr. Hitchens does his. Cheap Laughs didn’t convince me that liberal humorists will bring down this country: what it did was convince me that we as a people are desperate to find some relief from the oppressive self-importance of politics and culture wars.

I’ve always thought of humor as the way we deal with things that perplex and oppress us. We can either take them as seriously as they do themselves and throw ourselves over the precipice with the lemmings, or we can find a way to laugh as a people, and by doing so cut the tension. It’s a bonding thing, in other words. Think Lenten ribaldry when people dressed up as bishops and wore pigs' head masks—misrule like this was allowed for a few special days but would have been blasphemy and punished anytime else. The church wisely knew that people had to let off steam even if meant mocking the very things they valued intensely during the rest of the year.

What we choose to laugh at says mountains about what is important to us—just as the airport bookstores show what entertains us and passes the time—and humor can run from very crude to highly sophisticated and ambiguous. It can be gentle, as Will Rogers showed, or more pointed like that of Mark Twain, or over the top like Archie Bunker, who by providing something we could agree was ridiculous, provided an escape valve. The best humor I have heard has been self-deprecating, as when Ronald Reagan and even George Bush talked to the Press Club in Washington or when someone like George Clooney deflected personal attack with good humor and grace. These responses give us hope that some form of good manners and civilty can exist.

In the end, I can’t imagine why Mr. Hitchens, limited himself to the liberal humorists when there is so much “humor” in every spectrum of political and social thought these days (watermelons on the White House lawn, anyone?), but I also think he’s missed the point. We need humorists on all sides of all issues and we need to see the vital role they have to play for us. Somehow, I think the national conversation will survive humor from either side—and I shudder to think what will happen if we ever muzzle it.

The Like of This Man: Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy’s recent death had to bring back memories for anyone alive during those years. This is so because the Kennedys were as much a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. Every magazine in existence ran stories on their family lives, their fashions, their religion, their sports, and their children, as well as their political lives. Like them or not, agree with them or not, the family was inextricably tied to the times we all shared and would, I believe, seem strangely out of date today were they starting their careers now, maybe because they created the times around them.

Ted’s funeral reflected how most of us in the US saw the family in its heyday: larger than life, slightly over the top, dusted with religion, and quite unpredictable. The UK viewed the family quite differently, reflected in the quite different coverage of Ted’s death in the London newspapers. Over there, the nation never forgave Joseph Kennedy for his Nazi sympathies and tended to distrust the Kennedy children because of it. Not everyone loved the Kennedys, even in this country.

The various eulogies of family and friends, however, did much to humanize Ted Kennedy for me in ways that public displays of Camelot grief for the family could never have achieved. After I’d listened to them—and, yes, I watched the various ceremonies and gatherings—I found myself wishing that I’d had the chance to work with him. I would probably have been quite intimidated, but I would have loved the aura of energy and vitality that obviously was part of who he was.

I did meet him once—actually twice on the same day in 1990—when he visited the University of Hawaii at Manoa to receive an award from the School of Public Health. The dean of the school, a very well connected political force in his field, had invited the Senator to give a talk on universal health coverage—the topic, it appears, that still refuses to go away.

Since the school was the primary host, the president’s office was involved only in a ceremonial capacity. At least, as I remember, I wasn’t immediately involved until I was informed suddenly that my presence was needed in a welcoming group just as he was to come into the administration building. I recall hustling down the stairs to be part of a group of university vice presidents (with me representing the president’s office). He shook hands with us all very seriously. I just said “Welcome to the University of Hawaii,” and he nodded that shock of grey hair. Then he was whisked away.

“What happens next?” I asked our University Relations people. Like us, I don’t believe they had been completely involved until this point. I was told he was going over to Kennedy Theatre to give an address. This gave me an unpleasant intuitive feeling. “Who’s greeting him there?” I asked. The answer saw two vice presidents and me rapidly crossing the campus through the back ways to beat the Senator to the theatre.
We were standing there in a line along with the theatre director to welcome him again when he arrived.

When he reached our reception line, he glanced down at us. I knew he recognized us, but he didn’t say a thing as we welcomed him again. I can only imagine he was used to the strange ways of protocol and maybe just inwardly shrugged. Ah well. It would have been worse if we hadn’t been there. We followed him in and watched from the wings as he gave a firestorm of a speech about healthcare reform. The theatre was packed: the Kennedy name was working its magic as usual.

In his last twenty years of service to the nation, Senator Edward Kennedy built a towering reputation as someone who cared. It’s a tribute to him that even a very uncomfortable John McCain showed up at his memorial service. I don’t personally feel that there’s anyone left in Congress whose name alone conveys the sense that someone is watching the shop while all too many others are merely feathering their nests. I suspect we shall not look upon his like again, mainly because the present times are so very different.