Make Bushwood Great Again
Copyright 2021Forty-one years ago this month, Doug Kenney threw himself off a mountain in Hawaii, and I haven’t felt the same since.
Granted, forty-one years ago, I wasn’t yet even a twinkle in my old man’s eye. But in these hyperbolic, Trumpite times, why let a detail like that get in the way of a good grievance?
That Kenney’s death preceded my birth does not change the fact that I lost a little something when Kenney died. I think we all did. And it wasn’t simply because we lost a great talent – although we did – so much as it was because we lost a great talent who made us all laugh together, a feat which has since become increasingly difficult. Dying is easy, the old adage goes; comedy is hard.
This very adage – first heard by me in Peter O’Toole’s My Favorite Year – sprang to mind sometime late last summer when, on the fortieth anniversary of Kenney’s demise, I was suddenly feeling nostalgic for something funny. Of course, nostalgia in and of itself is not a newsworthy occasion for me. I am always feeling nostalgic. But the nostalgia that had me in its grips late last year was far greater, far more perceptible than normal, a condition no doubt borne, at least in part, from the crippling onslaught of the once-called China Virus, which had left more souls than just me yearning for anything of levity. The fact that this Eastern malevolence had besieged us in a year divisible by four had only made the yearning worse. But it had also made the dearth of good humor worse, so much so that I knew I wouldn’t find anything funny within our current culture: film; books; television, especially of the late-night variety. Consulting these, I knew, wouldn’t offer any levity at all. In fact, I would probably come away from them feeling even more dispirited than I already was.
So, as September faded to October, and political season prepared for its no-holds-barred run toward November, I resigned myself to the old and the tried: to my hand-me-down National Lampoons; and my first edition Lewis Grizzards; and my library of Chevy Chase films, the latter of which my wife dismisses as dullish dad humor (I wonder if the wives and mothers whose husbands and sons watched these films during Chase’s heyday would agree?) In doing so, I battened down the hatches against the many punchlines of contemporary Hollywood, knowing that, until the election was over, our contemporary comics and present-day jesters would be on full tilt. No one would be safe from their acerbic, sardonic, biting bon mots, nor from their unflinchingly caricatured impersonations, nor from their slapstick or their Trump-is-Hitler witticisms, the latter of which they would assuredly offer with unrepentant smugness and then congratulate themselves for their originality.
As we now know, I turned out to be more right than I could have possibly foreseen. Faster than one could say “Gunga Galunga,” the Trump-Biden showdown descended into madness; and lawsuits begot lawsuits; and little green men on grassy knolls were accused of stealing the President’s re-election; and an army of children from a William Golding novel stormed the Capitol like crazed zealots looking for their beast; and then Sleepy Joe slept through it all, whenever he wasn’t tripping his way through press conferences or moving the goalposts on masking or telling already-free Americans that they could see their families again and eat hot dogs once more if only they would get vaccinated by the same people who somehow still think cloth muzzles protect us from microscopic dangers. And all the while, our very “best” and “funniest” comedians tried to give this soaring lunacy a certain amount of color and humor and wit. But in the end, they struggled mightily to make me laugh, as I knew they would. Chances are, if you are anything like me, and you prefer your comedy to actually be funny, you probably didn’t laugh either.
Admittedly, some of my waxing humorlessness has had at least something to do with age. I may have not quite hit the big 4-0 quite yet, but I’ve still endured more birthdays than Jesus and James Dean, and I suppose there’s something about barreling towards forty – and all that the big 4-0 entails, like mortgages, bills, deadlines, children, and so on – which seems to take the frivolity out of things, even ridiculing politicians like Our Big Man in Orange and Ol’ Sleepy Joe. I witnessed this very same thing happen to my own parents, of course. During my childhood, whenever I cracked up during a Phil-Hartman-as-Bill-Clinton skit or a Weekend Update monologue, they’d say, “Saturday Night Live just isn’t funny anymore.” This would inevitably confuse me because the Saturday Night Live of my youth certainly was funny. It’s just that comedy is often a young man’s game, like statewide campaigns and fifths of Old Crow.
I nevertheless insist: There is more to my inability to laugh at today’s comedians than my proximity to Social Security or, for that matter, everyone’s proximity to those acutely strange presidential politics of 2020. So, instead, I must contend:
The very nature of funny has changed.
WHAT IS FUNNY?
The philosophies explaining humor are as varied as they are detailed. But peruse enough papers and the gist seems simple enough:
Freud thought that humor was a pressure valve, releasing the many built-up energies that society represses.
Plato thought humor could be dangerous if not checked because uncontrolled laughter betrays a lack of emotional discipline, and laughter, which is often at someone else’s expense, reveals a malicious superiority which has no place in the ideal state.
The early church, influenced by Greek thinkers, imbibed a great deal of Plato’s don’t-laugh-because-it’s-bad-for-you vibe. As it happens, this explains a lot about my church upbringing.
Later thinkers started to discuss something called Incongruity Theory. Writers as disparate as Kant, Kierkegaard, and Charlie Chaplin have expressed some variation on this theory, finding humor and mirth in recognizing what they sometimes call the incongruous. In the theory’s most basic variation, the audience expects something very specific, but their expectations are usurped, frustrated, sometimes inverted. It is this frustration which is funny. For example:
In Caddyshack, (an endlessly rewatchable Chevy Chase vehicle which Mr. Kenney, supra, co-wrote) an aloof golfer named Ty Webb, played by Mr. Chase, asks Danny Noonan, his caddy, whether he does drugs. Danny answers quickly, with earnestness. “Every day,” he says. And because the audience expects Ty to admonish the young man, they laugh when he instead says, “Good.” This is a variation on the old David Niven story (or Charlie Chaplin story; or maybe it’s Carl Reiner’s – I can’t remember where I read it) where a fat lady steps over a banana peel only to fall down a manhole.
Yet another variation of incongruity is where the audience recognizes something in the world that is incongruent with what they believe to be true or good. If, in this instant, an observant critic exacerbates the audience’s frustrated expectation, he is often rewarded with laughter. Think of the stand-up comic who expresses indignation at the expense of a tradition or routine which is outdated. Or think of Seinfeld exclaiming, “What’s the deal with…?!?”
In either variation, something conceptual is juxtaposed with something known (or believed to be known) and the recognition of the juxtaposition results in some kind of “a-ha!” moment.
* * *
Notice, though, that all these theories, although they offer different explanations of humor, at least share the same thing with audiences: a shared language. A shared understanding. A shared something. Consider:
For the Incongruity Theory, there must be a shared expectation in order for the juxtaposition to elicit laughter.
Alternatively, if humor is, as Freud claimed, the escaping tension of repressed energies, then there has to be a societal recognition of that tension or a shared understanding of the repression; otherwise, the joke falls flat.
Similarly, if you buy into the Superiority Theory, there must inherently be an “us” and a “them” that resonates with the audience; otherwise, how can someone share in the expense of the subject of the joke?
Note as well that this shared understanding can be aspirational. When a Polish person laughs at a Polack joke or when a lawyer laughs at a lawyer joke, they aren’t really practicing self-deprecation. They are aspiring to initiation, to be welcomed by their audience. This is important for reasons I will develop below. The useful thing for now is this:
In all cases, there is some shared sense of culture within which the maliciousness or the repression or the incongruity is legible and without which, it would be illegible. This shared language, in either its accepted or aspirational sense, can happen at the macro level or the micro. But I’m starting to feel as though it is not happening at all.
WHEN WE’RE NOT ALL IN ON THE JOKE
A modern mind – perpetually grieved and ambitiously iconoclastic – will no doubt argue that, by definition, the comedy I grew up with, and for which I am here nostalgic, was not actually shared, but was rather exclusive. I.e., the magazines, television programs, and films of my misspent youth portrayed few strong women, almost no blacks, and no gays or transgenders at all unless they were the butt of a cruel joke. These modern critics would also say, I am sure, that in the us/them dichotomy, supra, there were more “thems” than America’s white, racist, sexist, repressive culture had led me to believe. Hence, our comedy, even when it was pushing cultural envelopes, was dismissive of many and inherently discriminatory.
This is shortsighted criticism, though. To explain why, allow me a small tangent:
Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the script for Caddyshack, never belonged to a WASPy country club. Chevy Chase once said, “My father told me to stay away from Republicans on golf courses.” He took the role of Ty Webb in part to spoof golf, not to celebrate it. And Doug Kenney was the son a tennis pro, not the son of a member. He spent his whole young life making fun of a hypocritically phony establishment which he observed up close but never from within. Yet, one doesn’t matriculate Harvard and later move to Hollywood, as Kenney did, if they don’t want some measure of phoniness insulating them from the brutishness of real life. It’s a contradiction which reminds me, in a way, of the old Francois Truffaut bit about war movies. Truffaut (I think) said something once about being unable to make a true, authentic, anti-war picture because the more harrowing and grotesque the action, the more courageous, and thus appealing, the film’s protagonist.
Hence, the talent behind Caddyshack made a movie about working class stiffs sticking it to their betters. But without at least some respect for the betters, there’d be nothing resonating about the film for either the slobs or their betters. They made a movie ridiculing aspiration and success and establishments, but they couldn’t have done so without having some aspiration for joining the very establishment they were lampooning. Even the Judge Smails of the world had to have come from somewhere, long before they were sending children younger than you to the chamber.
In point of fact, much of the snobs-versus-slobs, anti-establishment, irreverently upending comedy of 1970s and 1980s Hollywood was never really anti-establishment at all. Yes, Judge Smails is a prick, but when he demands for Smoke Porterhouse to shine the wax out of his shoes, and Porterhouse instead takes the Judge’s spikes to a belt sander, who among us laughing at this comeuppance doesn’t innately understand that Porterhouse, the black man, wouldn’t still want to be a member of Bushwood, not because it is an all-white club, but in spite of it?
Likewise, we inevitably laugh at the end credits of Animal House as they inform us of Bluto Blutarsky’s eventual rise to the United States Senate. But when we do, we are not merely laughing at the irony (and the incongruity) of it all; nor are we simply sniping at the halls of Congress. We are also inherently, and unequivocally, approving of the institution as an institution and worthy of aspiration.
Here’s another one: When Clark Griswold looks at his beautiful, all-American family and tells them, “You’re all fucked in the head,” we laugh not only because we, too, sense something perverse lurking beneath the typical, Rockwellian, Reagan-loving American family, but also because we are similarly fallen. Hence, we inherently think that perhaps the typical Reaganite family isn’t all that bad of an environment to grow up in. In other words, Vacation doesn’t undermine traditional notions of the nuclear family so much as it makes the traditional American family seem more approachable and more relatable, not just for those who have had similar experiences but also for those who come from a more openly perverse or fallen or broken background. Vacation is essentially saying, “Hey, the Griswolds aren’t that much different than your family,” but it says it in a way that is both resonating with other nuclear units and also aspirational for those who come from broken homes.
Yes, it is true that there isn’t a lot of wokeness to the comedies of Landis and Hughes and Ramis and Kenney, but nor are they discriminative either. This is because, when these geniuses were in their primes, there was an assimilative nature to the culture. This assimilative ethos was embraced by even the liberals of the period, whether it was the whacky, sarcastic, adolescents of liberal Hollywood or the progressive lions of Washington.
Somewhere along the way, though, the left started to turn its back on assimilation.
This now-lost sense of something-shared was the undergirding reason as to why I could – and often would – laugh wildly at Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford bits even though I had great affinity for Mr. Ford. It was also why, when my hand-me-down Lampoons ridiculed Tricky Dick, I laughed despite my similar affinity for Mr. Nixon. Likewise for Will Ferrell’s Dubya routine, so famously portrayed live from New York on those long-ago Saturday nights. I would howl even though I voted for Dubya. Similarly, the idea that P.J. O’Rourke was a Republican never made me do a double-take on a masthead. Because why would it? Once upon a time, we were all aspiring to join the same Bushwood, whatever our politics.
But as I said, things have changed. And maybe I should have never been laughing at all.
Funny people today don’t make fun of Trump the way they made fun of Tricky Dick or even Dubya. This is because they aren’t making fun of Trump at all. They are making fun of something they are conflating with Trump. They are treating him – Republicans are, too, sadly enough – as the next in line, as another Judge Smails, Dean Wormer, Church Lady, and Richard Milhous Nixon; they are treating him as part of the American tradition which traditionalists themselves defend. Hence, the underlying culture which comedy’s ribald and shocking jokesters used to wink-wink and nudge-nudge along, even as they attempted to innovate it, is now the enemy, not the closet aspiration.
Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder: Were the alarmists of my youth – were the alarmists of every generation – not ultimately right? When T.S. Eliot upbraided television and the BBC, or when Bob Dole criticized the violence in True Romance, or when Dan Quayle excoriated Murphy Brown… maybe they were all on to something… Still, though, the entertainments they were skewering were at least legible for mainstream America. Sadly, mainstream America is now fast becoming illegible in and of itself and our entertainments with it.
This is why I can’t bring myself to laugh as much anymore. I don’t share in the experience. The experience is no longer legible. And even though today’s bloodthirsty Jacobins will doubtlessly chide and say, “Now you know how I’ve felt all these years,” I would argue that he, or she, is altogether missing the point about what once made funny funny.
BEFORE CHEVY, FISHER
Fisher Ames, the greatest of the founding generation, was also the wittiest and, pound for pound, the funniest.
For example, Ames, growing tired of being told that every man was created equal, once quipped, “But differs greatly in the sequel.”
His humor could be sardonic. He often resorted to it in his hatred of Jefferson. If only he would have had Twitter with which to take the Francophile down, maybe we all would have been spared the Second American Revolution. Fisher once wrote, “[W]e [Americans] love money. And if we had glory, we would joyfully truck it off for more money or another Louisiana.” I once recited that line to a fellow Republican politico who stared back at me blankface. When I told him it was the funniest thing maybe ever written, he replied that he didn’t get it and disagreed. Without giving due credit to Norm Macdonald, I told him that if he didn’t get it, he didn’t get not to like it. I went on to explain that Ames was making fun of Jefferson. When my colleague then riproariously defended Jefferson against those he called the lily-livered liberals in the Federalist Party, I reaffirmed what I already knew: there is no real room in the GOP for bona fide conservatives such as myself.
But I digress...
Ames prophetically wrote something once about the country being too large and too democratic to be governed as one nation. As with most things, Ames turned out to be right on the money, as prophetic, in fact, as Tocqueville, but funnier to boot. You see, whereas we once shared in a language which allowed funny to be funny, we’ve today torn that language to shreds so that nothing is funny. Or almost nothing. There are too many disparate groups, with sometimes fracturing interests, for us to share in any humor or for us to share in the set-up, never mind the punchline, or for us to even get to the set-up in the first place. Put another way – particularly if you buy into the Incongruity Theory – our country’s continued fracturing is ridding comedic art of the shared expectation that must be usurped for funny to be funny, as well as the usurpation itself. Falstaff stops being funny, you see, when we no longer expect Harry to turn his back on him, so that they instead keep whoring away together, like Bluto and Otter, bros ’til the end.
Fisher Ames also wrote once that the problem with the philosophies of those feverish Jacobins was that they might make “the rich poor, but [they] will never make the poor rich.” Similarly, today’s woke, enlightened, egalitarian march for equality might make our shared culture less hierarchal, but it will never create a new shared culture out of the fractured pieces. They might tear down Bushwood, but is that what they really want?
I’M (NOT) CHEVY CHASE AND YOU’RE NOT (EITHER)
Now that I’ve put these thoughts to paper and reconsidered my position(s) on humor, it may just be that my first inclination was right all along.
Maybe I’m just getting old. Forty beckons. Age looms.
But comedy still shouldn’t be this hard. And our politics shouldn’t be this fractured.
