In a lecture at Google’s New York office in 2008, Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, referred to a consulting firm called Humor Solutions International, which was devoted to helping businesses foster employee loyalty and fellowship through laughter. That firm seems to have folded, but a quick online search brings up several others.
In his lecture, Critchley recalled a visit to a hotel in Atlanta, where long-suffering employees of an unidentified company were put through the paces of a structured activity designed to produce hilarity. He then recalled a later scene outside the hotel, where a subgroup of the same employees—the smokers—stood huddled together, talking and cracking jokes among themselves.11xSimon Critchley, “On Humor,” Authors@Google, May 14, 2008; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZLl5e1HfWc.
For many Americans today, this image captures the essential relationship between humor and the rituals and norms of a given social order—namely, that humor cannot be used to reinforce those rituals and norms, only to subvert them. In his lecture, Critchley allowed that this was true in the case of Humor Solutions International. But as a philosopher who has thought seriously about the comic, he also suggested that without laughter there can be no social order.
Quick example: In the waning days of the Third Reich, when loyalty to the Nazi cause was slipping among the ordinary soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, tried various tactics to raise morale. But humor was not one of them. And that made it easy for the psy-ops division of British intelligence to further erode German morale with biting satirical jabs at the corrupt and cosseted Nazi elite.22xSee Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2024).
Satire is the sharp edge of humor, often motivated by righteous anger at injustice, malfeasance, and persecution. But its effectiveness and power depend on the particular target being satirized, the motive for satirizing it, and the position and character of the satirist. Does the target truly merit anger and implicit critique? Is the target less powerful than the satirist, in which case the attempted satire curdles into a cruel display of superiority? Or is the target too easy, reducing satire to an exercise in flogging a dead horse already well flogged?
And what about the motive? Does the satirist feel honest, informed indignation at a clearly defined instance of maltreatment, exploitation, or injustice? Is he aiming his barbs at a slew of vague, abstract evils with names that end in ism or phobia? Or is he flailing about in an all-out effort to bring down that huge, intangible, but ever-reliable catchall known as “the system”?
The position of the satirist is also crucial. Good satire aims in one direction but can cut in many, because instead of hardening into a fixed and approved attitude, it remains quicksilver and alive. Most of all, good satire is constructive. It seeks to restore the health, vitality, and even the intelligence of the community by exposing and ridiculing what threatens to bring it down. And to do this well, satirists must have enough self-irony, and largeness of soul, to see both their targets and themselves as humanly flawed.
I am setting the bar high, I admit. Only rarely in America have all these conditions been met. Today, however, most of what passes for satire does not even meet the minimum standards of being directed toward something tangible, being undertaken in reasonably good faith—and, most of all, being funny.
Instead, we have seen huge amounts of diffuse anger build up in the narrow cul-de-sacs of identity politics, along cultural borders that, once fluid and permeable, are now heavily policed, and across the expanding war zones of uncivil society. Today that anger has festered to the point that we are losing sight of the real enemies of human vitality and imagination. Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark, derived from the old Low German word snarky, meaning bad-tempered.
By the early 2000s, snark was trending upward as the attitude of choice for the hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt pervading popular culture, social media, and eventually politics.33xOnline Etymology Dictionary; https://www.etymonline.com/word/snarky#etymonline_v_24160. Accessed August 1, 2024. Yet two of our comic traditions, the African American and the Jewish American, have distinguished themselves precisely by largely resisting the decline into snark—and done so despite emerging from people with long histories of struggle against injustice, malfeasance, and persecution. If these have been, and still are, the most successful comic traditions in America, what is the secret of their success? And can it be replicated in a way that can rescue the country from snark?
“We Wear the Mask”
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville devotes eighteen chapters to the arts, but in only one does he consider the American theater. Finding it quite backward, he nevertheless predicted that it would be where “the natural literary tastes and instincts of democratic people will manifest themselves…in a violent manner.”44xAlexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY: Library of America, 2004), 564. This was prescient, to a degree. It would have been even more so if Tocqueville had considered not just drama but the other three performing arts: music, dance, and comedy.
Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, and at that Jacksonian moment, the first evidence of a distinctive contribution to the arts was appearing in low-rent venues such as fairs, circuses, and traveling medicine shows. You did not have to be a French aristocrat to overlook those early flickering of a distinctive art. Even today, it is hard to say anything good about them, because they were indisputably offensive.
Yet there is no gainsaying the inspiration of one Thomas D. Rice, a struggling actor from the Lower East Side of New York who, in the early 1830s, achieved stardom with “Jump Jim Crow,” a comical dance routine he claimed to have learned from a disabled black stable groom. Following in Rice’s footsteps, a generation of white men began blackening their faces with burnt cork and imitating the music, dance, and comedy of the enslaved black population. By the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy was a thriving business, with organized troupes touring the country in what is best described as America’s first form of mass entertainment.
Before the Civil War, almost all minstrels were white. But in the postbellum years, the troupes began hiring black performers, who in keeping with the entire post-Reconstruction economy were paid less than whites and shut out of most jobs in the first place. The only reason black performers got hired for minstrelsy was that they tended to be better than whites at performing “coon” songs, “plantation” dances, and “darky” humor. They too, were obliged to paint their faces and enact degrading stereotypes. Eventually a few stars, such as the legendary comedian Bert Williams, were able to shed the burnt cork. But shedding the stereotypes took longer. Indeed, several stock characters, such as the clueless hayseed Jim Crow and the fast-talking city slicker Zip Coon, have shown remarkable staying power. White racism is the main reason, but not the only one. As discussed at length in On the Real Side (1994), the definitive history of African-American humor by cultural historian Mel Watkins, the stylized behavior required of blacks during the centuries of slavery and segregation was Janus-faced.55xMel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1994), passim. On the outside, it was a gross distortion of their humanity. As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1895:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile…
But on the inside, that same mask served as a protective barrier. The poem continues:
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.66xPaul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Adansonia Publishing, 2018), 154.
Dunbar speaks of tears and sighs, but Watkins’s point is that the mask also hid a rich vein of laughter. And to the extent that such laughter was directed against whites, black Americans were the original smokers of Critchley’s anecdote, a huddled in-crowd outside the edifice of white supremacy, talking and cracking jokes among themselves. And while Watkins’s history is labored at times, it leaves no doubt that the subversive, satirical aspect of this humor has always been present. To illustrate, he quotes this passage from an 1855 slave narrative, in which a slave called Pompey tweaks the vanity of his master:
“Pompey, how do I look?” the master asked.
“O, massa, mighty. You looks mighty.”
“What do you mean ‘Mighty,’ Pompey?”
“Why, massa, you looks noble.”
“What do you mean by noble?”
“Why, suh, you looks just like a lion.”
“Why, Pompey, where have you ever seen a lion?”
“I saw one down in yonder field the other day, massa.”
“Pompey, you foolish fellow, that was a jackass.”
“Was it, massa? Well, suh, you looks just like him.”77xPeter Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit (1855), quoted in Watkins, On the Real Side, 67.
The slaveholder who detected this sly note of mockery would likely punish the offender. But the slave who overheard the same note would likely smile inwardly while keeping a poker face. As Watkins tells it, these reactions continued, with innumerable variations, through minstrelsy, vaudeville, the black variety theater of the “chitlin’ circuit,” Broadway, literature, film, radio, TV, and the now-dominant genre called standup. Only in the 1970s, he concludes, did the remnants of the mask get torn off—by a gifted comedian named Richard Pryor.
Seeking the Level Playing Field
During the first phase of Pryor’s career, comedians of all stripes had to obey state and local laws when appearing in live-entertainment venues, and the Federal Communications Commission regulated what could and could not be said on radio and TV. This did not prevent edgy comedians like Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory, Rodney Dangerfield, and Don Rickles from being funny. But Pryor was different. He had some modest success in these settings, but his low-life background (he was raised in a brothel in the red-light district of Peoria, Illinois), his volatile temperament, and his rare comic genius conspired against limits of any kind.
If the world around Pryor had not changed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, his career would have likely imploded. But the world did change, and his career took off. Between 1974 and 1976, he won three Grammys for his albums of standup comedy.88xRichard Pryor, “That Nigger’s Crazy” (Partee/Stax, 1974); …Is It Something I Said? (Reprise Records, 1975); and Bicentennial Nigger (Warner Bros., 1976). And by 1979, he was a star, celebrated (in Watkins’s words) for having transformed his mother tongue—“the frequently off-color vernacular speech” of everyday blacks, including both “the explicit obscenity and hyperbole of urban street folks” and “the subtle, guileful misdirection of rural blacks”—into brilliant comedic performance. At long last, the “insistently down-to-earth and bluntly realistic” worldview of African Americans was shining forth in its full humanity.99xWatkins, On the Real Side, 561.
Still, the key to Pryor’s success was a shift in attitudes that made it possible for some white Americans (not all) to encounter a black comedian, and satirist, on a more or less level playing field. And for that, there was a precedent. If minstrelsy was America’s first form of mass entertainment, then vaudeville was the second. The two genres overlapped in the 1880s and 90s, with minstrelsy being one of many acts on the vaudeville stage. But minstrelsy faded as vaudeville grew into an industry, with East Coast impresarios booking acts and sending them throughout the country to play in grandiose, Gilded Age theaters built for that express purpose.
To attract a broad audience, vaudeville performers had to “clean up their act before taking it on the road.” But clean did not mean timid. On the contrary, vaudeville was rife with what today would be called “ethnic humor.” And not by accident. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, America absorbed tens of millions of immigrants, mostly from Europe, as well as a significant number of contract laborers, called “coolies,” from China. The Chinese were subject to blatant racism in the form of legal sanctions similar to those long imposed on blacks and American Indians. But the various European groups—Irish, Slavs, Italians, Germans, Jews, and others—also encountered prejudice. And not just from the dominant Anglo Protestants.
Crowded together in immigrant neighborhoods, these groups harbored plenty of prejudices toward one another. And the resulting stereotypes—drunken Irish, clueless Pole, volatile Italian, stodgy “Dutch” (meaning German), crafty Jew—proved ripe fodder for vaudeville comedians. But in spite of these risible stock characters, the ethnic humor in vaudeville was different from minstrelsy, because instead of a dominant group laughing at a subjugated one, it took place on a playing field that was genuinely level. And, as described by the cultural critic Edward Rothstein, this yielded a rare social alchemy:
Irish, German and Yiddish accents were part of the patois of vaudevillian comedy, the mangled sentences echoing the increasingly familiar immigrant sounds of cities like New York. Oddly, though, these exaggerations were not generally an occasion for bigotry or hostility. There was an element of celebration in the mockery, partly because the actors were often themselves from these groups.… It was as if, by some unspoken agreement, marginal groups had joined forces in displaying, to each other, the comic absurdity of their position.1010xEdward Rothstein, “At the Edge of Respectability, a Celebration,” New York Times, November 19, 2005.
Over time, the group best positioned for success with comic absurdity were the Jews. The renowned sociologist Peter L. Berger offers two explanations for this. First, the emancipation of the Jews throughout nineteenth-century Europe shifted the center of Jewish life away from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and toward Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. It was there, in the elegant capitals of the Austro-Hungarian empire, that a “comic culture” arose, which, while it “could not be divorced from its Jewish components,” was sufficiently cosmopolitan that “insiders and outsiders were no longer identified only in terms of ethnicity and religion.”1111xPeter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 88.
Berger’s second explanation is that unlike the earthier, more carnivalesque traditions of immigrants who came directly from peasant backgrounds, not to mention the salacious aspect of minstrel comedy, Jewish humor did not need cleaning up, because it contained “almost no scatology and remarkably little sexuality.”1212xIbid. At the turn of the twentieth century, when strait-laced Protestantism still held sway, this reticence gave Jewish humor a boost. It was “in America,” Berger concludes, “that large numbers of gentiles have been drawn into the magic world of Jewish humor.”1313xIbid.
Yet despite these differences, the two comic cultures here under discussion have something in common. In Western culture, historically, both Jews and African Americans have been relegated to the status of “the stranger,” described by the German sociologist Georg Simmel as an individual “not rooted in the particularities and biases of the community,” who therefore “stands apart from it, in an attitude of objectivity…[that is] a curious combination of closeness and distance, of detachment and engagement.”1414x“The Stranger” (trans. Ramona Mosse), The Baffler, no. 30 (March 2016); from Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung by Georg Simmel (Berlin, Germany: Duncker & Humblot, 1908).
Simmel’s family were assimilated Jews; indeed, like many of their late-nineteenth-century peers, his parents were converts to Christianity. So his concern was with the ambiguous position of the Jewish stranger, not the situation of black people in faraway America. If he had given a thought to African Americans, it would probably have been to define them as a group so utterly “Other,” so vigorously “denied the common characteristics that count as fundamentally human,” that they did not qualify as “strangers” in his sense. Like the relation of “the Greeks to the barbarians,” he would have dismissed the relation of white to black Americans as “not what we have been discussing here.”1515xIbid.
Simmel was wrong about that, of course. He did not live to witness the assimilated Jews of Europe being denied their humanity. Nor did he live to witness African Americans affirming theirs. But today it seems evident that the comic cultures of both groups resemble Simmel’s “stranger” in being able (quoting Berger again) to see “many things that the native, who takes them for granted, fails to see or sees much less sharply.” The result is a comic sensibility that “invades and subverts the taken-for-granted structures of social life,” while also including “the “native” (i.e., the white Anglo-American) in the joke.1616xBerger, Redeeming Laughter, 91.
Are You Laughing at Me?
What does it mean to laugh at ourselves in twenty-first-century America, where our culture, our media, our politics, and our minds resound with mirthless snark? In an essay on the comic, it is all too predictable to tell an unfunny joke. But if the reader will bear with me, I will begin my answer with this old chestnut from the American South:
In a high-security prison in Mississippi, three black inmates are about to be executed. The white official in charge offers them a last cigarette. The first inmate accepts, so does the second. The third refuses, whereupon the second turns to him and says, “Amos, don’t make trouble!”
Smiling or not, the reader, I expect, will agree that this joke sounds authentically black. As it happens, it is a Jewish joke, told by Berger to illustrate the Jewish brand of gallows humor. (The punch line is, “Moishe, don’t make trouble!”1717xIbid., 92.)
Let us consider: What right do I have to tell this joke? I am neither Jewish nor black. So to tell either version is, by the regnant standard of our day, to offend one group or the other. But what if I were Jewish? Could I tell the Jewish version but not the black? What if I were black? Could I tell the black version but not the Jewish? And what about my own group, “old stock” Protestant Americans? I assume it is OK for me to mock that group as viciously as I like. But can I really be sure some troll out there will not try to cancel me for it?
Case in point: Two of the funniest characters I’ve seen lately are Moishe and Shirley Maisel, the first-generation in-laws of the title character in the streaming series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a show about Midge Maisel a young married Jewish woman in early 1960s New York trying to make it as a standup comedian. Many of the series’ producers, writers, and actors—including Kevin Pollak (who plays Moishe) and Caroline Aaron (who plays Shirley)—are Jewish. But that has not spared them the opprobrium of critics who find them guilty of internalized antisemitism.
As one hostile reviewer wrote, Moishe and Shirley epitomize “the cultural stereotype of The American Jew…obnoxious, loud, crass, obsessed with money to the exclusion of all else, lacking in manners and social grace, unclean, and possessed of a world view that sees the Goyim as the enemy to be defeated by our superior cunning.”1818xLee Michael Cohn, “Jewish Stereotypes and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Aish.com; https://aish.com/jewish-stereotypes-and-the-marvelous-mrs-maisel/. Accessed August 1, 2024. Surely this is laying it on too thick. I watched the entire series twice and never once saw Moishe and Shirley in this light. Instead, I relished their zaniness, which in addition to being wildly funny, is endearingly human in a way that is unique to this particular story.
Where does it come from, this compulsion to paste the “self-hating” label on every Jew who dares to poke fun at fellow Jews? An excellent source is “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor,” a fascinating essay published in 1973 by the Israeli-American folklorist, Dan Ben-Amos. Its main focus is Freud’s speculation, in his 1905 treatise on humor, that “tendentious jokes…directed against the subject himself” could also be directed “against someone in whom the subject has a share—a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for instance).”1919xSigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Standard Edition, vol. 8, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London, 1960), 111–112; quoted in Dan Ben-Amos, “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor,” Western Folklore, vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1973), 112; https://www.jstor.org/stable/1498323.
Ben-Amos makes it clear that the “collective person” Freud had in mind was the Jews. But Ben-Amos also notes that, while this was just “a casual remark” at the time, Freud later took it to a whole new level. In his 1913 book, Totem and Taboo, he posits the existence of a “collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual.”2020xSigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo and Other Works, 13th standard ed. (London, England: 1955), 157; quoted in Ben-Amos, 116. (emphasis added)
To his great credit, Ben-Amos finds this troubling. Back in 1973, he rejected Freud’s half-baked notion of a Jewish “collective mind” out of hand.2121xBen-Amos, 113. Today, a politically weaponized version of that notion has replaced America’s once tolerant, pluralistic understanding of group identity.
Fortunately, Ben-Amos offers a commonsense critique. First, he reminds us that “Jewish society is a complex, heterogeneous social environment, in which each individual fulfills sexual and religious roles, belongs to distinct age groups and professional associations, and defines himself in terms of economic classes.” So to reduce Jewish (or any other) society to “a collective person” is to oversimplify grossly. Indeed, it is to commit “the sin of reification.”2222xIbid., 121–122.
In other words, the roots of Jewish humor reach back to a particular place and time, the nineteenth-century shtetl, where joke-tellers were individuals who, in time-honored fashion, enjoyed making fun of other individuals. Berger’s prisoner joke is not about “the Jews.” It’s not even about the third prisoner (also called Moishe). It’s about the second prisoner, the dumb-ass who fears that things will get worse if Moishe (or Amos) makes trouble. All of us recognize that human type, and if the joke is told right, all of us will laugh.
Why Can’t We Laugh Together?
The ancient Greek root of the word comedy is disputed, but most scholars agree that it combines the word ōidē, meaning song or ode, with kōmos, meaning release or revelry. Alternatively, the root of comedy is said to combine ōidē with the similar-sounding word kome, meaning village or community. Kōmos also has a ritual element, in the sense of license to speak truth to power and to settle scores in public. But in the ancient Greek context, as in many others, that license was not issued to all of the citizens all of the time. And until recently, no one dreamed that billions of human beings would amuse themselves by raging at unseen enemies through a medium that profits from cranking up the crazy.
A friend of mine, who in addition to being a respected theater director has spent many years teaching the history of comedy, says not to worry. It’s enough to define comedy as the release of social tensions through revelry and shared laughter. This definition harkens back to vaudeville, with its “give as good as you get” ethos that made room for individuals, and groups, to laugh at each other and themselves. And it recalls Pryor’s genius in seizing the moment to make the same magic happen between whites and blacks.
But half a century after that breakthrough, I confess to finding Pryor’s nonstop use of profanity, not to mention the word nigga, the least compelling part of his act. Doubtless, this is because every would-be comedian who talks into a microphone, not to mention every rapper and screenwriter in what used to be Hollywood, now spews the same stuff. What was once cutting-edge satire in Pryor’s comedy is now a cliché, endlessly repeated and recycled to the point of blending in with the rest of the snark.
In his 1900 book, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, the French philosopher Henri Bergson contrasted the fluid, “elastic,” ever-changing movements of a living body with the hard, unyielding, repetitive workings of a machine. The root of all laughter, he suggested, lies in the collision of the organic with the mechanical.2323xHenri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1911), ch1, section II, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Gutenberg E-Book #4352 (2005); https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm. That is to say, not in words or jokes but in physical comedy: the ancient, antic, rough-and-tumble we call clowning.
For an example of pure clowning, I recommend spending a half hour on YouTube watching Pryor’s timeless sketches about his pet squirrel monkeys and the wild animals he witnessed on an African safari. I wager you will laugh out loud.2424xRichard Pryor, “Monkeys,” originally from the album Wanted (Warner Bros., 1978), on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKIj4DWjj5c; “Africa,” from Richard Pryor: Live on The Sunset Strip, on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDbJz6Oh72Y. And if you like Pryor’s gazelle-and-cheetah routine, you will love the impressions of sea creatures, farm animals, and pet dogs by the British comedian Lee Evans. Evans is referred to as a standup comedian, but the label is wildly inappropriate, because his hyperkinetic stage performances involve rapid-fire commentary accompanied by sidesplitting clowning that pauses only when the sweat pouring down his face becomes so blinding, he has to wipe it away.2525xLee Evans released numerous live recordings between 1994 and 2014. A compilation of his animal sketches can be viewed on YouTube https://youtu.be/xADbJdvUJ2c?list=PLXarLMAQr3DJPvImRIMQNzL0hhwygLCLe.
It is no mystery why these animal routines seem fresher and funnier than most of what passes for comedy these days. Bergson predicted as much when he suggested that the impact of the “mechanical” on the body has a mental equivalent: the predictable, inflexible thinking that results from having too many fixed ideas.2626xBergson, Laughter, op. cit. In a similar way, standup has grown so entwined with snark posing as satire, it is hard to find an aspiring comedian who would take time away from his or her venting to find the humor in impersonating a humble mammal or fish.
Still, there may be hope in the deeper layers of humor that make it distinctively human. The comic is not just a way to protest a particular social order. It is, to quote Aristotle, “a sort of readiness to turn this way and that; for such sallies are thought to be movements of the character.”2727xAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1128a 11–14. Put another way, humor is a function of the imagination, which in existential terms is the locus of human freedom, because it can always envision something other than what exists in the here and now.
When teaching this idea to undergraduates, I find it useful to characterize existential freedom as the kind people don’t want, because it can be the source of angst about the contingency of mortal existence. But it can also be the wellspring of laughter, with its pleasant jolt of awareness that our minds, and possibly our spirits, are not totally bound by that contingency. No one has said this better than the great comic film director Marcel Pagnol: “Laughter is a human thing, a virtue belonging only to humanity and God that perhaps God gave to humans as consolation for having made them intelligent.”2828xPossibly apocryphal, but so wonderful, who cares?
Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 26.3
(Fall 2024). This essay may not be resold, reprinted,
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