There Is No Gravity, But How About Levity?

A few years ago, when I was involved in a humor writers’ workshop, I noticed that my submissions were getting fewer and fewer laughs from the other participants and the director.

The puzzling part was that my friends outside the workshop, who often figured in the stories I was writing, were laughing themselves senseless over them. Finally the director told me I’d never make it as a humor writer because I hadn’t had the bitter, crushing experiences that the other members of the group had been through. Essentially he told me to give up.

Then I noticed that I could watch the Humor Channel for a half hour and not even smile. I wondered what the audience thought was so funny: “When I want to get rid of a guy I’m dating, I just tell him, ‘You know, I really, really love you, and I want to marry you and settle down and have your children.’ Sometimes they leave skid marks.” I noticed that one film that was reputed to be falling-down hilarious featured, shall we say, a flatulence contest, with one contestant having to leave the room because he has soiled himself. Then I noticed the frequency with which toilets were appearing in children’s cartoons, along with kids getting covered with green mucus shot from some sort of monster’s nostrils.

Around the same time, I asked one of the world’s greatest humorists whether he knew another comedian who lived in the Santa Barbara area. He told me he had met him once, at a party, and when my friend began wisecracking with him, the response was a snotty, “Are you auditioning for me, _____?”

I mentioned that incident to my brother, who replied, “You have to realize that all comedians have their demons.”

My humorist friend told me that after his first performance at a Las Vegas casino the owner had entered his dressing room and informed him that he needed to put some dirty jokes into his routine. Everyone else was doing it, he said, and a clean routine just wasn’t going to make it. My friend told him, “Look, I’ve never operated that way and I’m not going to start now. You can break my contract if you want, but I won’t do it.” The owner kept him on, but only grudgingly.

Early in the last century, Max Eastman said that laughter results when something that would otherwise be unpleasant is placed in a “play frame.” Sixty years ago that meant Mollie, of Fibber McGee and Mollie, read a newspaper report of a PTA meeting and said, “That meeting must have been a disgraceful, drunken affair. It says Mr. _____ made a motion from the floor, and the chairman didn’t even recognize him.” Drunkenness at a PTA meeting would be very disturbing, but the play frame consists of Mollie’s misunderstanding of Robert’s Rules of Order, and her comment is funny without any bitterness or cynicism in it. In the case of the female comedian I’ve quoted above, though, the humor lies in the double entendre of the skid marks, which places a play frame around a truly bitter experience that is common in this generation.

A large percentage of people today walk around with a glum, humorless expression on their faces, and when they do laugh it tends to be a bitter, cynical kind of laughter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think many of these are the kids who were raised to believe the world revolved around them; they were a pampered, spoiled generation, but when confronted with the reality of a cruel world they reacted with exacerbated paranoia. I saw a graffito that read, “There is no gravity. The earth sucks.”

This is reflected much of today’s music as well. The music of “the greatest generation” was full of humor, as was early rock and roll. Think of the big band number that proclaims, “I’ve got a gal in Kalamazoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo,” or Silhouettes on the Shade. It was a light, playful kind of humor, suited to kids who were enjoying what was good in their adolescence, while a large part of the music that is produced today is characterized by what a writer in the Atlantic magazine calls “apocalyptic nihilism.” He found that a considerable percentage of the young people he was dealing with had given up on the future, not only for themselves but for the world itself, so there was nothing left to strive for; there were no values worth upholding. Is that what we see reflected in those dull, lifeless faces?

It was no coincidence that our fascist enemies in World War II were a particularly humorless lot, as was our communist enemy in the Cold War. It was disconcerting to them that we could be faced with incredibly grim circumstances and still laugh uproariously at them and ourselves. Even with the inhumanly heavy burden that was on his shoulders, Winston Churchill reacted to some young officer’s criticism of his ending a sentence with a preposition by retorting, “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Neither is it a coincidence that the preponderance of great comedians of the 20th century were Jewish. The Jews have faced inconceivable hardships throughout many centuries, and the survivors have made it in large measure because they knew how to laugh in the midst of otherwise hopeless circumstances. An old friend of mine, Kurt Rosenbalm, who lost his entire family at Auschwitz, once watched me cross a four-lane street full of heavy traffic without breaking stride. In his Henry Kissinger accent, he deadpanned, “Let me see you do that again.” That is perfect humor; he pretended that I was implying I had supernatural powers. Our society is not in any Holocaust, at least not yet, and it might be a good time to evaluate what sort of attitude towards life will allow us a good bellylaugh once in a while.