AMERICAN HUMOR: Hardly a Laughing Matter

"HUMOR can be dissected, as a frog can," E. B. White once warned, "but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

Until recently, many American humorists obeyed that caveat by looking the other way when the subject was raised, or treating the whole thing as a joke. Robert Benchley spoke for most of his colleagues when he lampooned the scientific students of humor with his dictum: "We must understand that all sentences which begin with W are funny." Well, something unfunny has happened to American humor. Today the humorists are outexamining the examiners, some of them even making second careers as commentators who probe and pontificate on the radio and TV panels that ceaselessly sift American manners, morals and mores.

The reason for all the talk is that the nature, quality and targets of American humor are undergoing considerable change. Bob Hope and Columnist Russell Baker both believe that the change is for the better, and Carol Burnett proclaims: "Humor has gotten braver; we're doing nuttier, wilder things." S. J. Perelman, on the other hand, says unequivocally: "I have never seen so much ghastly work, even in television, as this year." And as far as Playwright (Cactus Flower} Abe Burrows is concerned, "there is nothing to kid any more. This is the age of consensus, and all the humorists are censoring themselves." If the purveyors of humor disagree on whether the change is for better or worse, however, they at least agree that it has profoundly affected their art.

That art has its roots in the work of a writer who made his Mark before the century began. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn," wrote Ernest Hemingway. "There was nothing before.

There has been nothing as good since." If Twain affected serious writers, he affected humorists even more. His timing as a public speaker is still being imitated by stand-up comedians. His wry one-line sermons ("Man is the Only Animal that blushes. Or needs to") have influenced every prose humorist who followed him.

Two generations afterward, Will Rogers twitted in the Twain vein, taking America and Americans to task: "Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." Soon afterward Fred Allen followed with his own caustic acid. "He was not brought by the stork," Allen once said about a heritage-happy snob. "He was brought by a man from the Audubon Society personally." During the Depression, Allen recommended setting up "a crumb line for midgets." His friendly enemy, Jack Benny, was not far from Twain's platform personality in a radio skit in which he was held up by a burglar: Thief: "Your money or your life." Benny (after a 30-second pause): "I'm thinking.

I'm thinking."

Unshockable Audiences

Twain had his circuit circus, Allen a large radio audience. But TV has exposed more Americans than ever before to a steady, if often unsatisfactory, diet of humor. It offers dozens of stand-up comics a month (on such as the Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson shows), and some 30 situation comedies every week. As the word fun becomes more and more an adjective, the comic is also spilling over into the commercials; where once the pitchman raved supreme, he now adds a light or whimsical touch to ads--in Buster Keaton's Ford-truck plugs, for example, or Bert Lahr's potato-chip commercials and Jack Gilford's Cracker Jack spiels. The comedians soften the sale--and they frequently outshine the programs.

Today's humor may not be much rougher than it was on the American frontier, but it has shed its inhibitions in full public view. Sex is no longer a taboo topic; it is, in fact, one of the commonest. Humor has not only been firmly entrenched in the bedroom, but is increasingly being brought into the bathroom. Even caustic Cartoonist Jules Feiffer says: "It's astounding what's allowable today." The gentle comedies that once titillated the town have been replaced by such farces as What's New Pussycat? and Kiss Me, Stupid, in which playboyesque exaggeration has been substituted for wit. Contemporary audiences are largely unshockable; to build up enough pressure to get a laugh, humorists have begun to abandon sex to take up the grave topic of death, as in The Loved One, proudly promoted as a picture "with something to offend everyone." Yet audiences have generally proved shockproof to spoofs on death and destruction; they do not laugh because they understand, and says Playwright (A Thousand Clowns) Herb Gardner, "The worst killer of laughter is too much" understanding."

A Dark Breed

Another type of inhibition has been banished by the considerable Yiddishization of American comedy. Before the Tonight show, the only Jewish comics most of America knew were simply comedians who happened to be Jews, few of whom would risk their inside Yiddish humor on a general audience. But as the funnymen limbered and loosened up on late-night TV, they began to use Jewish words, phrases and jokes, many of which made Bloomington laugh as hard as The Bronx. Jewish humor has penetrated strongly into print as well. How to Be a Jewish Mother became a big seller, bought by a lot of readers who were neither Jewish nor mothers. Still, beyond the simple shoulder-shrugging caricatures and the throwaway Yiddish, the Jewish experience is flavored with some sour salt. "Jewish humor is supposed to be warm and familiar," says Movie Critic Pauline Kael, "but there's a lot of hostility in it."

Because of this hostility--and the fact that the majority of top U.S. humorists are Jewish--Jews figure prominently among the dark breed that has been operating as "black humorists," an easily applied label that sticks to those who examine the megaton-megalopolis age and find it funny only in a fearsome way. In Catch-22, now a classic of its genre, Joseph Heller presents an American pilot who would bomb his country's bases for "cost"plus 6%." In Stem, Bruce Jay Friedman deflates the American concept of the hero by making his anti-hero a round-shouldered, wide-hipped urban Jew helpless to handle his neighbors, his job or even his flirtatious wife ("I saw a kiss. I saw tongues"). Jews, of course, have no priority on black humor. One of its darkest stars, Terry Southern, a Texas gentile, has been operating successfully in the black for years with ham-handed satires on pornography (Candy), nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove) and money and morality (The Magic Christian).

For Heller, the change to basic black was not made basically for laughs. "I am not using humor as a goal, but as a means to a goal," he says. "The ultimate effect is not frivolity but bitter pessimism." As Critic Leslie Fiedler sees it: "Black humor fits anyone worth reading today. It's the only valid contemporary work." Nonetheless, the strongest critics of blackness are found among humorists, many of whom believe that humor that does not make people laugh is not humor at all. Some of the critics, however, confuse black humor with sick humor, whose chief practitioner has been Lenny Bruce, the man who made the four-letter word a popular mixer before being ruled obscene by the courts.

For many in an age of constant change, the best place to find subjects for humor is in the news, and contemporary humor reflects a growing dependence on current events. The best humorous columnists--Art Buchwald and Russell Baker--naturally look to the news for their subjects, but so do more and more comics. "People are a lot more hip about humor today," says Bob Hope. "People like their comedians to be current. We have to do the things they're reading about. De Gaulle, for example. One man against the world--he's jealous of the American and the Russian walk in space; he's still trying to walk on water."

This concern with events has had its impact on the campus, where a news-hungry generation that has been in on the information explosion since the beginning finds the gentle, sophisticated comedies of the '30s and '40s relics to be viewed on the museum of the Late Show. Their memories are less of Benchley than of Berkeley, and, in the absence of much protest humor, they have concentrated on deliberate absurdities that refuse to deal with the adult world. Such were the elephant jokes (What do you get when you cross an elephant with a jar of peanut butter? A peanut that never forgets or an elephant that sticks to the roof of your mouth) and the more recent grape jokes. (What's purple and hums? An electric grape. Why does it hum? It doesn't know the words). Another collegiate fad was the Tom Swifties, inspired by Author Edward Stratemeyer's series. "I've been looking forward to this ride," said Lady Godiva shiftlessly.

When they do put up with their world, the college students do so mostly to put it down, cheering on in traditional collegiate fashion the impudent and the impertinent. Sardonic Singer Tom Lehrer remains a remarkably long-lived favorite, with five current records to skip study by. A recent Lehrer tune: "Doin' the Vatican rag/ Get in line in that processional/ Step into that small confessional/ There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original." Another favorite is urbane, eccentric Woody Allen, who is currently flipping the filmniks by writing a Japanese movie in which the dubbed-in sound track is totally different from what is occurring onscreen.

In line with the increasing tolerance of American life, Negro-Jewish-Irish dialect jokes are just about dead, at least in public. More in tune is Negro Comedian Dick Gregory's definition of North and South: "In the South, they don't care how close I get as long as I don't get too big. In the North, they don't care how big I get as long as I don't get too close." Despite the disappearance of the old ethnic comedy, though, some sub rosa jokes still thrive, on the assumption that only a really minor minority lacks the strength to fight or picket. The current favorite is the Polish joke, which ranges from harmless slap to unpleasant slur: Q. Why are there so few Polish suicides? A. It's not easy to get killed jumping from a basement apartment." The one subject that is strictly taboo right now is Viet Nam, says Jonathan Winters. Not that he need travel that far; Winters gets his laughs from way-out exaggerations of American types. Playing the farmer: "The Government pays me $25,000 just to watch the ground. Sometimes I think I would like to do some farming, just for the hell of it."

The Giggling Robot

To the unquestioning audience, the state of American comedy may appear to be healthy indeed. The proliferation of comedy into every corner of American life, the spreading hipness and the general joking seem to indicate one of the richest times for comedy in American history. But do they? A closer examination of current comedy reveals neither a renaissance nor a reformation but the beginnings of what could, unless it is reversed, become the dark ages of American humor.

Television, the disseminator of most current American comedy, has abdicated originality in favor of the safe and same. As recently as ten years ago, such comedians as Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs were savagely satirizing everything from fatherhood to French movies. Today on TV, comedy is rarely allowed to lumber into view unless preceded by its keeper--situation. Perhaps, too, it was inevitable that once man found a way to can the stuff of life he would some day find a way to can the stuff of the soul--laughter. Canned laughter is everywhere; TV has become a robot talking to itself, giggling at its own jokes. Even the few truly humorous shows--Get Smart!, The Dick Van Dyke Show--cannot fulfill the demand to be funny and original week after week. "It's not surprising," says S. J. Perelman, "that people who do weekly comedy shows on television are reduced to drivel."

If the quality of TV comedy leaves something to be desired, the quantity of written humor is pitifully small; most writers with a comic talent have been lured by the wide exposure and high pay of TV. No replacements have been found for such essayists as Benchley, Ring Lardner, Don Marquis. Frank Sullivan. There is no longer a Thurber, expressing in word and picture the uneasiness of modern life and the war between the sexes. "Funny men don't seem to write books these days," laments Russell Baker. Nightclub humor--what there is of it--is also in bad shape. San Francisco's hungry i, where many comedians got their start, has been hurt by the bare-bosom boom; Manhattan's Blue Angel is defunct; and the Bon Soir, where cerebral comedians once gamboled, now has a noncomic policy. The comic strips, too, are in a generally deplorable state, two notable exceptions being Schulz's Peanuts and Al Capp's Li'l Abner.

A Large Balloon of Wind

Though satire is still around, it is not in very robust condition. Mort Sahl, once a master of the form, is as hard fo find as an old Will Rogers routine; his last television show lasted two weeks. Monologuist Bob Newhart, one of a line of snipers who picked off American postures and pretensions, is rarely seen on TV nowadays, and Sid Caesar has not been seen regularly since 1964. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who took the Ins and made them Out to be a group of phonies, seldom appear together any more.

One of the problems of satire is that, to many humorists, the world itself is a large balloon full of wind, a satire on itself. "The world is getting so crazy you just have to laugh," says Art Buchwald, who lists some recent examples of self-satire: Lyndon Johnson showing his scar, Premier Ky and his wife in their Captain and Mrs. Midnight flight suits, the Ecumenical Council debating whether the Jews really killed Christ. There is surprisingly little political satire of Lyndon Johnson. The reason, believes Playwright-Director George Abbott, is that "humor is exaggeration, and President Johnson is his own exaggeration." Kennedy, in short, had a silk hat that could be knocked off by a humorist's snowball; Johnson's Stetson looks funnier on him than knocked off.

What satire there is these days often satirizes the village idiot. Batman kids the comics--which kid the kids. The man from U.N.C.L.E. is, at its best, only taking off on James Bond, an acknowledged spoof on itself.

Such is the state of U.S. humor that, except for the comparatively small squadron of black humorists, there are almost no original comic talents left. As it is now, the choice seems to lie between the banalities of the TV screen and what are the frequent absurdities of the black humorists, a choice roughly comparable to that offered by a menu with only two items: vanilla pudding and a whisky sour.

Too few of the absurdists have heeded the admonition of their existential idol Kierkegaard, who wrote: "The comic spirit is not wild or vehement, its laughter is not shrill." Black humor has a long tradition that reached its apex in Jonathan Swift. But the humorists who dwell on death and disaster today lean too often toward the narcissistic, reflecting images of themselves as helpless heroes in a world they can neither take nor leave. Their less lugubrious colleagues, on the other hand, have been all too willing to cede the comic to the journalists and to allow the commercial to override the classic. In the end, they have left a society almost without true humorists, making it vulnerable and vain, like a great man without a sense of humor.

Perhaps the American humorist may yet lead himself out of the dark by re-examining his own craft. "The one specific remedy for vanity is laughter," wrote Philosopher Henri Bergson, "and the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity." Is it only society that is laughable today? Or is it the humorists themselves, too proud or fearful or full of disdain to fulfill their function? That function is to be society's mocking bird, not its vulture. What the U.S. can always use is something that everyone has in him but only a true humorist can bring out: a good laugh.

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