Why Reagan is Funny and Watt Not

By Roger Rosenblatt

Then there's the one about the prisoners who were so familiar with the jokes told in the penitentiary that all they needed to do was call out the number of a particular knee-slapper to keep themselves in stitches. Offering a demonstration for a visitor, the warden called out 61-37-4. The prisoners howled and guffawed. "Now you try one," invited the warden. The visitor called out 53, then 89 and finally 2. No laughter, not a chuckle. The warden shrugged: "I guess it depends on how you tell it."

But seriously, folks: What about James Watt? Is it simply a matter of a fellow with poor comic delivery? That most recent remark, the one about the new coal-leasing review commission consisting of "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." It nearly got Watt ousted a few weeks ago. It might yet. Why? Surely the substance of his remark is not taboo. In the right hands, with the right tone, a joke about the overexacting demands of affirmative action could result in genuine, harmless hilarity. But not with Watt. When he tells a joke, the prisoners start to riot.

In part this is due to Watt's choice of language--the word cripple in this instance, which has the sound of a flat slap in the face. Yet a few days after Watt's remark, in a bizarre protest demonstration in his defense, a man on crutches supported the usage, citing other contexts where "cripple" is benign. True enough. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz forced himself out of the Ford Administration by telling a cruel and tasteless joke about "coloreds"; yet Dick Gregory could title his autobiography Nigger, and Flip Wilson won love and fortune by creating self-mocking black stereotypes. Context seems all, or much at any rate. One might imagine the comedy team of Butz and Watt barnstorming America hearing nary a titter in places where Amos 'n' Andy brought down the house.

Something more seems to lie behind Watt's spectacular comic failures, however. Something connected to Watt as a character and to the audience (i.e., the citizenry) he haplessly addresses. His employer, after all, addresses the same audience quite successfully, except for the time he decided to endear himself to a group of professional women: "If it weren't for women, us men would be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs." Usually he does better. Unlike Watt, the President generally prefers humor to comedy, humor being the warmer and more companionable exercise. Comedy cuts off human feeling, humor thrives on it, especially on self-deprecation. "I know your organization was founded by six Washington newspaperwomen in 1919," the President told the Washington Press Club in 1981. Pausing like Jack Benny, he added: "It seems like only yesterday." Yet he uses comedy too. Once in New York he delivered a fine line at a ceremony involving the Westway highway project, apologizing to the crowd that James Watt would have been present had he not been on assignment strip mining the Rose Garden.

Now why should it be funny when the President, who hired and supports Watt, makes a joke about his man's shaky reputation, while Watt is, in his own terms, as funny as a crutch? Because Reagan understands the delicacy of what George Meredith called the comic spirit. He knows that comedy serves as "an interpretation of the general mind" and must be handled with a surgeon's control. The Rose Garden remark was a joke on himself, at no one's expense, including Watt's. Indeed, it extended to the realm of absurdity the public's complaints about the Secretary's policies, implying by reversal that the President would never let Watt get out of hand. In short, Reagan knows that comedy, dealt carefully, may serve as an intellectual weapon, and thus he uses it deliberately whenever he seeks to dispel a serious national worry.

John Kennedy too was adept at this technique, poking fun at his wealth, his Harvard education, even his Catholicism ("Now I understand why Henry the Eighth set up his own church"), in the knowledge that all these attributes were of sincere concern to some portion of the electorate. Taking Indian Prime Minister Nehru on a yacht ride, Kennedy pointed out the mansions of Newport, R.I.: "I wanted you to see how the average American family lives." Gerald Ford used to kid about the Secret Service earning "combat pay" when they accompanied him on a round of golf. Even Richard Nixon, who seems to have learned the sound of laughter by listening to recordings, managed the art of comic defusing from time to time. "I don't trust President Johnson," he once observed, about to refer to a source of his own embitterment, "because of the way he looks on television."

The processes of mind set in motion by such remarks are labyrinthine but uncomplicated. The teller of the joke, realizing that there are unfavorable assumptions about him, wishes, by saying something funny, to suggest that they are unimportant or untrue. A joke may seem a frail vehicle for issuing rebuttals of substance, but it can do the job a) if the teller knows when and how to tell it and, more fundamentally, b) if he feels a basic sympathy with his critics, that is, if he takes their objections seriously enough to make a joke about them. The joke, so employed, becomes a sign of respect, and the laughter it elicits springs from the audience's appreciation of being appreciated. But the laughter is also the laughter of relief, like a great loud sigh, because curled in that laughter lies the admission that perhaps their worries about Kennedy's wealth, Nixon's 5 o'clock shadow or Ford's clumsiness were silly, exaggerated or unfounded. Almost at once, he who was a source of fear becomes an object of affection.

When, on the other hand, a Watt makes jokes such as his latest, he becomes an object of contempt, because it is clear from his timing, context and formulation that he feels no sympathy whatever with the viewpoint of his critics nor with their having an opposing viewpoint. In truth, the wisecrack about the coal-leasing commission could have amused only those who see affirmative action as a wrong idea that is not funny, rather than as a right idea that may also be funny. One cannot know without inspecting the Interior Secretary's interior if he personally abhors minority representation in government, but the suspicion runs high because Watt derided not only his commissioners, but also those members of the public sufficiently generous to find both humor and value in a sensitive issue. The laughter he elicited--and there was laughter--was the hollow laugh, what Samuel Beckett called the "mirthless" laugh (in the novel Watt, coincidentally), the laugh that itself gives a slap in the face.

Mark Twain's wife once tried to cure her husband of violent swearing by repeating verbatim a long stream of curses he had just let fly. Twain looked at his wife condescendingly: "Honey, you know the words, but you don't know the tune." In a sense, that is true of Watt, although it is unclear that if he knew the tune he would choose to play it. Comedy unveils the soul, but dimly. Still, if Watt resigns this time, or next time, assuming there will be one, it will not be because he had a weak sense of humor but a weak sense of people.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.