WE ARE NOT AMUSED-AND WHY

THE physician and comedian Jonathan Miller once pooled his two professional skills to describe the symptoms of a rare disease called cataplexy. Its victims are physically unable to laugh, though they desperately want to. "As they are about to laugh," Dr. Miller explained, "they are seized by a total paralysis and they slither helpless to the floor." The paralysis ends only when the impulse to laugh leaves them: the price of health is absolute sobriety.

Cataplexy--a sadistic punishment that might have been designed for the ninth circle of Dante's hell--threatens to become a metaphor for the condition of humor in the 1970s. At the moment, the silent absence of laughter is deafening, though the will to laugh is agonizingly there. Where are the wits of yesterday? The game is a humiliation to play.

When Miller wrote about cataplexy--almost ten years ago--he and his fellow Beyond the Fringers were about to bring their antic antiestablishmentarianism to Broadway.

Mike Nichols and Elaine May were catching with awful perfection the voice of the emancipated middle class talking to a wordy death just about everything, including sex.

If nothing else, TV offered the elaborate spoofs of Sid Caesar's Show of Shows. Mort Sahl, carrying a rolled-up newspaper like a blunt weapon, had set almost academic standards for the stand-up comedian as social critic. Lenny Bruce, Salvationist manque, was preaching his credo of holy scatology and apocalypse, "trying to panic people into laughing," as Sahl put it.

Humor was not just funny: it was seriously funny in those days. Tragedy was dean--everybody accepted that. But comedy was managing double duty, in plays like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, even Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Audiences laughed until quite literally they cried. In fiction, the selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece The Magic Christian, John Barth in The Sot-weed Factor, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Mother Night, Saul Bellow in Herzog.

Yet the early '60s already seem another world. Somewhere along the line, the theater of the absurd turned into the theater of cruelty, homosexuality became the matinee audience's concept of the in-joke, and Neil Simon went for meaning in the third act. The Beatles ran out of put-ons, and John Lennon took to bed. In accordance with Aubrey's Law, sitchcom has swamped or drowned television's handful of comic talents. Some Like It Hot shuddered into M*A*S*H, and the situation of cinematic comedy became a question of semantics. Debating topic: Is Catch-22 a "funny" film or a demonstration of cataplexy all by itself?

Where are the wits of yesterday? Dead. Silent or badly sobered, like Peter De Vries, punster turned grim predestinarian. What has sprung up to replace them? No New Faces of 1970 to compare. Even in public life, the last bastion of solemnity, there was the Yankee salt of John Kennedy and the bonbon mots of Adlai Stevenson. What are today's options? The wit of Richard Nixon and the epigrams of Martha Mitchell? Construction workers waving their flags, Women's Liberationists waving their bras--these threaten to become the unsmiling public faces of the '70s.

Still another crisis, then, the crisis of humor. And with a knee-jerk reflex, everybody as usual looks to the young. But Babbitt's automatic smile seems to have been replaced by Babbitt Ill's automatic scowl. Not to smile is the new integrity, a revolutionary's duty. The only saints of youthcult comedy, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, are second class --Ritz Brothers rather than Marx Brothers. One hears, far away, the flapping pages of Mad magazine, underground head comics, and the solitary giggles of the stoned. Little more.

We do not laugh. None of us--the young, the old, the middleaged. We are failing as an audience in a kind of conspiracy with the failure of the should-be laughmakers. History, horrible history is everyone's excuse. The man in baggy pants slipping on a banana peel keeps turning into a soldier tripping on a land mine in Viet Nam. "Who can laugh at a time like this?" cry the square, the hip and all the in-betweens, in what may be the only chorus of national consensus.

But history has always been rather horrible, and Americans, almost as a point of pride, have always managed to laugh. The Civil War was a veritable source book of jokes. Depressions have conspicuously doubled up victims with laughter as well as hunger pangs. In the good times, one laughed from pleasure. In the bad times, one laughed even harder, from necessity. Anxiety, Freud theorized, bears a causal relationship to humor. But if a joke is a scream for help, why aren't we screaming all the time? Why, then, have we turned cataplectic?

Hold the funeral. Perhaps old Dr. Sigmund has given us the clue. Is it possible that humor is not dead--merely that a particular kind of humor has died, along with the particular kind of anxiety that made it necessary? May not the diagnosis of our cataplexy be that American history has produced a new kind of anxiety--without yet producing a new kind of humor to relieve it?

There will be a short pause while we all shift comic tics.

Lord knows, the old kind of anxiety was around long enough. The country's friendly curse: puritanism. Hard work, optimum, an improbably chaste heart --and no time off from good behavior. What wildly unreasonable demands the old national code of idealism put upon us all! "The line is thinly drawn." James Thurber calculated, "between American comedy and American insanity"--meaning that three centuries of puritans just about made it to their favorite escape hatch.

American humor in its traditional forms --the wisecrack, the tall tale, the deadpan jape, the shaggy-dog story --has both resisted the official puritanism and made it all possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American humorists, in other words, have kept American puritans sane and alive.

Now other and more direct therapies have been adopted. The ex-puritans are letting it all hang out. Sex has become a compulsory part of the American footrace for happiness. There goes the rationale of the dirty joke--not to mention just about every other joke that originates in repression. Since Oh! Calcutta!, voyeurism has become something one buys tickets for. And instead of making a wisecrack against the system, one now throws a brick through the window of the Bank of America. Who needs laughs when everybody is doing his thing? Like a patient who has just finished analysis, the emancipated (at last!) American is inclined to regard his lack of humor as evidence of strength. Laughs are just wiggles in the corsets of the uptight, he thinks.

The fact is, however, that he may not be as emancipated as he believes. Enter, quietly, the new anxiety that dares not breathe its name. The reverse puritan takes his pleasure as aggressively as he once took his work. Having fun has become his new duty. "Feel!" has become the new moral imperative. The original puritan denied the feelings he had. The reverse puritan boasts of feelings he does not have, writing rubber checks on love in capital letters. Captive to a new perfectionism, he flagellates himself equally for his marginal failures at orgasm and for his secret indifference toward minorities, for relating badly to his children and for not relating at all to the children of Pakistan.

He has chucked sin but taken on cosmic guilt, including the ultimate guilt: feeling guilty about not feeling more guilty.

Help wanted: a '70s version of humorist to save the '70s version of prig. This once and future humorist may already be present. Imprisoned inside every prig, a comedian is signaling wildly to get out. And that, finally, is the metaphor of cataplexy.

Humor is civil war, even to the point of paralysis, between the part of man who wants to play God and the part of man who knows a real God when he sees one--and he is not that pompous character staring back from the mirror with egg stains on his shirt and his fly half-zipped, asking "What's so funny?"

The prig builds reverent statues to himself. The comedian--if he can break out--crayons mustaches on them to save the prig from his own miscasting. What makes the '70s no laughing matter is this: without comedians to deter them, little prigs tend to grow into big fanatics. Bombs being what they are nowadays, a custard pie in the face of a few prigs is a cheap price for civilization to pay. Bombs and bomb throwers we've got. But where are the pies? Where are those pie throwers? They'll come in their own time and their own guise. Not even Herman Kahn would dare to predict the details--it is the nature of subversives to surprise. All we can do is wait and prepare to forgive them for the shock treatments they will provide us. Bring on those '70s clowns. A touch of madness may save us from the real thing.

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