That's Not Funny!
By James Poniewozik
George Carlin died just when we needed him. The comedian made a career out of saying the things you were not supposed to say: on TV, in polite company, in the political arena. Now, the summer he left us, politicians and their followers are on a taking-offense offensive, adding more by the day--earnestly or with calculation--to the list of forbidden humor.
The most glaring recent example was the New Yorker cover that satirized the smears against Barack Obama and his wife. In a Dagwood sandwich of stereotypes, cartoonist Barry Blitt drew Barack (dressed in a turban) and Michelle (with an Angela Davis 'fro and an AK-47) exchanging a fist bump in the White House while a portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on and an American flag burns in the fireplace.
Obama had just come off the other side of a comedy controversy, after Bernie Mac went to an Obama event and told dirty jokes (a.k.a. what Bernie Mac does for a living). Comics Randi Rhodes and Penn Jillette took heat for nasty jokes about Hillary Clinton; John McCain, for joking about using U.S. cigarette exports as a weapon to kill Iranians. Partisans argued over whether Saturday Night Live was more unfair to Obama than Comedy Central was to Clinton. Across America, the body politic is busily making mountains out of droll hills.
Has America lost its sense of humor? If it seems that way, perhaps that's because dourness is effective politics. In Minnesota, former SNL comic Al Franken hit trouble in his Senate race because of the dark legacy of his past: not drug use or infidelity but a joke he made in 1995 about 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney being a rapist. His opponent, Norm Coleman, and Coleman's surrogates jumped on the joke, accusing Franken of thinking rape is funny.
Of course, Franken's joke was never about rape being funny but about the absurdity of imagining a beloved TV curmudgeon as a rapist. That may not be your cup of tea, but it's the same kind of dark impulse that inspires gender-conscious comedian Sarah Silverman's humor: "I was raped by a doctor--which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." Does that mean she hates women too?
There is such productive tension between politics and comedy because the two fields are so different. Politics is about biting your tongue and sticking to bland bromides (for which you have to blame not just politicians but also voters and the gaffe-happy media). Comedy is about tearing off scabs and unveiling anxieties. In a race that's so much about identity taboos--an old guy is running against a black guy who defeated a white lady--we need that more than ever. Yet the fear of sounding bigoted is precisely what has made (white, male) late-night comics and their (largely white) audiences tentative. (Dave Chappelle, your country needs you!) In June, Jon Stewart had to assure his audience after an Obama joke, "You're allowed to laugh at him."
Comedy, good comedy, is not just unsafe; it's uncontrollable--satire most of all. Satire takes a real position and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity. By nature, it is, if it is any good, subject to interpretation. The knock on the New Yorker cover was like the old critique of Archie Bunker: that some idiot bigot somewhere might take it literally and enjoy it.
This is why true believers suspect satirists, even those--as for liberals upset with the New Yorker--in their own camp. Satirists don't make crystal clear how you're supposed to read their work. They don't give you a road map to correct thinking, because a joke explained is neither funny nor persuasive. They give voice to the enemy's beliefs. And this makes it easy to call them traitors.
Suspicion of irony and satire, in fact, is a great unifier of the left and the right. Daniel Radosh, in his book Rapture Ready!, about Christian pop culture, explains why irony is anathema to Fundamentalist entertainers: it is too dangerous to introduce the slightest possibility that someone might not get the joke and thus might be led to moral error. Better safe than funny.
All this hypersensitivity comes, ironically--sorry!--as political comedy is surging: not just Jay Leno and David Letterman but now Stewart and Stephen Colbert, online satirists and news hosts like Keith Olbermann, who is as much comic as anchor.
These commentators are so effective (and more popular, among some audiences, than the straight media they've supplanted) precisely because they spray seltzer in the face of the official, inoffensive, phony public discourse. Unlike many politicians, they say what they think; unlike much of the media, they trust their audience's intelligence. That we should rely so heavily on them to do so is the biggest joke in American public life. I wish I could laugh.