Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  Take the Skinheads LOLing

  At worst, that kind of pointless irony can be the last refuge of scoundrels. It’s a way to deflect criticism from viewpoints that might be not just uncool but actively evil. In recent years, white supremacists have had considerable success joining online havens for Internet trolls like 4chan—places where anonymous, lonely young men gather to say outrageous things about women and minorities just for the “lulz”—and then recruiting them as actual neo-Nazis. As Andrew Anglin boasted on his neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, “The sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as people realized they were based on fact. . . . The rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP [the Nazi party] largely took place on 4chan.” Anglin called this new tactic “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.”

  And it wasn’t just some underground, deep-web phenomenon. In 2016, a new late-night series called Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, from the titular Rhode Island–based sketch group, debuted on Adult Swim and became an instant hit among the “alt-right.” Long threads on online white nationalist forums dissected each episode of the bizarre fifteen-minute sketch show, which posters were convinced espoused their far-right ideology. You didn’t have to watch the show for long to see what they were seeing: three minutes of cast member Sam Hyde in blackface screaming at a woman in exaggerated vernacular; a kids’ TV parody called Jews Rock; a non sequitur blaming the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, on gay sodomy; a man calling a woman fat and stupid, knocking her through a glass tabletop, and then charging her two thousand dollars to replace his bloody carpet; a black reality show contestant bragging that she gets “over forty grand” a year in disability payments. An Adult Swim source told Buzzfeed that the network had repeatedly found and removed “coded racist messages” in the show, including swastikas. Hyde himself moderated one of the show’s most enthusiastic online forums and used his Twitter account to troll progressive celebs, calling Lena Dunham a “fat pig” and accusing Patton Oswalt of killing his own wife. Most disturbingly, a video began to make the rounds of a 2013 stand-up set by Hyde at a comedy club in Brooklyn, in which his act consisted of reading fifteen minutes of antigay pseudoscience and homophobic rants about the “faggot brain.” He finished the set by blaming pro-gay propaganda on the Zionist “media machine” and then left the club to argue with some of the “hipster faggot” audience who had walked out.

  Throughout all this, Million Dollar Extreme on Adult Swim was drawing over a million viewers per episode. In any other field, there would have been an immediate outcry, but in our postmodern age of edgy, ironic comedy, Sam Hyde and his collaborators had some cover. This seemed like racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, but surely it was some kind of comment on racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, right? What if they weren’t Nazis, just extremely committed surrealist “hoaxsters” and “provocateurs”? And, hey, isn’t the best comedy uncomfortable sometimes? After six months of mostly-behind-the-scenes controversy, two popular Adult Swim writer-performers, Brett Gelman and Tim Heidecker, publicly criticized the network for airing Million Dollar Extreme, and the show was canceled three weeks later. When the Hollywood Reporter spoke to Hyde to get his reaction, he was still doing his metacomedy performance-art shtick, beginning the interview by telling the reporter, “Thanks for giving a racist like me a platform to spew my hate. I’m kidding. I’m just messing with you.” Stand down, everyone! The racist guy is reassuring us that his racism wasn’t really racist. Or . . . (smiling impishly with pinky finger raised to mouth) was it?!?

  I Was a Teenage Spy

  If David Letterman was my gateway drug to ironic remove, Spy magazine was the hard stuff. The legendary satire monthly was founded in 1986 by journalists Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, and barely lasted into the next decade before its original editors moved on and the magazine’s genius sputtered out. But during that short time span, New York’s rich and powerful lived in fear of its roving eye. Some of the names among Spy’s frequent targets—Mayor Ed Koch, John Gotti, Al Sharpton, especially Donald TrumpX—were ones I knew. But I was just as excited to read about the hijinks of media moguls and Nouvelle Society fixtures I had never heard of: Laurence Tisch, Nan Kempner, “Punch” Sulzberger, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. Each issue I pulled off the newsstand was like an entrée into a bigger, livelier world where everyone who mattered was in the know.

  Everything about Spy was clever, from the endlessly inventive lists and charts and squibs littering its “Naked City” section (“Separated at Birth” celebrity lookalikes, mutually fellating pairs of book blurbs, horoscopes of public figures on the day they were fired/assassinated/disgraced) to the incredibly research-intensive megaprojects in six-point type that no other magazine would even attempt (Mike Ovitz’s top secret Hollywood client list, a complete index to The Andy Warhol Diaries for readers looking up famous names, “1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush”); from the brainy cover packages nailing down elusive but pernicious social trends of the 1980s (postmodernism, yuppie lifestyle porn, organizer fetishism) to puckish celebrity pranks (which infamous tycoons will cash a $0.13 check?); from its arch house style (everything in Spy was “faux-” or “über-” something, often “preternaturally” so) to its dense, elegant design.XI The magazine was often laugh-out-loud funny as well, but “clever” was what really spoke to seventeen-year-old me, precocious and irritating and desperate to seem grown-up.

  When my high school newspaper, the Spirit, retired its advice columnist character “Dr. Blunt” at the start of my senior year, I was asked to fill in with an anonymous school gossip column, titled, in a burst of originality, “The Spirit Spy.” I assembled twenty-four column inches of cafeteria and teachers’ lounge rumors and wrote them up in my best approximation of acid-tipped Spy prose. I even laid out the first column at home on our Atari ST’s primitive desktop publisher, in an attempt to duplicate Spy’s fiddly, serifed typography—and to ensure that no one else touched the text. Nobody was very happy when the issue came out. What was this scathing, bitchy gossip column doing in a student paper right next to the bake sale rundowns and JV volleyball scores? “The Spirit Spy”’s anonymity lasted for about five minutes, and then I was called into the principal’s office for a very serious conversation about respect and journalistic responsibility. The next day, my editors and I agreed that “The Spirit Spy” should be retired. I’d used up all my ideas in the first column anyway.

  Leaving the principal’s office, I was ecstatic with my newfound status as a parochial school Lenny Bruce, a Martyr for Satire. But when I dug “The Spirit Spy”’s short-lived oeuvre out of my garage for a reread decades later, I immediately saw that my high school principal had had a point. The same gleeful spite and withering disdain that Spy brought to bear on political hypocrites and vulgarian billionaires wasn’t a good look when turned on the computer club, senior lock-in, or student production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.XII I had read Spy and thought, “These people are smart and talented, and are sometimes dicks in print. Therefore, if I am a dick in print, I must be smart and talented.” (To be fair, Spy’s founders were probably thinking the same thing, only their reference point was H. L. Mencken.) Without a cause or a deserving victim, my work wasn’t satire. It was satire’s eyeball-rolling teenage nephew, snark.

  Snide Effects

  Though Spy was capable of masterful satire and hard-hitting investigative journalism, much of its own output stayed well within the snark infield as well. It could be argued, looking back, that its snarky editorial voice was, for better or for worse, the magazine’s greatest legacy to the cultural landscape. What is snark? Snark is irreverent kibitzing as a way of life—the curled lip, the bored sneer. Snark is too detached and superior to really function as criticism, since it looks to put down everything, but it hates sincerity and sentiment above all. Satire denounces; snark merely dismisses. The word is onomatopoetic, from the ironic snorting sound often associated with a snide put-down, and originated with the German snarken.
It was, in fact, a German stock character who brought snark to the modern urban scene: Eckensteher Nante, a familiar figure on the Berlin stage and in comic pamphlets from the 1830s on. “Eckensteher” means, roughly, “corner-loitering,” and Nante was the archetypal Berlin day laborer who preferred to spend most of his time loafing on the city’s sidewalks, clutching a bottle of schnapps and aiming droll, mouthy remarks at passersby. In one typical story, a Berliner tries to hire Nante to haul a heavy chest of drawers for him, but the man is so miserly that they can’t agree on a price. “Just leave it here on the street and wait until nightfall,” retorts Nante, who couldn’t care less. “Then someone will carry it off for nothing!”

  About the same time, the snarky wisecrack was catching on across the Atlantic as well. Mark Twain’s friend and collaborator Charles Dudley Warner explained how the emerging American sense of humor was largely a response to the goopy sentimentalism then fashionable in poetry and essays. “I need not say how suddenly and completely this affectation was laughed out of sight by the coming of the ‘humorous’ writer, whose existence is justified by the excellent service performed in clearing the tearful atmosphere. His keen and mocking method . . . puts its foot on every bud of sentiment, holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard anything in life seriously.” Josh Billings agreed, using spelling that a frontier version of Spy certainly would have called faux-naif: “Amerikans love caustick things; they would prefer turpentine tew colone-water, if they had tew drink either. So with their relish of humor; they must hav it on the half-shell with cayenne.”

  But the “caustick” burn of cayenne is no longer just a condiment for us, an occasional sprinkle of comic pizzazz. In the media today, and particularly online, empty snark is now the entire cuisine. Consider: The central joke of Seinfeld was always that the four main characters were terrible people. They smugly dissected the faults of everyone they knew, they treated any actual striving or suffering by another human being as fodder for observational comedy, they would cynically push a senior citizen aside to make a cowardly exit from a kitchen fire or to grab a loaf of marble rye. Even the collapse of an entire publishing firm or the death of a fiancée at their own hands left them completely unmoved. It was a good joke, but we didn’t get it. We wanted to be their friends.XIII

  I enjoyed Seinfeld’s celebrated “No hugging, no learning” credo, but I don’t think we had to engineer an entire culture from it, like Star Trek aliens remaking their whole planet in the image of a single book about gangsters or Nazis or something. If George Costanza and his single-camera sitcom descendants aren’t going to feel bad about, say, poisoning a woman with cheap wedding invitation envelopes, then what life situations do require real sentiment anymore? If even Hallmark cards are offering best wishes ironically, what’s left?XIV I once walked by a “LOST CAT” poster tacked to a telephone pole in my neighborhood that read as follows.

  Wanted! [Preferably not] dead or alive!

  My beloved Bon Jovi got out and is living on a prayer . . .

  I know he just wants to live while he’s alive, but we really miss him! While he might be walking the streets with a loaded 6-string on his back, we can’t help but feel like we’ve been shot through the heart. All we have left are pictures hung in shadows . . .

  Come home, Bon Jovi. It’s been raining since you left me.

  I understand the impulse of the funny person to want to be funny wherever possible, and I certainly understand the impulse of the rock fan to quote the haunting desert poetry of Jon Bon Jovi wherever applicable. But why did a missing-pet bulletin need to be “punched up” with jokes at all? Can’t we even advertise the loss of a beloved cat without resorting to ironic nostalgia?

  Maybe, I told myself, Bon Jovi’s owner is mourning and this kind of detachment was exactly what he or she needed in a moment of grief. Certainly it’s true that a little ironic distancing can work wonders as a coping device. At Groucho Marx’s separation from his first wife, Ruth, for example, he told a joke. After many unhappy years, they had agreed to a divorce, and so she packed up the car and was leaving the house for the last time. Groucho put out his hand and said, “Well, it was nice knowing you . . . and if you’re ever in the neighborhood again, drop in.” Ruth laughed, and the tension was broken. It was the unprecedented and awkward seriousness of the moment that led to the ironic farewell, Groucho explained to his son. “I didn’t know quite what to say.”

  But when things really go wrong, we seem to know almost instinctively that irony is the wrong note. One week after September 11, 2001, no less an authority than Spy cofounder Graydon Carter decreed that the terror attacks spelled “the end of the age of irony.” The statement is mostly resurrected today to show how ridiculous it was, since the brave new irony-free era lasted only a month or two before everything went back to normal, but with more wars. Less often remembered is how obvious and right Carter’s decree felt at the time. Lorne Michaels’s earnest “Can we be funny?” appeal to Rudy Giuliani on Saturday Night Live notwithstanding, nobody was in the mood for wisecracks that autumn. The Onion had just completed its historic move from Madison, Wisconsin, to Manhattan, and on the eve of September 11 was celebrating its first New York issue, scheduled to go to press the very next day. Instead, the staff spent the next two weeks trying to figure out how to treat a gaping national wound as a joke premise. The resulting issue is widely considered a comedy classic, and even an act of bravery and ingenuity in the face of evil. Some of the articles do hold up well, especially Carol Kolb’s heartbreaking “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” But at the time, I couldn’t bring myself to laugh much at the issue. Clever takes like “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York” felt trivial; morally outraged ones like “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule” and “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell” just felt ponderous. If this was the smartest comedy that could be wrung out of the deaths of three thousand people, then maybe comedy didn’t have much comfort to offer in the face of the deaths of three thousand people.

  In comedy’s defense, nothing much else did either.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

  But wounds heal, and irony always comes back. Occasionally trend pieces will trumpet a “New Sincerity” movement set to storm irony’s ramparts at any moment, hopefully citing as evidence any new sign of earnestness or sentiment in the culture: Dave Eggers books, Korean soap operas, heartfelt emo music, cosplay. Yes, those fads are driven in part by a yearning to peel back the ironic reserve of modern life. Ironic reserve can be exhausting and lonely! But it’s never going to happen, as 9/11 demonstrated. Once the genie is out of the bottle, an irony culture is never going to go back to being a sincerity culture, because the roots go too deep. Authenticity is often uncomfortable and revealing; ambiguous snark never is. Who wants to be the only vulnerable poet soul in a world of irony-clad scoffers?XV

  The overflow of the comic outlook into every corner of public life has largely come in the form of lifestyle irony. But look: the fact that irony has changed shape so many times over the millennia, morphing from rhetorical tool to literary device to comedy sensibility to way of life, means that we have more than two options in how we think about irony today. We don’t have to choose between all and nothing, snark and Fall Out Boy. In particular, irony doesn’t have to be cynical. It’s just been a vehicle for cynicism so long that we forgot that.

  The canonical literary example of irony is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” In that anonymous 1729 pamphlet, Swift drew attention to the problem of rural poverty and overpopulation in Ireland, and then suggested a novel solution: have parents sell their spare children as food for the wealthy! “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,” he argued, “and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” He went on to do some back-of-the
-envelope calculations on how the logistics for his scheme would work out, sketched the wide-ranging social benefits of a world where plump and delicious toddlers are farmed like veal, and even suggested recipes.XVI In modern comedic parlance, Swift commits to the bit. In well over three thousand words, he never drops the ironic pretense, never once winks to let us know that, hey, he’s not really a weirdo with a cupboard full of Irish baby jerky at home.

  As Swift’s original readers would have noticed immediately, his essay was a pitch-perfect parody of the popular do-gooder pamphlets of the day. “A Modest Proposal” took aim at two targets at once: both the deplorable indifference to poverty plaguing society at large, and the callous social engineers hyping their own silly fixes. I can find no evidence that any clueless contemporaries actually fell for the gag and wrote outraged letters to the editor. In fact, Swift’s friend Lord Bathurst wrote to him joking that, in lieu of repaying a two-hundred-pound debt, Bathurst should just send Swift four or five of his own children, all of whom were “very fit for table.” Good old Lord Bathurst, always “yes, and”–ing!

  “A Modest Proposal” is an extended irony, but not a snarky one that leaves the author’s true feelings a carefully layered enigma. The ironic device doesn’t hide Swift’s righteous fury; if anything, it sharpens it. This kind of irony, principled irony, comes with advantages going back to Socrates. By pretending to espouse an opposing argument, an author can highlight its flaws and let an audience feel they’ve come around to the “right” conclusion as a discovery of their own.