by Ken Jennings
The Heirs of Will Rogers
Satire is not a modern invention, of course. As we’ve seen, comedy has been speaking truth to power since Aristophanes lampooned the Peloponnesian War. And satire became the dominant voice of modern culture sometime in the middle years of the twentieth century. Consider: the two great, abiding antiwar novels about World War I are All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms. They are devastating, sincere, pull-no-punches tragedies. The two great antiwar novels about World War II, on the other hand, are Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. In the space of thirty years, pitch-black comedy had become the preferred way to understand and to protest modern warfare.
But the weapons of satire are ridicule and disdain; satire is against something. This is very different from modern social movements, which are usually framed as being for something: for peace, for the environment, for equality. Fighting against social ills (a war on poverty, on cancer, on drugs) is generally how governments, not activists, frame policy. I suppose you could argue that all satirical comedy is an implicit plea for the opposite of the thing being satirized: Dr. Strangelove is for nuclear disarmament, Huckleberry Finn is for abolition. Veep is for, uh, having fewer sad, terrible people in politics, I guess? But I’m not buying that. Dr. Strangelove never mentions nuclear disarmament. Huckleberry Finn never beats the drum for abolition. That’s not a coincidence; it’s inherently easier to use comedy to criticize a viewpoint than to praise one. Historically, comedians who have become crusaders have found that passion wasn’t always compatible with their act. Lenny Bruce was funnier before legal troubles forced him into becoming a full-time First Amendment advocate. Bill Hicks’s political material was sharper when he wasn’t going down onstage rabbit holes into Waco and JFK conspiracy theories. The great Dick Gregory had perhaps the most sensible solution of all. When he found himself becoming a full-time human rights activist (and health food faddist!) in the early 1970s, he retired from comedy almost completely, not really returning to stand-up until the 1995 premiere of his one-man Broadway show.
Will Rogers was different. An early vaudeville and movie star, Rogers became the most beloved American of his era on the strength of the political commentary delivered in his weekly radio broadcasts and daily newspaper columns. Today we probably imagine Rogers’s act as a series of bland, folksy aphorisms (“Every time Congress makes a joke it’s a law. And every time they make a law it’s a joke!”) but, in fact, the “cowboy philosopher” was a surprisingly well-informed and incisive—if studiously bipartisan—political commentator. During the high times of the 1920s, he repeatedly warned of a coming crash, and once the Depression hit, his columns were full of specific policy recommendations on populist issues like agricultural tariffs, financial regulation, and government aid. His weekly newspaper audience was forty million Americans, fully one-third of the nation. In 1932, he spoke at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, receiving twenty-two second-ballot votes for the presidential nomination at the latter.
Rogers was also an activist. In 1931, with crops dying of drought and farms going under in the Dust Bowl, the Red Cross launched a massive disaster-relief campaign and fund-raising drive. Rogers personally visited President Hoover at the White House but was unable to convince the fiscal conservative to approve federal loans. The following week, Rogers flew to Texas and Arkansas to do a series of live shows and radio benefits for the marching sharecroppers. “Well folks, sure glad to be here with you,” he told a crowd in Fort Smith, Arkansas. “Glad you are starving, otherwise I would never have met you.” Rogers’s aw-shucks common-man persona was no put-on, according to Jennings family lore. My great-grandfather, the late Gardner Othneil Jennings,III always drew crowds to his little general store in Muleshoe, Texas,IV in early July. Those were the days when Will Rogers, visiting friends on a ranch nearby, liked to stop by the store and trade stories with townsfolk around the cracker barrel.
Will Rogers was the forerunner of today’s alternative to political satire: comedy that doesn’t merely mock a deserving target but advances a clearly articulated alternative as well. That path, of course, runs squarely through Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. From 2005 until 2014, while Stephen Colbert held down his half of Comedy Central’s evening programming block with traditional straight-faced satire of institutional buffoonery, Stewart’s show was increasingly a pulpit for his earnest brand of skepticism and outrage. In retirement, as Stewart became an advocate for the most vulnerable victims of government bureaucracy—veterans’ groups, 9/11 first responders—it was even easier to see the parallels with Will Rogers out marching with the Arkansas farmers.
Stewart’s onetime guest host and spiritual successor John Oliver took the comedy of conviction to its inevitable end. His Last Week Tonight series on HBO is weekly, freeing him and his writers from the frenetic pace of the other two hundred late-night topical comedy shows, and it’s ad-free, allowing him to slow the pace down for viewers. The combination allowed for longer-form deep dives into surprisingly wonky issues never heretofore touched by monologue: civil asset forfeiture, digital encryption law, Tibetan sovereignty, payday loans, voting rights in Guam. Along with the bubbly comedy, audiences were getting a high-level overview of some important but under-the-radar policy debates, but they were getting the program’s strong editorial viewpoint as well.
The success of the Jon Stewart/John Oliver school of issue-based comedy, along with hard-hitting sketch shows from Dave Chappelle and his spiritual successors, opened up new vistas of possibility for all kinds of comedy. It wasn’t surprising when a niche prestige comedy like Transparent tackled a different gender issue every episode, but soon mainstream family comedies were foregrounding social issues of the moment in a way not seen in America since the heyday of Norman Lear: immigration (Fresh Off the Boat, Superstore), addiction (Mom), race (Black-ish, The Carmichael Show). On the woke sitcom, every episode was a “very special episode,” and many of them ended up providing the definitive comic take on hot-button subjects of the day, from Black Lives Matter to the election of Donald Trump. On movie screens, a low-budget horror-comedy like Jordan Peele’s Get Out could make over $250 million by moving its social metaphor from subtext to—what’s more obvious than text? Supertext? And Hari Kondabolu could build a comedy album around observations like “I don’t think you can be environmentally friendly in a capitalist society” and “Race is a social construct! It’s a way to divide us!” That’s not really mere satire anymore.
Ethnic Stereotypes: Measuring the Canyon
The use of comedy to talk frankly about race was particularly striking, because comedy’s past record on race and ethnicity might be worse than that of any other art form. More racist than opera? Yes. Westerns? Yes. Aryan black metal? It might be a close call. Minstrel shows, with their grotesque caricatures of African Americans, were the most popular form of entertainment in America for almost half a century. Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang was the leading humor magazine of the 1920s, selling (according to its publisher, anyway) over a million copies every month. It traded heavily in jokes about every minority under the sun: Jews, blacks, Italians, Irish, Asians. Five-dollar prizes were offered to readers who submitted the “Best Hebrew Joke” or “Best Colored Joke.” Even America’s patron-saint humorists, champions of the little guy like Mark Twain and Will Rogers, weren’t immune to the prejudices of their day. Rogers joked about passing through black communities that were “so dark you couldn’t make your way around without a light!” Twain’s famous essay “How to Tell a Story,” about the importance of comic timing, ends with his describing the “Negro ghost story” he would act out as the big finish to his stage show. For five minutes he would shuffle and shiver around the stage, bugging his eyes out and saying thing like “My lan’, what dat?” in exaggerated African American dialect. It brought the house down every night.
Abe Lincoln loved minstrel shows.
But without people of color, modern comedy as we know it wouldn’t even exist. In her influential 19
31 book American Humor, Constance Rourke included the “Negro minstrel” alongside the frontier backwoodsman and the Yankee peddler as one of the three archetypes that birthed the brash, mischievous American sense of humor. To her, they all represent the same thing: comic triumph, resilience in the face of adversity. Today, that seems to conveniently elide the fact that minstrel “darky” stereotypes were constructed by outsiders and oppressors in a way that the frontiersman and the Yankee “sharp” were not, but it’s true that at least some of the music and culture preserved by the minstrel genre was authentic, and in later years a surprising number of troupes were actually made up of African American performers. (Many, confusingly, still wore blackface.) Minstrel shows, with their simple comedy sketches delivered by two actors called “end men” and a longer stand-up routine called a “stump speech,” begat musical revues and vaudeville, which begat pretty much every modern comedy form. Then in 1955, Redd Foxx single-handedly invented the modern comedy album by recording his nightclub act for a tiny black label called Dooto Records. His “party records” broke with tradition by including no novelty songs, just a half hour of jokes told to a live audience. They were a smash hit. Foxx sold over ten million albums in all, and opened doors for his fellow comedians of the segregated “Chitlin’ Circuit,” like Pigmeat Markham and Moms Mabley, to get their routines on vinyl as well. Within a few years, Bob Newhart, Nichols and May, and Bill Cosby were using the new medium to become household names.
The abundance of unpleasant racial and ethnic jokes in comedy history has less to do with the specific social views of funny people than with the inherent immediacy that humor requires. Understanding a joke usually involves a mental leap from the setup to the laugh. Jerry Seinfeld has compared this to a daredevil’s leap across a canyon: Make the jump too far, and you won’t get across. You’ll lose the audience. Make it too short, and you’ll bore them; the step across will seem trivial. There’s a happy medium where the twist is surprising but not too surprising. And this is where stereotypes come in handy. Observe:
Did you hear the one about the stupid guy whose library burned down? He lost both his books, and he hadn’t even finished coloring the second one.
It’s not great, because the canyon’s too narrow. The setup tells us he’s stupid and then explains that he did a stupid thing. What’s surprising about that?
Did you hear the one about the Spanish king Charles II, whose library burned down? He lost both his books, and he hadn’t even finished coloring the second one.
Now the canyon’s too wide. What, you didn’t know Charles II of Spain (1661–1700) was famously an inbred imbecile?
Did you hear the one about the Polack whose library burned down? He lost both his books, and he hadn’t even finished coloring the second one.
There we go.
Let’s be clear: the result is offensive to Polish people. But it’s important to note that antipathy to Poles is not what fuels the joke—it’s the fact that we’ve chosen a subject that makes the leap across the canyon the right length. The coloring-book owner doesn’t have to be Polish; he or she just has to be a member of some group that we, the joke-sharing community, mutually understand to be a little slow. Ethnic-joke scholar Christie Davies has pointed out that “Polack jokes” boomed in the United States in the late 1970s, when Polish Americans were no longer a suspicious, marginalized ethnicity. His implication: the target of disparagement humor can sometimes be almost arbitrary. It just has to be a convenient stereotype. Any real malice or racism might make the joke less funny, by introducing a second variable—potentially a controversial and distracting one—into the equation.
In fact, there’s no reason why the out-group in a joke like this has to be an ethnic one at all. Blasons populaires—“popular emblems,” the term folklorists use for historical stereotypes—can encompass anything from professions (lawyers are crooks!) to hobbies (gamers are virgins!) to hair color (blondes are dumb!). But the original medieval blasons were tales told about neighboring villages: these guys up north are cocky, those guys out west are rural and backward, those other guys across the river are stingy as hell. By far the most common local stereotype was a “fooltown,” a city of purported dunces used to tell ancient and medieval versions of our Irish jokes and blonde jokes and drummer jokes. In ancient Rome, the target was Abdera, a city in remote Thrace.
A man from Abdera saw a eunuch talking to a woman, and asked if it was his wife. The man replied that eunuchs can’t have wives. “My mistake!” said the man from Abdera. “She must be your daughter.”
England alone had forty-five different regional fooltowns over the centuries, most prominently Gotham in Nottinghamshire. When Washington Irving nicknamed New York City “Gotham” in 1807, it wasn’t really a compliment.
But when national identities began to replace regional ones, most of the stereotypes became ethnic as well.V The English tell jokes about the Irish, the Russians tell jokes about the Ukrainians, the Iranians tell jokes about the Armenians, the Danes tell jokes about the Norwegians, the Tajiks tell jokes about the Uzbeks. The most common joke is how stupid or rural the out-group is, and a surprising number of slurs revolve around their food. The French are “frogs,” the English “limeys,” the Germans “krauts,” the Mexicans “beaners.” Davies believes the implication is that these poor, backward people have to eat weird food—not like us! we eat meat!—but I wonder if what’s really to blame is the failure of imagination typical to racism. “Ha ha, look at these Germans. Always, uh . . . eating sauerkraut. You know what, I’m gonna call them ‘krauts’!”
In an interesting twist, many cultures make jokes not just about their dumb neighbors, but also about their cannier opposite numbers, a culture that’s, if anything, a little too clever. In England, the dumb Irish are offset by the sly Scots; elsewhere, the targets are often East Asian immigrants or Jews. The jokes can be just as mean, often revolving around the targets’ supposed conniving or miserly character. One such joke, about Scottish tightwads, is among the shortest jokes I’ve ever seen.
Scotland Yard: 2'11".
Get it? They’re so cheap that they shortchanged our yard by an inch. The joke isn’t really funny in any meaningful way, but it shows the powerful economy that comes by trading in stereotypes. A punch line in a funny story is often the collision between two “scripts”—two different ways of understanding some event. Stereotypes allow jokesters to tell the full joke while only having to spell out one of the two stories. The second script (“The Scots are cheap!”) is already out there in the ether.
And there’s the rub: ethnic jokes are generally powered by a widespread attitude of, at best, superiority, if not suspicion or outright dislike. According to Davies, the existence of both “canny” and “foolish” stereotypes in many cultures suggests that their purpose is self-congratulatory for the joke-tellers: we are neither too clever nor too dumb, we are just right. The joke reveals more about the teller than about the target. As a result, Davies doesn’t think we should fret excessively about the connection between ethnic jokes and bigotry. In a world with a history of actual horrific genocides against Jews, for example, mere jokes don’t strike him as the greatest danger. “To treat [Jewish] jokes as if they were merely and inevitably covert anti-Semitic utterances,” he writes, “is crass and simplistic and ignores the crucial distinction between that which is intrinsically anti-Semitic and that which might be exploited by anti-Semites.”
Personally, I’m not sure how crucial that distinction is anymore. Today, more people are conscious of the possibility that racism doesn’t have to be of the cartoonish, men-in-hoods variety to be pernicious. It can be a subtler, institutional thing, largely invisible but still advanced in thousands of tiny ways by generally well-meaning people. What effects could racially edgy jokes have on a playing field like that one? And what role could they play as the old-school kind of racism—cops beating on people of color, swastikas sprayed on synagogues—starts to come back?
The Glass Ceiling
/> Of all the stereotypes that fuel racial and ethnic jokes, humorlessness isn’t generally one of them. Generally, minorities have the opposite problem. Their portrayal as fun-loving clowns can be used as evidence of their lower intelligence or to belie the seriousness of their plight. Women in comedy face a very different battle: a widespread assumption that they’re not as funny as their male counterparts. That’s because comedy has, through most of recorded history, been seen as a male endeavor. In ancient Greek comedies, just as with the Elizabethans, female performers weren’t allowed onstage. It’s not clear that women were even allowed in the audience when female-friendly comedies like Aristophanes’ Lysistrata were first performed.
Human cultures have, pretty uniformly, assumed that men were much, much funnier than women. In mythology, the trickster figure is almost always a male god—Loki, Anansi, Puck, Old Man Coyote—and that’s no coincidence; the point is often driven home by giving him a big old phallus. The messenger god Hermes was honored on Greek roadsides with herms, square pillars usually decorated with just two features: Hermes’s head, and his erect genitalia. The Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga was even better endowed: his penis was so long that he had to wrap it around him when he walked and carry it on his back in a box.
And men, of course, wrote the history books. We remember Mark Twain as the great superstar of nineteenth-century American humor, but his contemporary Marietta Holley is almost forgotten. Holley, believe it or not, was every bit as popular as Twain in their day, selling millions of copies of her novels about a no-nonsense farmwife named Samantha Allen. Her Samantha at Saratoga was the nation’s top-selling book in 1887, and by 1893, she commanded a then-unheard-of $14,000 advance for Samantha at the World’s Fair. Women loved her books, but they weren’t marketed solely as chick lit. Clubs sprang up around the country to do dramatic amateur readings of her work, and were attended by men and women alike (including, in one case, prominent clergymen and a U.S. senator). Many readers assumed that, because the Samantha Allen books were so funny, Holley had to be a man writing under a pseudonym. Even after she added a photo to her book jackets in 1883, one stubborn reader insisted, “That book was written by a man!” “I have always supposed it was a compliment,” Holley would say.
