I know for myself, the comedy I like to write and the comedy I like to view is the comedy of *connection*- people reaching out to each other and failing because of their own hangups, blindspots, and weaknesses, with the catharsis being when they finally climb over those hills. I see a lot of that kind of comedy- even Bojack Horseman contains a lot of it, on its scaffold of Sick Humor. Ted Lasso is practically an archetype of it. An ethos of *We are all flawed, but we're also all we've got*.
Is that the next school of comedy? I don't know, but I think it speaks to a deep yearning in a modern society built on alienation and social media performance.
I have had similar thoughts, and discussions about a kind of “positive comedy” not based around judgment and scorn--the top comedy person with which I was chatting expressed skepticism, but they had been successful with the usual kind, so....
In its defense I think positive comedy would likely not kill its practitioners like Sick comedy seems to, or even make them into miserable kvetchy fuckers like other types of comedy do. But it also may not release aggression, which I think a style of comedy has to do, if it’s to be really durable.
I remember watching and liking S1 of Ted Lasso a lot; I remember seeing someone get locked in the luggage compartment of the team bus and emerging unscathed and thinking, “this is new” (Sick comedy would’ve had him die of exhaust fumes). It felt comforting, which was very welcome in those pandemic days. I popped in for an Ep in S3 and found it pleasant but not grabbing.
TLDR I think there is definitely something THERE, and I like the changes to comedy culture that would inspire.
Apropos of nothing: Were I young and full of vigor I would write a comedy pilot starring a recovering white supremacist. Sort of a Somebody Somewhere crossed with Abbott Elementary.
> But it also may not release aggression, which I think a style of comedy has to do, if it’s to be really durable.
I do think there's a space for that in positive comedy, because there's a lot of places to be frustrated by a world that isn't made for us. Like, here we are, grasping for connection, failing, and some of that failure is our own, but some of it is also just… who designed this world and this society? Nobody wants it to be this way, and yet- here we are. It's like the old Discordian joke: an acolyte prays to the goddess Eris, asking for help with a world where humans made other humans suffer, where unfairness and greed and violence define the world. "What's wrong with that," Eris replied, "if that's what you want to do?" "But no one wants it! Everyone hates it!" "Oh," the goddess said. "Then stop."
This is excellent. Most of it seemed new and eye opening-- which is weird because I’ve read Going Too Far. This suggests to me that I need to read it again, as it’s apparently gone AWOL from my memory.
Among many great moments, I like the analysis of P.J. O’Rourke. I’ve rarely liked him, but then I found out he’d co-written the high school yearbook (which is the gold standard for me) with Doug Kenney. So your point about their relationship explains a lot.
Karl, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed it. I love the fluidity of Tony's prose in Going Too Far, but after he finishes with the founders leaving Lampoon in 1975, he palpably loses interest. Sean always told me "Bone got a snootful of blow and powered through to the end." Still, it's some of a great book, and I can't imagine how wonderful it would've been if Sean had collaborated, which was the original plan. Sean's grasp of this stuff was encyclopedic, back to the 1500s. We were planning a podcast when he died.
I LIKE the craft behind PJ's writing, I just don't like the nativist anti-intellectual libertarian disdain in it. I also liked PJ personally when I met him in '07 or something; he was coming out of chemo and people say the cancer mellowed him. But I think it's really important to highlight his flaws, because unlike, say, Gerry Sussman, PJ actually had an effect on our politics, and it was a malign one.
As a writer, PJ was really Son of Doug, or at least School of Doug, and it's always struck me how PJ's I'm-rich-so-fuck-you misanthropy only really kicked in after Doug died. Anyway, this may explain the state of my bank account, but I've always suspected that "If the rich guys agree with you, you're probably full of shit." PJ seems to have come to the opposite conclusion, which strikes me as a character issue; the point of life isn't to marinate in the best possible bourbon, and thinking so reveals a hole where your self should be. It for sure reveals you as someone not wise enough to be writing satire.
Thanks for this generous reply! I read it twice, trying again to get this stuff to stay in my head.
Re: P.J.
I recall reading a book of his comic essays, and thinking that they had a lot of what I now identify with libertarianism-- the implication that you’re mocking things based on some honorable principle that would improve the world, while the reader suspects that you’re really just entitled and selfish.
Satire like that doesn’t work for me; I find cynicism more amusing when it feels like it’s really curdled idealism. (An aside: I’ve noticed some substack writers claim they write “satire,” and this usually means they’re just humorlessly trashing the left. I’ve come to see the word “satire” as a red flag.)
But P.J. was a great writer, at his best, I think, and I learned from a couple different places that he busted his ass to keep the Lampoon going. Maybe some of his conservatism came from that, an earned sense of having had to be the adult in the room for a while. That phenomenon seems to have curdled Henry Beard before him.
Well Henry, whom I know just glancingly, is a bit of a different case than PJ--Henry is from a Yale family and grew up well-off in NYC in the 40s and 50s; during his Lampoon days his mother, famously, used to drop off his laundry in a Bergdorf bag. People from Henry's background don't have Henry's type of career (his older brother was a CPA on the Board of the Yale Club of New York, for example), and so even though Henry has been wildly successful by any measure, that tension has got to have been quite substantial. I think being the magazine did wear on him, especially after Doug left. (Like Bystander wears on me.)
But in addition to being just a brilliant writer and editor, Henry was a Founder--it was HIS shop--and an authentic Brahmin, with the privileges and pressures of both of those things. Nobody else could've piloted Lampoon through those first five years as well as Henry did -- not Doug or Michael, not Harold Hayes, not William Shawn. National Lampoon from 1970-75 is simply bravura editing, perhaps the best I've ever seen. I've told Henry as much and, being the type of person he is, he has dismissed the compliment. But I know, and suspect he knows, too.
PJ's turn at the helm was different in that he seems to have gotten authority by sidling up to Matty; then reacted to being given authority by acting what he thought an EIC should act like. There is no judgment in this; I don't envy having to edit that menagerie, especially in the wake of the Founders' departure, and PJ was what, 31? But I know that emotional intelligence was what was required, and the way to do it is via strokes, not the whip. I think PJ's whole persona--his economic beliefs very much included--were his attempt to become what Henry had been since birth.
I know SCADS of people like Henry, and the first thing a thoughtful appraisal tells you is that their lot in life is not really to be envied. PJ's lifelong impression of a rich, well-connected WASPy guy prevented him from becoming whoever he really could've, and should've, been. And it's the pressure of that lifelong act that you perceive as "curdling."
I only know a tiny bit about henry beard but I read (skimmed) this insane piece he did that was a parody of legal writing for animals-- I’ve never seen anything like it, pure genius. It was as if james Joyce were writing for the Lampoon. He’s brilliant.
Where to start...? To me, there were two tribes at Lampoon, although their Venn diagram circles overlapped. (Yeah, yeah--Block That Metaphor. ) There were Doug Kenney blow-job types, and Henry Beard The Law of the Jungle types. I was always among the latter. When, in an editorial meeting, we were talking about some kind of macho comic book, and I said something like, "Nick Penis and the Brass-Ball Battallion," everybody laughed and assigned the writing of it to me. I thought: Oh God. What have I done? I wrote it anyway.
I remember asking Henry if, now that he'd left the magazine and could do whatever he wanted, he didn't really want to write a novel. (I assumed that, under those circumstances, I would.) He said no. ME: Really? HE: I don't *care.* I thought: Huh. That sounds like a valid, and even admirable, position.
Meanwhile, great essay, Michael. You could write a parallel one about the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish humor. When I was at Lampoon (76-78) there were the Jews (me, Abelson, Sussman, Kaminsky) and the non-Jews (Hendra, Kelly, Mann, O'Rourke). It's not clear to me what the differences were between the two, although I think the non-Jews (which is to say, the ex-Catholics) were *meaner* than the Jews, in a useful and good way. They, after all, were in rebellion against an all-encompassing system that oppressed them from the cradle to Heaven. We, on the other h., were always much more secular, and couldn't be bothered being outraged that God didn't exist.
As for PJ...He was talented, but his editorial meetings had all the rollicking good times of a lawsuit deposition. Before he became EIC, meetings were fun, loose, relaxed, and natural extensions of the atmosphere that prevailed all day, every day. When he took over, he sat at the head of the table and read from his agenda, quoting things he had recently written to a tense and silent room. As you said, he cultivated Matty Simmons, and was in turn cultivated by John Hughes.
All this reached a climax for me when, at one editorial meeting, PJ announced that we would no longer run parody ads that might cause the reader some confusion as to whether they were real or fake. Hughes immediately agreed and said, "Yeah, it's wrong to fool people."
One of my few professional regrets is that I didn't immediately say, "Are you fucking kidding?" But by then I was free-lancing and I needed the money. Still, you wonder why I have never seen a John Hughes movie? (jk. You don't wonder.)
I continue to love your mixture of passion and erudition Mike. Too many people are one or the other - well-read and dry or emotive and uninformed. Please never stop.
It's wild to think that the US', and by extension the world's, fixation on the blunt-but-smart style of humour all descends from the intermingling of the US miltary and academia. Makes sense though. Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both.
Again and again I find that right-wing attempts at humour - Crowder et al - run aground because (a) they offer you a return to the unfiltered libertarian hijinks of the Boomer era ('before PC ruined everything!'), then turn around and prop up the entire restrictive, unjust hierarchy the best of the Boomers were opposing; and (b) clapter isn't funny, but kneejerk opposition to the scolds doesn't automatically make you funny either. You need jokes. And meanness for the sake of meanness, sorry I mean freedom of speech, ain't enough to make a joke out of.
I always make an exception for Norm Macdonald, who had a sizeable reactionary streak but remains my comedic North Star - to me he was just funny in a way that transcends time, space and everything in them (and hey, someone needed to put OJ and the Clintons in their box). It helps that, unlike all the mediocre comics with persecution complexes who go around saying they're fearless, he actually was fearless.
Oh, and incredibly, genuinely strange. If we're going to get a comedic revival any time soon, I think the energy will have to come from strange people. Probably online people. The only comedians allowed on TV these days are maddeningly slick, suffocatingly normal.
"Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both."
I think both are terribly funny.
UK Office -- I found this hilarious, but I also found it bleak and small, and noted for the millionth time that professionally funny Brits mostly decamp to Santa Monica at the first possible opportunity. (Peter Cook being a notable exception.) I don't think it's just the weather; I think that living in a strict social hierarchy is bad for a creative person.
I think that the degree to which America connects with "tall poppy" kind of humor signals some very deep problems in American society. Post-1980 the American upper classes have become determined to install a kind of aristocracy in this country, via shoveling money upwards. But the rest of America is not going to tolerate an aristocracy; they're not going to tolerate social immobility; they will instead tear this country apart. Americans are descendants of people who found social/economic stasis SO INTOLERABLE that they risked life and limb to fight it. And then once they got here, many of them did it again, by moving West. There is a fundamental stability to British society that is the fruit of centuries, and a sense of being content with one's lot. America is not like that, and will never be like that, and so that particular brand of English humor (as opposed to the more eccentric, literary, anarchic flavors) will not release tension here, but stoke it.
Parliament of Whores—Read part and liked it, as I usually do PJ's stuff, but...I don't trust his thinking. I don't trust any humorist who delves too deeply into politics. As a matter of fact, I don't trust anybody whose politics don't start with, "Obviously we need to take care of the sick and infirm, educate all children, care for the old, and give our fellow citizens a hard floor under which no one can fall." Nobody asks to be born, and five seconds of serious thought about one's own life cannot help but reveal the central role that luck plays in our circumstances. To be gifted excellent circumstances then turn around and say, "I worked for everything I got!" is the political maturity of a 15-year-old.
I only knew Norm tangentially, but people whose comedic judgment I respect revered him.
I deviate widely from many progressive shibboleths--I do not, for example, equate speech with violence (and as a disabled person I have endured more than my share of ugly speech); nor do I think that plumbing history to reveal Who Has Suffered Most is very profitable. I do not think that shoveling opportunity to this group, then that, based on political vogue is something that will work. I would much rather have that hard floor installed; each human being respected and assisted simply because they are human; and then a society which held the accumulation of knowledge, and the peaceful expression of one's talents as "a life well lived." I don't think that would be so expensive or difficult, really, and probably work out best for everybody, but what do I know? I do not think there is one theory or another that, properly applied, will give us justice. That seems like religion, and whether it's unfettered capitalism, communism, or Randian objectivism, I think that brings a lot of needless suffering.
I agree with basically all of this Mike. 'I would much rather have that hard floor installed; each human being respected and assisted simply because they are human; and then a society which held the accumulation of knowledge, and the peaceful expression of one's talents as "a life well lived."' Amen, and amen again. My own struggles with chronic illness and low energy have made me wish for that hard floor many, many times - and the current forms of welfare, designed around badgering you constantly until you're off welfare again, absolutely don't count. We gotta have UBI and we gotta have it now, and if it takes the endlessly tiresome spectacle of AI to get us there, then so be it.
Also agreed that dogmatism of all kinds is the enemy - as Lao Tzu tells us, the rigid, inflexible trees get blown over, while the supple, pliable ones don't mind how hard the wind blows. Which is why everyone should convert to hardcore Taoism instantly, lest they die the sorry death of the heathen (see what I did there??).
Thanks Michael. I always enjoy your take and knowledge of humor and the industry. Technically, I'm a boomer, but that distinction never fit right for my generation. I was too young (thank God) to go to Vietnam, and too old to be a Gen-xer (thank God). My generation was best exemplified by the film Dazed and Confused. Certainly nails the head with a hammer. That's why, if you had older bothers (older sisters wouldn't be into this sort of thing), you'd get to read a National Lampoon laying around until your parents made them put it away. It's where I found the first "Match the breast" game, and thought, Holly Shit! I don't know if this game would play so well in today's environment.
But humor has always interested me. It was (and is) my only defense. The absurd is funny. People unaware of the absurd is funnier. I believe humor is the only weapon that can defeat fascism. It's strange to live in this moment where the confluence of technology, creativity, power, money, greed, and oppression meet. But this is not new, right? Like Eric Idle, always look on the bright side. Just stay away from anyone who might want to nail you to a cross.
I love your columns on humor history. Parody as judo is a perfect metaphor. I’d never considered how manners-oriented our comedy has been, but it certainly explains why The Office (a UK import) continues to be a cultural powerhouse.
Always enjoy and learn a lot from these occasional comedy expositions. Have been bookmarking them to return to in a more cohesive form and comb through more carefully for references and edification. Seems by now you're an expert, apparently mostly autodidactic, on North American comedy history - or at least that of the 20th and 21st centuries - if not comedy history in general, as well as humor 'theory.' Wonder if any university departments out there would offer a 'Chair of Comedy.' Also, with a touch of organization and editing, all these related posts / talks / (presumably) articles put together surely would make a great book on the subject.
Well that is very kind of you, @Jason, and I'm glad they are interesting/helpful. I planned to be an historian of the postwar period, so there is a kind of unity here.
I would say that this is a topic where one has to be an autodidact, because the knowledge is too recent to have been thoroughly macerated by academe. This may be on the cusp of changing, and I would not be surprised if AmStud professors are starting to teach about the comedy of the 60s and 70s.
But currently if you're interested in standups for example, you wouldn't take a course; you'd read Kliph Nesteroff, who certainly has a professorial level of knowledge, but is not a professor. He's had to dig up a lot of information on his own--interviews, libraries, basic research. I've done a lot of that in my way, too, and now that all the people I've talked to about this period are dead, I can say more than I used to be able to.
Theories of comedy are usually scraps of Philosophy, which seem to strain--was it Henri Bergson, for example, who talked about all comedy coming from repetition, the human becoming mechanical? You can understand why that theory would resonate with someone of *his* time, 1900, but does that really help us understand The Vietnamese Baby Book or Our Flag Means Death? I think one can look to the historical record and make common sense inferences. For example, taking the Michael O'Donoghue quote about there needing to be a new type of humor for a world on the verge of nuking itself out, and thinking about the effect that must've had on the Boomers as they grew...and suddenly the change from McHale's Navy to Altman's MASH makes sense. And you can see our current unease around masculinity in Our Flag Means Death. I think cloaking this stuff in theories of comedy, as most academics seem to, is probably obfuscating, whereas common sense historical inferences is less so.
Anyway, I would be happy to talk about any period or subtopic people were interested in. And if there's sufficient interest, I'd be happy to do a book.
Thanks for this education on sick humor. Excellent work. It has taught me to embrace sick and wrong humor with a new found passion. ...OK, I lie. I never stopped loving it.
I’m glad you enjoyed it; i cribbed from many sources, most notably Going Too Far--which Sean and Tony were going to write together, but then Tony took the advance and spent it on cocaine (according to Sean).
Remember as you toil in the vineyard of Sick: it can injure you. It is a subtle trauma.
Thanks for reading Curtice! As I’ve said in the comments, my problem with PJ’s stuff wasn’t that it wasn’t funny (if you bought PJ’s premises), but that the guy did not develop as a writer after around 1980. PJ settled into a very profitable existence as the One Funny Conservative, and woke up much, much too late to the insanity that began with Reagan and really accelerated after Gingrich. The party of Nelson Rockefeller is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that wasn’t hard to see happening, but PJ didn’t, because he was locked into a personal death match with entitled Ivy hippies. Entitled Ivy hippies are gross, for sure, but…are Cato Institute types any better? I’d argue that during the majority of PJ’s career Cato and ilk were by far the bigger problem, and he gave them a pass as the world caught on fire.
It’s s fine fun thing to stand up for boat shoes, neckties, fast cars and scotch in 1978, but you if you look back from 2023, Exxon was a more important thing for a satirist to talk about, precisely because the necktie-bourbon-boatshoe set (of which I am one) was never really under threat. And PJ was too smart not to know that, and push himself, and get better and more humane. He was too GOOD a satirist not to try to be a GREAT one, and who you skewer and why has to be part of that equation. IMHO.
Sick humor is far-better than the "sickness" of social media, which is now not simply suggesting, but demanding how people should think and behave likewise to them. Doesn't seem to work does it - considering all those venting their frustrations at the end of a barrel (i.e., gun)?
Don, I think it's always a bad idea to pay attention to the opinions of strangers on the internet--but I suspect that those few loose-screws who turn to violence are reacting not to others "demanding how people should think", but to online environments that make money by feeding their paranoia and sense of grievance. But then again, I am also a "stranger on the internet," so... :-) Thanks for reading!
I’m glad you liked it! I was wearing my Historian Tie.
Unfortunately I can’t upload a picture of me in my Historian Tie.
I know for myself, the comedy I like to write and the comedy I like to view is the comedy of *connection*- people reaching out to each other and failing because of their own hangups, blindspots, and weaknesses, with the catharsis being when they finally climb over those hills. I see a lot of that kind of comedy- even Bojack Horseman contains a lot of it, on its scaffold of Sick Humor. Ted Lasso is practically an archetype of it. An ethos of *We are all flawed, but we're also all we've got*.
Is that the next school of comedy? I don't know, but I think it speaks to a deep yearning in a modern society built on alienation and social media performance.
I have had similar thoughts, and discussions about a kind of “positive comedy” not based around judgment and scorn--the top comedy person with which I was chatting expressed skepticism, but they had been successful with the usual kind, so....
In its defense I think positive comedy would likely not kill its practitioners like Sick comedy seems to, or even make them into miserable kvetchy fuckers like other types of comedy do. But it also may not release aggression, which I think a style of comedy has to do, if it’s to be really durable.
I remember watching and liking S1 of Ted Lasso a lot; I remember seeing someone get locked in the luggage compartment of the team bus and emerging unscathed and thinking, “this is new” (Sick comedy would’ve had him die of exhaust fumes). It felt comforting, which was very welcome in those pandemic days. I popped in for an Ep in S3 and found it pleasant but not grabbing.
TLDR I think there is definitely something THERE, and I like the changes to comedy culture that would inspire.
Apropos of nothing: Were I young and full of vigor I would write a comedy pilot starring a recovering white supremacist. Sort of a Somebody Somewhere crossed with Abbott Elementary.
> But it also may not release aggression, which I think a style of comedy has to do, if it’s to be really durable.
I do think there's a space for that in positive comedy, because there's a lot of places to be frustrated by a world that isn't made for us. Like, here we are, grasping for connection, failing, and some of that failure is our own, but some of it is also just… who designed this world and this society? Nobody wants it to be this way, and yet- here we are. It's like the old Discordian joke: an acolyte prays to the goddess Eris, asking for help with a world where humans made other humans suffer, where unfairness and greed and violence define the world. "What's wrong with that," Eris replied, "if that's what you want to do?" "But no one wants it! Everyone hates it!" "Oh," the goddess said. "Then stop."
Automatic +1 to any comment that namechecks Eris. :-)
This is excellent. Most of it seemed new and eye opening-- which is weird because I’ve read Going Too Far. This suggests to me that I need to read it again, as it’s apparently gone AWOL from my memory.
Among many great moments, I like the analysis of P.J. O’Rourke. I’ve rarely liked him, but then I found out he’d co-written the high school yearbook (which is the gold standard for me) with Doug Kenney. So your point about their relationship explains a lot.
Karl, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed it. I love the fluidity of Tony's prose in Going Too Far, but after he finishes with the founders leaving Lampoon in 1975, he palpably loses interest. Sean always told me "Bone got a snootful of blow and powered through to the end." Still, it's some of a great book, and I can't imagine how wonderful it would've been if Sean had collaborated, which was the original plan. Sean's grasp of this stuff was encyclopedic, back to the 1500s. We were planning a podcast when he died.
I LIKE the craft behind PJ's writing, I just don't like the nativist anti-intellectual libertarian disdain in it. I also liked PJ personally when I met him in '07 or something; he was coming out of chemo and people say the cancer mellowed him. But I think it's really important to highlight his flaws, because unlike, say, Gerry Sussman, PJ actually had an effect on our politics, and it was a malign one.
As a writer, PJ was really Son of Doug, or at least School of Doug, and it's always struck me how PJ's I'm-rich-so-fuck-you misanthropy only really kicked in after Doug died. Anyway, this may explain the state of my bank account, but I've always suspected that "If the rich guys agree with you, you're probably full of shit." PJ seems to have come to the opposite conclusion, which strikes me as a character issue; the point of life isn't to marinate in the best possible bourbon, and thinking so reveals a hole where your self should be. It for sure reveals you as someone not wise enough to be writing satire.
Thanks for this generous reply! I read it twice, trying again to get this stuff to stay in my head.
Re: P.J.
I recall reading a book of his comic essays, and thinking that they had a lot of what I now identify with libertarianism-- the implication that you’re mocking things based on some honorable principle that would improve the world, while the reader suspects that you’re really just entitled and selfish.
Satire like that doesn’t work for me; I find cynicism more amusing when it feels like it’s really curdled idealism. (An aside: I’ve noticed some substack writers claim they write “satire,” and this usually means they’re just humorlessly trashing the left. I’ve come to see the word “satire” as a red flag.)
But P.J. was a great writer, at his best, I think, and I learned from a couple different places that he busted his ass to keep the Lampoon going. Maybe some of his conservatism came from that, an earned sense of having had to be the adult in the room for a while. That phenomenon seems to have curdled Henry Beard before him.
Well Henry, whom I know just glancingly, is a bit of a different case than PJ--Henry is from a Yale family and grew up well-off in NYC in the 40s and 50s; during his Lampoon days his mother, famously, used to drop off his laundry in a Bergdorf bag. People from Henry's background don't have Henry's type of career (his older brother was a CPA on the Board of the Yale Club of New York, for example), and so even though Henry has been wildly successful by any measure, that tension has got to have been quite substantial. I think being the magazine did wear on him, especially after Doug left. (Like Bystander wears on me.)
But in addition to being just a brilliant writer and editor, Henry was a Founder--it was HIS shop--and an authentic Brahmin, with the privileges and pressures of both of those things. Nobody else could've piloted Lampoon through those first five years as well as Henry did -- not Doug or Michael, not Harold Hayes, not William Shawn. National Lampoon from 1970-75 is simply bravura editing, perhaps the best I've ever seen. I've told Henry as much and, being the type of person he is, he has dismissed the compliment. But I know, and suspect he knows, too.
PJ's turn at the helm was different in that he seems to have gotten authority by sidling up to Matty; then reacted to being given authority by acting what he thought an EIC should act like. There is no judgment in this; I don't envy having to edit that menagerie, especially in the wake of the Founders' departure, and PJ was what, 31? But I know that emotional intelligence was what was required, and the way to do it is via strokes, not the whip. I think PJ's whole persona--his economic beliefs very much included--were his attempt to become what Henry had been since birth.
I know SCADS of people like Henry, and the first thing a thoughtful appraisal tells you is that their lot in life is not really to be envied. PJ's lifelong impression of a rich, well-connected WASPy guy prevented him from becoming whoever he really could've, and should've, been. And it's the pressure of that lifelong act that you perceive as "curdling."
Fascinating-- thanks for all this!
I only know a tiny bit about henry beard but I read (skimmed) this insane piece he did that was a parody of legal writing for animals-- I’ve never seen anything like it, pure genius. It was as if james Joyce were writing for the Lampoon. He’s brilliant.
Yep. Utterly brilliant guy.
Where to start...? To me, there were two tribes at Lampoon, although their Venn diagram circles overlapped. (Yeah, yeah--Block That Metaphor. ) There were Doug Kenney blow-job types, and Henry Beard The Law of the Jungle types. I was always among the latter. When, in an editorial meeting, we were talking about some kind of macho comic book, and I said something like, "Nick Penis and the Brass-Ball Battallion," everybody laughed and assigned the writing of it to me. I thought: Oh God. What have I done? I wrote it anyway.
I remember asking Henry if, now that he'd left the magazine and could do whatever he wanted, he didn't really want to write a novel. (I assumed that, under those circumstances, I would.) He said no. ME: Really? HE: I don't *care.* I thought: Huh. That sounds like a valid, and even admirable, position.
Meanwhile, great essay, Michael. You could write a parallel one about the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish humor. When I was at Lampoon (76-78) there were the Jews (me, Abelson, Sussman, Kaminsky) and the non-Jews (Hendra, Kelly, Mann, O'Rourke). It's not clear to me what the differences were between the two, although I think the non-Jews (which is to say, the ex-Catholics) were *meaner* than the Jews, in a useful and good way. They, after all, were in rebellion against an all-encompassing system that oppressed them from the cradle to Heaven. We, on the other h., were always much more secular, and couldn't be bothered being outraged that God didn't exist.
As for PJ...He was talented, but his editorial meetings had all the rollicking good times of a lawsuit deposition. Before he became EIC, meetings were fun, loose, relaxed, and natural extensions of the atmosphere that prevailed all day, every day. When he took over, he sat at the head of the table and read from his agenda, quoting things he had recently written to a tense and silent room. As you said, he cultivated Matty Simmons, and was in turn cultivated by John Hughes.
All this reached a climax for me when, at one editorial meeting, PJ announced that we would no longer run parody ads that might cause the reader some confusion as to whether they were real or fake. Hughes immediately agreed and said, "Yeah, it's wrong to fool people."
One of my few professional regrets is that I didn't immediately say, "Are you fucking kidding?" But by then I was free-lancing and I needed the money. Still, you wonder why I have never seen a John Hughes movie? (jk. You don't wonder.)
Great insights IMHO. But I’m counting on the ai robot comedy tour to save us.
I'd come up with a one-liner but Bystander's ChatGPT is down
I continue to love your mixture of passion and erudition Mike. Too many people are one or the other - well-read and dry or emotive and uninformed. Please never stop.
It's wild to think that the US', and by extension the world's, fixation on the blunt-but-smart style of humour all descends from the intermingling of the US miltary and academia. Makes sense though. Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both.
Again and again I find that right-wing attempts at humour - Crowder et al - run aground because (a) they offer you a return to the unfiltered libertarian hijinks of the Boomer era ('before PC ruined everything!'), then turn around and prop up the entire restrictive, unjust hierarchy the best of the Boomers were opposing; and (b) clapter isn't funny, but kneejerk opposition to the scolds doesn't automatically make you funny either. You need jokes. And meanness for the sake of meanness, sorry I mean freedom of speech, ain't enough to make a joke out of.
I always make an exception for Norm Macdonald, who had a sizeable reactionary streak but remains my comedic North Star - to me he was just funny in a way that transcends time, space and everything in them (and hey, someone needed to put OJ and the Clintons in their box). It helps that, unlike all the mediocre comics with persecution complexes who go around saying they're fearless, he actually was fearless.
Oh, and incredibly, genuinely strange. If we're going to get a comedic revival any time soon, I think the energy will have to come from strange people. Probably online people. The only comedians allowed on TV these days are maddeningly slick, suffocatingly normal.
"Meanwhile I personally find both the UK Office and Parliament of Whores a riot, but understand your principled opposition to both."
I think both are terribly funny.
UK Office -- I found this hilarious, but I also found it bleak and small, and noted for the millionth time that professionally funny Brits mostly decamp to Santa Monica at the first possible opportunity. (Peter Cook being a notable exception.) I don't think it's just the weather; I think that living in a strict social hierarchy is bad for a creative person.
I think that the degree to which America connects with "tall poppy" kind of humor signals some very deep problems in American society. Post-1980 the American upper classes have become determined to install a kind of aristocracy in this country, via shoveling money upwards. But the rest of America is not going to tolerate an aristocracy; they're not going to tolerate social immobility; they will instead tear this country apart. Americans are descendants of people who found social/economic stasis SO INTOLERABLE that they risked life and limb to fight it. And then once they got here, many of them did it again, by moving West. There is a fundamental stability to British society that is the fruit of centuries, and a sense of being content with one's lot. America is not like that, and will never be like that, and so that particular brand of English humor (as opposed to the more eccentric, literary, anarchic flavors) will not release tension here, but stoke it.
Parliament of Whores—Read part and liked it, as I usually do PJ's stuff, but...I don't trust his thinking. I don't trust any humorist who delves too deeply into politics. As a matter of fact, I don't trust anybody whose politics don't start with, "Obviously we need to take care of the sick and infirm, educate all children, care for the old, and give our fellow citizens a hard floor under which no one can fall." Nobody asks to be born, and five seconds of serious thought about one's own life cannot help but reveal the central role that luck plays in our circumstances. To be gifted excellent circumstances then turn around and say, "I worked for everything I got!" is the political maturity of a 15-year-old.
I only knew Norm tangentially, but people whose comedic judgment I respect revered him.
I deviate widely from many progressive shibboleths--I do not, for example, equate speech with violence (and as a disabled person I have endured more than my share of ugly speech); nor do I think that plumbing history to reveal Who Has Suffered Most is very profitable. I do not think that shoveling opportunity to this group, then that, based on political vogue is something that will work. I would much rather have that hard floor installed; each human being respected and assisted simply because they are human; and then a society which held the accumulation of knowledge, and the peaceful expression of one's talents as "a life well lived." I don't think that would be so expensive or difficult, really, and probably work out best for everybody, but what do I know? I do not think there is one theory or another that, properly applied, will give us justice. That seems like religion, and whether it's unfettered capitalism, communism, or Randian objectivism, I think that brings a lot of needless suffering.
I agree with basically all of this Mike. 'I would much rather have that hard floor installed; each human being respected and assisted simply because they are human; and then a society which held the accumulation of knowledge, and the peaceful expression of one's talents as "a life well lived."' Amen, and amen again. My own struggles with chronic illness and low energy have made me wish for that hard floor many, many times - and the current forms of welfare, designed around badgering you constantly until you're off welfare again, absolutely don't count. We gotta have UBI and we gotta have it now, and if it takes the endlessly tiresome spectacle of AI to get us there, then so be it.
Also agreed that dogmatism of all kinds is the enemy - as Lao Tzu tells us, the rigid, inflexible trees get blown over, while the supple, pliable ones don't mind how hard the wind blows. Which is why everyone should convert to hardcore Taoism instantly, lest they die the sorry death of the heathen (see what I did there??).
Thanks Michael. I always enjoy your take and knowledge of humor and the industry. Technically, I'm a boomer, but that distinction never fit right for my generation. I was too young (thank God) to go to Vietnam, and too old to be a Gen-xer (thank God). My generation was best exemplified by the film Dazed and Confused. Certainly nails the head with a hammer. That's why, if you had older bothers (older sisters wouldn't be into this sort of thing), you'd get to read a National Lampoon laying around until your parents made them put it away. It's where I found the first "Match the breast" game, and thought, Holly Shit! I don't know if this game would play so well in today's environment.
But humor has always interested me. It was (and is) my only defense. The absurd is funny. People unaware of the absurd is funnier. I believe humor is the only weapon that can defeat fascism. It's strange to live in this moment where the confluence of technology, creativity, power, money, greed, and oppression meet. But this is not new, right? Like Eric Idle, always look on the bright side. Just stay away from anyone who might want to nail you to a cross.
I love your columns on humor history. Parody as judo is a perfect metaphor. I’d never considered how manners-oriented our comedy has been, but it certainly explains why The Office (a UK import) continues to be a cultural powerhouse.
So many layers of Truth in this one. Fine work, sir.
Always enjoy and learn a lot from these occasional comedy expositions. Have been bookmarking them to return to in a more cohesive form and comb through more carefully for references and edification. Seems by now you're an expert, apparently mostly autodidactic, on North American comedy history - or at least that of the 20th and 21st centuries - if not comedy history in general, as well as humor 'theory.' Wonder if any university departments out there would offer a 'Chair of Comedy.' Also, with a touch of organization and editing, all these related posts / talks / (presumably) articles put together surely would make a great book on the subject.
Well that is very kind of you, @Jason, and I'm glad they are interesting/helpful. I planned to be an historian of the postwar period, so there is a kind of unity here.
I would say that this is a topic where one has to be an autodidact, because the knowledge is too recent to have been thoroughly macerated by academe. This may be on the cusp of changing, and I would not be surprised if AmStud professors are starting to teach about the comedy of the 60s and 70s.
But currently if you're interested in standups for example, you wouldn't take a course; you'd read Kliph Nesteroff, who certainly has a professorial level of knowledge, but is not a professor. He's had to dig up a lot of information on his own--interviews, libraries, basic research. I've done a lot of that in my way, too, and now that all the people I've talked to about this period are dead, I can say more than I used to be able to.
Theories of comedy are usually scraps of Philosophy, which seem to strain--was it Henri Bergson, for example, who talked about all comedy coming from repetition, the human becoming mechanical? You can understand why that theory would resonate with someone of *his* time, 1900, but does that really help us understand The Vietnamese Baby Book or Our Flag Means Death? I think one can look to the historical record and make common sense inferences. For example, taking the Michael O'Donoghue quote about there needing to be a new type of humor for a world on the verge of nuking itself out, and thinking about the effect that must've had on the Boomers as they grew...and suddenly the change from McHale's Navy to Altman's MASH makes sense. And you can see our current unease around masculinity in Our Flag Means Death. I think cloaking this stuff in theories of comedy, as most academics seem to, is probably obfuscating, whereas common sense historical inferences is less so.
Anyway, I would be happy to talk about any period or subtopic people were interested in. And if there's sufficient interest, I'd be happy to do a book.
Good piece, although I will take issue with your stance on P.J. O'Rourke, who remained laugh-out-loud funny until the end.
Thanks for this education on sick humor. Excellent work. It has taught me to embrace sick and wrong humor with a new found passion. ...OK, I lie. I never stopped loving it.
I’m glad you enjoyed it; i cribbed from many sources, most notably Going Too Far--which Sean and Tony were going to write together, but then Tony took the advance and spent it on cocaine (according to Sean).
Remember as you toil in the vineyard of Sick: it can injure you. It is a subtle trauma.
Thanks for reading Curtice! As I’ve said in the comments, my problem with PJ’s stuff wasn’t that it wasn’t funny (if you bought PJ’s premises), but that the guy did not develop as a writer after around 1980. PJ settled into a very profitable existence as the One Funny Conservative, and woke up much, much too late to the insanity that began with Reagan and really accelerated after Gingrich. The party of Nelson Rockefeller is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that wasn’t hard to see happening, but PJ didn’t, because he was locked into a personal death match with entitled Ivy hippies. Entitled Ivy hippies are gross, for sure, but…are Cato Institute types any better? I’d argue that during the majority of PJ’s career Cato and ilk were by far the bigger problem, and he gave them a pass as the world caught on fire.
It’s s fine fun thing to stand up for boat shoes, neckties, fast cars and scotch in 1978, but you if you look back from 2023, Exxon was a more important thing for a satirist to talk about, precisely because the necktie-bourbon-boatshoe set (of which I am one) was never really under threat. And PJ was too smart not to know that, and push himself, and get better and more humane. He was too GOOD a satirist not to try to be a GREAT one, and who you skewer and why has to be part of that equation. IMHO.
Sick humor is far-better than the "sickness" of social media, which is now not simply suggesting, but demanding how people should think and behave likewise to them. Doesn't seem to work does it - considering all those venting their frustrations at the end of a barrel (i.e., gun)?
Don, I think it's always a bad idea to pay attention to the opinions of strangers on the internet--but I suspect that those few loose-screws who turn to violence are reacting not to others "demanding how people should think", but to online environments that make money by feeding their paranoia and sense of grievance. But then again, I am also a "stranger on the internet," so... :-) Thanks for reading!
Genius.