{"id":2405,"date":"2019-04-07T01:06:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-07T01:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2405"},"modified":"2020-11-14T18:38:58","modified_gmt":"2020-11-14T18:38:58","slug":"on-being-funny-knowing-funny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2405","title":{"rendered":"On Being Funny & Knowing Funny"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Common sense and a sense of\u00a0humor are the same\u00a0<\/i>thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.\u00a0Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with\u00a0nothing.”\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

—\u00a0Clive James<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Also true: an active sense of humor, at the giving or receiving end, is the great social leveler of American life, though you\u2019d barely know it now as we\u2019ve been squeezed tighter into this grim shouting match that passes for political discourse.<\/p>\n

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For me, being funny or at least \u201cknowing\u201d funny compensates for most political sins and I\u2019ve gotten into plenty of trouble for making such allowances. There was much (we’ll put it at “everything”) about William F. Buckley\u2019s politics that I found undigestible and racist, however much he walked back his segregationist sympathies towards the end of his life. Nevertheless, whenever the subject of Buckley came up among us intense student lefties back in the day, I would often get eye daggers aimed at my forehead when I dared suggest, \u201cWell\u2026at least he\u2019s funny<\/em>!\u201d<\/a> This is why for most of my life I could never be considered a reliable enough ideologue or revolutionary.<\/p>\n

I blame my upbringing. (Doesn\u2019t everybody?) I grew up in one of those households where if you couldn\u2019t take a joke, you became one. My mother was the lone holdout. \u201cThat\u2019s not<\/em> nice!\u201d she would say whenever the rest of us, especially my father, ganged up on something or somebody. But after a while she grudgingly accepted her role as comedic foil to the rest of us smart-assed Seymours. (Missing you, mom! In your own way, you too knew funny!) If you hung out with us for any length of time, you had to be funny or, failing that, accept your fate. Not everybody appreciated the vibe, but over the years my siblings and I came to cherish and even protect the leveling effect our collective joshing and jiving had on whatever social milieu was taken aback by our presence.<\/p>\n

With my father, though, it was always a risk whether the one-liners would work even with my mother. And when it didn\u2019t work with strangers, he\u2019d just shrug and say, \u201cI make a friend a day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, it\u2019s never been apparent, for all the pride we take in our stand-up clubs from sea to shining sea, that Americans can take a joke, even though they\u2019ll all make passes at telling one.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more than apparent is that the incumbent president of the United States is a dreary gasbag who can neither take a joke (thinking mostly of the bad Buster Keaton imitation he gave towards his predecessor\u2019s jibes at a White House Correspondents Association dinner) nor tell one very well, though when he slow-dances with the flag<\/a>, he\u2019s at least convinced himself<\/em> that he is funny.<\/p>\n

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My friend Colin McEnroe, who\u2019s not only a lot funnier than President Trump but a whole lot funnier than anybody who\u2019s after Trump\u2019s job, conjectures that 45\u2019s idea of funny came from repeatedly listening to Don Rickles\u2019 1968 LP, Hello Dummy<\/em> <\/a>at an impressionable age, though I would think that at 22 (assuming he\u2019s not fibbing about his age), Prince Don T. had outgrown his need for role models. Just as generations of would-be comics thought from listening to Richard Pryor\u2019s albums that all you needed to buy into his renown were jokes about farting and fucking, Trump likely inhaled all of Rickles\u2019 rude noises without digesting his timing and craftiness.<\/p>\n

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Is it really so hard to be funny? To know funny? If you really want to gauge what\u2019s been lost over the last fifty years in degrees and dimensions of political wit, compare any YouTube video of Buckley on his Firing Line<\/em> talk show with ten random minutes from Fox News, his alleged ideological descendants. You may not make it past five. Tucker Carlson\u2019s petulant browbeating veers at least forty miles wide of Buckley\u2019s vulpine stealth. Neither Carlson nor anybody else on the Fox schedule displays anything close to Buckley\u2019s twinkly indulgence of opposition viewpoints, during which interval either a rhetorical hammer or pointed stick loomed overhead.<\/p>\n

Things aren\u2019t all that giddier over on MSNBC, where one finds surfeits of enthusiasm, earnestness, passion, energy \u2013 and relatively little to make even a partisan laugh except for a sarcastic whoop here and there. I might feel a lot better being on Chris Hayes\u2019 or Rachel Maddow\u2019s side if every so often their respective commentaries emitted smoky-spicy ironies redolent of Fran Lebowitz.<\/p>\n

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Which, some may agree, might not be necessary. Because, as you\u2019re already dying to tell me, we don\u2019t need the MSNBC gang to bring the funny as long as the Jon Stewart Alumni Association \u2013 Colbert, Noah, Bee, Oliver, Cenac and company \u2013 is at work at its members\u2019 respective platforms. I\u2019m not disagreeing. As I\u2019ve written elsewhere, comedians appear now to own the kind of credibility once claimed by journalists, though at least Oliver has said aloud that if it weren\u2019t for journalism, nothing he has to say on HBO would matter<\/a>. What worries me about those guys, however, is that their repeated bashings against what often seems a granite edifice of clueless cruelty could exact such a toll over time that they could become too absorbed by the chaos to be an antidote against it.<\/p>\n

Besides which, wielding snarky comebacks in public brawls, however cathartic the blows may feel, isn\u2019t as satisfying as the leveling process that comedy at its most bracing can yield. Though John Oliver at least will season his outbursts with dorky self-deprecation (making them somehow more effective than those of his peers), you wish for more of a kind of ecumenical acknowledgment by all sides that when you come down to it, we\u2019re each as full of shit as the next person. This shouldn\u2019t narrow the prospects for more and better funny. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

But because the aforementioned discourse is now set at Defcon 3, or lower, that equanimity seems even more unreachable. Everybody\u2019s more skittish and defensive about what they say, when and where they do it. So there\u2019s a whole lot to laugh at \u2013 and not much that\u2019s funny.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it\u2019s the other way around. I\u2019d ask my dad about it, but he\u2019s no longer around. But if he somehow found his way back to our present-day reality\u2026well, the first thing I\u2019d do is apologize for whoever did such a thing to him. Then I\u2019d give him time to get a sense of how truly fucked up things are on all sides. And at some point he would say something he always did whenever bullshit was piling up all around him from friends and strangers alike:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least I know<\/em> I\u2019m fulla shit!\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you have a comeback for that? Then it sucks being you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  “Common sense and a sense of\u00a0humor are the same\u00a0thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.\u00a0Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with\u00a0nothing.”\u00a0 —\u00a0Clive James     Also true: an active sense of humor, at the giving or receiving end, is the great social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134,812],"tags":[975,1064,984,978,983,979,980,974,977,981,973,982,976],"class_list":["post-2405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-history","category-politics-other-disappointments","tag-chris-hayes","tag-clive-james","tag-colin-mcenroe","tag-don-rickles","tag-donald-trump","tag-john-oliver","tag-jon-stewart","tag-rachel-maddow","tag-samantha-bee","tag-stephen-colbert","tag-tucker-carlson","tag-william-f-buckley-jr","tag-wyatt-cenac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2405"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2862,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions\/2862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}