On Cynicism and Humor
Ironically, the printed comments on the sides of these spongy can/bottle holders, designed to keep beverages cool, are likely lost on their Chinese factory workers.
Alas, they’re not lost on Americans, for whom they are marketed. I sold three of the damned things yesterday – at $1.79 each – replete with the requisite remarks from the customers buying them, to the effect, “Oh – that’s funny! I’ve GOT to get one these! My wife/husband will love it!”
Yeh, yeh – they’re hilarious. Here’s eight examples from the Koozies’ canon of cheeks-pinching humor:
* “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.”
* “Tell me again how lucky I am to work here (I keep forgetting).”
* “Work fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
* “I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.”
* “Your ridiculous little opinion has been noted.”
* “God must love stupid people, he made so many.”
* “Never go to bed angry. Stay up and plot your revenge.”
* “I’m not fluent in idiot, so please speak very slowly.”
Har-de-har-har, as late comedian and former Miami, FL resident Jackie Gleason used to say on his once fabulously popular Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½60s TV show, “The Honeymooners.”
Gleason also used to say this scripted “punch” line to his TV wife then: “One of these days, Alice – pow! – right in the kisser!”
Battered wife humor. Har-de-har-har.
* * * * *
I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, the next major greater metropolitan geographical area above Miami, where we had one of Gleason’s lesser-known peers, Woody Woodbury, performing live in a pre-“Where the Boys Are” beach restaurant by standing on-stage with his mic while the diners (mostly married couples) awaited Woodbury’s attack on their marriage(s), or their clothes, or their looks, or their weight, or – something about either husband or wife that was snide and insulting.
Generally, in the early Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½60s, it wasn’t considered good comic form to go after the wife, though.
My mother always wanted to go to see Woodbury, while my accommodating father was usually less enthused – probably because he’d end up being the only one of the two of them singled out, and put under attack in front of his neighbors. My mother used to look good. My father looked only fair, and often bewildered.
He ran his own hardware store, whose monthly sales never really skyrocketed as he had hoped. To that end, my parents had their fair share of relationship issues.
My mother was typical, too, of her generation: she was a stay-at-home mom, which is why my generation was raised in a world largely without cynicism and would-be comedic insults-dressed-up-like-jokes.
Woody Woodbury’s humor was certainly cynical (if not pro alcohol, as well), true. But it was also something of a novelty back then.
There used to be a lot of room for novelty in America, but not so much any more. Folks are generally either too anal and/or self-conscious these days to embrace much of anything outside of mainstream ideologue thinking – particularly in the American workplace.
Being perceived as a novelty there now can cost you advancements, one should take heed, if not actually your job.
* * * * *
There were several Woody Woodbury-styled comedians back in those days, but the one who rose out of the pack popularity-wise – Don Rickles – turned “insult jokes” into mainstream humor. Rickles’ “schtick” was hugely successful, if for no other reason than its audaciousness – which for me was always inadequate as humor.
Both Rickles and Woodbury made me cringe, actually.
It’s still not clear how Rickles pulled off such success (although showing up on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” a lot didn’t hurt). He also made it a point to show his affable, sweet side during interviews, too, suggesting that his act was just that – only an act. He was apparently a “great guy,” as so many of his celebrity friends reiterated.
Rickles is still performing, by the way. In any case, here’s an example of the type of humor he brought to the mainstream table at the closing hours of his heyday:
“Top Ten Insults for David Letterman
Presented live by Don Rickles
February 5, 1996
“10. Do yourself a favor, Letterman – make an appointment with a brain surgeon.
9. Who picks your clothes – Stevie Wonder?
8. Why are you always speeding, Letterman? It’s not like you’ve got people holding their breath Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½til you get there.
7. Personally, I liked you better when you were on the cover of “Mad” magazine.
6. Don’t look now, but something died on your head.
5. This is the part of the show where I always say to myself, “I wonder what Koppel’s doing tonight?”
4. Ball State – now there’s a real hotbed of rocket scientists.
3. If Drew Barrymore hadn’t flashed you, you wouldn’t have had any sex life at all.
2. Hey, Dave, I’m having an Oscar party this year. I hope you won’t be working that night.
1. Letterman, let’s face it – you put the Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½suck’ in success.”
Ba-dump-bump.
Now, here’s something I found unexpected about Rickles’ Top 10 list – and let’s see if you may not have picked up on same difficulty, too:
There were ten punch lines.
But zero genuine laughs.
It’s the kind of non-humor invasively practiced on TV’s Roastmasters’ specials – and just about every lazily-written, laugh-track-manipulated contemporary sitcom.
And of course, in every single news report on Fox, MSNBC, and all of the CNNs.
* * * * *
So, when insult humor “works” – what’s some of its criteria? Delivery of the lines helps, to be sure – and there must always be an element of surprise: stating the kind of thought the consensus has been “thinking” silently, but was maybe too tightly-wound or overwrought to have had the courage to express – emphasis on the word, “courage,” and its rarely-acknowledged presence in our better-known stand-ups, all of whom had to weather cat-calls and insults during their careers.
The trick is, “good” insults need to be dead-on in their timeliness, accuracy, and truth in order to work – and even then, a universal agreement over what’s funny and what isn’t can never be achieved. Why? Because most human targets of insults don’t find them the least bit funny – so that’s pretty much the end of that.
Seriously – do you enjoy being insulted?
And it’s here where the worm turned regarding insult humor as it entered into the New Millennium.
* * * * *
As if to remove the fear of retribution for expressing insults, more and more people outside of entertainment began “doing” it, and so our culture embraced it.
One of my co-workers brought a popular book into the store yesterday (as if to underline our same-day delivery of the latest Koozies) – and in it, the one-note, pro-far-right author identified those he decided were something like The Top 50 People Responsible for Ruining America âÂ?¦ or something like that. Regardless, his “humorous” writing, of course, was intended to be timely, accurate, truthful.
It flopped in that respect – but that hasn’t apparently hurt his books’ sales. If one agrees with his listings, then that’s all that’s required these days. Forget dialogue, to iron out dissenting perspectives. The biggest truths draw the biggest laughs – right? Who needs discussions?
It’s all about who can best out-insult whom now. Wasn’t that the entire premise, in fact, behind Eminem’s 2002 film, “8 Mile?” (By the way – this author included Eminem in his Top 50 America-Ruiners [!].)
Among the others this author included?: the enormously influential Anna Nicole Smith; and, yes, the commonly anti-far-right comedian Al Franken, who himself has been known to use insult humor in his books aimed at, well, guess who.
The trouble with insult humor now is that there’s no longer even a requirement that it has to be funny – simply insulting may carry the day, as might out-of-sorts.
In practice, insult (non-)humor is often used to psychically maim (or at least hurt the feelings of) those for whom it is targeted. It’s Sticks and Stones Gone Verbal – the act itself almost intended as an effort to see if “names can never break me” is still a valid concept.
Name-calling has become commonplace. I recently watched a “newsman” on, of all networks, CNN Headline News (!), use the word “nut case” close to ten times (!!) when describing someone affiliated with the plot to blow up airliners flying out of London recently. So, what – editorializing is okay now in our news “headlines?”
There is no formal (or even informal) psychological malaise described as, “nut case.” And get a clue: flailing phrases about like that accomplishes little, except increasing hysteria – an apparent rising goal of television news in order to lure in viewers (the phenomenon itself a conundrum).
Those, too, are often the words of very angry finger-pointers, who believe “those people” out there are responsible for the impending collapse (however that manifests itself inevitably) of the once great – and now late – United States.
You know, the country that’s gone Ancient Rome?
Anyone up for The Rapture today?
This now-widespread rage (for that’s what this anger has grown into) is rarely diagnosed when insults are hurled now, either. And you’ve got to believe – THAT can’t be good.
* * * * *
Psychological denial: It’s rampant. It’s everywhere.
And it’s very very real (only hardly anyone in the consensus world believes in it).
So is a deeply pronounced absence of humility. The latter is even hard to find in this planet’s various religions nowadays (which have fallen into the Finger-Pointing Pit).
When, oh when, do we as participants in this surly, unbalanced, “performance enchancements”-friendly culture, get to widely verbalize these statements finally – as in, insults lead us all nowhere, as do our endless and petty self-destructive aggressions – and have these probable universal truths register, at last, on our nation’s mostly discarded Correct-O-Meters?
âÂ?¦ As in, outside of a handful of Internet sites? Land-based news publications, which are lately businesses first, and cultural “institutions” way thereafter, won’t publish statements of such a pessimistic bent, even in their editorials – because such opinions are usually unpopular, and “unpopular” translates into lost viewers and, thus, lost sales.
âÂ?¦Does one begin to connect the dots here? We’ve truly lost our free press, at least on TV – never mind our willingness to face some hard truths.
* * * * *
“Greed is good – greed works,” stated the iconic villain in the 1987 film, “Wall Street,” Gorden Gekko (actor Michael Douglas received an Oscar for playing that role) – who somehow, some way, U.S. Big Money Players over the past two decades have commonly decided was that film’s hero!
On which planet? Are you bleeping kidding?!
That’s cynicism, hard-core – which itself might be funny, however unintentionally, were not such a conviction so brutally selfish and sadistic. Just ask any of those once-smug profiteers who jumped off of Wall Street skyscrapers after the stock market crash of 1929 just how “dead-on” their former support of greed proved to be for them. Does this nation’s high school and university history courses even emphasize that crash – which led to The Great Depression – any longer? Surely, to do so would not be “good” for our business schools. You think?
And this, as an aside – and in a brief return to topic:
Name-calling doesn’t even strive to get it right. It’s just all I-hate-you-hate-you-hate-you-hate-you-hate-you.
Might we all just vocalize our adolescent, roiling-to-the-surface victimizations – and be done with them, already?
* * * * *
We’ll close this particular ever-mounting diatribe (okay, snit) with an analogy, of sorts:
Have you noticed that this essay gradually devolved from being initially good-humored and accessibly constructive to, you know � something less than that?
Well, that’s how insult humor gravitates – and if the proof’s in the pudding, so to speak, that’s how insulting jokes (and the cynical world views behind them) have gone in our not-as-cute-as-it-thinks-it-is society. Downhill was always the primary course setting for name-calling.
What’s funny isn’t always funny, in other words. The deepest truths must always be spoken first – or all that one comes up with without them is flat-out prejudice.
Ah, but there’s more:
Cynicism isn’t funny on its own. It usually lacks both insight and direction – never mind courage. Cynicism amounts to little more than a verbal funeral dirge. Har-de-har-har.
And who’d have ever imagined that the real impetus behind good comedy, nasty or sweet, would be the expression of âÂ?¦
– This is so-o-o hard to grasp! –
� the expression of Genuine Wisdom?
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