M. Thomas Inge

Editor’s note:  In a little less than one year, the American people will elect a president.  In the past decade, politics has seemed to become much more polarized and impassioned–with the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as prominent examples.  Politics has also been consistent fodder for humor–with the rise of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, as well as the continued influence of SNL and The Onion, among a myriad of other humorists commenting on politics and humor.  The interest of readers in the link between humor and politics is evident in the searches people use to find this site and in the consistent popularity of M. Thomas Inge’s piece “Politics and the American Sense of Humor,” which helped inaugurate this site.

In this spirit, Tom has graciously given us permission to post another piece.  Enjoy.

The Essential Nature of American Laughter

M. Thomas Inge

            For one brief moment in our history, it seemed that there was no humor in the land–September 11, 2001.  For the next few days, no jokes were passed among friends on the internet.  The New Yorker published no cartoons in its issue that week for the first time since Hiroshima and shrouded its cover in black.  Dave Barry announced to his readers, “No humor column today.  I don’t want to write it, and you don’t want to read it.”

Editorial cartoonists, caught with no time for reflection, traded in their wit and caricature for outrage and cliché and produced multiple images of the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam weeping or averting their faces from the carnage.  The irreverent weekly newspaper, The Onion, cancelled its next edition.  The David Letterman and Jay Leno shows went into reruns, and the comedy clubs closed down.  Even Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury declared his favorite target, George W. Bush, off-limits.  Comedy writers and performers gathered at a symposium on “Humor in Unfunny Times” in New York to discuss what their function should be at a time when the nation was racked by grief.  Several public intellectuals declared that irony, sarcasm, and comic cynicism had died in a country that has prided itself on its caustic sense of humor.  Finally permission to laugh came when mayor Rudolph Guiliani appeared on Saturday Night Live, along with New York police, fire, and rescue personnel.  After an opening tribute, the show’s director, Lorne Michaels, asked the mayor, “Can we be funny?” Guiliani quipped, “Why start now?”

This was a defining moment in our history, because Americans have always placed a high value on their ability to laugh.  William Faulkner once noted that “We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans.  That trait is our humor.”  Americans are thought to have a special sense of humor that often features exaggeration and hyperbole.  But our sense of humor has a direct link to our political system, what Robert Penn Warren once called a “burr under the metaphysical saddle of America.”

Comedy is encouraged by our democratic system because we have posited higher ideals than we can reach, but rather than berate ourselves, we engage in self-ridicule as a safety valve.  It is the incongruity between the ideal and the real, between the dream and the failure to achieve it, to which most American humor is addressed.  Has there ever been a time when we would not laugh at Mark Twain’s statement, that “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress”?

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