by Ken Jennings
Other directors might have approached this task very differently, but McKay, the director of goofy screen comedies from Anchorman to The Other Guys, decided to dive in using the full postmodern comedy tool kit, like he was making a very long Funny or Die video. There were onscreen cartoon doodles, funny cutaways à la The Simpsons, even scenes that ended in the middle of a line of dialogue, like Tim & Eric do on Adult Swim. When the macroeconomic exposition got particularly dense or technical, McKay would deploy a celebrity to break the fourth wall and explain the action directly to the audience. Anybody will listen to a short lecture on global finance as long as it’s coming from Margot Robbie in a bubble bath.
During the third such cutaway cameo (Selena Gomez at a blackjack table!), it was hard not to feel a little guilty. Are we children? Is this what we need to understand current events now, comedy blanketing everything like the cloying grape flavor in pediatric cough syrup? Take your medicine, America, it’s okay. There will be a joke every few minutes.
But The Big Short actually does something much cannier with its comedy. The story of the housing bubble and the dopey people who made it happen is full of ludicrously over-the-top moments, the kind that you’d never believe in a dramatic Hollywood screenplay. But in a comedy, McKay can have his characters literally testify to the movie’s accuracy. “If it seems almost too perfect,” Ryan Gosling’s character tells the audience at one point, “trust me, this happened.” In many ways, the housing crash was a comedy of errors, if a pitch-black one. Getting an audience to laugh at those errors—and then feel weird about laughing—is a perfect way to tell that story. I walked out of the theater convinced that The Big Short would be its generation’s Dr. Strangelove. In the same way that today we remember and understand the tense absurdities of mutually assured Cold War destruction largely through the lens of satire, someday The Big Short, not any actual econ textbook or news coverage, will be the way people remember the 2007 financial crisis.
If Thou Canst Not Beat Them, Joinest Thou Them
It’s now been more than half a century since the holy Church, once the world’s biggest name in joke-squelching, elected its first funny pope. Beginning in 1962, the historic Second Vatican Council spent three years reinventing Catholicism for the modern world. Out went papal infallibility, anti-Semitism, and the Latin Mass; in came ecumenism, expanded liturgy, and an embrace of human rights. We shouldn’t be surprised that the man behind these changes—Pope John XXIII, who convened the council—also broke with tradition by displaying a keen sense of humor in office. After hearing complaints that the Vatican had raised staff salaries to a point where ushers were making as much as cardinals, Pope John is said to have replied, “That usher has ten children. I hope the cardinal doesn’t.” In his most repeated quip, Pope John was asked by a reporter how many people worked at the Vatican. “About half of them,” His Holiness grinned. Most stories about John XXIII’s impossible wit have the distinct air of apocrypha to them, but that’s missing the point. What was new was the world’s Catholics taking pride in their funny pope and inventing tall tales about his good-humored wisecracks. Similar stories were told about John’s most iconic successors, John Paul II and Francis. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though the papacy will have to be centered on that same common touch, that twinkle in the eye. Upon this rock will I build My church.
The befunnying of modern religion is, at least in part, a calculated act of self-preservation. The churches are watching their pews empty in an increasingly secular society; as a result, homilies and sermons now have to be entertaining, in order to compete with the wash of jokes everywhere else. The free advertising on the church signboard out front can’t be merely a Bible verse anymore. Instead, short, clever jokes are the industry standard.
LOOKING FOR A LIFEGUARD? OURS WALKS ON WATER.
ETERNITY: SMOKING OR NONSMOKING?
LET’S MEET AT MY HOUSE SUNDAY BEFORE THE GAME. —GOD
CH__CH. WHAT’S MISSING? U R.
They’re dad jokes, but from a heavenly father rather than an earthly one. And the desperation to seem current is almost palpable in these little aphorisms. E-mail is often compared—unfavorably!—to “knee mail.” Workout buffs are urged to be “cross-fit.” In 2014, with the Seahawks headed to the Super Bowl and Seattle awash in “12th Man” fever, a church near my house even opted for the unfortunate observation “JESUS HAD 12 MEN TOO.”
The jokes may be corny, but like the sex ed classes and “funny” paintings we saw earlier, they benefit immeasurably from their staid context. It doesn’t take much to seem hip or slightly irreverent by the standards of organized religion. Books of marquee ideas circulate in Protestant circles; these one-liners have become churches’ “number-one outreach tool,” a Methodist minister told the Washington Post. A Sunday sermon about Jesus will last half an hour and reach the same one hundred people—preaching to the choir, in some cases literally. But a little signboard pun about how brightly “the Son shines” is visible 24/7, and can reach thousands.
I graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a Mormon monoculture that takes its annual “Most Sober School” rating from the Princeton Review very seriously. BYU’s strict honor code prohibits alcohol, sex, drugs, beards, “revealing” clothing, coed housing and post-curfew socializing, and pretty much every other reason most people go to college. It was, as you’d expect, not a hotbed for comedy. But in 2014, a video from Studio C, a mild, wholesome sketch show that aired on the campus television network, went viral on YouTube. “Top Soccer Shootout with Scott Sterling” was a simple slapstick idea in which the titular goalie keeps inadvertently blocking penalty kicks with his face, but it unexpectedly racked up ten million views in just over a week. Suddenly BYUtv, of all places, had a hot comedy property on its hands, and saw an opportunity to promote its family-friendly brand to a vast new fan base. The Studio C troupe was dispatched to conventions and podcasts and even showed up on Conan O’Brien’s show, after Conan learned that his kids were fans. In the age of peak funny, even Provo—where caffeinated sodas were always banned in campus vending machines and Rodin’s The Kiss was once pulled from an art museum for being too naughty—is a comedy factory.VII
Forced Laughter
At the end of the movie Mary Poppins, the crusty bank manager Mr. Dawes (played by a heavily made-up Dick Van Dyke, doing double duty) summons Jane and Michael Banks’s buttoned-down father to the bank after hours and fires him for bringing anarchy to the world of finance, just as his new nanny Mary Poppins has brought anarchy to the Banks home. Seeing his carefully constructed world toppling around him, Banks begins to laugh hysterically, and feels moved to tell the bank directors his kids’ favorite joke:
“I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.”
“What’s the name of his other leg?”
After Banks skips merrily out of the meeting, the old bank president puzzles over the joke. “A wooden leg named Smith? A wooden leg . . . named Smith.” Finally he gets it, and begins to laugh so uproariously that his effervescent good humor carries him magically out of his chair and up to the ceiling.VIII
This is a common fictional archetype: the old curmudgeon whose heart is softened by the purity of a child’s laughter. Does it ever happen in real life? Even if people do sometimes embrace humor overnight by finally “getting the joke”—and I’m skeptical!—institutions do not. Institutions, whether rock or poetry or religion, are more like Ebenezer Scrooge: they have to be dragged kicking and screaming by the ghosts of their worst nightmares to arrive at their comic epiphany.
The establishment, in other words, came around to humor for purely self-serving reasons, not out of the goodness of its heart. Much as post-Enlightenment religion has been forced to grapple seriously with science instead of sneering at it or locking it in dungeons, it now has to accept laughter and comedy as facts of life. Being comedy-skeptical just isn’t an option anymore in a post-serious world. It makes institutions look oblivious and out of touch—not to mention int
olerably dull. In the last decade, the Catholic Church briefly tried out a throwback, unfunny pope; he lasted only eight years before stepping aside for a jollier, more quotable model.
The decline of anticomedy has been a liberation: everyone in society now has implicit permission to be funny, whatever they’re doing. On Twitter, on cocktail menus, or in the workplace, that can sometimes be oppressive, but in fields once kept joke-free only by critical fiat, the new possibilities can be a godsend. Think of the generations of funny Christians, musicians, and poets forced to drop out or keep their sense of humor deeply closeted. If the gatekeepers to humor had never given up their posts, we would never have had The Big Short, or a Billy Collins, or a “Weird Al.” Those last two creators would probably be working dull nine-to-fives somewhere; the jokes are so central to their art that it’s hard to imagine them doing purely serious work. There’s probably no parallel universe in which “Normal Al” Yankovic is noodling on guitar with his jam band, or William J. Collins is undertaking a ten-year terza rima translation of Dante instead of writing poems about his dog.
It’s now a world without censors—which must be dispiriting for Mae West types who thrive on the martyrdom, and the publicity, of being persecuted truth-tellers. This is no doubt why many comedians bristle today at even the most innocuous pleas for civility. There’s no angry Legion of Decency or vice squads to contend with nowadays, so slightly-over-the-hill comics are reduced to complaining about how they can’t say things are “gay” or “retarded” anymore. That’s not censorship in any meaningful sense, but it’s all they have now.
In Western liberal democracies, that is. The end of enforced seriousness has created one strident new strain of humor foe: angry religious extremists more than willing to start shooting people when they don’t like a cartoon. But when I think about how religious power in the West devolved from severe monks to punster youth pastors, I wonder if this is a problem that will solve itself in Islam as well. Surely it’s only a matter of time before radical Islamist terrorists borrow a playbook from Madison Avenue advertisers and neo-Nazi trolls and political candidates and Christian churches. Don’t oppress humor; co-opt it. Make it work for you. Get a little wordplay going on those madrassa marquees, drop some wholesome sketch comedy about soccer into your propaganda videos. Let’s get those ironic sharia memes out there.
* * *
I. English Bible translations usually render the word as “coarse jesting” or “vulgar talk.” Ironically, a few centuries earlier, eutrapelia had been the word Aristotle used for the refined kind of joking that he could personally put up with, neither too pointed nor too silly.
II. There are similar debates in other religious traditions, but with stronger evidence on the “funny” side. Buddhist texts often refer to the master’s “faint smile,” for example. And some of the oral hadith describing the deeds of Muhammad portray the Prophet as a bit of a jokester. In one story, he’s eating dates with some followers and keeps pushing all his seeds onto his cousin Ali’s plate, to make it look like Ali’s been hogging the dates. Ali looks at Muhammad’s empty plate and replies, “Who’s the hog? You’re the one who eats his dates whole, even the seeds!” Owned.
III. She also told McCarthy, “Come home with me now, honey, I’ll let you play in my woodpile,” which to my mind seems to be mixing up the metaphor a bit.
IV. This only goes for stand-up, interestingly. The post-Pixar world is an unprecedented golden age of family-friendly TV and movie comedy that’s also hip and funny. In my day, comedy for children was almost uniformly terrible. We had nothing but Herbie Goes Bananas and cheap-ass Hanna-Barbera shorts and syndicated Brady Bunch reruns, and we liked it! We couldn’t get enough of it!
V. Collins’s work has been referred to so often as “accessible” that he now chafes at the word, calling it a “light burden.” But there’s no getting around it: his work is reader-friendly, even if critics might disagree on whether its simplicity is a virtue.
VI. Several more recent winners have been dramas with comedy elements. There’s Terms of Endearment, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love, and The Artist.
VII. The oddities of BYU notwithstanding, I should not imply that Mormons are gloomy puritans. In fact, they see themselves as happy and fun-loving. After the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, the very first building they built was a shaded bowery, which was soon used for music and theater. When Brigham Young dedicated a more permanent playhouse in 1862, he asked that only comedy be performed in it. His people had known “enough of tragedy in everyday life,” he said, “and we ought to have amusement when we come here.” But before 2014 and Scott Sterling, the Mormons’ idea of fun had never aligned with American comedy norms. Donny & Marie, our previous high-water mark, debuted on ABC in 1976, when Saturday Night Live had already made prime-time variety shows effectively obsolete.
VIII. In a bizarre twist, we learn in the movie’s final scene that his violent laughing fit killed him. Do you think he sank back to the floor gradually as the life ebbed out of him, or did he plummet immediately the second his heart stopped?
NINE
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A BLURRY, AMORPHOUS THUD
Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet to the White House early on the morning of September 22, 1862. His overworked secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, arrived late and was annoyed to find the president reading aloud excerpts from the first book by Artemus Ward, the country-fried humorist who would export American comedy to London with his comic lectures in 1866. The president was already a big fan.
He was reading a sketch called “High-Handed Outrage at Utica,” about a traveling salesman trying to impress upstate New Yorkers with his wares: wax figurines of the twelve apostles. A local ruffian ruins his trip by pounding his Judas Iscariot statue all to hell in a fit of religious fervor. Lincoln was laughing loudly by the time he got to the end—“without a single member of the Cabinet joining in,” Stanton observed icily. Undeterred, the president proceeded to read a second chapter. Stanton was about to walk out when Lincoln finally decided to end the open-mic night and get to the business at hand. Pulling a piece of paper from his trademark hat, he read to them from a document he had just finished revising and had decided to issue: the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing every slave in the Confederacy.
That Lincoln was telling jokes minutes before abolishing slavery wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew him well. From youth, his ravenous reading habits included a ribald British jokebook called Quinn’s Jests, and he grew to adulthood on the frontier, swapping yarns with groups of men around fireplaces and woodstoves. Like so many other funny people before and since, Lincoln battled clinical depression as an adult, and jokes kept him going in his darkest moments. During the Civil War, humor collections starring Lincoln with titles like Old Abe’s Jokes and Wit at the White House were big sellers in the North. Abraham Lincoln isn’t just the nation’s secular saint. Before Mark Twain, he was also the first name in folksy, irreverent American humor.
But curiously, Lincoln’s famous sense of humor was much more restrained in public. Editing a 1910 collection of Lincoln’s addresses, Daniel Kilham Dodge noted that Lincoln only gave one “purely humorous” speech in his political career, delivered to Congress in 1848 on the subject of then–presidential candidate Zachary Taylor. “As a rule, he confined his story-telling to conversations,” Dodge wrote, observing that even in his rough-and-tumble debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln steered clear of the homespun anecdotes he was forever tossing off in daily life. “The occasion is too serious, the issues are too grave,” Lincoln explained to friends who wanted him to be funnier on the stump. “I do not seek applause, or to amuse the people, but to convince them.” Much of our modern conception of Lincoln as a public jokester comes from his enemies in the press, who had political incentives to portray him as a backwoods figure of fun. And Lincoln’s biographer Carl Sandburg, perusing the fad Lincoln joke books, found that, rather than collecting actu
al quips from Honest Abe, they mostly recycled stale old jokes, using Lincoln “as a handy peg on which to hang them.”
There have been a handful of truly funny world leaders down through history. In the Middle Ages, monarchs like England’s Henry II, France’s Louis IX, and Spain’s Jaume I inspired the Renaissance ideal of the rex facetus, the “jesting king,” who ruled with shrewd wit and brightened life for all his subjects with his laughter.I During the Stuart period, Robert Harley, the first Earl of Oxford, was Queen Anne’s prime minister by day and a member of the famed Scriblerus Club by night, dining and trading wisecracks with all-time A-list satirists like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. But for the most part, Western civilization has chosen to maintain a careful line between government and comic entertainment. Look at the marble statues in London and Paris and Washington—they’re none of them grinning. Not even Lincoln.
Repealing Corwin’s Law
In the United States, this bright line even has a name: Corwin’s Law. Nineteenth-century politician Thomas Corwin advised future president James Garfield, “Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments of earth have been built over solemn asses.” Corwin had been governor of Ohio, a United States senator, secretary of the treasury, and minister to Mexico, and is best remembered for the (appropriately unfunny) Corwin Amendment, an abortive attempt to permanently enshrine slavery in the Constitution. Though biographers agree that Corwin was privately a man of “infinite humor,” his gambit appears to have worked. In his legacy of photographs and portraits, he unfailingly has the bland, unamused look of a Victorian butler.II