It is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN adult laughs 17 times a day. Or did; it’s reasonable to assume that this figure has dropped off over the past month. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, laughter has been difficult to muster. It feels uncomfortable, inappropriate, to be rolling in the aisles right now. As local humorist Jimmy Tingle says, "We’re in a national wake. Do you walk up to a casket and tell funny stories? No, you don’t. You’re respectful. You’re quiet."
Until recently, maintaining that comedy should be tempered with funereal respect would have seemed absurd — like saying fly swatters should come equipped with FM stereo. "Safe" comedy — the sugar-coated quips of Bill Cosby and Bob Saget — was something your grandmother liked. True connoisseurs of comedy demanded irreverence, edginess. Sometimes, irreverence and edginess became substitutes for genuine humor.
"The problem with comedy in America today," says satirist Barry Crimmins, "is that people often mistake the blunt edge for the cutting edge. They mistake Andrew Dice Clay — who is idiotically profane — for Lenny Bruce." The Andrew Dice Clays of this world are likely to come under closer scrutiny now, and that is a good thing, but so too are the Lenny Bruces. The cutting edge may just be too cutting for comfort.
Case in point: a few days ago, I was leafing through George Carlin’s most recent book, Napalm and Silly Putty (Hyperion, 2001), when I came across a passage that parodied the American appetite for sensational news coverage: "Big chunks of steel, concrete, and fiery wood falling out of the sky, and people running around trying to get out of the way. Exciting shit!"
He continued, "Sometimes an announcer comes on television and says, ‘Six thousand people were killed in an explosion today.’ You say, ‘Where, where?’ He says, ‘In Pakistan.’ You say, ‘Aww, fuck Pakistan. Too far away to be fun.’ But if he says it happened in your hometown, you say, ‘Whooa, hot shit, Dave! C’mon! Let’s go down and look at the bodies.’ "
This may have been funny a month ago. Today it seems grotesque. Of course, Carlin couldn’t have had any idea how prescient his words would be. And of course he wasn’t poking fun at the victims of terrorism — but that doesn’t make the passage any less appalling. The point is that after September 11, this sort of hard-hitting satire can no longer be lobbed around with reckless glee the way it has been in the past. "The world," says veteran satirist Paul Krassner, "has been divided into before and after." And what was funny before may not be now.
IN 1996, an Arab-American humorist named Ray Hanania published a book called I’m Glad I Look like a Terrorist: Growing Up Arab in America (USG Publishing). "The title is meant to be satire," Hanania says. "Maybe it seems a little rough now, a little uncomfortable, but in the long haul the use of the terrorist as a stereotype is wrong. So I know I’m right, even though this is one of those occasions where being right is not good. If you look at me and think I’m a terrorist, then you’re wrong."
Still, the sort of time-delayed faux pas committed by Carlin and Hanania are likely to have a lot of comedians scouring past material for stuff that might now be deemed offensive. Certainly, given the current mood, no one is going to be making quips about fire and steel falling from above — no matter how germane the message. There are just some things you cannot touch now. As John Aboud, co-editor of the online magazine Modern Humorist, puts it, "America has become a tough room."
Jimmy Tingle found this out the hard way when, a few days after the attacks, he performed at Club Passim in Harvard Square. Tingle is known for his political satire, and he was playing before a crowd of Cambridge liberals, but the single, relatively mild Bush joke he threw in landed like a sock of ball bearings. "The audience couldn’t handle anything," Tingle says. "There was no laughter."
In the week after September 11 — perhaps mindful of suffering a similar fate on a national stage, or perhaps simply shell-shocked like the rest of us — the nation’s late-night TV hosts stepped gingerly, apologetically, into the spotlight. Leno fudged and fidgeted, Letterman was lachrymose, and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart didn’t appear at all, choosing instead to air reruns. When he did return, Stewart sobbed uncontrollably during his opening monologue.
There was a similarly gloomy reticence among print humorists. The notoriously irreverent weekly the Onion chose not to run any new material in its post–September 11 issue. (On September 26, the Onion confronted the attacks head-on — president urges calm, restraint among nation’s ballad singers; dinty moore breaks long silence on terrorism with full-page ad; hijackers surprised to find selves in hell — and logged record traffic on its Web site.)
Modern Humorist led its first issue after the attacks with a sort of apology: "Understandably, some of you may not want to think about comedy right now...."
"The first question was what was appropriate," says co-editor Mike Colton. "We decided that we had to be honest for the first time on the site, to talk to our readers directly." Modern Humorist, too, came back with a bang the following week, posting a list of "new entertainment guidelines for a changed America": "Any stand-up comic who does a routine about airplanes is to be accompanied onstage by a federal marshal"; "Comedy about violent Islamic extremists should not impugn all of the innocent violent extremists of other faiths."
This kind of take-no-prisoners humor, says Colton, was exactly what his readers had demanded. Though Modern Humorist received hundreds of messages thanking the editors for their sensitivity following the attacks, many more letter-writers seemed eager — even desperate — for some return to the status quo. The overall mood was captured by a short e-mail from a guy who called himself Jim:
When will it be again ok to laugh?
I’ve been wondering.
