own excessive group sensitivity are the clearest proof of comic health.

The surge or resurgence of Jewish humor is another warrant of comic vitality in America. This is all the more true in view of the appropriations of Jewish humor and character-types that are occurring on adjacent ethnic borders: the Irish actress, Ali McGraw, plays the Jewish heroine of Roth’s "Goodbye, Columbus"; the Italian, Kay Starr, carries off the stage role of Mrs. Goldberg.¹⁷ Most notably, Woody Allen is one of the best triple-threat comedians, as writer-director-performer, that we have ever had. He continues to be an expert satirical wisecracker—"I placed my wife under a pedestal!"—combining comic misogyny and famous Jewish self-deprecation, as here against equally famous Jewish family and marital values. In addition, films like the futuristic "Sleeper" (1974) show his increasing talent at sustained imaginative humor and a whole gamut of comic devices: extravagant one-liners ("I’ve missed 200 years of analysis—I could be almost cured by now!"), slow Chaplinesque ballet at the start of the film, controlled slapstick throughout, and consistently satirical social commentary. Woody Allen is a one-man phenomenon. So is Neil Simon a sort of one-man writing team all to himself, writing comic drama and films—"Barefoot in the Park," "The Odd Couple," "Plaza Suite," "The Sunshine Boys," etc.—with phenomenal regularity. And in the novel both Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift) and Philip Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint and The Breast) continue to be leading figures in American humor as well as American literature. And we can detect in certain general jokes a satiric Jewish turn, especially when the locale is New York: we now know exactly what Rip Van Winkle said when he woke up!—"Five more minutes!"¹⁸

Active or resurgent humor in the country is evidenced not only by more and more widely accepted and adopted ethnic humor, but by greater wit in our daily journalism. I mean that, in addition to stalwarts—the political satiric columnist, Art Buchwald; the social commentator, Russell Baker; and the domestic comedienne, Erma Bombeck, fast becoming our female Will Rogers—there is wit or humor in everyday reportage. Here are two examples from Life Magazine in 1968: Samuel Rosenberg’s description of Frankenstein’s monster as that "poor, nameless son-of-a-botch," and Tom Prideaux’s discussion of Picasso’s "broad flat planes—or shall we say plain flat broads?" From Newsweek in 1972: "It used to be that you could tell a Roman Catholic nun by the cut of her clothes, or a priest by the turn of his collar. Today, however, many

Catholic clergy are no longer creatures of habit." And in the modern sharp but welcome vein of epithet, Richard Sheickel’s criticism of a noxious film for Time in 1974: "This movie should not be reviewed. It should be posted—like a poisoned waterhole." Some journalists and writers, however, are newsworthy celebrities themselves, with a comic element in their public roles: William F. Buckley, Jr., whose suave snobbery is in itself a satirical rebuff to democratic modesty and homey liberalism: Truman Capote, who cultivates a kind of brazen effeteness: Heywood Hale Broun, who has played the dandified and erudite sports commentator on CBS; and Ralph Nader, the serious public champion, who is not above scourging with satire ("The Congressional branch of government has become a twig.")

Even our most self-righteous and humorless of enterprises, advertising, has deviated into comedy, on and off, these past years. There have been punning beverage ads: a beer company’s "Swallow our pride" and a soft drink’s "Un for the road." On that road a motel company has called itself "The Inn Group." During one September’s advertising campaign department stores adopted an effective variation of the street sign—

SHOP!
SCHOOL’S
AHEAD

As regularly as possible, Alka-Seltzer promoters do what they can on television to alleviate the general moronicism and pseudoscientific indoctrination of TV ads. General Telephone made some good fun of itself for awhile in California. And in the early ’70s Kellogg hired Stan Freberg or someone very much like him to give us a Jeannette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy duo singing ecstatic praises to cornflakes at breakfast; the husband sang his final lyrics outside the house at the curb near a milk truck that had just pulled up, the driver of which was naturally enough, but also symbolically, dressed in a white coat.

Comic bumper signs, called "bumper snickers" by newscaster Paul Harvey, may be a form of compensatory self-advertising, as we have noted before. Nonetheless, they can be effective, whether prefabricated, custom-made, or merely paired in a strategic manner. A prefabricated but witty sample: "Smog: Our Air Apparent." A

custom-made intramural sticker of 1975, probably ordered by an alumnus or student at the Colorado School of Mines: "Ban Mining/Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark." This has been answered by a Montana riposte: "Freezing in the Dark/Builds Character." (That relatively short debate never reached the scale of the 1972 quasi-political bumper dialogue in California: "America, Love It or Leave It," answered by the "Have a Nice Day" put-down of all righteous sloganeering, followed more pertinently by "POW’s Don’t Have a Nice Day," answered impertinently by "All Our Boys in Viet Nam are POW’s"; if the whole debate had not involved something so serious, the humor of such extravagant highway exchange would have been less clouded and more memorable for us.) Meanwhile, if consecutive placement could produce an effect, so could simultaneous placement—or pairing plus punning: on the left of a rear bumper, "Passing Side," and on the right, "Suicide."

The resurgence of American humor, however, has not been due only to ethnic minorities, journalistic wits, some advertising agencies, and certain segments of the automotive public. There are notable successes by professionals at large in the last decade. On television these include "The Smothers Brothers" and "The Laugh-In," especially controversial and funny in the 1968–69 season. Good acting has greatly helped a number of situation comedy series, like "The Odd Couple" and "Sanford and Son," which were probably at their best in 1973, and "All in the Family" and "Maude," which also derive from English models but are phenomenally consistent in American adaptation. Norman Lear has added to his roster, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," whose strongest innovation is not so much soap-opera parody as it is the absence of any canned or prompted laughter. We have had Richard Bair’s expert sophisticated comedy, "Playmates," in 1972—about a lower and higher class divorced couple, only one pair of whom becomes reconciled, thus resisting the easier resolutions of 1930s scripts; but television has not pressed on very forcefully with feature-length comedies of this kind, probably because the mature conception and unstereotypical characters take more time and effort to perfect than the medium dares allow itself.

But there is one feature of generally maligned TV entertainment that must be accorded its due through the years, and that is dance. It is inimitable in its energy and gayety. In fact, the light and comic talent of American dancers—all the chorus lines and groups as well as Gwen Verdons and Ben Vereens—has never been sufficiently praised. It is usually better than the singers and the stand-up comics

who make room for it on revue programs. Its antecedents stretch even further back than movie musicals, and why Americans are so characteristically good and joyous at it is a question.

There have been some notable film comedies in this period, too. Woody Allen’s movies are fast becoming subject of a semi-cult. Mike Nichols’ later films, including his movie version of Catch-22 have not matched The Graduate, but then there are those who think The Graduate is worth all of the romantic comedy of the 30s put together. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, although weak in its last third, is justifiably considered an anti-military comic classic. Richard Lester, though English, used Americans mostly, including the late Buster Keaton, in his memorably hectic version of Plautus on Broadway, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Bob Fosse’s grim but memorable musical Cabaret and Peter Bogdanovitch’s spare but antic Paper Moon are further instances of comic range in American movies. And zany Mel Brooks finally brought off a sustained film that appealed to almost everybody, Young Frankenstein: slapstick, like the scene of the revolving bookcase, not overdone; fewer and better puns, like the play on "Wherewolf?"; and Gothic parody and satire—the kites and electrical machinery—all under effective control.

One other medium deserves attention: record albums, including those by George Carlin and Bill Cosby and especially the modern imaginative discs cut for Columbia by The Firesign Theater. "Waiting for the Electrician" is one of the most inventive comic records ever made. Its dark skit, "Beat the Reaper," in which the contestant must guess the correct plague he’s been shot with before time’s up for an antidote, is not only an ultimate in sick humor—if you’ll excuse the expression—but a fine covert satire on our disease of hysterical acquisitiveness. There is, of course, a great deal of verbal humor all through the rest of the record—outrageous punning literalism, parody, and bizarrely mixed dialects. We are in an alien world (actually situated in Istanbul) of babel, a comic nightmare of 1001 nights. The record closes on a note complementary to and echoing the start; we have gone from a helpless sense of translation to a hopeless translation of sense.

Rounding off such specialized evidence is general American joketelling, which seems to be resurging these recent years. The newest variation of the shaggy dog story places a man in a bar with a talking dog, who demonstrates his powers by answering "Woof! Woof!" to the question of who was the greatest home run hitter of all time; after he and his master have been thrown out of the bar, they

look at one another and the lapsing dog says, "What’s the matter—should I have said Hank Aaron?" Or take the latest military question: "What is the best of our armed forces—the army, navy, coast guard, air force, or marines?" Answer: "The coast guard. We have yet to lose a coast." Or today’s variation of this-feller-in-the-street-comes-up-to-me-and-says: ‘Do you want any pornographic material?" And I said, "No . . . I don’t have a pornograph." Or a breakthrough of ethnic comedy in my adopted section of the country: "In Montana our Native Americans don’t go around saying ‘How!’ They say, ‘Who’—they already know how." Which brings us to expected anti-libber jokes of a more or less popular kind—"Women should be obscene, not heard."—and of academic variety:

If we go the route of chairperson, we may just as well start talking about country person . . . kinsperson, longshoreperson . . . postperson . . . freshperson; personhood, personliness, person of the world . . . person of straw, person of war; we may even start talking of personing the ship. . . . And finally, Persons’ Room. Now, surely we would want to be able to tell what is behind the door . . . wouldn’t we? So we will have to start talking about Persons’ Room in contrast to Wopersons’ Room. This will lead to flagperson and flagwoperson, policeperson and policewoperson, salesperson and saleswoperson, person of the house and woperson of the house, and chairperson and chairwoperson. Most surely, wopersons—or fepersons—would wish to distinguish woperson power from personpower . . . and most of all, wopersons’ lib from persons’ lib!¹⁹

But don’t women, or wopersons, have the last word? Annette Kolodny has struck back in a recent work on the image of land-as-woman (and man-as-rapist). Fiendishly, she entitled her 1975 volume, The Lay of the Land.²⁰

Where do we come out, after all the contrary, in-between and hopeful evidence? Every man to his own opinion, of course. My own is a double one. The first part of it is that frankly, while there has been a certain resurgence, we are still at lower rather than higher ranges of American humor in our contemporary period.

There are disheartening reaches of some questions that we have not sufficiently broached. Take again the presence of ethnic humor on television. The spate of ethnic sitcoms in 1975–76—Black ("The Jeffersons," "Good Times," "Sanford & Son"), Jewish ("Rhoda"), Italian ("The Montefuscos" and "Joe and Sons"), Chicano ("Chico and the Man")—parallels the many balkanizing "prides" and audiences we are falling into in the country at large. They do not exist in

addition to something, but instead of. Exaggerated ethnic consciousness of this scope is something by default, a compensation for the loss of a proper national image, especially after Viet Nam and Watergate. We seem to be taking pride in the parts because the whole is breaking down. I hope I am wrong.

I hope I am wrong, also, when I try to gauge the professional retrenchment of a stand-up comic like Mort Sahl. His semi-quitting is important, but in retrospect the pre-quitting manner of it was even more important or indicative. Practicing his mordant satire—"Washington, D.C.: The Jefferson Memorial and C.I.A. Building: from the beginning to the end of a civilization."—he, himself, guffawed more and more frequently in his last appearances. The bitter satire of remarks like, "War is good business—invest your son," produced a strangulated laughter of his own, so that he could hardly proceed with his routine. Was Sahl showing us how the self-protective function of laughter was failing not only audiences, but performers? The celebrated utility of humor was turning into comprehensive futility. Similarly, in James Purdy’s novel, Cabot Wright Begins, the hero’s inane giggling becomes an empty annihilating laughter at the end, joyless and unavailing. Are these bellwethers?

The literary critic, W. L. Godshalk, contrasting James Branch Cabell and John Barth,²¹ in effect compares the two mid-century quarters, to our chill detriment. Cabell’s "resolute frivoloty" has deepened into Barth’s and our "nihilism." In his own revealing essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Barth himself justifies futile literary gamesmanship as the only recourse in a played-out age of general decadence. Professor Brom Weber²² seconds the analysis by linking Barth’s silence finally to an event in modern stand-up comedy—not Mort Sahl’s retrenchment, but Lenny Bruce’s suicide. The implied prophecy is that we shall go on our un-merry way from useful humor and satire through self-deprecating and useless laughter to humorless gamesmanship and a final quitting entirely of routines, words, and even life.

Why? Because, for one thing, vital and sacred words themselves—"In the beginning was the Word"—have become utterly corrupt Language itself, the very embodiment of our thought and feeling, is so debased that it is practically useless. What happens inside us when vocabularies systematically turn the worlds of commerce, politics and education upside down all around us? American "enriched" bread, for instance, is actually impoverished bread since experimental rats have literally starved on it. Real estate "developers" do not essentially "develop" or "improve" God’s earth,

but generally dis-improve or destroy it. On TV, ads are not ads, but "messages," rephrasing which enables the general confidence game of business to be transformed into a confidential exchange between parties, half-truths or lies thereby becoming whole communicative truths. But the powers that be have commenced grandiose fibbing to themselves as well as to the public; on November 14,1974, the NBC in-house censor declared that henceforth he wanted to be called, more accurately, a "creative editor" . . . Leave it to Madison Avenue—whose initials, by the way, are Mad. Ave.—to proceed well past dissimulations and self-deceptions to downright doubletalk. Auto dealers, both on and off the tube, had a long recent season talking up "mandatory options."

The last three political administrations have not been far behind, stylistically. Bombing during the Viet Nam war, which was technically an "action," was "pre-emptive retaliation." The bombs themselves were "devices." Whitney Darrow’s cartoon of the sixties was all too true, when he pictured a Pentagon meeting where the Chief of Staff cries, "For God’s sake, Hinton! You mean all this time I’ve been talking about pacification you thought I meant peace?" That was warfaring during one party’s administration. At home, the next administration evolved its own problems and a brave defense it called "stonewalling," as if our valiant Confederate past gave the noble example for vulgar lying. When these lies were revealed, we were told that the truth was "inoperative." Later, the next administration operated on the word "detente," finding it necessary to remove it from our vocabulary, thereby ridding us of the reality.

Imposture and pretension characterize education²³ as well as business and government. In education-ese desks are not desks, but "pupil stations." The library is "the instructional materials resource center." In higher education, we don’t have courses in Speech any more, but in Intra-Personal Communication. And in Medical Schools, we are now being solemnly told, many students are now "specializing" in General Practice.

No wonder so many people have become comically insensitive, overwhelmed as they are by current events, the virtually institutionalized put-on, and the whole atmosphere of cultural and linguistic decadence. There is no surprise, after all, that so few humorous books are written any more.²⁴ Among other reasons, people have little spirit left for a Thurber, Benchley, Mencken or Perelman. The only Benchley that succeeds now is one who writes about literal and human sharks in Jaws. In moving from Robert to Peter Benchley, we have changed our taste from self-satire and gentle misanthropy

to savage dismemberment.²⁵

Well, that is to put the subject in its most melodramatic light. Perhaps we can see things in another way. For instance, has not the extreme freedom of modern realism, obscenity included, simply replaced humor? Let us recall that humor, according to the Freudian view, is itself but an oblique means of telling the truth and expressing hostility. In a time of brutal frankness, like ours, aren’t all forms of humor simply less necessary? As humor theoretically replaced primitive directness and obscenity, perhaps it in turn is being replaced by profane truth-telling as we revert to a neo-primitivist period of psychic health. Either happiness²⁶ or truth works against humor. The only trouble with such theories is that we don’t seem, otherwise, so ecstatically happy, free-spirited, or mentally healthy. If anything, Americans have never been so cheerless, alienated, and demoralized as they are just now.

But that brings us to the ultimate inside American joke. At this Bicentennial juncture of malaise and defeat, we may in fact be getting out of our deepest troubles. Perhaps we have really fought our last war, or "action," and have instituted a long but true course of civil rights for all—the central issue for a pluralistic nation. In other words, at the very moment of felt failure, we are beginning to succeed in peace and justice. Coincident with the threats of decay and the balkanization of American society is the covert joke of resumed historic progress and an almost fully formed American "identity" by now. Stand on any street corner outside of the United States, in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro or New Delhi or Moscow or Paris or London, and you can pick out the American. Whether he is a northerner, southerner, easterner or westerner, or white or black, or short or tall, or young or old, he has a distinctive way of walking, standing and even sitting. By now, there is a repertoire of posture and gesture—and speech—and value—that distinguishes us, whatever our race, creed, or national origin. At this very moment of feared disintegration, we are becoming a recognizable type—a whole people. We can outlast our varied and temporary disorientations, perhaps, if we appreciate this irony in time. We ought to recognize this joke history is playing upon us—and take heart from it.

After all, isn’t the old saying true? He laughs best who laughs last.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA

    ¹"Today Show," N.B.C., June 21, 1973.

   ²Here are three unpublicized random events from separate stages of our history which match anything in "Animal Crackers" or "Duck Soup." John Paul Jones calmly accepted British surrender, taking the enemy Commander’s sword on his quarterdeck, and then piping everyone Back over to the British ship, since his own was actually sinking. Kit Carson arrived at the remains of a scalped wagon train, only to rummage through belongings and discover a dime novel about Kit Carson rescuing a besieged wagon train in the nick of time. When the French ambassador said, "Je me demande . . ." on meeting newly elected Andrew Jackson, he was thrown out of the presidential office—because nobody ‘demanded" anything of President Jackson.
    ³Bruce Jay Friedman, ed., Black Humor, (New York: Bantam, 1965), p. vii.
  

    ⁴Recall one of James Thurber’s last witty jokes: "Strontium 90, Humanity 0."
   ⁵Such reversals are not new either, only more thoroughly broadcast. Included among the Fables of "Aesop" (George T. Lannigan?) and Bret Harte, circa 1885, is a latter-day 19th century re-working of "The Good Samaritan":

A certain man went from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves, who beat him and stripped him and left him for dead. A Good Samaritan, seeing this, clapped spurs to his Ass and galloped away, lest he should be sent to the House of Detention as a Witness while the Robbers were released on Bail.

    ⁶John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), pp. 143–144.
   ⁷A two-hour Bob Hope "Special" in 1976, a long exercise in genial self-parasitism, used film clips of guests who had appeared on other Hope shows over the last twenty years.
   ⁸In a rare interview—Honolulu, January 27, 1969—Jack Benny, though still greatly popular himself in night club appearances, confided to his TV interviewer and audience that pre-war radio comedy was far more "intelligent" and "meticulous" than contemporary humor.
  ⁹The argument about shortened comic distance these years is well illustrated by the quickly elapsed time between the tag line of Wilson in his "The Devil made me do it!" and the sensational success of The Exorcist.
  ¹⁰Part of the trouble is the ascendancy of market research. West coast writers, still plagued by Hollywood preview theaters, are now presented scientized graphs and other audience "read-outs" and are urged to write shows with more and more laughter "peaks" and less and less ‘valleys." The market research and producer’s ideal is one of continuous punch-lines without straight-lines or set-ups; logically, of course, this would come to mean a flat level without valleys or peaks, the level being neither high nor low. This is the kind of governing stupidity writers have to contend with—freely aired in the P.B.S. exposé, "You Should See What You’re Missing"—without most of those writers, whose major complaints have to do with the censorship of sexual and other realism, being that good, to begin with.
   ¹¹A Broadway play, "Minnie’s Boys," has been made about the Marx Brothers.
   ¹²"Light Verse in America," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, Louis D. Rubin, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), p. 272.
   ¹³"Not For the Old Lady in Dubuque," in Rubin, pp. 231–246.
   ¹⁴Including the one about saying grace in a low voice. Interrupted by someone at the table complaining "I can’t hear you," he answers, "I wasn’t talking to you." (p. 68)
   ¹⁵Not all of whose humor was written solely for radio: he confides to Groucho (July 22, 1953) that on his vacation he has come upon a Maine seaport "so dull there the tide went Out one day and never came back
   ¹⁶"My Turn," Newsweek, April 12, 1976.
   ¹⁷It works the other way also: the Jewish song-and-dance man, Joel Gray, nostalgically impersonates the Irish Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan.
   ¹⁸On the radio a generation before, Fred Allen had Mrs. Nusbaum report that her family rose on Sundays "at the crack of noon.
   ¹⁹Merrel D. Clubb, Jr., "And God Created Person," MLA Newsletter, March, 1974.
   ²⁰There is much more raw material in the 1976 volume, Titters, Stillman and Beatts, eds. (New York, 1976).

     ²¹"Cabell and Barth: Our Comic Athletes," in Rubin, pp. 215–283.
   ²²The Mode of Black Humor," in Rubin, p. 371.
   ²³A great number of otherwise literate and sensible professors go about parroting ‘I could care less" when they mean "I couldn’t care less," joining many others these days who are wrecking a perfectly good idiom in order to say exactly the opposite of what they mean.
   ²⁴Woody Allen, actually our first quadruple-threat in American humor, has given us two notable exceptions: Getting Even (1966) and Without Feathers (1972).
   ²⁵We might also contrast the relentless, harrowing death visited upon the girl at the very start of Jaws with earlier sentimental whimsy on the same subject. Here are the first three representative stanzas of Wallace Irwin’s 1904 poem, "The Rhyme of the Chivalrous Shark":

Most chivalrous fish of the ocean,
    To ladies forbearing and mild,
Though his record be dark, is the man-eating shark
    Who will eat neither woman nor child.

He dines upon seamen and skippers,
     And tourists his hunger assuage,
And a fresh cabin boy will inspire him with joy
    If he’s past the maturity age.

A doctor, a lawyer, a preacher,
    He’ll gobble one any fine day,
But the ladies, God bless ’em, he’ll only address ’em
    Politely and go on his way.

    ²⁶"There is no humor in heaven," Mark Twain wrote.