It seems to me that a sixth grade textbook entitled Seeing Through Arithmetic (Scott Foresman & Co.) cannot be published by a reputable house and sold to countless school districts all over the country without making us wonder about ourselves. I know of one school board member who has quipped about "the Old Numbers Game." But for every one like him who makes fun of the unintentional comic ambiguity of the title, there are nine who don’t see anything in particular to laugh at. They are victims of a kind of subjective blindness nowadays. And tone deafness: not to be able to hear emphasis on the second as well as first word—seeing through arithmetic, as through a fraud—is to be losing our senses as well as comic sensitivity. Maybe that’s what cultural decline is.

I do not want to prejudge the whole case, however. Let me simply begin with the negative factors, proceed through in-between evidence, look at positive indications of possible resurgence, and only then come to my own tentative conclusions.

But we start with the example before us—with professional people who could not possibly have meant the inside joke about arithmetic’s being a false discipline easily seen through. And so we begin with a wholesale, general insensitivity to double meanings-and double-talk meanings—across the land, probably rooted in that mood of intense blinkered subjectivity instead of extroversion that characterizes us now. One finds, for example, not only "Giant-size half-quarts" blatantly advertised in chain supermarkets, but a "Free 50¢ Car Wash" in Missoula, Montana. Such signs were impossible a generation and more ago, not because perpetrators lacked the nerve, but because the public had a mind free and objective enough to ridicule them out of existence—and because promoters, coming from that public, monitored themselves to begin with.

What has happened? Why have we lost so much objectivity and the famous American extroversion and ready laughter necessary for a sense of the ridiculous? For one thing, too much history, along with the constant reporting of it, has happened. "It is impossible," remarks Art Buchwald, "to invent anything wilder than the front page."¹ We know much too much in these years of mass media news. There is instantaneous world-wide reporting of accelerating events of an exploding population to whom more and more is happening. Such knowledge boggles the whole mind, including our

sense of humor. How many people in 1898 read or heard about General Shafter’s remark in the Philippines, "It may be necessary to kill half the population . . . in order that the remaining half be lifted from their barbarity to the civilization we are ready to give them"? That is pretty close to attempting to destroy Viet Nam seventy years later in order to save it, the chief difference being that we have read, heard about and directly heard such things over and over and over again in our time.² After a while we simply know too much for our own good, including our own free and easy imaginative good. Our comic invention has been outflanked or balked on every side of heavily reported modern life.

"What it comes down to," writes Bruce Jay Friedman, "is The New York Times, which is the source and fountain and Bible of black humor."³ What serves Friedman’s point is that events have so far outdistanced us and outstripped even our terms for dealing with them that we must now coin a parallel and more neutral term— perhaps "dark" or "grey" humor—in order not to suggest ethnic Black humor nowadays. The analyst himself, as well as the humorist and public, is rapidly tangled in the coils of sudden comic inversion.

Collapsed comic distance and accelerated events no longer allow us to toy with exaggeration or play with reversal or any other possibilities of a given situation in order to draw it extravagantly out or turn it surprisingly around and back on itself. One might very well have listened to a far-out moment on a segment of Fred Allen’s radio show of the thirties, perhaps "Allen’s Alley," during which he would interview a man of strange occupations: maybe someone who worked as a custard pie thrower in the movies and also as a spitter for sound-effects on evening radio westerns. But wouldn’t even Fred Allen have had a difficult time trying to distance the news nowadays? I quote from Newsweek, September 20, 1976:

U.S. Senate candidate Daniel P. Moynihan was stopped in mid-promise by a well-placed mocha cream launched by . . . Aaron Kay. Kay, who moonlights as an agent for Pie Kill, Unlimited, a pie-throwers-for-hire service, said that in the Moynihan case he was acting without a sponsor. . . . I achieved notoriety as the man who spat on John Erlichmann at the Watergate trial two years ago. . . .

Competing with such events is becoming well-nigh impossible. The thing itself will quickly surpass anything we could do with it. Here are two separate but related news items from The New York Times that virtually compose themselves into a typical scenario or cartoon of reality these recent years.

April 19, 1969: The International Narcotics Control Board cautions prudence in the curbing of illicit drug cultivation: total eradication might "destroy the way of life" of local producing populations and "terminate in immeasurable distress."

Ankara, June 18. 1972: More than 100 members of the dominant Justice party proposed today that Turkey renounce a decision to stop growing and processing opium by December 31. They said that this step harmed the livelihood of 70,000 farmers who raise the cash crop.

One could say, of course, that nothing is more sacred than cash. In any event, how could even Lenin have guessed that opium would become the religion of a people? . . . All we have to do is bide our time while clipping from the news, and history will compose its own swift comic reversals for us. We merely have to supply a caption—like Cold Turkey—sometimes.

But we don’t even have to do that for other, captionless stories from the recent past that obviate all humorous or satiric comment whatsoever. On the Pueblo incident of 1968: we agreed, for the release of our crew, to a previously denounced confession. On the last phase of our involvement in Viet Nam: the peace talks, which were non-talks for so long, were stalled because of controversy about the shape of the table; and the results of that whole war became, as Shana Alexander pointed out, finally its cause—our POW’s; i.e., we stayed valiantly on in Viet Nam in order to get our prisoners out. On both the dark and Black joke of desegregation in the United States, a passing moment from a February 9, 1970, N.B.C. news interview of a Louisiana student: "Nigras are slower than us. We learn more faster." On the ecological or pollution front: the leading fire hazard for years in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, has been—its flammable river.

But even more to the point, beyond the twists and turns of current events are the reversals of attitudes that have occurred in our country, interchanges of feeling and value that we would have attributed to the purely farcical imagination had they not actually happened. Not too long ago, for instance, extravagantly paranoid John Birchers were satirized—as in the Kubrick/Sothern film, "Dr. Strangelove"—for fearing literal bodily invasion. They were afraid that poisonous fluorides, etc. were a communist means of infiltrating "our body fluids." It has taken a very few years for that phobia of the right to metamorphose into equal and opposite fears on the left: strontium 90 infections⁴ visited upon us by the military/industrial complex; cancerous agents in cyclamates and in the spoilage retardants used in a great range of our foods, to say nothing of the assorted and possibly

lethal agricultural poisons in use everywhere; it is as if liberals and activists have all become peace-time Yossarians crying, "They’re trying to kill me!" Wait long enough and the most unlikely, even unimaginable circle of belief will have spun directly around. The notorious political concept of guilt-by-association in the 1950s has become its opposite twenty years later in the loose alliance we see now between radicals, Blacks, Women Libbers, and Gays; that is, innocence-by-association. The identical name McCarthy, shifted from Joseph to Gene, renders the whole transformation with a symbolic effrontery that not even the Marx Brothers screen writers would dare to have used.

If we lengthen our perspective to a thirty-year period of our social history, we may recall a famous World War II epithet: "Your grandmother wears GI shoes—and they fit!" For some seasons, especially on campuses across the nation, their granddaughters and some oldsters—were wearing footwear looking suspiciously like GI shoes. And they fit.

If our perspective is shortened just to the ten years under consideration, accelerating events have continued to outdistance imaginative comedy or satire. Here are three widely separated illustrations, criminological, political, and economic respectively. The state of Iowa will now indemnify burglars who may be injured by would-be victims protecting their lives and property from them; in the notorious "Briney case," scandalized state penitentiary inmates took up a collection for the victim in question, who had become bankrupt in the matter. . . .⁵ Before the 1972 Presidential election a prominent bumper sticker carried by Republicans was, "Nixon’s the One." Not terribly long after that election and Watergate, Democrats began carrying the same sticker. More contemporary is a recent news item from California. After urging public conservation of energy—and thereby losing some revenue—Los Angeles’ utility company decided, inevitably, that it had to hike its rates.

In view of such events and their constant reportage, comic invention is blocked on almost every side. It may be, then, that introversion was not a defect that mysteriously happened to us in our recent history but a trait we have deliberately cultivated in order to protect ourselves from overloading. Subjectivity, the inveterate enemy of humor, has been a general defense mechanism.

Still other factors, in addition to defensive insensitivity and the spectacle of varied events outdistancing our comic imagination, contribute to the decline of American humor. One is the element of

put-on in popular entertainment and art today. Confusion is particularly sharp when satirical impersonation or spoof earnestly takes the place of what it is supposed to be parodying. When that happens, we cannot tell the difference any more. In American song, for instance, both Jimmy Durante and Louis Armstrong long ago introduced raucous, certainly unmelodious voices that amounted to parodies of crooning. But in each case, especially the famous trumpeter’s, the put-on became the distinctive and distinguished thing.

In the last ten years, a singing put-on was repeated, with half-success, by banjo-picking soprano-voiced Tiny Tim and, with quarter-success, by actor George Segal. But the true phenomenon of our time has been the organized put-on of rock ‘n’ roll groups in outlandish harlequinade and amplified guitar exercises, singing garbled lyrics in convulsive hysterics or with exaggerated romantic solemnity. Similarly, the country music craze appears often to have been a camp appropriation of an already corrupted folk music; the triple-intentioned movie, "Nashville," manages to veer around a second and then a third time to some semblance of exposé With such involutions of culture and entertainment, it has become almost impossible to tell the genuine from the phony, to begin with, and the real lampoon from the ambiguous parody or exploitation, to end with.

Probably the most famous movie director, Alfred Hitchcock, operating with greater and greater financial success in this period, gives us our best example of highly elaborated and accepted put-on. The preposterous non-sequiturs and hokum of "North by Northwest" led Hitchcock at last to that impudent practical joke inflicted upon the audience, "The Birds." For all of DuMaurier’s partial theme about nature’s passing revenge against man, neither the author nor the moviemaker had the desire or will to drive to any real conclusion. Making a virtue out of defect, they proceeded to give us a mystery without a solution. The birds, of course, provide the director with occasion for visual punning, since they are blackbirds. But the brazenness of the film lies in the early sequences of the movie, dealing with the lovers’ alternating practical jokes on each other. With such flagrant signaling the master of suspense foists an avowed hoax upon his public, no longer troubling about conclusions or explanations at all, providing suspense without any pay-off whatsoever—a highly stylized con game. We might add similar notations about his 1976 film, "Family Plot," with its totally unnecessary and wicked central coincidence—and thus the covert pun in the title; the hoaxed suspense of a runaway car, whose hurtling

descent down a mountain road would certainly have been terminated early by any real-life taxi-cab hero, who would have simply turned off the ignition key; the concluding hoked-up "psychic" discovery of the hidden diamond by a fraudulent and sleazy heroine, who ends the film by winking at us to punctuate Hitchcock’s seriated and stylized confidence game.

No entertainment or art, least of all literature, seems immune from decadent gamesmanship of every flagrant kind. John Barth provides eminent instances in the last decade—especially in Lost in the Fun House—writing parodies within parodies, an almost infinite series of technical regressions and hoaxes. Here is a pertinent excerpt from his "Menelaid" section, whose thirty-eight pages are like the following:

"‘"‘You’ve got me, son of Atreus,’ he said, unless I said it myself."

‘ (‘ (("Me, too.")) ’)

. . . ‘"‘ . . . What gives you to think you’re Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea? Why shouldn’t Proteus turn into Menelaus, and into Menelaus holding Proteus? But let that go . . .’"’"⁶

In painting there are all sorts of actual variations on the old joke of an empty canvas (like the utterly blank Western Round-up: "How come there’s no grass?" "The cows ate it." "Where are the cows?" "They grazed off." "And the cowboys?" "They’re rounding ’em up.") There is, in fact, a painting called White on White hanging in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, with a miniscule dab of paint in the middle of an empty canvas. Awards are presented to complete mishmashes (third prize at a New Haven art show went to a streaked-up canvas on which the tail of a backed-up jackass had been put to work) and mechanical flimflam. A cartoon making fun of all of us shows a knot of people at the end of an exhibition corridor, studying something on the wall: "I’d hate to tell them," one museum guard says to another, "they’re looking at the ventilator." In music, on the principle that the rests between the notes are just as important as the notes, especially for pianists, all of the pauses were put together in a showcase piano composition, entitled "Silence," for an 8½ minute con-concerto—was it by John Cage—in Los Angeles in 1967, and I believe there was a good house.

The question of imposture brings us to the whole medium of television, with its canonized "repeats" that convert a year into a half-year—and its other assorted ills and hoaxes, not the least of which are its endless "spin offs" or parasitical repetitions in the

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name of variety.⁷ We must evidently be prepared not only for an eternal run of "Sanford and Grandson" but, if things come full circle and all together, for the "New Adventures of Lassitude, the Bionic Dog." And at the furthest cynical range of involuted non-entertainment, perhaps one more Award show, for the best—or worst—giving and receiving of awards during the past year?

At least the situation comedy lord, Norman Lear, tries hard. But frenetic supervision cannot conceal the fact that, over all, TV comedy, like the rest of the medium, has fallen off, not only from the earlier good days of radio,⁸ but from earlier TV. It is true that Fred Allen’s Mr. Moody worried about radio ("I don’t hold with furniture that talks"), but that was in the service of down-east characterization. In his own direct Irish voice, Allen’s epithet about TV—"chewing gum for the eyes"—strikes us as not only still funny, but, in light of certain inevitable comparisons, more and more accurate. For example, the total number of memorable comedy personalities and series is certainly lower on TV than it was on radio—and the contrast is more telling since the pace on radio was far more grueling through thirty-nine bona fide seasonal weeks of no-repeat performances. Furthermore, the total number of consecutive years’ running time of a Fred Allen or Jack Benny or Edgar Bergen or Fibber McGee far exceeded the continuity of careers on television, with the notable exception of Carol Burnett. Moreover, the continuous quality of radio comedy shows provides a distinct contrast to the second or third season let-downs of Danny Kaye, "The Laugh-In," Flip Wilson,⁹ etc. Finally, those earlier TV series that were fair successes, like "The Dick Van Dyke Show," have been followed by succeeding series and spin-offs—"The Mary Tyler Moore Show," ‘‘Rhoda," and "Phyllis"—that are, by and large, so witlessly inferior in scripting that we are entering an era of nostalgia about the earlier TV—from Sid Caesar through Jackie Gleason and Dick Van Dyke—rivaling our memories of the best of Fred Allen on radio or the Marx Brothers in the movies, which that earlier TV had actually seldom approached.¹⁰ It is as if cloning has replaced clowning on television, to signal the general decline of humor and originality. The really curious perspective we can assume over the span of two generations is that during a time of Depression we apparently had rising spirits, and in a time of rising or relative prosperity we are depressed.

As if these contrasts and perspectives were not enough, the factor of nostalgic mimicry must be weighed into the balance. Following Chaplin as the much beloved and imitated comic model are the Marx

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Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, and W. C. Fields as idols of the past, figuring in the repertory of not only impressionists, but comedians and performers in their own right. The impersonator Rich Little and singer Steve Lawrence and others repeatedly "do" Groucho Marx (as Marty Feldman now mimics Harpo’s wide-eyed and rampant sexual mania);" Stan Laurel has been mimicked by Van Dyke and Dick Martin and has provided the model for Art Carney’s "Norton," the opposite number to Gleason’s Hardy-esque "Kramden"; Fields is imitated by Ed McMahon and others on TV and now by Rod Steiger in a film biography. The political satirist and lyricist, Mark Russell, models himself heavily on the deceased Jack Benny. And in the acceleration of current history that we have noted, nostalgic fixation has been updated to the ’50s, focusing on Lenny Bruce, about whom both a play and subsequent movie have been made. Is not the present age confessing itself a vacuum of talent and ideas when it returns so concertedly to the past for vital atmosphere and substance? Impersonation on this scale indicates the degree of non-personality today; unable to create sufficient comic persona in our own right, we simply repeat heydays of the past.

More ominous than anything yet noted is a fact called to our attention in 1971 by TV producer Lear. Deriving his own shows, like "All in the Family," from English models, Lear pretested and controlled every aspect of his production series. He became unhappy with the one remaining spontaneous aspect of his production—the live spectators. Studio audiences cued themselves unnaturally, responding with laughter that was either too prompt or insensitive or mechanical and forced; they sounded more artificial than canned laughter!

And so we come back to the general public and its decline. Following Lear’s professional observation in 1971, the year also of Ogden Nash’s death, Morris Bishop’² wrote about the decline of light verse in America and felt obliged to link that decline or even fall to the general falling off of humor in our time, the unreceptivity of all audiences. Isn’t that the prime reason why very few books of humor of any kind are sold any more? No Robert Benchleys or Ogden Nashes or James Thurbers are published because no public is in the mood to make it worth any publisher’s while.

Nor is newspaper or magazine humor, leaving aside dirty joke porzines, in an exactly flourishing state. Perhaps gauging public taste and mood exactly right, The New Yorker—our one possible candidate as a national magazine of sophisticated wit and general humor—continues its strategic withdrawal from humor

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(first signalled by its post-World War II publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima). Gerald Weales has called attention to the latter-day New Yorker, increasingly serious but pompous, turgid and unfunny.¹³ Such criticism tends to overlook the whimsicalities of short story writers like Barthelme that the magazine has been regularly accepting and encouraging but, by and large, Weales is doubly right—the increased stylistic heaviness through the years has been paralleled by content as well. The closest thing to a national magazine of wit and humor is, then, no longer in that particular business. If we add the fact that its most famous survivor of the old writing crowd, S. J. Perelman, is in obvious decline—as witness his last collection of New Yorker pieces, Chicken Inspector #23—then the case seems complete

Except that Perelman is getting physically old, after all, and that much of the negative argument as a whole has been too selective. In fact, certain evidence, perhaps at the limits of the case, begins to turn the entire subject around.

¯ ¯ ¯

If Perelman’s latest book was a disappointment in 1968, The Groucho Letters, brought out the same year by Signet, was not. It was and remains a first-rate book of humor. It shows Groucho as the original wit he was, before the later senility so shamelessly exploited by girlie magazine "interviews" and articles. The Groucho Letters culminated a long career of humorous opinion, original jokes,¹⁴ and jousting exchange with highly literate and worthy correspondents and colleagues—T. S. Eliot, Bergen Evans, Goodman Ace, James Thurber, Fred Allen,¹⁵etc. The only reservation we have is that the performance, like the man, represents a vital hold-over from a previous generation.

It is hard to determine on which side to bring down judgment in questions like this. Are we heartened by some old and still-funny faces and routines before us, or disheartened by the relative lack of new ones?

In 1976 Henny Youngman still refurbishes—and furbishes—new one-liners. ("You look tired, my dear," he says, with mock paternalism to a pretty stage assistant, "why don’t you go to my dressing room and lie down?") Or Milton Berle, who is getting old enough to be a sit-down comic, is not only still standing, but is very much up there on the Las Vegas stage in full, pungent irreverence. ("So," he asked me, "are you a Jehovah’s Witness?" and I said, "No, I didn’t even see The Accident.") Still, celebrating Youngman’s or Berle’s comedic longevity is somewhat to the

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detriment of new talent that might have replaced it and is ambiguous praise for an era.

Similarly, other demonstrations and phenomena are critical puzzles. David Levine, for instance, draws the finest caricatures—for The New York Review of Books—seen anywhere, any time. No, that is not quite true, since we have seen it somewhere, some other time—notably in Daumier’s nineteenth-century cartooning. Levine’s derivativeness goes so far back that his antiquarian talent looks positively new. But it is not. Still, it is expert. Do we accuse him of unoriginality or applaud the satiric artistry anyway?

In the more popular and general vogue of bumper stickers sported by all sorts of people in the United States, what are we to conclude? Don’t bumper signs like "Attention Car Thieves: This Car is Already Stolen" show Americans as funny people? Or, since the greatest number of them are mass-produced, do they merely show our advertisement of a sense of humor—which is quite different? It is a dilemma. A favorite of my own dates from 1973. It consisted of a double decal found on a parked car, in California’s Orange County, that the owner evidently did not want trashed by any extreme ideological group: the American flag to one side and a green Earth flag to the other. That’s wittily having it all ways, or calling health down on both houses. But was it prompted by an ingenious sense of humor—or by absolutely humorless defensiveness?

At 3300 feet in altitude and over 500 miles from the sea in Western Montana, the Rocky Mountain city where I live contains an accommodation called the Trade Winds Motel. To add to the comic incongruity, its large sign carries a feathered Indian head, like a neon nickel. But this eye-catcher, representing modern Dada advertising or Marx Brothers rigmarole, turns out not to have been special-ordered for topical comedy. As far as research can trace these matters, apparently a Honolulu hotel cancelled its Seattle order, whereupon the sign company sold it to the Missoula, Montana, motel for a discount, throwing in an Indian Chief as extra added attraction. And so a possible local parodist is, after all, only an actual petty bourgeois.

But, then, how about that Seattle salesman?

¯ ¯ ¯

Because people still do have a sense of humor. They have it on their own, and they have it as an audience, and they have it as a pool for resurgent talent.

Ethnic comedy, for instance, continues to flourish. Black comics,

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the older style Redd Foxx or the newer style Flip Wilson, perform now in the mainstream of American entertainment, having joined Jewish comedians there. In raw talent and versatility, Flip Wilson may be one of the finest comedians we have ever had. He is excellent at the American wise-crack. "Do you want to build a $50,000 split level," he asks a fellow Black, "and have some Indian put a wigwam next to it?" He may be one of the best tellers of long involved jokes, often acted out in a virtual one-man skit, ever found on an American podium (usually a Spooner joke, like the slightly indecent Roman story culminating in the line of Shakespearean parody: "We come to praise your berry, not seize it.") His main trouble is fame and affectionate public appearances, which keep him from trying hard. But his range and flexibility are great, including first-rate female impersonation. Also audacity, particularly in ethnic give-and-take; as "Geraldine" he coos about a hair-do, "You don’t think it makes me look too . . . Polish?" This is not the kind of nasty gibe that Michael Novak rightly complains about in "The Sting of Polish Jokes."¹⁶ The permissive remnant, really, of a whole panoply of anti-Semitic and racist insults of the past, the stinging Polish jokes of today may signal the very end of that pseudo-comic obscenae and smart-aleckism of our pluralist history. But Wilson is taking a chance on good-natured kidding, engaged in that mutual rubbing off of sharp edges that the minorities especially perfected back in the ’30s (the "feuds" of Irish Fred Allen and Jewish Jack Benny, the Swedish Edgar Bergen and German W. C. Fields, etc.). For Wilson can also mock and even supercede the skeptical Jewish wit of a Dorothy Parker—"Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses"—when he recites new lines with new pride, "If I like the frame/I play the game." Of course, he makes constant fun of his own Black extravagance, too.

That is probably the surest sign of true humor. Any time confidence is strong enough to allow and even prompt self-ridicule, we have the authentic thing. That is the case with Slappy White’s joke about a bus-load of Negroes, vintage 1969, with himself as an updated Mr. Bones quizzing the big man standing next to him: "Are you a member of the N.A.A.C.P.?" "No, I’m not." "Do you belong to CORE?" "Nope." "Do you follow the Black Panthers?" "Naw." "Believe in Black Power?" "No." "Good—then get off my foot!" Or the latest Negro joke, spring, 1976: "About them millions of blackbirds the Army went after in Kentucky—the Government never woulda done it if they was white!" Satires like these on one’s

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