In President Barack Obama’s inaugural address, he reminded us of the extreme difficulties our first president faced. Forty-four presidents later, as we celebrate Washington’s birthday today, we again face very difficult times and many uncertainties as to the best solutions to our problems.
A recent PBS television series on the history of TV comedians highlighted the way comedy styles evolve and change over the years. Just as women’s fashions mirror the state of the economy as well as our emotional state, so too, our humor would seem to reflect our national state of mind.
It is no accident that a large majority of our comedians are Jewish with eastern European roots. They had to overcome difficult circumstances, and humor was a shield from hurt and an acceptable way to cut your adversary down to size. Many started in vaudeville and in burlesque, then entertained at the Catskill resorts and finally as technology arrived, graduated to radio, motion pictures and television.
Remember Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Milton Berle (known affectionately as Uncle Miltie), Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Don Rickles, and more recently, Billy Crystal and Jerry Seinfeld? Henny Youngman’s one-liner, "Take my wife ... please!" became so well known, it is now included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
Just as poverty and hardship were the crucible for Jewish and black humor, they were also the roots of our 1929 depression era jokes. Bill Cosby once noted, "You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything — even poverty, then you can survive it."
The ability to laugh at ourselves is a uniquely human ability and an important tool in our survival kit when the going gets tough. Perhaps that is why there are so many jokes about the aging process, even though many of them are exaggerated and inaccurate. When used well, humor and laughter are therapeutic; some experts feel it can decrease stress and diminish pain.
Good humor pinpoints the reality in such a way that we can laugh at hardship and thus help to overcome its hold on us. Perhaps, however, there are some things we should not laugh about.
Have we, for instance, become so accustomed to political misbehavior (Spitzer of New York, Blagojevich of Illinois, and just in Connecticut, Bridgeport’s John Fabrizi, Waterbury’s Joseph Santopietro, Hartford’s Eddie Perez, and the former governor of our state, John Rowland, etc. etc.) that we shrug it off instead of becoming actively indignant and demanding better accountability in our financial institutions and a higher ethical standard for our public servants?
Are these too easily dismissed after a shoulder-shrug type joke on David Letterman or Jay Leno?
While I am certainly aware that for those who have been downsized, lost their jobs or a good portion of their savings, or even their homes, none of this is a laughing matter, it will be interesting to watch how a new humor will develop to reflect on, and help us cope with, the challenges we all face today.
In the words of Erica Jong, "Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations." What, you were expecting some closing words from Jack Benny?
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