Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

BOOK REVIEWS

Lewis Lips Sinks Ships 

CRACKING UP: AMERICAN HUMOR IN A TIME OF CONFLICT
by Paul Lewis, University of Chicago Press, 2006

Review by Larry Mintz

HOW MANY TIKKUNS DOES it take to heal and transform the world? One, but it has to be really, really funny. Paul Lewis sets out to explore the role of humor in the contemporary American zeitgeist. This is no easy task since there is no clear understanding, even among scholars who study humor, of what it is much less of its motives and functions. Susan Sontag wrote that any definition of so varied and complex a phenomenon as humor would necessarily be reductive or so broad as to be useless. Nevertheless Professor Lewis knows what it is when he sees it, knows when it's been bad or good, and knows what it means for the zeitgeist. He relates it to the current culture of conflict and crisis (that is in contrast to the eras of tranquility and harmony that have preceded it).

Lewis is not the first observer of the state of comedy to relate it to cultural climate. Much has been written about the "golden age of comedy" circa the 1920s, the similar period of comic centrality around the 1970s, and recently, Stephen Kercher has examined superbly liberal social and political satire in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis is also not alone in worrying about a mean, cruel, nasty streak in contemporary humor. This reviewer presented a conference paper entitled "W(h)ither Humor? The End of Laughter in the Nasty 90's." Christopher Lasch included our humor in the narcissistic popular culture that anguished him, and professional comedians in every era are quoted as failing to understand the ugly and obscene comedy appreciated by current audiences.

Cracking Up identifies a key paradox. We think of comedy as associated with pleasant phenomena, with smiling, laughing, and with framing experience in a light, amusing, painless point of view. Yet we also know that it is associated with aggression, hostility, ridicule, and other less sunny dispositions. There is a simple explanation, which, like most simple explanations, will satisfy no humor maven (i.e., every reader of Tikkun and everyone related to every reader of Tikkun). Humor involves a transfer of frame from serious to not serious, resulting in a relief of tension that is often, though not always, manifested in laughter or smiling. The catch is that one has to accept the transfer to find anything funny. If it is still serious—to you—it is not funny. There is no such thing as something being funny but not appreciated as such. If you do not find it funny, it isn't. If you find it funny, it is.

So what is with all the nasty stuff that some people find funny? We know some laughter has always been what seems to many of us (including Lewis) to be cruel. The original stand-up comedians were actual defectives in the medieval courts, genuine fools and grotesques who eventually gave way to clever professionals who hid behind the license awarded to the "naturals" and yes, from this they made a living. American humor and modern humor have always had violent tendencies. Lewis examines a number of related phenomena including laughing at pop culture horrors such as Freddy of fright films fame, and to my mind more significantly, to the large number of commercials that feature meanness, cruelty, and selfishness. Whatever happened to friends sharing a case of beer selflessly hauled all the way to the deserted beach? Now they devise clever ways to hurt anyone trying to get near a brew in their fridge, or associate the cold one with pain inflicted on dogs, dates, themselves, and anyone else the creative department can involve.

What in the name of Freud is going on here? Sure there is still benign humor around, and Lewis digresses with an extraneous chapter dealing with the humor consultants, gurus, and therapists who will cure all that ails us. There is a lot of innocuous comedy in film, comic strips, television, and other media, that Lewis properly ignores here. But increasingly, or so it seems at least, our humor is of the darker sort. Is it laughing to keep from crying (an ethnic specialty)? Perhaps. There is certain bravery, or at least bravado, in choosing to face the horrible, the absurd, the grotesque, and even the unthinkable (un-think "Dr. Strangelove") with laughter rather than tears or screams. Alternatively, dark humor might be a way of the cynic and the skeptic dealing with true believers, idealists, and optimists, real or feigned, who are in need of a rose-colored glasses removal service.

But the readers of Tikkun wouldn't know anything about that.

Larry Mintz recently retired after thirty-seven years on the faculty of the University of Maryland. He lives in North Carolina where he writes, lectures, teaches, and consults on the popular arts and entertainments, especially humor.

Mintz, Larry. 2008. Lewis lips sinks ships. Tikkun 23(1):79.