Modified On September 20, 2006
There’s a piece on Slate.com (“Stop Them Before They Joke Again”) by a guy named Peter Hyman. It’s kind of embarassing. He doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor, the poor dear. (Unless, of course, he has some sort of hyper-intellectual sense of humor that we just don’t get– a sorta ultra dry, ironic, I-went-to-Harvard, advanced degree in funny kinda sense of humor where one doesn’t actually get the joke in the traditional, throw your head back and cackle way, but in an arched-eyebrow, knowing smile kinda way.)
He gets a coupla things wrong.
He seems to think that “There is more comedy being broadcast today than ever before, thanks to the full flowering of the Seinfeld effect (everyday existence is funny) and the comedic explosion inspired by the show.” Of course, this is horse hockey. He completely ignores the Survivor effect. The truth is that there’s never been more reality television– a genre that is tenaciously and drearily without a sense of humor. And, since television (even with several dozen cable outlets) is a closed system with only so many broadcast hours to go around, the preponderance of reality programming necessarily has meant a precipitous drop in comedy programming. Perhaps Mr. Hyman just feels the humor more acutely– rather like the recently dumped lover (who thinks everyone is in love!) who can’t even bear to see the squirrels in the park doing the nasty.
And then he makes the classic mistake of asking a professor about humor.
Andrew Stott, an English professor whose academic treatise Comedy explored the philosophy of humor, sees it like this: “Being funny is a means of avoiding scrutiny. It’s a deeply concealing activity that invites attention while simultaneously failing to offer any detailed account of oneself. The reason humor is so popular today is that it provides the comfort of intimacy without the horror of actually being intimate.” Thus, schlock-jock Opie & Anthony clones rule drive-time America while truth-tellers like Bill Hicks linger in relative obscurity.
Two things: Here all this time we’ve been told that we’ve been avoiding intimacy by joking all the time. Now, according to Professor Haha, we’re “providing the comfort of intimacy” with our humor. Curious. Secondly… does Mr. Hyman think that Mr. Hicks is still alive? It would seem so. Mega-curious. (And, as for Mr. Hicks’ obscurity, we daresay that Mr. Hicks is selling more CD’s than a lot of comedians that are alive and well.)
We agree with Mr. Hyman on a larger point and that is that joking should be left to the pros. We’ve said in this very publication that folks like Joe Biden and others in positions of authority quite often make giant fools of themselves when they attempt to make merry.
But Mr. Hyman seems intent on bringing the entire humor industry down with his screed. He just comes off sounding like a master curmudgeon. (And one of the YouTube clips he sites as relying on “hacky premises” is actually quite well-done and rather funny! We realize humor is subjective, but, in this case, we think that Mr. Hyman actually misses the funny train on this one! Click on it and see if he rightfully singles out this clip for hackiness or if he simply misses the subtlety.)
The whole essay is a mess-ay, but we figured we’d hip you all to it. Is there anyone at Slate (besides Hitchens) that’s making any sense?