It’s not that funny, is it

I noticed it first when a new acquaintance was sitting with me and two of my closest friends back in the early 1980s. We’d always had a certain way of talking to each other, teasing each other, and she finally said, “Gee, are you sure y’all are FRIENDS? You don’t sound like it.”

We were quick to explain that we were being what would come to be called snarky. No harm was meant. We were simply in a constant game of one-upping each other with what we thought were witty, clever comments. Lots of friends are sarcastic with each other, right?

But her comment stayed with me. I began to really listen to the things we said, and I wondered whether harm was done, even if it wasn’t intended. I consciously began to remove some of those jibes from my conversation and tried to remember occasionally to say something positive. I stopped assuming that my friends just KNEW what I liked or admired about them. I didn’t think it would hurt to express a compliment now and then. Because it felt good when people said nice things to me, too. I wondered why it was usually strangers who made that effort instead of the people who supposedly knew us best. And right there–can you see the underlying fear? The people who know us best–maybe they don’t think there’s anything to compliment about us?

The next thing I noticed was morning radio shows that I listened to on the way to work. All these clever put-downs and insults–were they really funny? The DJs found themselves hilarious, but I grew tired of all their humor at someone else’s expense (most often, the targets were women and homosexuals). I found that I was changing stations a lot. Then I gave up the radio altogether, listening to tapes instead. (This was before CD players were commonplace in cars, before everyone had an iSomething attached to their ears, before books on tape or CD were widely available.) It was amazing how much better my days started when I drove to work listening to music without rude chatter.

Then it was late night talk shows. Yeah, Carson and later Leno and Letterman could be funny in their monologues, especially talking about politicians and celebrities. We seemed to like irreverent humor, the act of bringing “big people” back down to human size. Except–wasn’t it us who inflated their importance to begin with? Did any of those people profess to be without flaws? Greater than human? So the act of elevating them just to revel in tearing them down wasn’t all that funny to me. Snark had become schadenfreude, and it just seemed cruel. I didn’t believe that just because people were successful or wealthy that they couldn’t feel the damaging effects of ridicule.

I also didn’t believe that people with power were inherently untrustworthy and therefore deserving of contempt masked as humor. I understand that power can corrupt, and those who are given power should be subject to oversight. That’s what our votes, our checks and balances, and our free press are supposed to ensure. But I grew up around politicians, and I knew they weren’t all “just out for what they could get.” They weren’t all corrupt. Some people genuinely do want to serve our communities, from local to national levels. To constantly hear these people (and their families) mocked and ridiculed grew tiresome to me, and I believed it contributed to widespread cynicism. I think that hopelessness and apathy are the children of cynicism, and that can’t be good. I felt like all this “humor” was spawning a growing disbelief that anyone could make things better. It was like the laughter of the doomed. Eventually I stopped watching late-night talk shows because they stopped making me laugh.

Then I began noticing that the commercials that played during sitcoms were much the same as the shows themselves. Someone (usually a man, especially a father) was portrayed as a bumbling imbecile. I thought about the commercials of my youth. Chiffon-wearing women Pledged tables to perfection so that when men came home from doing “important” things, they were greeted by a clean house, a hot meal, and a wife who looked great in her organdy apron. In fact, just like now, so many of the TV shows then were like the commercials of that period. Maybe today’s illusory prime-time world was just a reaction to that illusory world of the Eisenhower/Kennedy years, some effort to achieve parity between the sexes and also hopefully to finally give visibility to people of color. But whether black or white, were there only two choices for men? Boss or buffoon? Were women either subservient or bitches? It became drearily predictable, so I stopped watching sitcoms and the commercials that went with them.

I wondered if I might be losing my sense of humor as I got older. I worried that if I didn’t appreciate what was “edgy” and culturally current, soon I’d be too out of touch to write to a contemporary audience. But I couldn’t help it. I wondered how things like dignity and civility and good manners could be unfashionable. When Will and Grace debuted, I knew I was supposed to be happy about it. Everyone said I should be. Progress! GAY CHARACTERS! On PRIME TIME! Will proved that a GAY MAN! could be just as boring as anyone. Yeah, there were times I laughed a lot at the show, but from the very beginning, I said to my friends, “But Will and Grace. They’re so mean to each other! They’re supposed to be best friends, but they’re always tearing each other down. I’m a straight woman. I have best gay friends. We’re funny. But we’re not constantly belittling and insulting each other. This isn’t amusing to me.” But a zillion prime time viewers couldn’t be wrong. Could they?

Have you stayed with me this far?

The reason I bring all this up is because of recent uproars over “insensitive” remarks. It seems to me that for at least two decades, we’ve given forums to celebrities, moralists, commentators, broadcasters, or pundits and called their attacks on anyone who was different from them or held views different from theirs “entertainment.” We’ve applauded the ones we agreed with and demonized the ones we didn’t agree with. Lately, however, there seems to have been a shift in what we’re willing to tolerate. There’s a fast and furious response (albeit in varying numbers) when anyone with an audience says something deemed sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-American, or anti-religion. Then there’s the other uproar from people who say, “Oh, stop being so politically correct! People have a right to their opinions. We have free speech in this country! You can’t fire EVERYONE who disagrees with or insults somebody else!”

No, you can’t. And yes, we do have the freedom to say whatever mean or stupid or brilliant or witty thing we want to as long as we don’t threaten anyone’s life. But maybe we’ve gotten to the “You can’t say ANYthing these days!” point because for so long we’ve been in “It’s okay to say EVERYthing!” mode. I’m no physicist, but isn’t there a theory that says, “For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction?”

Maybe other people have, like me, grown weary of every debate and discussion being spoken in the sneering language of insults and put-downs and called “humor.” Maybe we’ve finally had enough of hearing our fellow human beings belittled. Maybe we’re just tired of the noise and wish that those people with microphones and blogs and TV face time and book deals would stop trying to find the most shocking or loudest way to insult other people and would start talking about stuff that’s really scaring the shit out of a lot of us. Like our economy. Our health care crisis. Our inability to help a stricken part of our own nation emerge from a natural (and also unnatural) disaster. Our compromised environment. Our confusion that conveying our will on any number of issues to our elected leaders is being ignored.

While passionate and good people–and they are members of every group into which we can divide ourselves; no political party or race or gender or orientation or profession or color or spiritual group or age has the market on decency–are trying to fix such ills as poverty, hunger, war, racism, homophobia, sexism, and hate crimes, we NEED humor. Laughter nourishes us, lifts us, sustains us. I believe that. I place a high value on humor. It’s why I try to include it in every novel I write, even the “serious” ones, and look for it in every novel I read. It’s why I choose people in my life who make me laugh and who laugh with me. I do understand that humor is subjective. And I admit that sometimes my inside jokes with my friends and colleagues ARE directed at other people, almost always at people who have a disproportionate sense of their own importance. But we should always recognize that when we laugh at other people, it’s best to do it with gentleness because we are really laughing at ourselves. We are every one of us, after all, made the same–beautiful and flawed.

It seems to take a lot less to make a joke at someone else’s expense than to mine the rich humor of everything that makes us the same, even in our differences. But in the long run, I think the cost of that cheap laugh is much higher.