Are we losing our sense of humour?

It's springtime for laughter somewhere...

Remember The Producers and Springtime for Hitler in Germany? And how we laughed and shrieked? It seems a century ago, and nothing has come along since that is even half as funny, pace that JoJo Rabbit movie or the German made He is Back. Though the fact that the latter is of German origin gives me hope; the Krauts are still far too serious about everything.

Speaking of which, thinking seriously about laughter and what it means made me realize that the best times of my life were when I was laughing so hard I was crying, completely, utterly out of control and possibly, peeing my pants as well. Which, in my family, is a tradition. Rumour has it that my maternal grandfather, an eminent judge and his two equally eminent brothers, used to amuse themselves with telling stories so outrageous that the entire family had to flee to the bathrooms. Zany, helpless, the world is completely senseless laughter, is a tradition with us. And it pains me that in these perilous times, it’s not just everyone else who’s losing the most precious resource we have; it’s me. I seem to be losing my sense of humour. And that, dear people, is serious.

And I know why: two years of Covidiocy and living in Trudeauland, where I and thousands of fellow Canadians are still people with ‘unacceptable views’ who cannot leave the country.

The trouble is, lacking any sense of humour is now quite common among large sectors of society. Certain people in the woke world really hate it when you laugh at them. Actually, they all do; it’s their MO but I think we should punish them with hilarity more often. All the time, loudly, and with conviction. They deserve nothing less. The more serious the threat is, the more we should laugh it out of the room.

The reason we don’t do this is that it is hard to laugh when we cower in fear of the bogeyman du jour. Is anyone laughing at The Virus yet? At Bill Gates and the WHO? I’ll be watching out for satires on that. Meanwhile, the woke wackos have got us scared, and we lack the necessary emotional distance to make proper fun of them while giving them the finger. Effective satire depends on emotional distance and a sharp mind, and I seem to have lost both somewhere. And I am not alone.

The overall mood in society, the current Zeitgeist, has darkened; as any policeman can tell you. They find themselves increasingly embroiled in violent incidents, property theft and just plain vandalism Toppling statues of our historical heroes and daubing them with red paint is common and not even prosecuted. It’s another aspect of the woke wars that specialize in shooting ourselves in the back. Bill Maher has noticed that as well as the new, violent street scene rife with smashed car windows in San Francisco. So he quipped,

“I’ve lost my heart in San Francisco, and also my wallet, and my cell phone…”

And here in sleepy Victoria, we’ve got something new as well: On weekends downtown, you can find large, angry swarms of youths, attacking pedestrians, the homeless and each other. Motorists are increasingly leaning on their horns for no good reason. Also, the young, woke cashiers at The Gate Street Market are surly and uncooperative. One of them recently summoned the manager on me because he misinterpreted what I was muttering to myself, not to him. To be fair, I am easily irritated by the foibles of my fellow Canadians, oddly obsessed with masks and tests and pandemic shit in general when it’s more than clear from the data that the virus is waning and has become just another cold. But data doesn’t matter when your mind has been traumatized, and your sense of humour is impaired. The New Abnormal has become a laughter-free zone, though people grimace perfunctory smiles at me as I walk in my neighbourhood.

But there is always just one perceptive comedian who calls it like it is. Let’s start with one of the masters the art of poking the beast of seriousness: Charlie Chaplin. He made The Great Dictator, the first of a long list of satirical movies about Hitler and pompous jerks in general, in spite of enormous pressure to abandon the project. And he made it in 1940, while Hitler was just getting started. Chaplin was actually inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler documentary, Triumph of the Will, which he considered very funny, while everyone else took it seriously. "I was determined to go ahead," he wrote in his autobiography, "for Hitler must be laughed at." He was way ahead of everyone. Even half a century later, the question of whether one should be allowed to laugh at Hitler and the Nazi era was still being agonized over in Germany and even in the Guardian, OMG. But as my favourite Professor, Kieran Egan, always said, Absolutely anything can be funny.

Laughter is not just good for your personal health, it is vital for the health of civilized man, a potent political weapon, feared by politicians, woke persons and power mongers alike. As such, it is a force for democracy, for freedom and a happy life. Nothing else, neither sex nor money comes close.

Even pandemics, wars and climate change must be laughed at. Life, no matter what happens, must be laughed at or we’re all going to end up as grimly woke Neo Nazis. That’s what I have always believed because I grew up in Germany while it was trying to ‘recover’ from taking the Nazis and Hitler rather too seriously. Believe me, the atmosphere in Germany at that time was not joyful, and hundreds of thousands of disillusioned former Hitler admirers like my mother, left for merrier shores. I was thrilled to come to Canada where they only knew about how horrible it is to live with fascism from the News. I will never forget the sense of freedom I felt while hanging my head out of the filthy train chugging from Quebec City to Calgary. What a glorious country! What lovely, friendly people!

But that was then. And this is now, when the woke fascists, exhaustion from Covidiot overreach and a strange mirthlessness has taken hold, not just here in Trudeauland but globally. Even some of our professional comedians seem to have lost their sense of humour.

The ‘slap’ between Will Smith and Chris Rock was cynically staged, designed to push up sagging audience numbers at the Academy Awards, but lots of people bought it, and for sure, those ratings improved. Some people even laughed. Then there was that deranged guy attacking David Chappelle with a knife hidden in a fake gun (only in America!) and Chappelle’s friend Chris Rock quipped Was that, Will Smith?, a rare instance of spontaneous wit, as opposed to staged fakery.

Though Howie Mandel, the Canadian comic famous for his OCD and host of Deal or No Deal, lamented

‘…violence triggers violence…and I think that this is the beginning of the end of Comedy’.

Aw, come on Howie. Where’s your sense of humour? Things are great for professional comedians; they have never had so much material to work with, though reality today does seem to be outpacing their best efforts at mocking it. The Comedians are actually having a field day what with all the great material that real life dishes up. They’ve got a political class more than usually venal and corrupt, wokism and cancel culture, a cynical war that could blow us all into the stratosphere and not to forget, stagflation. Oh, and don’t forget Climate Disasters, Klaus Schwab, plus Bill Gates outdoing each other in planning our doomed futures. Hey, I would argue that the comics have rarely had it so good. Not since the Weimar Republic have we been in a situation as insane as this one. We literally have the best serial Apocalypse ever bearing down on us. As Paul Cooper, the historian who writes the YouTube series Fall of Civilizations would say, we tick all the downfall boxes.

But turning all of that into good comedy is not exactly simple, as John Cleese notes in his wonderfully self deprecating memoir, So, Anyway. For one thing, there is the problem of maintaining audience interest:

In Fawlty Towers, Connie and I were able to build the tension and the laughs continuously, but if you try this for more than about thirty five minutes some kind of ennui infects the audience. I don’t know why exactly, but it does. Sir Henry Irving was asked on his deathbed whether dying was hard. “No,” he replied, “dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

And aside from professional comedy, being good humoured, being able to take yourself lightly, is even harder. Personally, I have always thought we couldn’t go wrong in heeding G.K. Chesterton’s wise and witty remark that ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly’. Clearly, I am no angel, but neither are the surly cashiers and the violent youths of our fair city. If you need more proof of the importance of good humour, biting satire and brilliant puns, just do some research on Humour in Nazi Germany. Which I did to spare you the trouble. And I found out that I’ve been wrong about the Germans and their well known lack of humour my whole life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/humour-in-nazi-germany-resistance-and-propaganda-the-popular-desire-for-an-allembracing-laughter/FCD11EC305A634635CA909068A6F7FBC

Everybody knows that the Germans weren’t allowed to be funny when the Nazis came to power. Lachen verboten! Or so I have been led to believe.

But it wasn’t the Nazis’ doing, at least not initially. The truth is, the Germans always had brilliant comedians, especially during the twenties and into the thirties. Satire, Cabaret and satirical magazines like Simplizissimus flourished, even when the Nazis took over. Goebbels himself didn’t really consider satire a danger and did not interfere with the publication of several satirical magazines, such as Die Brennessel (the Stinging Nettle) and Black Corps (Schwarze Korps).

Unlike the woke brigade, he was secure in his power and identity as Hitler’s enabler. A bit of satirical laughter at his expense was okay. The Black Corps, the official weekly publication of the SS, was the most successful periodical published between 1933 and WW2 and offered plenty of satire. There was also a so-called plague of ‘whispered jokes’, that is, jokes too dangerous to say aloud. Hmm. That does sound suspiciously like an early woke thing. But my source for these revelations, a heavily footnoted paper published by Cambridge University Press on Humour in Germany, makes a good case that the importance of the whisper jokes was exaggerated later for political reasons, i.e., to make the spirit of resistance to Hitler appear stronger than it actually was. And the author, Patrick Merzinger, claims that it was the German public itself that got fed up with satire and demanded to see a very different kind of humour. One that made them feel in sync with the community, the Volksgemeinschaft. They wanted sweetness and light, not cutting wit and satire.

And that is how the myth of German humourlessness began.

The article argues that comedy comes in different colours. They arrange joke material into three distinctive types. The first type is what you might call the ‘innocent variety’, like puns, and screwball stories. The second type is the business of stand-up comedians, which is to tell tendentious, satirical jokes that have a definite social and often moral, message. Satire is by definition subversive humour that can and does undermine whoever it is aimed at. And if it is aimed at you, you might not find it funny.

Here’s a joke test: What do you call three (insert your fave awful people here) down in the riverbed? A good start…

Now do it again, insert people you actually love, and see how you feel about satire. Context is everything, always.

The third kind of humour was the type Germans wanted when people sensed that the good times were coming to an end. They wanted something nice and sweet; something they could all laugh at together. They wanted escapism, not Truth. Something safe. Well, the woke cult and our non elected public health officials, like Teresa Tam, have adopted that obsession with safety. We’ve been so ‘safe’ during the last two years our society often resembled a large if somewhat unruly Kindergarten. The truckers were clearly the ‘problem children’, who were severely disciplined.

The paper is heavy on footnotes and is historically fascinating, showing that in a time of anxiety and confusion, people do lose their taste for satire. Apparently, right before and during the war, more than eighty percent of movies in Germany were silly comedies; Heil Hitler. That trend, whether in Germany or in the English-speaking world, is not a good sign. We certainly seem to be lacking in original, daring or even mildly interesting new movies. It’s all remakes and weird woke stuff like Bridgerton. The few movies attempting something new are, as it happens, made by Ricky Gervais, who used to be a comedian. His small scale After Life is sweet and full of good humour, while the more bittersweet Cemetery Junction is is a gritty and funny coming-of-age portrait of life in seventies Britain. Maybe all is not lost.

While walking in my neighbourhood the other day, I came across this sign in front of a new bookstore:

A day without a book is like a …honestly, we have no idea.

I stopped, read, and smiled to myself. And for about five seconds, I didn’t feel anxious, depleted, and angry; feelings that have become my almost constant companions during the last two years. Which in its small way proves that humour is a vital survival tool in a reality I call ‘the new abnormal’. A couple of weeks ago, I even heard my neighbours laughing and talking in the hall. As if everything was …okay. And maybe it is. If we remember to take ourselves lightly, with just a dash of reason and irreverence thrown in for good measure, we’re going to be all right. In that spirit, I’m going to watch The Producers again. And laugh ‘til I cry.