— by Odysseus
The intersection of comedy and politics has been in the news recently, occasioned by the untimely passing of Harold Ramis, and, subsequently, by President Obama’s decision to appear on “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis. This author is, apparently, not the only one contemplating the change in the style of comedy over the Obama years. Sonny Bunch, in the March 11, 2014 Washington Free Beacon, also noted and commented on the article by Kyle Smith in the New York Post about Ramis’ passing.
While we here at The Cassandra Times found Mr. Smith’s thoughts to sufficiently mirror our own and to re-print below his thought provoking article in full, we believe that he did not fully explore the large a change in the culture that this shift in comedy represents. From his article, it appears that perhaps he is not old enough to know too much about the role of comedy in our culture prior to Mr. Ramis’ generation in the 1980s.
The attitude of today’s comedians to shy away from sharp criticism of the President is something that we have only seen before in the harshest of totalitarian states. In those states such as Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or Hiter’s Germany, we supposed that it was outright fear that engendered such self censorship. Is it the same now here in the United States?
The sharp and threatening tone taken by President Obama in his faux interview with Zach Galifianakis certainly seemed to hold an edge of warning to other entertainers. When Mr. Galifianakis asked what “it felt like to be the last black man to be President of the United States”, President Obama retorted, “What does it feel like to get your last interview with the President of the United States?”
While these lines were written for Mr. Obama, and this was merely a faux interview, the delivery by Mr. Obama was so harsh it was genuinely chilling. He was angry, vengeful, and wanted the public to know it. Mr. Galifianakis was the proxy mouthpiece for the questions Mr. Obama most hated and had desperately wanted to respond to with threats and intimidation directly for years, but for political reasons, could not. Mr. Galifianakis gamely served himself up as a straw man proxy for those critics Mr. Obama really wanted to spar with, but did not have the courage for the real thing. His genuine nastiness showed, even in this demonstration fight that he was guaranteed to win.
While remarkably reticent in comments on actual events of geo-political significance, such as the Russian takeover of Crimea or the Iranian nuclear ambitions, Mr. Obama is always at the forefront to insert himself into any event in pop culture. In an a press comment, Mr. Obama paid tribute to Ramis’ movies, saying that he and Michelle were “saddened” about his passing and said that when they watched his movies they “didn’t just laugh until it hurt. We questioned authority. We identified with the outsider. We rooted for the underdog. And through it all, we never lost our faith in happy endings. Our thoughts and prayers are with Harold’s wife, Erica, his children and grandchildren, and all those who loved him, who quote his work with abandon, and who hope that he received total consciousness.”
Ever hypocrisy deaf, the present American left fails to take note or even chuckle at this remark or the head-spinning fact that apparently he questions any authority that is not HIM (even when he insisted before the election that he should not even be criticized for his ears). However the importance of the observations in Kyle Smith’s article goes far beyond merely Mr. Obama and his notoriously thin, cafe-latte, skin. It says something deeply disturbing about a sea change in our culture.
Harold Ramis’s comedy for the underdog, who could rise up and triumph over the stuffed-shirt, had deep roots. It was not the 1970s post Richard Nixon era of liberalism, it was the beating heart of the Magna Carta itself. The earliest days of film comedy in the English-speaking world drew their humor from lampooning the powerful. Nearly every Marx Brothers gag was about the commoner putting powerful pompous aristocrats in their place. Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” was intentionally not a wealthy celebrity/politician sneering at buffoonish commoners.
Harold Ramis himself knew this to be an established feature of comedy in all the periods leading up to his own. In the website, “No Film School”, Justin Morrow quotes an interview with Ramis in which he discusses comedy. Ramis believed in comedy as the medium of the underdog, once saying, “It’s hard for winners to do comedy. Comedy is inherently subversive… we attack the winners.” Harold Ramis and his merry band knew that they stood on the shoulders of giants. They were carrying on a subversive tradition. This was always comedy, just until very recently.
Lewis Costello, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, and Jim Carrey were abnormal, goofy clowns. They were not the recipients of the punch line. Their characters’ habit or willingness to live outside social expectations made the “straights” uncomfortable and, thereby, engendered the comedy. They inherently questioned societal expectations, as we laughed at both the stiff characters discomfited by the clowns’ uninhibited nature and we also laughed at ourselves.
Apparently, this is not any more. Today’s so-called comedies and so-called comedians are the acid-tongued defenders of the status quo. They are the scolds, gadflies, and Erinyes of those who dare to deviate from the cultural norm. Movies began to appear with actors and themes that were based on the discomfort of the quirky character and reinforcing the smug superiority of the stuffed-shirts, who are the proxies for the status quo. This is true of such comedies as “Meet the Fokkers” or virtually any movie by Ben Stiller other than “Zoolander.” The movies of Will Ferell, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd are centrally themed as a circus freak show. The audience does not see quirky, non-conformist characters holding up a mirror to society to show the latter’s absurdity. Rather, they invite the audience to laugh at the freak, who, sadly, is very painfully aware he is a freak and is dismayed by his inability to fit in.
This current trend is not subversive comedy, but is, rather, a kind of sadism. This is the only comedy tolerated by a society so uncomfortable with itself that it must be constantly reassured that conformity to its social norms is not only desirable, but a moral absolute. The new comedy does not afflict the powerful, lampoon the wealthy or question the successful. Instead, it invites perverse joy at throwing stones at the stray dog. It encourages obsequious groveling before our “betters”, be they the prettier, richer, more influential, more powerful or simply the more popular. It encourages the attitude that the underdog is what he is because he should be so and that is exactly where he belongs.
There is no surprise that this what we get in a post-George Carlin world. We live in world in which our leadership and pop culture only like to question previous authority, but, now that they are the authority, they will brook no criticism. The members of the generation who grew up singing that they were “free to do what they want, any old time” have changed their tune. Now, when they insist we all together sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in unison, it sounds strangely like “Deutschland Uber Alles”.
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Comedy to Comfort the powerful
by Sonny Bunch
Washington Free Beacon
March 11, 2014
(http://bit.ly/1iadzGy)
After the death of Harold Ramis, the New York Post‘s Kyle Smith noted that comedians these days are more interested in gross out gags and navel gazing than they are in bringing the powerful down a notch. This is in stark contrast to the slob vs. snob efforts of Ramis and his peers. Wrote Smith:
For Ramis’ generation, politics was chiefly defined as hating Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam’s father) and, later, Richard Nixon. In those terms, liberals have a lot of company on the right, which adores Ramis and the other ’70s comics as much as lefties do. …
Critically, generation Ramis wasn’t making an affirmative case for the left. Ramis-ites didn’t say our guys would run things better than their guys. They disdained the concept of leadership. They thought no one should be running things. The Ramis vision is of a bottom-up, leaderless society with central power structures crushed and humiliated. It’s a hippie vision, sure. And it’s pure Tea Party.
I was reminded of that today when I saw that President Obama had taken part in an episode of Between Two Ferns, the FunnyOrDie.com series in which G-Force thesp Zach Galifianakis awkwardly interviews celebrities. It is, generally, an extremely funny show because it’s one of the few places where the idea of the obsequious celebrity interview is turned on its head: The interactions are awkward, almost painfully so. The Ben Stiller segment, for instance, is five minutes of awkward brilliance that opens with Galifianakis intentionally botching his name and suggesting he do scenes from his movies. It’s all in good fun, but it’s good fun at the expense of the actor in question.
The Obama interview, however, was just dreadful. After a few semi-unbearable moments during which the president shows he doesn’t at all understand the point of the show—the guest is not supposed to get in good zingers; he’s supposed to be taken down a peg—there’s an utterly unbearable moment during which he hawks the failed social experiment that is HealthCare.gov. It’s just gross.
Nothing screams “brave, edgy comedy!” like “I’m here to let The Man sell you on health insurance!”
None of this, of course, is surprising. Funny Or Die’s cocreators, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, are committed liberals who think that their second job is to make you laugh. Their first, naturally, is to sell you on the wonders of the Democratic Party. In this, they are the exact opposite of Ramis and his cohort of merry mischief makers. They’re big government liberals, the sort of people who think the feds need to tell you what to do for your own good because you’re too stupid to do the right thing otherwise.
Anyway, as I said, none of this comes as a shock. But it’s somewhat annoying to hear the chattering classes fall all over themselves to praise the comedy site for its edgy fare, for its “hilarious” humor.* And it’s incredibly annoying to watch dupes like Dylan Byers suggest Zach G. would be inclined to ask tough questions of the president—was there really any chance that the Hangover star and Obama-booster wasn’t going to conduct an “uncharacteristically tame interview” for the president?
Of course not! Because modern comedy is all about telling the little people how to live their lives and comforting the powerful—so long as they’re the right kind of powerful, naturally.
*On a similar, but unrelated, note: The idea that it’s “pretty baller” for a hugely wealthy musician to passively aggressively snipe at a hugely wealthy corporation after he decided not to sing a theme song for them is gross. Ooh, he signed something naughty in the memo line! SO BALLER. Give me a break. Take two seconds off of making rich people feel like they’re edgy heroes for refusing to fulfill their contractual obligations, would you?
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Where’s the Nerve? Today’s Comics Mock Poop Not the Powerful
by Kyle Smith
New York Post
March 1, 2014
(http://bit.ly/1fXG89i)
As Chevy Chase might have put it on “Saturday Night Live,” Harold Ramis is still dead. And with him has gone the finest era of comedy: The ’70s kind.
Ramis was as close to the king of comedy as it gets, as a writer, director and occasional sidekick for “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “Caddyshack,” “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to School,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Groundhog Day.”
Now Ramis, like his fellow counterculturalists John Belushi, Doug Kenney (co-writer of “Animal House” and “Caddyshack”), Richard Pryor and George Carlin, is gone. Chase just turned 70. David Letterman is 66 and Bill Murray, 63, has pretty much given up comedy, unless you count unintentionally funny projects like “Hyde Park on Hudson.”
Taking off with the movie “M*A*S*H” in 1970 — a huge hit that grossed $450 million in today’s dollars — and its spinoff sitcom, ’70s comedy ruled from an anti-throne of contempt for authority in all shapes. College deans, student body presidents, Army sergeants and officers, country-club swells, snooty professors and the EPA: Anyone who made it his life’s work to lord it over others got taken down with wit.
When the smoke bombs cleared and the anarchy died, comedy turned inward and became domesticated. It also became smaller.
“The Cosby Show” and Jerry Seinfeld didn’t seek to ridicule those in power. Instead they gave us comfy couch comedy — riffs on family and etiquette and people’s odd little habits.
Now, in the Judd Apatow era, comedy is increasingly marked by two worrying trends: One is a knee-jerk belief, held even by many of the most brilliant comedy writers, that coming up with the biggest, most outlandish gross-out gags is their highest calling.
It was Apatow who made Kristen Wiig put the diarrhea scene in “Bridesmaids” because, after “American Pie” and “There’s Something About Mary,” comedy’s highest aspiration is to go below the waist.
Would-be Apatovian movies like “That Awkward Moment,” which came from a comedy writer considered (at least at the moment) hot in the industry, veer awkwardly from bedroom to bathroom, frantically throwing in scene after scene of dudes standing around staring at each other’s junk or talking about which one of them just pooped.
“Caddyshack” and “Animal House,” considered crude at the time, are about as far from “That Awkward Moment” as they are from Noël Coward.
The other worrying trend today is self-centeredness: Get more and more personal. Put a microscope on that belly button! We really want to know about the quantity, color and consistency of the lint you discover there.
Ramis, Chase and Murray would never have dreamt of doing a thinly disguised autobiography like “This Is 40.” They would have asked a) Who cares about my boring, well-heeled existence? and b) If I weren’t me, wouldn’t I hate me? These questions never occurred to Apatow because comedy today is therapy. Why storm the barricades? It’s easier to flip the channels.
Ramis and his contemporaries invented the comedy version of the ’70s dramatic anti-hero — the Dustin Hoffman/Jack Nicholson/Steve McQueen type.
In the dramas, the hero was invariably crushed by the system, but in the comedies, the underdogs rose up, kicked out the stuffed shirts (Sgt. Hulka in “Stripes,” Judge Smails in “Caddyshack,” Greg Marmalard and Dean Wormer in “Animal House,” Peck in “Ghostbusters”) and seized power while remaining cool at all times.
Crucially, they were too cool to wield power, because power isn’t cool. Nor is earnestness: The most embarrassing faux pas of any of the Ramis anti-heroes would have been to make a straightforward, unironic, sincere defense of anything. (Only in romantic moments do the boys let up with the quips, and then only for a moment.)
Consider Murray’s hilarious defense redefining diffident post-Vietnam, post-Jimmy Carter, pre-Rambo America as Underdog Nation in his loopy inspirational speech in “Stripes”:
“We’re Americans . . . That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts! Here’s proof: His nose is cold! But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt. Who saw ‘Old Yeller’? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end? [Sarcastically] Nobody cried when Old Yeller got shot? I’m sure. I cried my eyes out.
“So we’re all dogfaces, we’re all very, very different, but there is one thing that we all have in common: We were all stupid enough to enlist in the Army. We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us — we’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!”
Ramis, like most other ’70s comics, was a committed lefty and described “Animal House” as a story about the last days of possibility before the Kennedy assassination. That “10 and 1” line was, he said, his way of sneaking in a jibe about Vietnam, which he bitterly opposed.
For Ramis’ generation, politics was chiefly defined as hating Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam’s father) and, later, Richard Nixon. In those terms, liberals have a lot of company on the right, which adores Ramis and the other ’70s comics as much as lefties do.
Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie calls “Ghostbusters” “the most libertarian movie ever,” and Reason colleague Jesse Walker notes, “William Atherton’s EPA agent fills the space in ‘Ghostbusters’ that John Vernon’s dean does in ‘Animal House’ and Ted Knight’s old-money country-club man does in ‘Caddyshack’ . . . There isn’t even that big a shift in the targets. In the ’70s, activists on the left as well as the right regularly took aim at the regulatory state.”
Critically, generation Ramis wasn’t making an affirmative case for the left. Ramis-ites didn’t say our guys would run things better than their guys. They disdained the concept of leadership. They thought no one should be running things. The Ramis vision is of a bottom-up, leaderless society with central power structures crushed and humiliated. It’s a hippie vision, sure. And it’s pure Tea Party.
Full props must be given to President Obama for becoming (I believe) the first sitting president to quote Carl the Gardener of “Caddyshack,” in a surprise statement on Ramis’ passing: “Our thoughts and prayers are with Harold’s wife, Erica, his children and grandchildren, and all those who loved him, who quote his work with abandon, and who hope that he received total consciousness.”
Still, Obama is exactly the kind of stuffed-shirt know-it-all — pompous, humorless and in love with himself — that Ramis mercilessly lampooned. To my knowledge, Obama has never spontaneously said anything funny. But he does say alarming things like, “We’re gonna punish our enemies,” and goes on amazing adventures in self-aggrandizement.
Personality-wise, Obama is just Nixon with a shiny Harvard veneer. Somewhere, a new Obama-era EPA bureaucrat is frustrating some small businessman like Peter Venkman, except in real life, the Venkmans have no chance against the gooey green blob of authority that slimes all of us.
In his Ramis statement, Obama said, “When we watched his movies — from ‘Animal House’ and ‘Caddyshack’ to ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ — we didn’t just laugh until it hurt. We questioned authority. We identified with the outsider. We rooted for the underdog.”
But Obama grabs more and more authority for himself and his coterie. His style is all-controlling, even to the point of sending his wife out to tell kids not to drink soda. Obama doesn’t object to the existence of a rulebook. He just wants to be the one writing it. The slogan on the “Animal House” poster: “It was the Deltas against the rules. The rules lost.”
Seventies comedy had a revolutionary undertone. It had a purpose. It had substance. It not only made you laugh, it put the world to rights. It was a snowball with a rock inside it.
How does the massive group diarrhea of “Bridesmaids” do that? What does pie-bonking tell us about society?
Today’s comics have abdicated their responsibility to take down the powerful. They tiptoe around President Obama, but comedy has to be fearless.
These days, they’re more at ease mocking their social inferiors than going after the high and mighty. Comfortably ensconced inside the castle that Richard Pryor and George Carlin tried to burn down, they drop water balloons on the unspeakable middle-America drones of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office.”
There’s a joke from “The Office” that’s typical of the contempt. Andy says, “I went to a little school called Cornell — ever heard of it?” It’s not a takedown from below but a sneer from above, in tune with Dwight Schrute’s pathetic insistence on his title of “assistant regional manager” when he’s merely “assistant to the regional manager,” and anyway, anyone with “regional manager” in his title is a nobody by definition.
Cornell, to comedy elites and graduates of the 15 schools that outrank it, is a near-mediocre brand so lame that only a dope would brag about it. (First-tier Ivy Leaguers, when their teams are losing to Cornell at the end of football games, break out the cruel cheer, “That’s all right, that’s OK, Cornell’s not a real Ivy League school anyway!”) “The Office’s” first and second showrunners, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, both went to Harvard, as did writer-actor B.J. Novak. Their colleague Mindy Kaling went to Dartmouth (which also unclogs its nose at the likes of Cornell).
Ramis’ death is a reminder that comedy has gotten too fat and happy, too rich and insulated, too therapeutic and self-adoring, too willing to mistake the meaninglessly crude for the spectacularly subversive.
Even comics who present themselves as the loyal opposition to the political leadership, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, expend most of their efforts simply repackaging Democratic Party talking points as jokes. The ’70s hang-’em-all anarchist spirit lives on only in the margins, in a few brave outposts like “South Park.”
It’s as if today’s comedy writers are sitting respectfully, stars in their eyes, as their beloved president sits amongst them like Charming Guy with Guitar in “Animal House,” gently strumming away and singing, “I gave my love a cherry.” If some free-ranging Blutarskyite came up and smashed the guitar, they’d stand up — and pound the rebel for interrupting such a beautiful, magical moment.
Then they’d go back to cracking jokes about those pathetic losers destined for unspeakable middle-management manufacturing jobs because they only managed to get into Cornell.
