Immunity from Humor

[LisaLynne]

A local radio station that I listen to on my way into work has been playing David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists in the morning for a while now. They usually do them right as I’m making the turn into my parking lot, so I just get to hear the whole thing by the time I’ve found a space and stopped the car. Last week, there was another list filled with jabs at Cheney and Bush. I found myself smiling and laughing, which is normal, but then I realized I was feeling something else, which was a little disturbing to me when I thought about it.

I was feeling surprise. Surprise and a little discomfort. What was causing these feelings? Well, I realized I was unused to hearing such jokes made about the pResident and vice-pResident on a mainstream show like Letterman’s. Even though he’s been doing it for some time now, I just still doesn’t seem natural somehow. I also had a twinge of fear for Letterman’s career, if not life (because I can’t help but be paranoid).

And that’s when it hit me that this was all part of Rove’s plan.

We joke around a lot here on DU and make some pretty biting and funny comments about Little Lord Pissypants on a regular basis. In fact, some people have complained that we do too much of that when we should be talking about something more important. However, I believe that being able to make fun of and laugh at the pResident is very important.

There are producers and writers of Saturday Night Live who credit (and yes, they think it is to their credit) themselves with bringing down the Ford presidency by their relentless (and not unwarranted) portrayal of him as clumsy. Politcal cartoons have been around since the invention of the printing press (and perhaps are scrawled on cave walls, for all we know). We have ALWAYS made fun of our politicians. And yet, somehow, with this administration, it seems as though it had in many ways become taboo.

As the Bushies are fond of saying, make no mistake: The Republicans are acutely aware of what humor can do. They saw what happened to Bush I, Quayle, and even their golden patriarch Reagan. They were more than happy to try to turn that against Clinton. That’s why they probably didn’t care that the Whitewater non-scandal didn’t go anywhere – they had all that “over-sexed” Clinton stuff to make jokes about. They did their best to turn Clinton into a punch line, although they seem to have failed miserably.

Still, they knew enough that when 9/11 happened, one of the many things they used that tragedy for was to make sure that it was no longer cool or proper to make jokes about Bush. Now he was a “war president” photographed with a saintly halo over his head while he presided over the War on Terror, in order to gain revenge for our stricken nation and ensure our safety from weapons of mass destruction. There’s nothing funny about that.

Humor is often a form of dissent, and that was what Rove was trying to immunize Bush against. The façade is cracking now and maybe a day will come when the humorists of the early 21st century will talk about how they had a small hand in taking down the most corrupt and vicious administrations our country has ever seen.

[jojo54]

1. I agree with you but you gotta admit,

some of the jokes going around are pretty damn funny. The scary part of it is, they're TRUE!!

[LisaLynne]

2. Oh, I think they're great.

That's my point -- we NEED the humor. Rove just tried to get it so we wouldn't be able to joke about Bush. He knew if we started laughing at him, we'd never stop. :)

[deutsey]

3. Humor horrifed the Nazis

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/holocaust_humor.htm


SNIP
Finding humor in a situation is finding some incongruity, that is, some disparity between the way things are and the way they should be; and that requires a critical mind. Successful comedians are never unintelligent or unnoticing people. During the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, humorists were among the first to call attention to what was going wrong. The earliest criticisms of the Nazis came not from politicians or clergy, but from cabaret entertainers and newspaper cartoonists. At a time when most Americans did not want to know what was going on in Europe, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator called our attention to Hitler's insanity.

In the ghettoes, Hitler's "masterpiece" was referred to as Mein Krampf (My Cramp). His theory of the Master Race was the butt of dozens of jokes. There are two kinds of Aryans, one went: non-Aryans and barb-Aryans. Others mocked the disparity between the icon of the tall, blonde, muscular Aryan and the actual physiques of Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering.

This critical spirit worked against the Nazi propaganda machine. Research on brainwashing, indeed, has shown that humor may be the single most effective way to block indoctrination.

Because humor interfered with their propaganda and revealed the awful truth about the Nazis, they were quite afraid of humor. Hitler, wrote one biographer, had "a horror of being laughed at."4 When well-known figures made fun of him, Hitler viciously attacked them. Bertold Brecht, for example, was declared an enemy of the Reich, stripped of his citizenship, and forced to flee Germany.

One of the first actions of the new Nazi government was the creation of a "Law against treacherous attacks on the state and party and for the protection of the party uniform." As Hermann Goering reminded the Academy of German Law, telling a joke could be an act against the Führer and the state. Under this law, telling and listening to anti-Nazi jokes were acts of treason. Several people were even put on trial for naming dogs and horses "Adolf." Between 1933 and 1945, five thousand death sentences were handed down by the "People's Court" for treason, a large number of them for anti-Nazi humor.

One of those executed was Josef Müller, a Catholic priest who had told two of his parishioners the following story:

A fatally wounded German soldier asked his chaplain to grant one final wish. "Place a picture of Hitler on one side of me, and a picture of Goering on the other side. That way I can die like Jesus, between two thieves."

MORE...

[LisaLynne]

4. Wow, great article!

Thanks for posting that. It really shows just how effective humor can be and how much totalitarian regeimes fear it. That's also very interesting what it says about brainwashing. Humor can reveal the truth and that's why it's so useful. Again, thanks -- great, great article.

[Danascot]

5. Hey, it wasn't us

that brought shame, dishonor and ridicule to some of the nation's most hallowed institutions. They did this to themselves. If you don't think about the fact that they have brought death and tragedy and that they have destroyed the nation for a generation, their slapstick incompetance is all pretty funny. Take comfort in the fact that everytime you laugh at them it erodes their power just a bit more and contributes to their downfall.