The American Sense Of Humor

European humor is based on class distinctions and supports the establishment. American humor, in contrast, is based on equality and democracy. Too bad we are losing it.

So says Nicholas Lynch in an article for the U.K. Spectator entitled Have Americans lost their sense of humor? He says America used to be “the funniest place on earth.” But no more:

Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter.

I don’t know about that. But what interests me in his article is what he says about American humor. European humor, he says, grows out of a class-based society. The jokes tend to be about low class people trying to get above themselves. Or, they are about social commentary of one kind or another, including political and social satire. Humor is at the service of the status quo.

America, though, really has been the land of democracy and equality. As a result, American humor is an equal opportunity offender, making fun of rich and poor alike. Lynch describes this democratic humor in this wonderful paragraph:

This democratic sense of humor was not some dainty old comedy of manners – a museum of wrongly-held forks, counterfeit airs and the thousand other fragile trinkets of aristocratic life, all such cultured amusements of a buttoned-up society where social climbing was a passion. No – the American creation was instead what historian Henry Steele Commager called “comedy of circumstance,” that made fun of every man, who “at one time or another aimed too high, adventured too boldly, boasted too loudly.” It mocked rich people like poor people, made fun of smart people in the same way as dumb people – because in the US no man is allowed to stay king. Only here was humor let off the leash, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought to leave the order intact. In Europe, mockery operated within a fixed aristocratic structure – as a pressure valve in a system not designed to change its fundamental hierarchy. Here, ridicule was integrated into a self-correcting democratic project – an informal mode of checks and balances powered by short memories, mixed company and freedom.

Also and importantly, Americans pursued humor for its own sake, just to be funny. We see this in what Lynch says is the distinctly American comic genre : the tall tale:

The tall tale – distinct enough to, for the first time, qualify as an original art form – gave shape to a new kind of nation. Unlike the satirical critiques of the British essay or the witty comedies of French theater, the American tall tale was funny without a point. It wasn’t social commentary. It didn’t exist to prove genius. It was laugh-at-me tomfoolery. As Mark Twain saw it: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.”

Meant to be heard rather than read, the tall tale was a kind of story that – pretending not to know – brags big, falls flat, gets in its own way, speaks past the point, wastes the audience’s time and doubles back to waste it again, concealing its punchlines and playing dumb all the while. Twain contrasted this with the self-important European habit of advertising comedic effect with “whopping exclamation points” and explanations in parentheticals.

Recall, for example, the monologues of Garrison Keillor, back when he was permitted to be on the radio. The master of the tall tale, of course, was Mark Twain, who certainly used humor for serious purposes in his novels, but became famous for his “lectures,” some of which he later published. (See, for example, the Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.)

Another difference, according to Lynch, is that while European humor measures human beings according to the standard of perfection, American humor is open to the imperfect. Lynch quotes Twain again:

It was a “very depressing” thing, [Twain] explained, to find joy in the sublime, the beautiful, the useful and the orderly and yet be unable to find it in the incoherent, the elusive and the unexpected. The American sense of humor, in his view, was animated by a frank affinity for the imperfect, making sense of a people who preferred the patchwork pursuit of a more perfect union rather than the sterile fixity of a perfect one to start.

Lynch thinks we have lost that democratic sense of humor and what passes for humor today is more like the European style, full of politics and in-group jibes against out-groups. He concludes: “Americans are slipping back into the Old World habits we once escaped. Democracy and humor are dying of the same disease.”

UPDATE: Australia is another highly egalitarian country with its own distinctive sense of humor (or, I should say, humour). Just today my Australian family connections sent me the latest advertisement for Australian lamb, an iconic product whose ads have developed a reputation for iconic humor. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year, though we’re just a few days in: