Writing Right with Dmitri: How Not to Speak Snark to Power
Created | Updated May 20, 2018
Writing Right with Dmitri: How Not to Speak Snark to Power
We all applaud those brave comedians who have the nerve to make jokes about humourless dictators, right? That's an act of civil courage right up there with standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, am I right?
I'm going to swim against the tide here and say, not necessarily. Hear me out.
Hitler visits the insane asylum. Everybody but one man gives the Hitler salute. Angrily, Hitler demands to know why the man didn't 'Sieg Heil!' him.
'I'm the nurse,' is the reply. 'I'm not crazy.'
Yes, there were anti-Hitler jokes. I once found a whole book of them – printed in Czechoslovakia in 1938 – and read them at one sitting. This left me slightly nauseous. They weren't all that funny. I suppose you had to be there. A lot of them had to do with how fat Hermann Goering was, or how full of hot air Goebbel's speeches were, or how gay SA leader Ernst Roehm was. To get all the bad puns, you'd have to be fluent in 1930s German, which, frankly, is kind of a waste of a good education.
People used to claim that these jokes represented resistance to Hitler. After all, it was legally possible to prosecute individuals for telling these jokes. One of the jokes goes, 'Was gibt's für neue Witze?' 'Zwei Monate Dachau.' Not easy to translate, but basically, 'What have you got for new jokes?' 'Two months in Dachau.'
Some modern researchers, however, dispute the idea that the purpose of these Flüsterwitze, or 'whispered jokes', was to undermine support for the regime. Instead, they insist, the jokes served as a way for citizens to let off steam, express their discontent without doing anything about it. They argue that far from spurring people to action, the whispered jokes served to normalise the situation Germans found themselves in. The jokes express resignation – and incidentally give away the fact that the joke-tellers, at least, knew far more about what was really going on in the country than they usually admitted to outsiders after the war. So, joke-telling could be a form of complicity. The message: keep your heads down, it will all blow over.
But what about the other kind of political humour? The kind that isn't whispered, because you're living in a democracy and can say anything you want if you can get somebody to listen to you? Is this kind of humour useful, and are there standards for it? I would argue that it is, and there are. But I would differentiate.
These days, at least half (some people are hoping a bit more than that) of the voters in the United States dislike the executive branch of the federal government. They feel that the election of the current incumbent of the White House was a grave mistake, besides being possibly the result of foreign interference of an illegal nature. They are generally outraged by the actions of this administration. They want people to remember that what they see as incompetence and malfeasance at the highest level of government is not normal. They want people to view current events as an aberration. For that reason, they make jokes at the government's expense every single day. This task mostly falls to professional comedians on 'daily', 'nightly', 'late night' shows, etc..
Making these jokes doesn't require bravery on the part of the comedians. They won't have to leave the country one step ahead of the thought police. In fact, if they didn't tell jokes like this, they would probably lose their jobs. People might accuse them of 'cowardice'. They certainly wouldn't earn the big bucks.
This isn't to say that the comedians aren't being honest when they criticise the government. They really dislike what's going on, just like (possibly, probably, we'll see at the next election) the majority of Americans out there. Some comedians, like John Oliver, are thoughtful about this. They go into detail about the events they're critiquing. They make you laugh at the absurdity of it all, but they also make good points about real issues in public policy.
And then there are the cheap-shot jokesters.
I actually really like Sarah. I think she's very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye…
Before somebody gets mad at me, of course she had the right to make that joke. They hired her to do it, more or less. But it's really kind of an obscure joke, and it's not very telling. If that was the best the comic could come up with, I'm not really impressed. But it is a knotty problem: how to make a joke that is both telling and funny about the tedious process by which a press secretary addresses, daily, the thankless task of trying to put a positive spin on the actions of an administration that is all-too-often contradictory and capricious? It would almost require making sense of it all. And comics don't exist to make sense of things.
What we need to do in the modern world, I think, is to keep in mind what humour can and cannot do. Humour can spice up our learning and deliver our messages more effectively at times. But humour cannot and should not substitute for serious thinking. Taking cheap shots at the appearance, mannerisms, or other foibles of a person in the public eye – smokey or not – will never be the last step in public decision-making. So your foreign minister has a dreadful hairdo? Sure, but what's his policy like? The fact that the president of the United States takes hair growth medications is irrelevant. What is the administration's policy regarding nuclear proliferation? Let's be grownups and get our priorities straight. And leave the bad jokes to the professionals and people who have nothing better to do than attend awards dinners.
PS: Which would you rather see? This stand-up routine at a company dinner, or this analysis of the guns-in-schools debate?
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