Nervous Laughter: American Humor Studies in Dispiriting Times

When asked to consider coming on board as editor of Studies in American Humor (StAH), I was, of course, flattered. Then I recalled two seminars on American satire that I had led at the Newberry Library the previous year. The first was on November 3, the day after the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series in 108 years. The seminar participants, high school teachers from the greater Chicago area—some baseball fans, some not—were elated. The conversation was lively and good humored. They shared a variety of strategies they’d developed for teaching satire over their collective decades of teaching experience, eliciting productive discussion punctuated frequently with laughter. In between that convivial meeting and the second, one week later, something changed in American culture. On November 10, the seminar room was somber. Having had a day to digest the results of the 2016 election, this group was in no mood for laughing. My attempts to place the genre in the context of history did little to distract them. Thomas Nast cartoons, George Schuyler columns, film clips of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, Dorothy Parker poems, Randy Newman songs—nothing that I presented elicited even a snicker, just dejected conversation. A collective sense of disbelief, disappointment, and apprehension cast a pall over the room. So we slogged through the three hours politely, absent of humor.

Jump forward a few months—humor took another hit in the political arena when Denise Fairooz, a member of Code Pink, was arrested for laughing during the confirmation hearing of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions. I think that bears repeating, with emphasis: she was arrested for laughing. In her defense, Ms. Fairooz claimed that when Richard Shelby introduced the nominee by lauding his record of “treating all Americans equally under the law,” she “just couldn’t hold it. . . . It was spontaneous.”¹ To make matters worse, Ms. Fairooz was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison—for laughing. Laughter, as we all know, comes in many forms. But even when caustically derisive, it has not in my memory been treated as a criminal offense—not in the United States, at least. We can take some solace in an appeals court decision to overturn the conviction, and in the Justice Department’s recent announcement that it will not retry the case. Still, regardless of what one might think of Attorney General Sessions or Code Pink, the fact that laughter was criminally prosecuted provides another opportunity to use a word that has gained currency to the point of becoming a cliché—unprecedented.

This inhospitable climate for humor reminds me of a Lewis Black bit— really, it was his entire act when I saw him in San Antonio in September 2016. His monologue lamented that the current political atmosphere had become so absurd that stand-up comedians didn’t stand a chance. For him, politics threatened to make humor obsolete. To be sure, these kinds of apprehensions have been expressed from time to time since the middle of the twentieth century, if not earlier. And those fears were premature then, as Black’s are now. Stephen Colbert is surfing a ratings wave fueled by his decision to lampoon the White House and its chief occupant in unabashed, witty take-downs. But if viewers of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS, 2015–present) are laughing, it’s a nervous laughter. Colbert’s acerbic jokes— like those of Seth Meyers in his “Closer Look” segments on Late Night (NBC, 2014–present), of Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and of Daily Show alums Samantha Bee and John Oliver—are fueled by anxiety as much as glee. Indeed, Noah, Bee, and Oliver are immigrants, and these days immigrants are no doubt more nervous than others. The power of the presidency is still an awesome force even when the president himself is the butt of the joke.

As I pondered the decision to accept the editor’s role in these dispiriting times, I turned to StAH itself. Perusing recent issues, I took solace in the broad and deep analyses represented in the journal...