No Joke: A Frown Is A Smile Turned Upside Down
When did people lose their sense of humour? How did satire expire? As this video shows, Bob Dole and Saturday Night Live both had a sense of humour about themselves in 1996, making fun of Dole’s presidential defeat and Norm MacDonald’s impersonation of him. When Dole died last week only one side had retained their sense of humour. And it was not @SNL.
They’re not alone in seeing that, in their SJW wonderfulness, they’re the joke now. Canadian actor/ film maker/ provocateur Seth Rogen recently produced an animated feminist feature called Santa Inc. The premise is a female elf aspires to become the first woman Santa. As you might expect of the recent outings from a Woke Hollywood polemicist like Rogen and his collaborator Sara Silverman the film is heavy handed on political agitprop.
Reviewers were not kind to Rogen. "You haven’t had a good movie since Pineapple Express. Maybe take five years off and when you come back you might be funny again,” tweeted one. Predictably, Rogen the Prophet missed the point. "We really p***ed off tens of thousands of white supremacists with our new show #SantaInc”. (That the profane Rogen bleeped the word pissed is precious.)
A New World virtue hound not getting the joke? Never. The real humour here is that Rogen can’t see he’s now part of the new establishment, not the rebel he thinks he is.
How about the Providence, RI, Rep Theatre whose self-aware production of A Christmas Carol fell flat on its catalogue of grievance politics? “We wish to acknowledge the trauma our country and many of our artists, staff, students, volunteers, audiences, and community partners are experiencing” the Rep’s PR flack said in getting the crowd in a holiday spirit.
The Providence Journal was unimpressed with the strenuous virtue lectures. “There was a hit-or-miss feel to the production, highlighting the risk of tinkering too much with a sure thing… — there is a layer being added to Dickens’ message of humanity and kindness that feels forced.”
Kindness. Now there’s a relic of the past. Naturally the Rep was apoplectic. “Trinity Rep has written directly to the reviewer and editor to specifically identify the other elements that were in violation of the theater’s content guidelines, designed to protect our artists and staff from harm caused by unconscious bias.”
Yes, everyone wants to be Jussie Smollett, the punchline who paid to get punched on an arctic Chicago night in 2019`. He’s now up on charges he perpetrated a race crime by staging his attack. But as attorney Jonathan Turley explains, Jussie is defying satire. “Smollett is not really trying to convince anyone he didn’t stage the attack. He is trying to get the jury to vote for him despite his guilt.
“It is called jury nullification, and this may be the most raw example of the practice in decades... He knows reality is not what is true but what an audience wants to be true… Vice President (Kamala) Harris, Speaker Pelosi and others proved that with their protestations over his “attempted lynching.”
Yes the best jokes these days are the ones that none of the grimly serious humourists like Rogen or SNL get. The death of irony was something Monty Python mocked in 1979’s Life of Brian as the People’s Front of Judea (or Judean Peoples Front) debated men having babies.
REG: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man–
STAN: Or woman.
REG: Why don’t you shut up about women, Stan? You’re putting us off.
STAN: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.
FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan?
STAN: I want to be one.
REG: What?
STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me ‘Loretta’.
REG: What?!
LORETTA: It’s my right as a man.
JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
LORETTA: I want to have babies.
REG: You want to have babies?!
LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.
REG: But… you can’t have babies.
LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.
REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
LORETTA: [Crying]
JUDITH: Here! I– I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
REG: What’s the point?
FRANCIS: What?REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.
Except the struggle against reality is now reality. Just ask feminists who’re finding that men-having-babies or competing in the Olympics as women upends everything they’ve fought for since the 1960s. If it wasn’t so grim you’d laugh. From government to corporate to culture to journalism, the unfunny and unkind now impose the ridiculous as fact.
Laugh it off? It can cost you your job, your friends, your neighbours. Bob Dole got the joke. Too bad we don’t.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx