Goofing past the graveyard

by David Benjamin

“No more ashes, no more sackcloth, and an armband made of black cloth
Will someday never more adorn a sleeve,
For if the Bomb that drops on you gets your friends and neighbors, too.
There’ll be nobody left behind to grieve,
And we will all go together when we go … ” —Tom Lehrer

MADISON, Wis.—Every year, I sponsor a scholarship competition for young writers at Robert M. La Follette High School, in memory of my first publisher Bob Schuster, who at the time was in eleventh grade at La Follette. The kids who compete are eloquent, their prose well-crafted and often deeply emotional. However, this year’s entries offered—as usual—nary a glimmer of comic relief.

This year’s essays and stories were more than dead serious. They were bleak. Not one kid cracked a joke. The grand prize went to a girl who envisioned a future world without trees or birds whose only currency of exchange is garbage.

Of course, I sympathize.

These students have grown up in the sardonic shadow of Donald Trump. Their earth is in the midst of a climate maelstrom that promises them a lifetime of carcinogenic air and dead oceans. They approach voting age under a regime that contrives to cancel every election for the rest of their lives. They teeter on the portal to a political culture that portends violence so pervasive and bloody that all votes will be rendered meaningless and void. They foresee a future of little more than autocracy, crushing debt, pandemic betrayal, mob rule and jungle law.

Life in the land of the free, as these kids eloquently chronicle their experiences, has ever been less free and more perilous.

Except, maybe, when I was in high school.

Those days, I was writing, too, for The Id, Schuster’s illicit literary magazine.

Despite the Republican myth that those mid-century decades were a halcyon era of simplicity, moral clarity and prosperity, I was living in poverty, like millions of Americans, under the threat, fueled by twenty years of McCarthyite propaganda, of a nuclear holocaust that would vaporize my family, friends, teachers and every living thing on earth except rats, cockroaches and hemorrhagic viruses.

The environmental crisis that troubles and discourages kids today was also rampant when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The air was gray with smog, the local rivers ran thick with filth and almost every bay was an open sewer.

Jim Crow was still the law of the Confederate south and, up north, no black person was ever seen in a TV ad or behind the sales counter at Macy’s, Gimbel’s or J.C. Penney’s. I was witness—in the news—to the murders of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, Malcolm X and Reverend King, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. George Wallace ran for president on a hate platform of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Richard Nixon, who won that election, was a Jew-baiting bigot who committed crimes in office and lied unrepentantly to the American people. In the service of continuing an illicit war, Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, also lied to me—and to every boy in my high school. We were all eligible for the draft, into a war that ended up killing 58,000 of us, plus millions of Vietnamese, 300,000 Cambodians and another 50,000 or so in Laos. Then, we lost the war.

Girls? They had no access to contraceptives. They could get raped, which they did without recourse to a legal system that assumed they were “asking for it.” Then, she couldn’t a legal abortion to save her life. Girls could date, they could flirt, they could fill up a hope chest, but they weren’t allowed to play varsity volleyball, or softball, or basketball or any other sport.

Life, as we all agreed, was a shit sandwich.

Did you hear what I just said?

That was a joke. This sort of thing used to be a handy coping device.

Like my young writers today, my friends and I grew up next-door to an immense social, political and environmental graveyard. Strangely, though, rather than gloomily watching “the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row“ and composing apocalyptic metaphors, we whistled. We goofed and joshed.

I have no idea what was wrong with us. We had ample reason to despair. Instead, we kidded around. In my junior year, I dashed off a silly quatrain that summed up my attitude toward the imminent End of the World. It read:

Hooray, excelsior and pow.
The ship of state is sunk and dead
And we, the fools, are at the prow,
From which the wise and good have fled.

Of course, there are clues to the flippancy that infected my circle of teenage wags. We had role models who, in word, deed, lyric and verse, despite the rain of slings and arrows onto this vale of tears, exercised their sense of humor. While our teachers earnestly plied our minds with Gatsby and Lord of the Flies, we absorbed and mimicked Holden Caulfield’s profane irony. We studied war under its satirists, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.

My mentors in comedy dated back to Aristophanes and Shakespeare. I read Mark Twain—Letters from the Earth, The War Prayer. I read Mencken’s lacerating commentary and his history of the bathtub. I pored through A Thurber Carnival and tried to mimic—I’m still trying—the comic rhythms of Mike Royko and the wisdom of Slats Grobnik. If I could sing, I’d prefer lyrics by Cole Porter, Dave Frishberg and the Smothers Brothers, with orchestration (and the occasional gluk-gluk) by Spike Jones (composer, by the way, of “Der Feuhrer’s Face”).

The anti-Bible of comedy was MAD. It modeled our irreverence toward everything reverential. It was our sheet-music for whistling past the graveyard. It gave us a presidential candidate whose blank gaze and rictus grin have been the hallmark of politicians since the birth of the republic. Look at Donald Trump but think Alfred E. Neuman. You’ll feel better.

If there was a troubadour for those dire and tumultuous times, a Tin Pan Alley cat with the wit and courage to confront every absurdity, to lampoon every taboo and make us laugh—laughter that came as release from the pent-up fear, the frustration and rage that had can shrink your heart and paralyze your resolve—it was a Harvard math professor who died this month, Tom Lehrer.

Lehrer’s album, That Was the Year That Was, was one of the first records I ever bought. I can sing along with “The Vatican Rag” and “So Long, Mom (I’m Off to Drop the Bomb)”. His song about pollution was as tight and trenchant as any published treatise on the effects of detergents, industrial waste, sewage and greenhouses gases. He understood the extraordinary power of humor. He knew how mockery creeps under the skin of the high and mighty.

Humor, I learned, is the most daunting form of creativity. Most writers can’t do it. The philosopher Arthur Koestler studied it exhaustively and explained that a joke, a jibe, a witty putdown is effective beyond its seeming frivolity because it strikes the ear as a surprise. It shocks the listener into a sort of awakening. It’s a little electric jab can reduce the prince to a punchline.

Laughter is antidote to the awestruck exaltation that balances the tin pot on the dictator’s noggin. It is the tinkling of bells on the jester’s cap.

Why else does Donald Trump, invariably, erupt into rage and vindictiveness whenever the joke’s on him? Why did he plot revenge for five years for revenge on the uppity nigger who made fun of him at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner?

There’s no defense against laughter. There’s no better relief from despair. There’s no sharper needle to deflate the king.

The king’s only solution is to kill the jester.

Why else did Colbert have to be canceled?