The kids aren’t all right

by David Benjamin

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.” — William James

MADISON, Wis.—Recently, in a spasm of random woolgathering, I recalled my circle of high-school friends and their talent for writing. I had gravitated to kids for whom well-crafted prose was a common skill. My sidekick Dick, for example, wrote a wry and profound short story, set in war-torn Vietnam, that I wish I’d written. Scott, an avid consumer of science fiction and discoverer (for me) of Kurt Vonnegut, invented the comic philosopher, Brother Chiboinkin. Another friend, Bob, conceived and published The Id, an underground literary magazine for which I became a primary contributor. Looking back, I counted at least ten of us who had the talent to venture a career as a writer.

I’m the only one who made that blunder.

I’d been pushed down Memory Lane by a file of stories and essays written by kids at my alma mater, La Follette High School. Nine years ago, I diverted a legacy from my sister, Peggy Benjamin, into a scholarship fund for young writers at La Follette, named in memory of Robert M. Schuster. Bob, who died of leukemia in 2016, was Peg’s classmate and, more pertinently, the publisher of The Id.

Typically, this year’s Schuster Prize entries tended to be earnest but largely awkward, meandering, workmanlike. But, as always, there are a few students with a measure of talent that justifies the money I’m going to be handing out. However, even among the best of these young writers, I recognized two trends that have persisted since I started this program. True to their adolescent turmoil and the guidance of “creative writing” teachers who tell them to “write about yourself,” the kids are intensely self-absorbed. Many of their essays read like the transcript of a fifty-minute hour with Bob Hartley.

But—this is the trend that defies the Hartley reference—they’re not funny. Here’s a representative quote from this year’s entries: “Sometimes it’s hard to look into the future and feel optimistic. I understand that more than anyone, I’m a high school student in a world with conflict and confusion. It can be hard to get out of bed, and it can feel hard to do your work in school. It can feel hard to have faith that everything’s gonna be okay.”

For nine years, I’ve been reading dystopian cris du cœur by teenagers with lines that read like: “Alone, desperate, pleading, I lay cold on the ground waiting for someone, something, anything, to come find me. My life as I know it, is done for now.” Or this cheery image: “He could hear the screams of his mother, trapped under debris.”

Of course, at a time when government goons are abducting people into black vans, the White House is drenched in gilded kitsch and climate change is turning the earth into an overheated waterworld, this sort of apocalyptic outpouring is hardly surprising. Grownups have bequeathed to our children a Covid-ravaged wasteland ruled over by a senile Ozymandias with a tangerine kisser and platinum comb-over.

But, just a minute here, kids. To invoke a phrase common among my high-school peers way back when, our mad king is “funnier than a train wreck.” These days may be dark, but there have been darker. My grandparents had the Great Influenza and World War I. My parents had the Great Depression and World War II. In my turn, I grew up with the certainty that I’d be dead before thirty—along with every other living thing except cockroaches—in a nuclear holocaust. This wasn’t funny but, somehow, Tom Lehrer found rich irony in the prospect of global annihilation. In his 1965 LP, “That Was The Year That Was,” he turned Armageddon into a bouncy ditty that read, in part:

“So long, Mom, I’m off to drop the Bomb,/ So don’t wait up for me./ But while you swelter down there in your shelter,/ You can see me, on your TV./ Watch Brink-a-ley and Hunt-a-ley, describing contrapuntally/ The cities we have lost./ No need for you to miss a minute of the agonizing holocaust…”

During those same strange days, the Grim Reaper of Vietnam loomed over every male approaching age eighteen, poised to snatch into its black shroud any of us not sheltered in college with that life-saving “2-S” Selective Service tag. Fifty thousand of us were killed by Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon before we were old enough to vote.

But we laughed. Among my fellow literary poseurs, humor was our sword and shield, sarcasm was our armor, comedy was both consolation and perspective. One of our teen role models was Holden Caulfield, whose mordant profanity was forbidden in the classroom, so we passed dog-eared copies of The Catcher in the Rye from hip pocket to hip pocket. Our pre-Rambo war heroes were Sergeant Bilko and the darkly comic Yossarian of Catch-22.

We sought out comedy: Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Mark Twain’s blasphemous Letters from the Earth. Our poets were, of course, T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost but also e.e. cummings, Ogden Nash and Theodore Roethke, who began one poem, “There was a Serpent who had to sing./ There was. There was./ He simply gave up Serpenting./ Because. Because …”

We had grown up studying satire, parody, mockery and “Alfred E. Neuman for President” in MAD magazine. We unfolded Playboy for the naked women but found, on the back pages, the brilliance of artist Art Spiegelman (Maus) in the comic-book farce of Little Annie Fanny. We saw, in the “funny pages,” drawn by Walt Kelly (“Pogo”) and Al Capp (“L’il Abner’), smartass political addenda to Huntley, Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. We read Mike Royko and Russell Baker on the op-ed pages of the Wisconsin State Journal. Our TV “influencers” were Nichols and May, Garry Moore and Durward Kirby, Mort Sahl, Señor Wences, George Gobel, the Smothers Brothers, Rowan and Martin, Groucho Marx (“I like a good cigar, but I take it out once in a while.”) and Spike Jones—who had been funny since the bleakest days of World War II: “When der Fuehrer says we ist de master race,/ We heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in der Fuehrer’s face …”

Maybe my friends and I, who laughed—through our mid-century ordeal—to keep from crying, were outliers. Maybe the kids around us were as despairing and dyspeptic as the students whose mirthless prose I’m reading today. But I wonder if we older folks have somehow convinced our offspring—and their kids—that there’s nothing funny anymore. Did we forget to share with our kids the therapeutic tonic of kidding around? Did we convey the message that laughter, after all, is not the best medicine and might actually be poisonous?

A while ago, one of my copy editors questioned my locating a high school in one of my novels beside a graveyard. This seemed, she said, unlikely. But this wasn’t fiction. La Follette High has a cemetery next-door. In our formative years, my friends and I—guided haphazardly by parents, by some of our teachers, by the funny pages and TV comics, by movies (Dr. Strangelove OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World) and music—developed the soul-saving good sense of whistling past that graveyard.

Maybe life has gotten too cruel and unforgiving, and the future too hopeless for kids to laugh at their troubles, or to laugh at all, except in code (LOL, LMAO). But whistling? C’mon, kids! This is a timeless skill as effortless as Lauren Bacall, who was still a teenager, reminded Bogart, in one of the sexiest punchlines ever uttered:

“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? Just put your lips together … and blow.”