Rage is easy, comedy is hard

by David Benjamin

“Serving in Congress is like having a second shot at high school.” — Barney Frank

MADISON, Wis.—The day Barney Frank stepped into my office at the Mansfield (Mass.) News, I got no sense that he was angry about anything. He had established a reputation as a) probably the smartest guy in American politics and b) the funniest.

But his sense of humor was his tell.

Underneath that amiable, sharp-witted and slightly overweight exterior was a deep-seated, lifelong kernel of rage. I understood, because I had seen a similar streak of laughter-leavened anger in my father. And, as I look back, I realize that most of my heroes in life have been people driven by a quiet fury that had been tempered—arduously—by a talent for the razor-edged jibe.
My dad, a frustrated man too smart for his smalltown milieu, was angry enough, in his younger days, to drive away his wife and scare his kids. But he was a master of irony and the most charming publican in Monroe County. As he aged, his anger receded—but never departed—and his wit became his signature.

I developed my own anger, almost unconsciously, as a grade-school outcast, unfashionably bright and stigmatized as the child of a divorcée in a Catholic school. But as I chafed against the sneering of peers and nursed my latent ire, I studied my dad’s knack, in his best moments, to deflect his life’s frustrations into self-effacing comedy.

I came of my cultural age in the era of the Angry Young Man. Dyspeptic post-teen males were prominent in letters (the Beat Poets, Ken Kesey, Eldridge Cleaver), in music (Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Barry McGuire) in film (Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One) and often in the news (Hell’s Angels, Black Panthers, Weathermen). The patron saint of angry young men everywhere was probably James Dean, who seethed with anger and anguish through two (Rebel and East of Eden) of the only three movies he ever made. Before the release of his last film, Giant, a big-budget sprawl in which he was compelled to wear a cowboy hat and lots of makeup, Dean died on the highway in his Porsche. In the crash that killed him, the other car was evidently at fault and Dean was going thirty miles-an-hour slower than his legend celebrates. But Dean’s death at age 24 has come down us as an object lesson, a definitive tantrum by the quintessential Angry Young Man.

When I was fifteen, I was captivated by Dean’s Shakespearean performance as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. I mourn him still because of an immense talent lost too soon, but moreso because he never got the chance to outgrow his anger. Indeed, the funniest moment in Dean’s three films wasn’t his line. In Rebel, just before the “chicky run” that eerily foreshadows Dean’s automotive demise, Jim asks Buzz Gunderson, played by Corey Allen, “Why do we do this?” Allen gets one of cinema’s great punchlines. Laconically lamenting the imperative of performative manliness, Buzz replies, “You’ve gotta do somethin’. Don’t you?”

In counterpoint to the inchoate youthful rage modeled by Dean, by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, by Allen Ginsberg in Howl, I healed my psychic wounds with humor. I wrote my first satire—a literary form rooted in anger—in fourth grade at St. Mary’s School and had to justify my mockery, unsuccessfully, to Father Mulligan. I was eleven when I bought the first postal money order of my life, to buy a subscription to MAD magazine. In high school, I began to style my writing after authors whose anger had been subdued with a shot of wry: Jaroslav Hasek, William Goldman, Joseph Heller, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut. Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth was my alternative Bible, articulating and mitigating my outrage against a Church that had—I thought—duped and indoctrinated me. (It wasn’t ’til much later that I realized I had somehow absorbed a therapeutic dose of Jesuit skepticism.)

In 1969, I became a die-hard fan of the Boston Celtics because of Bill Russell. He was then player-coach of an aging team, pitted in the National Basketball Association’s Finals against the most gifted and glamorous team ever assembled, the Los Angeles Lakers of Jerry West, Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain and the silky Elgin Baylor. The Celtics had survived six games against this Hollywood five, but were overmatched underdogs on the road in Tinseltown for Game 7. According to sports reports and subsequent legend, Russell stepped onto the court at the Fabulous Forum, the newest and loveliest arena in America, and he looked up. Russell, who played his home games in an aged stadium that was squeezed into a Boston neighborhood where no black man dared to walk after dark, saw, above the court, a provocation. Owner Jack Kent Cooke had filled an immense net with purple and gold balloons, his team’s colors, to be released as soon as the Lakers had dispatched Russell’s creaky band of hoop has-beens.

Russell responded to Cooke’s hubris with one of sports’ immortal lines: “Those fuckin’ balloons are never coming down.”

Of course, they never did. Cooke had impetuously pitted wealth, arrogance and glitz against the anger of the proudest black man who ever played basketball. However, Bill Russell, like my dad and Mark Twain, had mellowed with time. He balanced the chip on his shoulder with a joie de l’humour that cooled his jets and endeared him to his peers—and to his coach, Arnold Auerbach, whose nickname, “Red,” was reference to his own short and fiery temper.

Like Red Auerbach, Barney Frank was a Jew. Secretly, until he came out in 1987, Barney was gay. He understood the ostracism, the isolation and the stifled, stifling rage of belonging to two blackballed minorities in a society that only gives lip service to the declaration by a white Anglo-Saxon slaveholder that “all men are created equal.” Virtually every achievement in Frank’s life was a repudiation of the destiny ordained by his exclusion from John Donne’s main. His every triumph, like Bill Russel’s eleven NBA titles, was a raised fist of defiance. But Barney knew better than to strut, boast and gloat whenever he beat his detractors. Barney had history’s richest comic heritage, a Jewish sense of humor. Plus, he was from New Jersey, the most sarcastic state in America.

In the end, a half-hour in my newspaper office with Barney Frank—who won his election that year by twenty points—was a session of congenial sparring and political kidding between two chronic smartasses.

When I learned last week that Frank had died—but not without first issuing a few sharp words to the Democratic Party—I remembered our encounter fondly. It also summoned to mind my long-held conviction that anger is energy, an inspiration as powerful in human affairs as faith, hope and love. But, unless anger is leavened by a calming perspective—ideally by respecting its tendency to detonate messily—it simply hurts, offends and alienates.

Barney Frank was, I think, an angry man. Like Twain and Bill Russell, Reverend King and Stephen Colbert, he deserved to be angry. But, although he was expert at pissing off other people, Barney rarely showed his own temper. He understood, better than almost all his colleagues in politics, the dire cost of losing his cool.

Referring to the true believers of his acquaintance, both leftist and right-wing, Barney once said, “They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.”

That’s a good line.