Bemoaning our loss of laughter
By Stephen Helgesen
This piece was posted May 8, 2025, on The American Thinker.
There are many more things’ we Americans can talk about today than we can laugh at.
And if that line didn’t shake something loose in you, you needn’t read any further. The reason is you will not agree with my thesis, which is that as a nation we have lost one of our most valuable safety valves that has served to keep us all sane … laughter.
Laughing at life’s absurdities or even its actual challenges was always a way for us to blow off steam and protect our loved ones from being our punching bag. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, comedy flourished in the U.S. Comedians of nearly all stripes were sought after on television, in supper clubs and on vinyl LPs.
We all had our favorites, from a generation that included W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx and Will Rodgers and were preceded by satirists like Bob Hope, Samuel Clemens, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Hennie Youngman, Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett, Jack E. Leonard, Alan King, Don Rickles, Phyllis Diller and Rodney Dangerfield.
All were notably un-blue, with routines that eschewed scatological patter or downright vulgarities.
Then came the turbulent mid-to-late sixties and comedy turned nasty. This gave rise to comedians like Richard Pryor who never met a swear word (or a drug) that he didn’t like.
Comedy had not come of age; it had regressed and practitioners began to appeal to our disgust with our society and the world. Comedians were bottom-feeders off Americans’ feelings. Variety shows featuring comedians started to disappear and late-night talk shows filled the void.
Comedy had lost its preeminence as a temporary antidote for America’s tension and frustration with recessions and unemployment and wars and, instead, became an anomaly interlude between interviews with vapid Hollywood actors and pompous politicians.
After Sept. 11, 2001, comedy seemed to die along with the thousands that perished in the World Trade Center attack.
And then came political correctness.
No longer could comedians tell an ethnic joke or a gender-based joke. Jokes about real life and America’s struggles with its own society and culture were off limits until some comedians started to rebel. Humorists like Lewis Black took up the challenge. Black’s humor was decidedly un-P.C. but was roundly accepted because he and an HBO host, Bill Maher, tapped into the growing anger towards America’s conservatives who had formed groups like the Tea Party and were actively opposing the left-wing political forces that Bill Clinton had awakened in the 1990s.
African Americans had powerful comedians, too, whose humor initially crossed over into the mainstream — like Eddie Murphy, who was preceded by Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis, Jr. and the now-disgraced Bill Cosby. Others, though, went a bluer and often more ‘ghetto’ or rap-influenced and even protest-politics route that didn’t cross over. This kind of humor hit a wall with Evangelical Christians and arch conservatives who opposed it on obscenity grounds.
This created a niche market for comedians like Larry the Cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy.
But America then become comedically bifurcated.
In time, you could choose to reinforce your own personal bias with your own comedians that represented your particular political ideology. No longer was comedy poking fun at everybody, equally. It had ridden the crest of a political wave that had separated the country along ideological lines and was now swimming around in a tidal pool, feeding off the same kelp.
Is it possible for America to find its way back to comedy that doesn’t need to shock us every five seconds with a foul four-letter word or a vulgarity to be funny?
Have Americans turned a comedic corner that can only lead to a cul-de-sac from which there is no exit? Are all that we have left the shocksters like Sarah Silverman to keep us entertained as she attempted to do at the Kennedy Center honoring late night host Conan O’Brian with the Mark Twain prize? Silverman had pasted a photo of O’Brian’s lips (which she said resembled a vagina) under the seats of every person in the theatre and then asked them to hold it between their legs so the television cameras could record it for posterity.
I doubt this would have pleased Samuel Clemens or any comedian that still had a modicum of good taste left in them. It did, however, show us how far we have fallen off the turnip truck of propriety and are happily rolling around in the gutter beside it.
The real question is: “Do we even know how to laugh anymore without being subjected to a comedian’s demand that we give up our sensibilities?” There are still plenty of things to laugh about that don’t include Donald Trump or the Republicans. I would suggest that comedians accept who they really are – simple jesters – and stop trying to change the world lest they be seen as the proverbial dogs who have caught the car they’ve been chasing and have the mistaken impression that they can drive it.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven on American politics, and has written over 1,500 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He now lives in Denmark and is a frequent political commentator on Danish media. He can be reached at: [email protected].
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Have a great and prosperous week.
Hug somebody.
SPIDER Bytes
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