What's Humor Good For?
If you want to understand humor, try explaining the Volga River to a Marxist...
I got my start as a journalist trying to be "seriously funny" back when the Cold War was still icy cold and Leonid Brezhnev was the dictator of the U.S.S.R.
Harper's Magazine assigned me to travel on a three-week riverboat luxury cruise through the Soviet Union with a group of aging American leftists. These were not your Elizabeth Warrens or your Nancy Pelosis, but real unreconstructed 1930s Stalinist types. They were to the left of – and even older than – Bernie Sanders, if you can imagine.
Watching this bunch of geriatric Reds trying to put a good face on Brezhnev's Russia was a remarkable experience.
The experience reached its peak while we were going through one of the enormous locks on the Don-Volga canal. A very old, very Marxist lady came up next to me at the boat's railing. She was staring at the gigantic blank wall of concrete on that side of the lock.
"Marvelous! Marvelous!" she said. "They're such marvelous engineers in the Soviet Union." I agreed with her that it certainly was one really big wall of concrete. "Marvelous engineers!" she said, peeking over the side of the boat, "And where do they get all the water?!"
I had an epiphany right then and there. I realized that, for the rest of my life, I would never lack things to write about. All I had to do was put myself in foolish situations (something I'm good at) and keep my eyes and ears open.
I'd go on to cover six wars, two revolutions, two Palestinian Intifadas, seven or eight local insurrections, a number of Third World elections (which combine the worst aspects of combat, civil disturbance, and U.S. presidential candidate debates), plus any number of other places exhibiting garden variety hatred and repression (U.S. presidential candidate debates, for instance). I have found them all humorous.
In general, there are three kinds of humor:
- Parody – where you make fun of people who are smarter than you are.
- Satire – where you make fun of people who are richer than you are.
- Burlesque – where you do both, while taking off your clothes.
I don't personally attempt any of these (especially, you'll be relieved to know, the last one).
Instead, I try to use humor as a journalistic technique for covering serious stories such as war, revolution... and health care reform.
The Democratic politicians who passed Obamacare and the Republicans who are trying to replace Obamacare are all telling us that we can increase the amount of medical treatment, increase the number of people who receive medical treatment, and decrease the total cost of medical treatment.
I only got as far as Practical Math in high school, but this doesn't add up. It's like saying I can smoke, drink, gain 200 pounds, and then, when I've reached age 95, win an Ironman triathlon.
Federal "health care reform" is a tragedy. But humor has nothing to do with the charming or the cheerful. Humor is how we cope with violated taboos and rising anxieties (and rising gorges, too). Humor is our response to the void of absurdity. Humor comes to the fore when events render us impotent. (And as men my age know, all events eventually do.)
We laugh when we don't know what the hell else to do. Humor is not about a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn, unless – to borrow a line from my late colleague at the National Lampoon, Michael O'Donoghue – the kitten strangles.
I had spent most of the 1970s, along with O'Donoghue, as an editor at the National Lampoon. Meanwhile, the real world seemed like a bigger joke than anything we could come up with.
Mark Twain said, "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow." I wanted to get at that awful secret source.
After going to Russia for Harper's, I got an idea to take the skills of humor-writing and apply them to reporting on actual news events. Convince editors to pay my way to Lebanon, El Salvador, South Africa, etc. I wanted to know where trouble came from.
I was curious about the kind of trouble humans cause for themselves – the kind of trouble that humans could, presumably, quit causing at the drop of a hat (or at the drop of a gun, anyway).
I wasn't curious about natural disasters – earthquakes, mudslides, hurricanes, and floods.
How do you laugh off a flood? I mean, unless you worked for FEMA under the George W. Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina?
And the one thing I really like about being a humorist is that I'm not expected to have any answers. It's the great benefit to humor as a trade. Ignorance has a positive value. I mean when I'm covering a story, I'm free to just come right out and say that I don't understand the big issues.
Like the 2008-2009 financial crisis... I didn't understand it one bit. The guy down the road from me with a lot of cars up on blocks in his yard fell behind on his mortgage payments and the world economy exploded.
I'm ignorant. I find this to be an advantage. It was an especially big advantage when I was a foreign correspondent. I was so ignorant that I was willing to admit curiosity about even the most basic aspects of international political troubles, social squabbles, and armed strife.
And this basic, primitive level of curiosity allowed me to avoid some of the pitfalls of more sophisticated journalism. I never interviewed any heads of state or highly placed sources (not that they'd let me, but that was fine). These people didn't get to where they were by being dumb enough to tell the truth to reporters. And although I'll admit to most faults, I do not have the network news anchor-sized self-conceit that makes me think that Vladimir Putin is suddenly going to confide in me. "Just between us, P.J., on Monday, Russia nukes Latvia."
A humorist necessarily writes from a worm's-eye point of view. The things I asked my fellow members of the blind, spineless worm phylum are things like, "What's for dinner?" and "Please don't kill me." In other words, I asked what ordinary people ask during periods of confusion and strife.
I stay away from earnest messages. Well, I don't really stay away from them. Half the world's suffering (and hence, per Twain, half the world's humor) is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality – radical Islamism and Federal Reserve monetary policy, to name two. But I try – sometimes unsuccessfully – to avoid promoting any earnest messages myself.
The opposite of humor is not seriousness. Humor, by its nature, has to have serious content. That kitten tangled in the ball of yarn, even if the poor thing doesn't strangle... The situation is, from the kitten's point of view, fraught with serious contradiction and frustration. This is why puns are oppressive and shaggy-dog stories are obnoxious – they are "humor" without the necessary serious content.
The opposite of humor is earnestness. Earnestness is not about how serious an issue is. Earnestness is about how seriously the person talking about the issue takes himself. A serious person says: "It's important to lower the federal deficit." An earnest person says "I'm important for saying it's important to lower the federal deficit."
No matter how serious things are, taking ourselves seriously about them does not improve the fate of the people involved. By being terribly, terribly earnest about AIDS, we could not save a single life. The condom machine in a gas station men's room was doing more good than we were.
Fifty years of being earnest about the Holocaust did nothing to prevent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, or Bosnia.
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college (specifically, I'd say, journalism school).
If you'll indulge an old liberal-arts major for a moment... The serious purpose of humor can be seen in Aristotle's distinction between comedy and tragedy. It's not that awful things don't happen in comedies. For example, in the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, the women kick the men out of bed until the men stop fighting wars.
Lysistrata is about two awful things: war and not having sex. But comedy, said Aristotle, concerns ordinary people in every day circumstances, while tragedy concerns great men and important events. Well, as you may have noticed, the world is a bit short of great men.
As for important events, we all know what kind of everyday circumstances important events – like the London terror attacks – can cause for ordinary people.
Aristotle said that the other important distinction between comedy and tragedy is that tragedy captures the emotions – "freezes us between pity and terror."
Frozen between pity and terror – that's watching your kids become teenagers. Not much you can do to help it, and nothing you can do to stop it. Being frozen between pity and terror is not a great place to be.
Comedy shakes us out of this stupor. Anger will do it too. But comedy has the advantage of giving us some emotional distance on what we're dealing with. I mean, I'm a Republican, so lately I've been really angry – at the Republicans.
The Republicans have the Oval Office, the House, the Senate, and half of the Supreme Court, and they still can't get any place. They're just standing there like kids waiting for mom to help them cross the street.
Thank goodness I don't have to make sense of politics. I just have to make fun of it.
Real seriousness is involuntary. If you're an American soldier trying to stem the violence in Afghanistan, you'll be serious about it. If you're a decent person, you'll also have serious feelings witnessing that violence.
In fact, if you're a decent person, faced with all the world's catastrophes, horrors, and pleas for help, you'll make a serious attempt to perform the right acts – whether you're serious-acting or not.
St. Thomas More, the Lord High Chancellor of England martyred by Henry VIII for refusing to become Protestant, joked with his head on the block. "My neck is very short," he told the executioner. "Take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry – for saving thy honesty."
The Persian king Xerxes was amazed when his spies told him that the doomed Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae were combing their hair and changing into clean clothes for battle. It seemed a far too serious moment for such gallantry.
But gallantry and good humor are the proper attitudes for people who are worth taking seriously. Or so the gallant humorist likes to think.
There is one exception, however – one situation in which taking yourself seriously and being self-important are completely appropriate. A haughty attitude and an earnest tone are always needed when calling the dog.
Goodbye for Now...
Dear Digest readers,
This is, I'm sad to say, my last Stansberry Digest column – at least, for the time being.
Although... I'm not really going away. I'm just traveling to another dimension. And you're invited to come along.
I'm now editing a new free digital magazine, American Consequences: Ideas That Matter.
Stansberry Research and I are doing something different in the field of financial news and newsletters.
For 18 years, Stansberry Research has been known for its investment tactics and strategies and for its examination of macro- and microeconomic trends that drive marketplace shifts.
But there's more to Stansberry Research than wise analysis and savvy stock, bond, and commodity tips. Behind the expertise are Stansberry's people. And behind the people are ideas.
Ideas matter. Ideas shape the market. But those ideas also have social, moral, intellectual, and political effects.
The ideas people have led to the ways people behave, and the ways people behave led to... American Consequences.
Please take a look. I hope you'll enjoy it.
Now, let me return to the subject of fond farewells...
I've been doing this column for the Digest since October 2015, and I haven't had so much fun writing things since I was passing study hall love notes to Kathy P. back in high school. (Hi, Kathy! Hope all's well with you!)
Until the Digest, I had spent most of my 47 years as a journalist covering things like Washington politics, foreign wars, and tragic events in far-away places. I've been much happier writing about the free market.
Unlike Washington, markets are rational (most of the time). And unlike politics, the free market is never zero-sum. We can make more goods and services. We wouldn't even want to make more senators and representatives.
The free market is an obvious improvement on war. In fact, it's the opposite of war. You go to markets and make voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit. You go to war and get killed.
And although tragic events do occur in markets, at least they occur right here at home, in my bank account, instead way off in the desert of Iraq, the boondocks of former Yugoslavia, or the chaos of Somalia. At least I can cry myself to sleep in my own bed.
I've loved writing for the Digest. And I love Digest readers. You give me exhilarating feedback – hitting me with new information, topics, points of view... smacking me on the behind of my prose when I get out of line, and sometimes even laughing at my jokes.
Plus, I've loved working with the Stansberry team. Many of you have met them. For those of you who haven't, they are quick, sharp, warm, thought-filled, thoughtful, interesting, and interested – just the way you'd expect them to be.
I'm looking forward to working on American Consequences with that Stansberry team and with a bunch of other people who are smarter than I am.
Not to get all sentimental and poetic about it... But a verse from Robert Frost's "The Pasture" comes to mind [with addenda by me in brackets]:
I'm going to clean the [muddy economic thinking out of the marketplace's] pasture spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves [of regulatory obfuscation] away (And wait to watch the [free market] water clear, I may): I sha'n't be gone long. – You come too.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke