It appears to me that one of the best markers of this country’s ethical rot is the unpardonable babble that passes for entertainment these days.
At the time I was a kid, individuals didn’t have sufficient energy for amusingness. We were too occupied with wiping the smile off Hitler’s face to worry about heedless tittering and sit out of gear laughs. For us, roar was like shoe bands or smallpox vaccines – fantastic to have however not a lavishness a large portion of us could manage.
Besides when we did humor ourselves in certain careless funny redirection we searched out fair, cultivated humorists – men who told thump jokes and regretted their wives crazy using and baffling endeavors to make pot cook. Men who peppered us with plays on words and jabbed fun at the shortcomings of pestering mothers-in-laws and the dangers of shady nonnatives.
Our funnies didn’t malign our nation’s qualities – they epitomized them.
In present modern times however it appears that each hard criminal with a squalid personality and a cynical grievance is parading over the screen of my Magnavox grasping at his private parts, telling disagreeable jokes and carrying on a like raving trick on a day pass from a home for the criminally indecent.
You never caught Bud Abbot calling President Roosevelt a “douchebag” or jabbing fun at the Lindbergh child. You never caught Jack Benny discuss smoking amphetamines or “bumpin’ uglies” with the Andrews Sisters. Those men had class – and they grasped that assuming that they crossed a line we’d beat them silly with a sack of equitable anger speedier than you could state Fatty Arbuckle or The First Amendment.
There are no “take my wife” jokes or pure punches at those vile drink-adoring Irish anymore. Each savage quipster in present modern times needs to split clever about social disparity, political embarrassment, the female life systems and each other issue my era used years smothering, denying and working eagerly to disregard. They’re subversive, they’re rough and they’re undoing our social fabric one HBO uncommon at once.
Provided that you ask me we’re on a way to perdition – and provided that we don’t change our comedic stripes soon and come back to the straightforward joys of ironic statements, beguiling pratfalls and skillfully blue-penciled one-liners it won’t be long before we get our equitable pastries and are using an interminability sitting through an endless “open mic night” in the Lenny Bruce Lounge of the Holiday Inn in Hell.