Getting the Joke

This squib appeared recently in the Washington Post Magazine. It seems, the squib says, that Carol Burnett, one of the doyennes of the now-outdated '50s TV culture (which managed to remain the norm during her tenure on CBS from 1967-78), is suing the Fox network over an insulting reference, broadcast on "The Family Guy" in 2006, to one of her signature comic characters.

"Burnett is angry about an 18-second blip in an episode from a year ago, which showed her trademark 'charwoman' janitor mopping up in a porn shop, aped the theme music from her hit '70s comedy show, and made a vulgar reference to Burnett's signature ear tug," the article says.

The writer of the article, Hank Stuever, thinks Burnett is just being, like, "I'm old, and I don't get it, and I sure don't dig it."

When I read that, I wondered what it is that Burnett (and myself) are too superannuated to get.


Meanwhile, the Don Imus blowup was about to happen. As the whole world knows by now, in the brief time since Easter Sunday, 2007, the talk-radio mainstay has rightfully had his show canceled for referring to the African-American women on the Rutgers basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."

David Steele of The Baltimore Sun today filed this column on the controversy. He correctly bemoans the tendency of many observers to lose focus on the fact that the Rutgers women were dehumanized by Imus for being black, female athletes. That's the main point here, I fully agree.

But there's another point, too, which is that some have been accusing the Imus-bashers of (in Steele's words) "not getting the joke."

Not getting it — there's that phrase again!


It's as if we are living in a world in which anyone can say or do anything ... as long as it can be (however remotely) construed as a "joke."

When the writers and producers of "Family Guy" trash Carol Burnett's charwoman, it's a "joke."

When a shock-jock trashes the Rutgers hoopsters on the air, it's a "joke."

When Michael "Cosmo Kramer" Richards uses the N-word while doing standup at the Laugh Factory, it's a (bad) "joke." When he apologizes later, he says he was simply trying to shut up his black hecklers by being even more "outrageous" than they were. Being "outrageous" is the new name for humor. And, as everyone knows, there is such a thing as "humorist's license," after all.


The essence of humor is to detach briefly from whatever part of the world is being laughed at. To denature it. To (if it is a human being) dehumanize it.

But if the humorist goes too far — as the "Family Guy" folks did, as Don Imus did, as Michael Richards did — the result isn't funny; it's a Mel Gibson moment.

For some reason today, people are always trying to get right up to the proverbial line on the other side of which is "too far." Maybe that's because we're so postmodern these days, we no longer believe in rules of courtesy and civility.


An op-ed piece by Reza Dibadj in The Sun asks whether postmodernism can save the world. That philosophical movement, Dibadj says, enshrines "incredulity toward meta-narratives." With that quote from Jean-François Lyotard does Dibadj finally explain postmodernism to me in a way I can understand.

A "meta-narrative," I assume, is a sort of master story, a template for the unfolding of a plot in a novel or movie or whatever: one that implicitly is understood in the same way by the audience as by the author. As, for example, "the butler did it" in a mystery, which we all understand to be a case of "the least-obvious suspect" who is actually, deep down, fated to be the true culprit.

If such narratives' "fatedness" reflects something deeply true about the reality of our world, then we should all be anything but incredulous about the validity of meta-narratives. But if fatedness is basically just a literary convention, and nothing more, then we ought to "deconstruct" it and become thereby incredulous toward it. That is the postmodern mantra.


Once we become thus immunized to meta-narratives, we can get about the serious business which is (to borrow the words of Dibadj) "to forge our own localized stories."

All this stuff about who does and does not "get the joke," it seems to me, is really a way of saying that the "joke" is what sometimes happens, by accident, as we struggle to "forge our own localized stories." Sometimes when we improvise, we cross the proverbial line. Ha ha. The "joke" may be on us ... but that's all it is: a "joke."

"Jokes" are what happen when the serious business of becoming postmodern goes temporarily awry. To which I say, bring back the meta-narrative.