​IN PRAISE OF TASTELESS HUMOR

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the president. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin. ​

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the president. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.      David Letterman
 
If nothing else, I know that more people will read this column than most of my other ones because of the title. So this better be good.
 
I have never met a person who does not believe he or she has a good sense of humor. Some of those folks are wrong, but I think laughter is so important in this world that I don’t want to tell them and risk taking away what little fun they can find.
 
I used to travel with a talk about humor in which I acknowledged that any time you had to explain it, it wasn’t funny anymore. That’s because humor relies on three things: surprise, injury, and a sense of superiority. Take away any of those three things and the listener/observer won’t laugh, at least honestly. The whole laughing-with-you/laughing-at-you cliché is just an aspect of those three things, especially the last one.
 
Take this classic Letterman joke. The surprise comes with the last option. The injury is, Lincoln is dead. The sense of superiority is a little more complicated: first, the listener is not dead, and second, the intellectual exercise Dave seems to be creating is punctured for its pretentiousness.  And…presto! Now the joke isn’t funny anymore.
 
That is especially true because, if you think about it for a minute, there is nothing funny about Lincoln being dead. He was, of course, assassinated. It was a tragedy on every level. Making sport of a murder victim is the height of insensitivity because it diminishes the condemnatory nature of the immoral act and seems to make it less shocking and more acceptable. Wow, now the joke REALLY isn’t funny.
 
There is so much more to humor than those three ingredients. Context is perhaps the most important.  This joke works more than 150 years after Lincoln’s death in a way it could not possibly have been received at his funeral.  I cannot even begin to define the elements of context. A comedy show sets the context of laughter – people come intending to laugh. A conference of Lincoln scholars, especially if they take themselves seriously, might not be primed to delight at the demise of their subject. But in between those two extremes? You kind of have to be there.
 
I admire the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. They were faced with the unimaginable challenge of the hit musical comedy, “The Book of Mormon,” taking aim not only at their scripture, not only at their values, not only at their being overwhelmingly White, but at their commitment to abstinence from the coarser aspects of culture (and I do not mean only caffeine). In order to gauge a reaction, some devout Mormon had to deal with a script and lyrics that deployed the f-bomb more frequently than negative political ads during campaign season.  And how did the LDS Church respond? They took out ads in “Playbill” that said, “You’ve seen the play. Now read the book.” That is classy. And funny.
 
Would the world have been a better place if “The Book of Mormon” had celebrated the generosity and family-centric ethos of the church instead of the practices and hierarchical culture most people outside the church find off-putting? In a respect-for-the-First-Amendment’s-free-exercise-clause sense, absolutely. But those of us who were surprised, saw the injuries, and felt superior laughed, setting aside humorless outrage. The musical comedy was tasteless, inappropriate, offensive, disrespectful. And funny.
 
A dour rabbi I once knew once offered this critique of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers:” I don’t have to see it to know I don’t like it. (I replied, “Can I have your tickets?”) Humor is no more a get-out-of-jail-free card than the free speech clause of the First Amendment, but a good joke (and how much the more so a great joke) can help us see the absurdity of our obsessions with being serious, even when justified. What constitutes a good joke? Well, I can’t define your context. You kind of have to be there.
 
If Lincoln were alive today, he would be 213 years old, and likely not strong enough to do any of the things Letterman suggested. But I’d like to think that if he were alive, he would at least be chuckling.