Make America Funny Again

Americans need a break from humorless scolds.

Debbie and I have sort of a ritual, and it involves surfing Hulu/Disney, AppleTV, Prime, Netflix, and the free channels for something to watch – and usually failing. We have thousands of channels of nothing – I have reached a point where I am reluctant to try anything new for fear of wasting fifteen minutes to find out whatever it is sucks.

Last night was one of those nights when there was nothing on in which we wanted to risk investing our time. So, I wasted time by surfing the web and watching clips from the Democrat summer meeting.

Holy crap.

Has there ever been a more joyless, humorless group of scolds?

I think not. It was clip after clip of “I’m the first person of my race, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. in my position and even though I suck at my job, clap for me”, “we need to acknowledge how bad we are”, and “has anyone here stopped thinking about how fascist and authoritarian the Bad Orange Man is?”.

But what really struck me was how performative all the seriousness felt. It felt as if the Dems really didn’t want to be there, but they had no choice. It was like watching a low budget Netflix movie and trying hard as they could, the “C” level actors just could not pull it off.

They all just looked unhappy.

Given that experience, a few random thoughts and observations began ricocheting around in my quite spacious empty skull like a marble in an empty paint can.

America seems to be losing its sense of humor, and while it is appropriate to be serious about truly serious things, what many in America consider serious are ridiculous. It seems a minority of our country believes they have a solution and spend all their waking hours looking for problems that solution can solve…and in the process, making most Americans 100% miserable.

I was thinking about how Jefferson wrote that the “pursuit of happiness” was one of the three legs of the liberty stool and peace is part of it – you can’t be happy when you fear for your property or your life – happiness also includes the stress relief and mental release a little humor provides.

We need to be able to laugh – at ourselves, at each other, at funny animal videos.

The problem is that unhappy people amplify the bad and we have nothing on the other end of the scale to moderate the negativity.

Losing our sense of humor is something that seems unusual in American history – one of the interesting aspects of the most difficult and dangerous times in American history, wars- and particularly WWII, gave rise to great comedians, actors and musicians – Bob Hope, George Burns, Red Buttons, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, Clark Cable, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart – and Ronald Reagan to name a few…

Our entertainment industry has bought into the idea that they need to push the postmodernist agenda…and therein lies the problem. If everything is serious enough to be an issue, then nothing is funny. Many established comedians have stopped playing college venues due to this very fact – and as a result, the comedy institutions are producing young comedians who just aren’t funny, at least not to the majority of America.

Where are people like the original SNL cast, "The Not Ready For Prime-Time Players" - Laraine Newman, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, and Chevy Chase (even though Chevy Chase has turned into a bitter old man) or the original SCTV cast - John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas? Where are comedians like Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy?

Who has the courage (and chops) to be the new Mel Brooks? For godness sake, this man made arguably the funniest movie of all time, Blazing Saddles, a movie based on lampooning racial stereotypes. He even made a movie called “The Producers”, the central plot of which revolved around putting on a Broadway musical titled “Springtime for Hitler”.

I know it seems to be easing, but it is still difficult to imagine a film like “Blazing Saddles” getting greenlit by Hollywood today.

Never happen.

As I told one of my kids, when you succumb to the postmodernist idea that there are no objective standards, that truth is relative and that opinions are equal in weight to facts, it should come as no surprise that people will be offended by anything and everything can be construed to fit any narrative. It just so happens that most of the narratives today are negative and designed to punish.

This is not to say America doesn’t have serious problems – because it does – but the attention given to issues created by the social justice postmodernists is taking time away from working on the real issues and without humor, the relief needed to deal with the true seriousness is missing.

We have MAGA and MAHA, what we need is a healthy dose of MAFA - Make America Funny Again.