Henrietta Hay's Column

Have the recession and the election caused Americans to lose their sense of humor, or was it on its way out before that?

"Nobody tells jokes any more," a friend said. So I told her the Texas middle school story-of-the-week. "Two men ran into a bar. When the first one bumped his head, the other one should have ducked." My friend decided that stories like that might explain the shortage.

I think that our collective sense of humor is not decreasing but simply changing. What is funny to one generation probably is not to the next one. J. M Barrie said, "The humorist's like a man firin' at a target -- he doesna ken whether he hits or no till them at the target tells 'im." "Them at the target," today are a lot more sophisticated than our ancestors were, and we laugh at different things. This may or may not be progress.

Once upon a time we thought Amos and Andy were pretty funny. Today they would not be allowed on the air, so perhaps civilization has advanced a little. More recently, Fibber McGee and Molly kept us laughing on Wednesday nights at the inept housewife and we still think of Molly when stuff falls out of our closets. George Burns and Gracie Allen continued the stereotype of the dumb-like-a-fox housewife who made us laugh, but most of us wouldn't think them funny now. Today we have Roseanne as the Housewife from Hell. She is a far cry from Molly or Gracie, and millions of modern Americans relate to her and laugh with her - or at her.

That brings us to modern television, which does not define humor the way J. M. Barrie does. The TV powers that be think that I am not smart enough to know what is funny, so they tell me just in case I hadn't noticed. They have added the ubiquitous laugh track, which I would gladly consign to the Gobi Desert. It is noisy and distracting and they turn it on after nearly every sentence of dialogue. One time when I was too irritated to follow the story line, I counted laugh track insertions. At one point when one character said, "What?" the laugh track exploded. It is hard for real live people sitting at home to compete with the raucous laughter and only a few situation comedies are good enough to rise above it. Personally I think Murphy Brown is one of them. Fortunately Northern Exposure is not considered a situation comedy, so we can chuckle or not as we choose.

All in all, I suspect that television has contributed more to the decline of humor than the recession, unless you stay up until midnight and catch some of the not-for-kiddies shows.

Today's political scene has many aspects of a major joke, but it is so scary we are afraid to laugh at it. While the current election has some pretty funny aspects, the politicians are notoriously lacking in humor. Not since Adlai Stevenson have we had a really witty presidential candidate, and look what happened to him. All most people remember is the hole in the sole of his shoe.

I have often wondered why we are so afraid of a leader with a sense of humor. We seem to think that if a President or Governor or Senator laughed out loud, his/her dignity would be impugned. Of course, almost any joke is going to offend someone, as many a politician has found to his sorrow. Probably they agree with that cynic Malcolm Muggeridge that "good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore." But the ability to laugh at oneself would be a welcome addition to the political scene. I think I will vote for the next candidate that finds something truly funny in the pomposity of an election year.

No, I don't think we have lost our national sense of humor. As long as we have politics and teen-age jokes, we will survive.