No Laughing Matter
Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler can be a funny guy. His Halloween column, “The Deadly No-Growth Craze,” however, was less funny than scary. It turns out that no-growth, an idea harking back to the early 1970s, is back. Only worse: “the new craze, is actually ‘de-growth.” Rhetorically, he asks: “Have we lost our minds? Who could be against raising living standards and reducing poverty?” Where’s the punchline?
“Normally, “I’d say ‘Pfffft, ignore them,’ but none other than the Davos dudes of the World Economic Forum are featuring arguments for de-growth. Weird because mostly growing global companies pay the WEF’s bills—tributes to the woke dons.” Kessler’s contemptuous description of “the Davos dudes” stands in stark contrast to their own dead-serious self-image as a club for “the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” No hidden conspiracy here: the Geneva-based organization’s website lists the names in all their credentialed splendor.
Since its founding in 1971, the WEF has pushed the de-growth agenda steadily. Then came the great crisis that couldn’t be wasted, and the dudes upped the ante. The Covid plague was obviously heaven-sent. “[T]he pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world” is how latter-day prophet Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive chairman, interpreted the pandemic. The Great Reset went viral, pun divinely intended. Described in detail on both the WEF website and a book co-authored by Schwab and Thierry Mallaret, however, TGR turns out to be just rebooted de-growth mantra. Groans Kessler: “Someone tell the World Economic Forum that without growth, life would emulate lockdowns awaiting orders from our leaders. Hey, maybe that’s their goal.” (Maybe?) “Just say no to No-growth.”
We might all laugh about it, but no such luck. Where’s SNL when you need it? AWOL. For years, it has abandoned the humor of Gilda Rattner and her colleagues, choosing instead to snicker at dumb deplorables stuck on the wrong side of history. How did it all go so wrong? “Why Did Comedy Die?” asks Misha Saul on his blog Kvetch, and thousands offer speculations. “Left-of-center satire is becoming an endangered species,” concluded Noah Rothman the day after Halloween in Commentary. But it is columnist Harry Stein who attributes the demise of humor to TGR/de-growth dementia itself.
Stein’s article is part of an excellent new anthology Against the Great Reset, whose contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, and the late Angelo Codevilla, to whom the book is dedicated. Buttressed by strong evidence and air-tight arguments they warn, in the words of editor and contributor Michael Walsh, against this cult of the “satraps of Davos.” For “the damage it can do is incalculable.”
How did we come to this? Stein takes a deceptively lighter topic, but its effects are ominous. The son of a comedian and a self-described red-diaper baby, Stein is no stranger to the “grim rectitude” of the ideologue. But he is on to their new game. He could tell early on that once comedy became an almost exclusive preserve of the Left, it was doomed. When everything is political, nothing is funny. The Party kills all parties, eventually even its own.
The absurdity of the Great Reset/de-growth is familiar fare to anyone who’s heard the popular joke that used to make the rounds in the Soviet Union. It was about a judge seen chuckling as he walks out of his courtroom.
“What’s so funny?” asks a friend.
“I heard a great joke.”
“Tell me.”
“Can’t, I just gave someone ten years for repeating it.”
If we can still laugh at that, it is surely not with the smug self-certainty we once could—not given the regularity of the assaults on free thought in today’s America and the brutality with which they are everywhere enforced, from the newsroom to the boardroom and, yes, on late night television and comedy club stages. Indeed, at this point Hiram Johnson’s famous adage might well use some updating: in the culture wars at hand, truth may be the first casualty, but its sidekick, humor, blindfolded and smoking its last cigarette, is just a split second behind.
Stein dubs the Great Reset “a scheme of such grandiose evil it might have been designed by a DC Comics archvillain.” Yet it used to be possible to be both a leftist and funny: consider his own father and his amazing friends. Joseph Stein, who wrote the screenplay for “Fiddler on the Roof,” had belonged to the pretorian guard of comedy alongside Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, and Neil Simon. Those were halcyon days. And then something happened. Not all at once but stealthily, starting around 1970.
While the academy had been brainwashing impressionable adolescents, Americans were watching TV - especially sitcoms. Indeed, “no popular entertainment in the modern era had more faithfully reflected the nation’s sense of itself,” writes Stein, “than those half-hour slices of quasi-reality.” Lubricated by hilarity, camouflaged in ordinary plots, they made perfect weapons of mass distraction.
[A]s Hollywood progressives abandoned their postwar defensive crouch in the sixties and seventies and began moving toward industry dominance, no genre was more effectively exploited to nudge average Americans leftward. Moreover, this represented a shift not just in television comedy but also in the function of humor in America generally. Never had comedy been put to ideological purposes on such a mass scale; to the contrary, it had long been a place where even the bitterest foes could find common ground. That we generally found the same things funny, or at least not divisive, was, indeed, as much an aspect of our common identity as our shared history and allegiance to fundamental principles now under sustained assault by the internationalist cabal busily revising the nature of appropriate thought at the WEF.
Though America’s ornery, multi-cultural amalgam of immigrants was its defining strength, unum prevailed de pluribus, strengthened by dialogue. What is going on now is sinister in a way not seen before on such a large scale: the culture is imploding, turning against itself. Its anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom turn makes comedy – how to put it? - less Jewish, suggests Stein.
He certainly does not mean that literally. Neither Bob Hope nor Charlie Chaplin had been Jewish, though rumors to that effect have never been entirely disproved. When Eddie Cantor gave Sammy Davis, Jr. a mezuzah, long before the great entertainer’s actual conversion, it was because he had recognized a soul-landsman. And it’s not as if conversion could have made him funny - just look at Marx. Karl, not the brothers, geniuses who catapulted the genre to its zenith.
Those artists had been funny because they were irreverent. Whatever their personal politics, and they were hardly monolithic, it never showed in their equal-opportunity critical, anti-obsequious irony, the light sarcasm devoid of venom. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, Stein reminds us, “and well into the twentieth, America’s most representative humorists were nonideological, taking on all comers. ‘I don’t make jokes,’ cracked Will Rogers, ‘I just watch the government and report the facts’—and it’s a line that might have just as easily been used by Mark Twain fifty years earlier or Johnny Carson fifty years later.”
No longer. Once politics intruded into the world of entertainment, what counted as funny no longer united. It tore us apart. There is no question, declares Stein, “that our foes both at home and abroad revel in their great and ever-increasing power to dictate what is ethically (which is to say, ideologically) permissible, and, as the Great Reset would have it, to exact punishment upon those who stray over their ever-shifting lines.” In other words, the culture is becoming eerily reminiscent of the fate of Jews throughout the centuries, when they retained their right to complain by resorting to an incredibly rich language, Yiddish, suffused with innuendo and humor, through subtle anecdotes whose punchlines eluded those unfamiliar with intimidation, repression, and terror.
No wonder its jokes proliferated under totalitarianism, appropriated and recycled, its dangerous mirth life-sustaining. “Once fascism and Communism routed and regimented the rest of the population as well,” writes Ruth Wisse in her book No Joke, “Jewish humor resonated with citizens under similar attack, and became emblematic of the kind of freedom” only jokes can capture. Which is why the non-Jewish Czech liberal Vladimir Karbusicky “emphasizes the Jewishness of his joking,” explains Wisse, “because where liberalism is under siege, the Jewish joke stands for independence, for the right to joke and freedom to mock.”
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of laughter: now there’s a Declaration of Independence to die for. Real Jewish humor addresses the human condition. The right to joke is the right to not give up, to just say no to political correctness and to de-growth, to refuse Grand apocalyptic Resets; it is the right to snicker at the folly of utopianists playing God.
In The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Wisse described the schlemiel as “the symbol of an entire people in its encounter with surrounding cultures and its opposition to their opposition.” The slightest adjustment reveals his universality as the symbol of anyone in an encounter with surrounding cultures, in opposition to their opposition. It was the crucible for humor at its very best, the caviar of wit.
Centuries of survival against horrendous odds have turned Jews into exquisite comedians who laugh through tears. “In the repertoire of shrugs and quips, among the self-mockery and exaggerated foolishness,” writes professor of Yiddish literature Sanford Pinsker in The Schlemiel as Metaphor, their “comic characters communicated to their audiences at the very deepest levels of sensibility.” Wisse praises the novelist Bernard Malamud for defining the schlemiel condition “as the clearest alternative to the still-dominant religion of success,” exposing the Faustian apostasy for the travesty of its promise. Success indeed.
Since “the Yiddish schlemiel did not abandon faith in the Almighty simply because he was confronted by proofs of God’s perfidy,” observes Wisse, “he learned to live suspended between belief and skepticism, perfectly and eternally balanced.” And what makes this extraordinary feat possible is the most sophisticated instrument of survival known to man: the joke.
Which is how Pinsker concludes:
Two elderly Jewish men sat drinking glass of tea after glass of tea without a word being exchanged between them. After about two hours of silence, one sighed a deep, deep sigh and said, “Oy vay!” His friend answered, “You’re telling me!”
God figured we could take a joke. In fact, He was counting on it.
Juliana Geran Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her latest book is The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom. She has taught at the National Defense University, the Institute of World Politics, American University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland and George Washington University.
