What's Not Funny?

George Carlin in l969 (ABC TV)

There are certain things that you can’t or are not supposed to joke about and when you do you receive the remonstrative “that’s not funny!” followed by a disconcerting disengagement by the offended party. That’s may have been what George Carlin was trying to avoid when he cancelled “I Kinda Like it When a Lotta People Die,” which was filmed on September 10, 200l. The special is finally seeing the light of day (“George Carlin’s lost pre Sept. ll routine gets new life on CD,” CNN, 9/12/16). Which brings us to the case of the Muslim marine recruit who was put in an industrial level dryer by his drill sergeant at Parris Island (“Marines Scrutinize a Culture of Toughness After a Muslim Recruit's Death," NYT, 9/14/16). It’s a horrific bit of abuse, but there's also something undeniably humorous in it. It’s the kind of black humor that goes  into make a musical like The Producers with its “Springtime for Hitler,” or Wally Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon. Horror becomes the butt of satire. After all putting someone in a dryer is not too far from “hanging them out to dry” and the blustering drill sergeant has always been a source of comedy. Phil Silvers made a big hit of Sergeant Bilko back in the 50’s. Still you have to ask yourself how far is putting someone in a dryer from putting them on a leash like in Abu Ghraib or, for that matter, in an oven. But rather than silencing the laughter, maybe when things reach a certain level of grotesquery, the only thing to do is laugh. Alfred Jarry was prescient in Ubu Roi. His tyrannically comical character bears an uncanny resemblance to the preposterous rantings of dictators like Kim Jong-un and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

All in the Family

According to a piece Business Section of the Times (“Techology's Man Problem,” 4/5/14) Pax Dickinson of BusinessInsider tweeted “it’s not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies.” The tweet was in response to a presentation by two Australians at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon who the Times quoted as saying, “Titshare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” According to the Times the exchange caused ripples in at least one part of the tech universe. Dickinson lost both his job at Business Insider and his partnership with a young woman named Elissa Shevinsky with whom he was involved in a start-up called Glimpse Labs. Dickinson apparently made an apology (which not being one to miss a publicity op, he posted on a blog called VentureBeat) and Shivinsky and he made up, but isn’t this a little like the Salem witch hunts. Wouldn’t those who wish to counter the sexism of the tech world be better off if they fought fire with fire. Why not decree the equivalent of Title IX in intercollegiate athletics? Why not force men to face the same indignities as women by mandating male civil rights violations for educational purposes? Macho tech entrepreneurs could be required to watch a film like Oppressed Majority. The short which depicts a universe where women grope and bully the very men whose talents and abilities they’re dismissive of has according to the The Times already received 8.5 million  hits on YouTube (“French Film Goes Viral, but Not in France,” NYT, 4/6/14). Majorité opprimée, as it’s titled in French, was directed by Eleonore Pourriat, a screenwriter and actress, and according to The Times features a scene where bare-chested women jog past its harried stray-at-home dad, Pierre. Back in the 70’s Carroll O’Connor played Archie Bunker, a wise cracking neanderthal, who made offensive cracks on All in the Family. The show was a smash hit and also did more to create awareness of discriminatory attitudes than the language police who view political correctness as the salvo to inequity.  If only George Carlin were alive to make waves at the next TechCrunch?

The Absence of Presence

George Carlin in l969

Have you ever had the feeling that someone is not really there? It could be them or you. Either the person in question is quite distant and removed because they are thinking of someone or something else or you are having one of those out of body experiences in which you experience both yourself and others as strangers. This last is almost like amnesia but not quite. Verfremndungseffekt is a term for alienation in the theater coined by Brecht, but it can happen in real life. You know exactly who you and they are. You are simply experiencing one degree of separation, as if you were hovering like a doppleganger right outside the confines of personality. This condition, which we might term, “the absence of presence,” is becoming an increasingly common affect disorder that had been camouflaged by more globalized feelings of alienation (experienced, for example, by baby boomers against the military industrial complex in the 60’s). Ask anybody if they haven’t experienced it at one time or another. George Carlin humorously commented “I’ve adopted a new lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” Human beings are social animals and alienation is a social phenomenon, what the sociologist Emile Durkheim described as “anomie,” while “the absence of presence” is a syndrome that has the earmarks of a neuropsych disorder. What is the cure? Followers of Zen or the recovery movement talk about living in the now. “You only have today,” they will tell you and alas, this may be the best and only known analgesic, capable of lessening the disturbing feeling of apartness that comes to those who suffer from “the absence of presence.”

George Carlin’s 7 Words Revisited

Photo by Bonnie from Kendall Park, N.J.

George Carlin did a famous routine in which he talked about “Seven Words You Could Never Say on Television." They were “shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.” Tout ca change, tout c’est la meme chose. That was back in l972 and you can hear all of them on public access and on  cable, but maybe only one on the networks or anywhere else for that matter--the lonely “piss.” You’d be hard put to find much push back about a cop telling his partner he has to take a piss on Law and Order: SVU. Motherfucker is not popular amongst classicists since what Oedipus did is still a touchy subject. Proctologists find shit offensive since it’s dismissive of an activity they’ve spend a lifetime studying, defecation. Cocksucker is disliked by its practitioners since it takes an activity, fellatio, which is considered to be an expression of love, and turns it into an expletive. Fuck is still a hard one to sell. How many times have we heard “is all he or she does is want to fuck?” as if he or she are doing something bad. It’s rare to hear a male or female complaining about their partner and saying “is all he or she does is want to have sexual intercourse.” Tits is another one. “Sweetie, you have really nice tits” is offensive to some woman who find tit to be a fetishistic objectification of the word breast which they deem more noble. Naturally the best is saved for last. Cunt is still the mother of all offensive words, despite its superiority to the often wrongly used vagina. Cunt encompasses the whole female genitalia while vagina, for example, really just refers to the inside. Even though pussy was not on Carlin’s list for the obvious reason that the networks could never have taken a word referring to an infant cat off the air, only pussy creates as much controversy. Prick didn’t make Carlin’s list for the same reason, but you’re better off calling a guy a cunt rather than a prick, if you really want to be insulting.

Life is Elsewhere

Life is Elsewhere is the title of a novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a phrase that was graffitied on Paris walls by student revolutionaries during the riots of ’68. George Carlin famously quipped, “I’m into a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clov asks Hamm, “Do you believe in the life to come.” His response: “Mine was always that.”

Oliver Sacks’s recent essay on asylums in The New York Review of Books is a reminder that not all mental institutions are snake pits, and that in the 19th century, some asylums offered the possibility of companionship and community for those who had inadvertently opted out of so-called normalcy. In The Divided Self, another ‘60s artifact, R.D. Laing argues for schizophrenia as a viable form of existence characterized by forms of expression that have value in and of themselves, and that are not only significant as manifestations of mental illness.

When the stock market moves from inflated values to values more commensurate to the equities they reflect, financial analysts call it an adjustment . Whether for reasons financial, political, or geological, the earth seems to be in the throes of something more drastic than an adjustment. It is wobbling on its axis, both metaphorically and literally. Tectonic and climatic shifts have caused massive upheavals, taking the forms of tsunamis in Southeast Asia, flooding in the Southwest United States, drought in Africa, and the melting of polar ice caps. It was recently reported that in the next 10-15 years, shipping companies may no longer have to use the Panana Canal, as they can make their way through the North Pole, thus shaving thousands of miles off their trips. But this savings has been achieved at a cost, and not only in environmental terms. Technological advancement has been met with the equal and opposing rise of fundamentalism, with triumphs of reason overshadowed by desperate millenarian passions.

Every age has its upheavals, its plagues, its inquisitions. In the twelfth century, the Arab world, now so fraught with the ravages of war and religious strife, was the seat of advanced science, with polymathss like Averroes making historic contributions. Today, globalism has compounded the effects of local upheaval. Modern transportation exports viruses and violence with equal efficiency. A once economically viable society like Iceland finds its whole financial system in danger of collapse due to the alacrity with which it leveraged its investments abroad.

Can we still refer to Imperial America when talking about a country whose deficit exceeds the trillion-dollar mark? And when and how do changes in the bulwarks of a society filter down to the foot soldiers of the everyday life? Astronomers believe that a meteor hitting the earth may have caused the ice age, eradicating a huge reptilian population. Which economic or meteorological scourge will hasten the onset of the newest stage of evolution, and where will it lead? Will life still be here—or elsewhere?