Comedy Just Died

Appalling behavior is not entertainment. Harassment - sexual and otherwise - is not the least bit funny. Watching people be awful to one another should not be how we get our jollies.

This all sounds completely reasonable, but only because it's the new normal. New normals can arrive with startling speed (no one in 1985 would have imagined Americans taking to raw fish). But here's the question: All those years I spent watching the Three Stooges smash each other, and guffawing at "What knockers!" jokes in Young Frankenstein, and seeing Jerry Lewis portray poor motor function and cognitive disability for laughs....was it all a depraved fever dream of me-as-monstrous-brute?

Have we evolved beyond that? Should we view characters slipping on banana peels with due empathy, rather than laughing at their pain and misfortune? Our laughter reflects our ability to desensitize, and human desensitization is the root of all evil. Are we waking up from a long civilizational sickness, and, finally, rightfully spurning the central propositions of comedy?

That seems to be where we're headed. And it's accelerating wildly. I recently predicted that, within 50 years, Marx Brothers films would be viewed as appalling, barbaric, and unfunny. There's nothing to laugh at while watching that asshole Groucho harass that nice Margaret Dumont woman as she tries to throw her parties, or to sing her lovely opera arias! But I'm stepping up that prediction. I believe that within five years, Groucho will be an obsolete relic. No thoughtful parent will let their children watch Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny cartoons. Because we're better than that.

Comedy may well be over, because it's based, fundamentally, on the notion that appalling behavior is entertainment. Harassment - sexual and otherwise - is hilarious. And watching people be awful to one another should be the preeminent way to get our jollies.

Are we evolving into something kinder, gentler, better? Hey, perhaps! I don't discount it! On the other hand, humans deny their darkness at their peril (it's no coincidence that holier-than-thou types so often turn out to be the most secretly depraved). Comedy's a release valve for our crueler instincts, even though it often pushes past uncomfortable lines, just as pro sports are a release valve for our warrior instincts in spite of the concussions and fan hooliganism. The more sensitive we become, the less tolerant we feel toward release valves, because they carry too much whiff of the full-throttled thing.

I can see both sides. Comedy is appalling, if you think about it. It will very likely cease to exist under currently shifting fashions. But when I think of Groucho and Bugs and Wiley Coyote and the Stooges, I have trouble mustering a fashionable sense of disapproval for those assholes. I guess I slightly favor legacy (i.e. decades of enjoyment) over new-fashioned social waves; I lean slightly conservative, at least in this matter.

But here's the thing. When the Marx Brothers films become cultura-non-grata - and they will, soon - many will sincerely believe they always hated those films. Consider how, by 2015, nearly everyone was a crusading gay rights proponent unable to fathom any other position. That was strange, given that only a few years earlier there was virtually no full-throated condemnation of gay persecution (much less support for rights like marriage). I've supported those rights for some time, but I remember when homosexuality creeped me out. But only me, apparently. Everyone else seems to have acquired a weird amnesia. They always approved of sushi.

Watch. Groucho's going down. And no one will have ever liked him.