Not a laughing matter: America’s sense of humor is becoming morbid
Some years ago I was watching the film “Braveheart” with a friend of mine. There is a prolonged battle sequence some ways in of sustained, awful gore. Men chop others’ heads off, arrows pierce legs, maces shatter people’s skulls. The scene begins drolly, with William Wallace’s Scottish troops mocking and mooning the British Army. It quickly becomes deeply unfunny.
The friend I was watching with laughed loudly at the mooning, as did I. Then arms started getting severed, and my friend kept laughing. He laughed all through the Battle of Stirling, louder with each shower of blood and each shattered leg. After a point I finally turned to him and said, “Dude—do you actually think this is funny?” He fell quiet and shot me a look as though I were a stranger in the room. “No, I don’t,” he said. “Just—leave me alone, man.” We watched the rest of the scene in silence.
Last Thursday, ASWC Films screened “Children of Men” in Kimball Theater. I cannot think of a more starkly serious and sincere film; the entire arc of its story is about a deeply cynical man evolving from detachment to caring. The movie is about being sincere.
Why then, was most of the audience—you, Whitties—laughing through the entire middle stretch of the film? What is funny about three people trying to escape being murdered in a car that won’t start? What is funny about someone seeing a human baby for the first time in 18 years and reacting with shock? What is funny about a refugee beating a man with a sledgehammer?
I first saw “Children of Men” while studying abroad, and in Mexico nobody laughed, except when the characters made jokes themselves. Could it be that other cultures just aren’t as accustomed as we are to laughing at people? Could it be that, being a generation that has never in our own country seen refugee camps, war, or for that matter very much honesty and decency, we have forgotten that such things are traditionally met with quiet, humble respect?
Or could it just be a strange, unhealthy coping mechanism? I noticed that no one was laughing much at Thursday’s screening until the film’s first brutal action scene, in which three people are shot at close range. After that a switch seemed to have been thrown, and everything was funny, as though out of desperation the audience had sought refuge in comedy that wasn’t there. Everything provoked snickers, from a baby being born to goofy stuff like a woman standing up and praying in order to save her friend from being dragged off a bus and shot. Yes, she looked kind of silly doing it, but have we all undergone some Pavlovian training whereby things that have historically appeared in comedies—recent, mean-spirited comedies, I might add—must always be funny, no matter the context? Goofy stuff indeed.
I’ve heard we are coming out of the Age of Irony, but to me irony still seems to have a stranglehold on young people’s appraisals of things. While “The Simpsons” are as popular as ever in theaters, and reality TV invites us to make fun of silly people, and most of us can’t say whether we were laughing with or laughing at Napoleon Dynamite, I have to wonder: If “Forrest Gump” came out today, would we laugh at him, too?
Next week I hope ASWC Films shows “Scary Movie” or “Pulp Fiction.” At least in those movies it’s clear: You don’t have to take anything seriously. That’s what everyone seems to want, anyway. And who can blame us? In our sealed, white-bread summer camp of a school, doesn’t everything “out there”—internment camps and desperation and genocide—just seem like one big, silly game?
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