The Truth About Comedy

I believe I witnessed the exact moment American comedy reached the turning point in its descent toward total depravity.
 
It was late one Monday night at a famous Los Angeles comedy club a generation ago. A few top comedians were testing their new material before appearing on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In the audience were Hollywood heavy hitters and legendary comedians (I was sitting near Rodney Dangerfield). On stage, some comedians told jokes about the absurdities of everyday life while others joked about whatever was in the headlines.
 
Then a relatively new comedian on his rise to stardom took the stage and yelled.
 
He yelled punch lines and obscenities. He yelled his rage against morals and religion. And he broke taboos by pushing the envelope further into graphic sexual imagery. Of course he wasn’t the first to do blue comedy and focus on scatological topics; there were many before him. But his style was different. Though the shock value was high, there was something about his approach that reeked of mass appeal, and I had never seen anything like it before.
 
I knew then that this is what mainstream American comedy would turn into. I sensed that this kind of “dirty” comedy would soon leave the domain of dark, smoke-filled comedy clubs and enter Main Street and the homes of millions of “average” Americans.
 
And it did. American comedy today, whether it’s movies, TV, online or stand-up, is expected to be raunchy, dwelling on body functions and the specifics of reckless sex.
 
Why does this matter? According to Rebbe Nachman of Breslev, the true essence of a country is revealed by its comedy. If you want to see what a certain country, let’s say the United States, is really about, then forget about the news, politics or economy.
 
Look at its humor.
 
In his story The Humble King, Rebbe Nachman writes, “One can understand the nature of a land by knowing its humor. In order to understand something, one must know the jokes related to it.”
 
So comedy is our society’s x-ray scan. It shows us just how swiftly American culture plummeted down the moral-ometer in just a generation.
 
Not to sound like a prize-winning prude, but I would have pinned the blame on the comedians and comedy writers who seem to help bring us all down by throwing hedonistic sludge in the air (and airwaves) and lowering standards to new depths. But it appears the opposite is true. Today’s anything-goes comedy is chock full of content that was once considered offensive, bad taste and even taboo only because American society is.
 
Which means we in America are in trouble.
 
If history has taught us anything, it’s that great nations and superpowers fall only after becoming hedonistic. Civilizations like ancient Rome were rife with undisciplined sexual practices (even their gods sexually pursued both women and men) before they disappeared. History has shown us many times over that once a country rots from the inside, it can then be destroyed from the outside.
 
It’s a lesson worth learning today in these historic times. Threats are increasing worldwide, especially from Iran and Russia. And now that Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine under Putin’s pretext of rescuing ethnic Russians living there, it’s feeling a lot like 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia under Hitler’s pretext of rescuing ethnic Germans living there. And we all know what that led to.
 
It’s interesting to note that popular American comedy during World War Two was clean (for the most part) and free of profanity, reflecting both a morally and physically strong nation that could and did triumph over evil.
 
The old-school comedy of Milton Berle, Jack Benny, George Burns, Henny Youngman, Alan King and Sid Caesar (to name a few of the Jewish comedians who dominated 20^th century comedy), may have included innuendo, but it was family friendly and profanity free. And funny.
 
This old-school brand of “clean” comedy is all but extinct thanks to the current state of decadence the society around us has plunged to. I’ve even seen comedians attempt clean comedy and fail. A few years ago, I attended an event benefiting a Jewish organization that featured a popular comedian as the evening’s entertainment. Because most of the audience was Orthodox, the comedian was told to keep his act clean, and he promised he would. He then told jokes about his private parts. His conception of “clean” was using thinly disguised euphemisms.
 
Some comedians, though, understand society’s impact on comedy. Jewish comedian David Brenner, who recently passed away (and who avoided profanity in his act), said in a recent “CBS This Morning” profile that “You can gauge how down society is and how bad the world conditions are by the number of comedians.”
 
You can also gauge how down society is by its jokes. And as American society continues its downward slide as reflected by popular comedy, it’s another sign that strengthening our emuna and guarding our eyes is more important than ever, especially during these turbulent times.