A Word In Edgewise: T’ain’t Funny, McGee

Young latin woman laughing while friend inflating bubble gum. Closeup face of multiethnic friends enjoying outdoor street. Brazilian girl laughing and blowing chewing gum with friend embracing her.
Photo courtesy of BigStock/Rido81

I used to listen to “Fibber McGee and Molly” at night on my little radio back in the 1940s and ‘50s. The middle-class couple lived in Wistful Vista, where Fibber’s tales and Molly’s invariable “T’ain’t funny, McGee!” retorts were my first insights into repartee, while being glued to the 7 p.m.-every-Sunday Jack Benny show offered a masterclass in nuanced humor and timing. TV added visuals: gems like “The Honeymooners” (Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows, Art Carney, Joyce Randolph). Only 39 shows, but gems. They’re still on reruns if you hunt.

Pivoting from the horror, crime and mayhem of his EC Comics, Bill Gaines’s MAD magazine debuted in August 1952. Humor and satire reigned; gimlet-eyed exposé of the Grown-Up world by artists and writers who’d achieved calendar adulthood but declined to get on board. They unveiled before wide-eyed readers the methods adults (parents, educators, commercial jackals) were using to subdue youthful spirits and offering instead a sly “Cliff Notes” on how to spot an assault.

Older, I discovered Harvard Square’s International News stand stocked “Private Eye” with its taste of Brit wit that targeted everyone from Royals to plebes lifting the cloaks of the mighty, clerics’ robes and the pin-stripe armor of business-venal. Christmas issues included flexible 45s with spoofs voiced by Barry Humphries, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Eleanor Bron and their ilk.

Humor is human. Imperial Russia had Nicolai Gogol (“The Inspector General”).The Soviets had Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Master and Margarita”) and Ilf and Petrov’s “The Twelve Chairs,” which struck Mel Brooks’ funny bone hard enough that he created his 1970 movie version. Not much humor from that vast land today, however. Olga Robinson, writing in 2018 for the BBC, opens, “How Putin’s Russia turned humor into a weapon.”

Laugher can literally heal. In 1964, Norman Cousins, then editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review of Literature, was stricken ill and given a 1-in-500 chance of recovery. Cousins checked out of the hospital and into a hotel to submerge himself in humor. There, he made the “joyous discovery” that ten minutes of belly laughs brought him two hours of sleep. In 1979, Cousins published “Anatomy of an Illness,” outliving his original diagnosis by 26 years.

Compare the smile quotient of our centenary leader for whom the American flag was recently flown at half-mast to that of those who will follow. The silencing of laughter, of humor, of a satiric song (Tom Lehrer) a book (“1984,” “Catcher in the Rye”), a film (“MASH”) or cartoon (Gary Trudeau, Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes) may be considered a sad — if not downright unhealthy — act.

Unfortunately, laughter, satire, irony — the lot — are foreign to the humorless. Should they suspect they’re being mocked — or worse, their lack of raiment be pointed out — they’ll never, ever roll with the punches. “T’ain’t funny, McGee,” they’ll hiss, planning revenge.

Cartoonist Abner Dean knew them well. An example from his 1949 “And on the Eighth Day”: Stage right, a crowd of townsfolk laughing at a solitary “savior” who with sword and shield approaches a fire-breathing dragon emerging from its cave, stage left. Hilarity? The dragon is a skeleton, its skull rests on a forked branch, nostrils “breathing” smoke issuing from a smudge pot below, nothing’s hidden from the swordsman, but he doesn’t see the joke and sallies forth. Dean’s caption: “The humorless are the real leaders.”

One of America’s greatest crops is Humor, and when laughter is repressed, it’s as sure as ravaging locusts darkening the sky an omen of coming famine. Laughter, like the willow, bends in the gale; other taller, grander trees, if rigid, may snap under pressure. Keep smiling, give yourself up to mirth; you’ll keep afloat through rough waters.

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