Is there a sense of humor peculiar to New
York? Let’s explore the subject and see. Since the New
Yorker presents itself as quintessential New York, we’ll have a look at
some of their cartoons (minus the cartoons
themselves, alas). Not the cartoons of recent
years, which I don’t find that amusing, but vintage cartoons from the past. Then as now, they often show a middle-aged
couple in their living room, with one of them addressing the other.
In one cartoon that I still find amusing,
the husband says to the wife, “Well how would you feel, if someone called you ‘spry’?” Of course this assumes that the reader
catches the nuances of “spry,” which most Americans would; it’s used of the
elderly and meant in a complimentary but somewhat condescending way. Right off one notices that New Yorker cartoons have a context,
require a certain amount of prior knowledge.
A famous New Yorker cartoon shows a householder retrieving the Sunday New York Times that has been delivered
to his doorstep. When he picks it up,
under it he finds a dog squashed flat.
No New Yorker requires an explanation, but other readers might not fully
“get” it, unless they know just how thick and heavy a Sunday Times can be.
Still another cartoon: a matronly woman is
showing a bunch of tiny tots around a museum that could well be the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The kids are
eyeing a painting reminiscent of Manet’s Le
Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), showing two very clothed gentlemen and two very unclothed ladies
lunching in a rural setting. Says the
matron, somewhat taken aback, “It’s … a picnic.”
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| Some picnic. |
Still another very New York-centered
cartoon is a cover illustration of the New
Yorker showing a crowded rush-hour subway car and, holding onto a strap and
unmistakable, Osama bin Laden. But the
tired commuters either have their nose in a book or newspaper, or stare
vacantly into space; no one recognizes the man most wanted by the U.S.
authorities in the wake of 9/11. I sent
this to a friend in North Carolina with a brief explanation of New York
commuters and the boredom of the commute; without that explanation, he confessed
he wouldn’t have “got” it.
Finally, I’ll mention my favorite New Yorker cartoon, dating from years
ago but fresh in my mind because our downstairs neighbor has it posted on his
bathroom wall. Speeding in a roadster
are a middle-aged couple, the wife in an abundance of furs and an outlandish
hat that looks like an inverted funnel, and the husband sporting dark glasses,
with a cigar planted firmly in his teeth.
Everything about them says filthy rich, and nouveau riche at that. The
wife says to the husband, “Remember that Christmas you sold your watch to buy
me a comb, and I sold my hair to buy you a watch fob?” Mildly funny to begin with, but much funnier
if you recognize the famous O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi,” that
inspired it. In the story a young
husband and wife with scant resources want to give each other a really nice
Christmas present, so he sells his watch to buy her accessories for her hair,
and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain. They then discover that their gifts have been
rendered useless, but they appreciate the intent behind them and therefore feel
rewarded. The O. Henry story has a dose
of sentiment, but the cartoon has none. Once
again, for full appreciation the New
Yorker cartoon requires prior knowledge on the part of the viewer.
What do I conclude so far? Yes, there is a New York sense of humor,
urban, sophisticated, and devoid of sentiment, and it assumes a certain
knowledge and awareness. Here now are
two time-honored New York jokes, so time-honored that no New Yorker will waste
a laugh on them, but that show a New York sensibility:
Tourist to New Yorker: “How do I get to
Carnegie Hall?”
New Yorker: “Practice, practice,
practice.”
Again, there’s a context: you
have to know the significance of Carnegie Hall.
The second joke: A young man arrives for
the first time in the city and sets his luggage down. “Look out, New York,” he announces, “I’m here
to conquer you!” But when he looks down,
his luggage is gone. (More relevant in
the 1960s and 1970s, when New Yorkers were obsessed with crime.)
Further conclusion, based on these two
jokes: New Yorkers consider themselves insiders, and everyone else
outsiders. But the club is not
exclusive. Anyone can join it by moving
to New York, or by visiting often enough to get to know the New York
temperament.
So what do New Yorkers laugh at
today? Here are some examples:
· Larry Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho, was
arrested in 2007 for alleged lewd conduct in an airport men’s room. He claimed it was all a misunderstanding, to
be explained in part by his “wide stance” when sitting on the john. Late-night comedians had a field day with
this, and New Yorkers joined heartily in.
· “Wildman” Steve Brill, a forager who leads people on
foraging tours in city parks, was arrested in 1986 for picking and eating a
dandelion in Central Park. When the
media reported a man arrested for eating a dandelion and described him as
“nabbed
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| Here he's putting the bite on Japanese knotweed. |
in mid-bite,” gales of hilarity erupted, and the charges were dropped
before the case could be laughed out of court.
(I celebrate the Wildman in post #23.)
· In 1997, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a committed
law-and-order type, appeared in public in drag, sporting a blond wig, jewelry,
and a frilly pink gown, New Yorkers were at first incredulous. When the story proved true, they roared with
laughter and came close to forgiving Mr. Get-Tough-on-Crime his many misdeeds
as mayor.
· In the 1990s I did volunteer work for the Whole Foods
Project, a nonprofit advocating a nutrition-based approach to AIDS and cancer.
At one of the Project’s Sunday suppers a young woman performer, an enthusiastic
supporter of the organization, introduced a number of her own by telling how she
approached a new neighbor, a young woman from Memphis, and inviting her over
for cocktails so they could get to know each other. “Oh no,” the neighbor replied, “I couldn’t do
that.” “Why not?” The singer then launched into her song,
“Jesus loves me but he can’t stand you!”
It brought the house down. The
woman minister of the church, in whose recreation hall the event was taking place, happened to be
present and laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair. The occasion is vivid in my mind to this day.
The last example might not work outside
New York, depending on the audience, but it suited the city’s sense of humor
completely. Urban and sophisticated, New
York humor tends also to be secular, and leery of anything claiming to be
sacred.
What New Yorkers do and don’t find funny
in a public figure can be seen in the career of Jim Fisk, the bouncy Vermonter
whose antics put Wall Street in a frenzy more than once, and whose grandiose
style of living while managing and mismanaging the Erie Railway earned him the
name Prince Erie. To replenish Erie’s
near-empty coffers, he and his pal Jay Gould brought suit against Commodore
Vanderbilt, the richest man in the country, whom they had already diddled once
but hoped to diddle again. Appearing in
court, Fisk testified in a whimsical manner that repeatedly elicited laughter. Describing an interview he had had with
Vanderbilt, he said, “It was pretty warm -- not the interview but the
weather.” (Laughter.) “I remember, because the Commodore was a bit
profane about it.” (Great
laughter.) “It shocked me to hear him
talk like that.” (Laughter.)
Fisk further remembered that, while he and
Vanderbilt talked, he had noticed the great man’s shoes. “They had four buckles. I thought to myself, if men like this have
shoes like them, I must get me a pair.”
(Hilarious laughter.) So
convulsed in mirth was the courtroom, that the judge himself was wiping tears
from his eyes.
And when Fisk and Gould tried to corner
gold and almost succeeded, convulsing markets on both sides of the ocean, they
were summoned to Washington to testify before a Congressional committee
investigating the tumultuous events of September 24, 1869, Black Friday. Had Mr. Fisk tried to corner gold? Certainly not. The committee chairman was baffled; millions
had been at stake that day, yet no one admitted to a profit.
“Mr. Fisk,” he asked, “where did all that
money go?
Replied Fisk, “It went where the woodbine
twineth.”
Silence. Then titters, followed by mounting gales of
laughter.
New Yorkers couldn’t help but like a
rascal who disarmed courtrooms and even a Congressional committee with
mirth. But then there came a
change. Scandal-hungry elements of the
press began reporting on Prince Erie’s deteriorating relationship with his
lavishly kept inamorata, Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, who was said to be
dispensing her charms to a certain Ned Stokes, a dapper young man about town. Quarrels followed and Miss Mansfield, in a
gesture of fiery farewell, hurled Fisk’s galoshes into the street. When a cartoon appeared in the press, showing
Prince Erie bedewing his galoshes with tears, Gotham roared.
But for Prince Erie, worse was to
come. In July 1871, when Fisk’s Ninth
Regiment of the National Guard was protecting a march of Ulstermen against
threats of violence from Irish Catholics, shots rang out, causing panicky
spectators to stampede across the line of march, leaving the toppled colonel
with a dislocated ankle. To avoid mobs
of hostile Irish, he hobbled down back alleyways, hid his uniform under a
coat given him by a sympathetic householder, took a taxi to the docks, boarded
a steamboat, and ended up nursing his swollen ankle on the veranda of a hotel
in Long Branch, New Jersey, a resort where he was persona most grata.
Getting wind of Colonel Fisk’s strategic
retreat all the way to New Jersey, the press turned viciously on him, reporting
rumors of his “wounded (?) ankle,” his backyard flight past ash cans and
privies, his alleged fainting from terror, his fleeing the state in an old
lady’s bonnet and dress. All the dailies
sneered.
When the ailing Colonel finally retuned to
New York, he faced lawsuits by Stokes and Josie attempting to squeeze thousands
of dollars out of him. He who had once
reveled in attention from the press now fled reporters hounding him daily for
more juicy scraps of gossip. And he who
had always been a joke-spewing mixer, a “people person,” kept more and more to
himself, holed up in his brownstone with his valet, wrenched from the rumpus of
his life. Yet the press showed him no
mercy, and the town continued to titter and guffaw. Like most Americans, New Yorkers suck joy
from the fall of the mighty.
When Ned Stokes, enraged by defeats in
court, shot Fisk on a hotel stairway on January 6, 1872, and Fisk died
the following day, the city reappraised him.
Still hostile to Prince Erie were Wall Street, the bluebloods, and the
pious, who viewed him as an upstart, a publicity-hogging parvenu, a disrupter
of markets, a cheat, and a wanton. Those
who sincerely mourned him included bellhops, messenger boys, dancers and chorus
girls, his office staff and his adoring National Guard regiment, Erie Railway
bruisers (his bodyguard), and recipients of his random acts of charity.
What made half the town idolize this
rascal? He had tweaked noses with a wink
of merriment, punctured pretensions, tipped generously, and laughed heartily at
himself; above all, he was fun. When, as colonel of the Ninth, he got a
military funeral with all the frills involved, multitudes watched in tears, as
his coffin was borne away to the sound of muffled drums, with six colonels and
a general in black-draped, solemn pomp – the biggest sendoff seen in the city
since Lincoln’s casket had passed though en route to Illinois, a comparison
that some thought obscene. Prince Erie
had been a rascal, but at least a merry one; they would miss his bustle and
shine.
Further conclusions: New Yorkers love a
sense of humor, scorn weakness, relish scandal, hate pretension, esteem those
who can laugh at themselves.
A personal note regarding this last: The only president of my time that I disliked personally was Richard Nixon. There was
something about him that put me off: his total lack of humor, his
vindictiveness, his vulnerabilities masked by spite and rage. My dislike began when, during Eisenhower's presidency, Nixon, the Vice President, was photographed in a church praying for Eisenhower's recovery from a heart attack; the photo had obviously been carefully planned, with the photographer positioned in the pew in front of him, so as to get a good full-length shot from the front. On the other hand, though I disliked almost
all his policies, I rather liked George Bush Jr. When the Washington Press Club confronted him
with a list of his utterances that made little or no sense, he laughed and said
he hadn’t the slightest idea what he had meant to say. This won me over completely.
When it comes to four-letter words and
irreverence, New Yorkers are an easygoing bunch, vastly more tolerant than
many. But that doesn’t include the
authorities, as seen in the Lenny Bruce obscenity trial of 1964. A stand-up comedian already notorious for his
loose language and numerous arrests, Bruce was appearing at the Café Au Go Go on
Bleecker Street in (where else?) Greenwich Village, where his performance on
March 31, 1964, included a bevy of blunt sexual references such as “jack me off,”
“motherfucker,” and “go come in a chicken”; the observation that “Eleanor
Roosevelt has the nicest tits of any lady in office”; familiar monologs of his
like “Pissing in the sink” and “To is a preposition. Come is a verb”; and the statement that men
are oversexed animals willing to have quick sex with anything that moves,
including a chicken. Sitting in the
audience was a city license inspector who scribbled notes furiously. On April 3 plainclothesmen arrested Bruce and
the club’s owner on charges of presenting “obscene, immoral, and impure …
entertainment … which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and
others” – charges bringing a maximum of three years in prison. (And charges that, come to think of it, echo
the charges against Socrates in ancient Athens.)
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| One of his many arrests, this one in 1961. |
News of Bruce’s arrest provoked protests
from prominent writers and entertainers of the day – Allen Ginsberg, Paul
Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, James
Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Woody Allen, and others -- guaranteeing that the trial in
June 1964 before a three-judge panel would be well attended and well reported. Bruce’s attorney thought he faced prosecution
not for his use of dirty words, but for his attacks on religion and public
figures. The prosecutor, on the other
hand, viewed Bruce’s show as a series of “nauseating word pictures” seasoned
with offensive words spewed at the audience, unredeemed by any artistry or
cogent social criticism. Testimony by
the license inspector and policemen who had attended performances took three
days. The defense called expert
witnesses who testified that Bruce’s routine was not sexually arousing, did not
offend local community standards, and was socially significant. The prosecution then complained that it had
trouble finding expert witnesses to counter these arguments, because the
experts didn’t want to come off as “squares.”
So there it was: the hip vs. the square, easygoing New York vs. the
prudes or, to be kinder, vs. traditional morality.
The decision wasn’t announced until
November 4, 1964: guilty. Bruce’s act,
said the presiding judge, appealed to prurient interest, was patently offensive
to the average person in the community, and lacked redeeming social
importance. One of the three judges
dissented.
At a later date Bruce was sentenced to
four months in the workhouse but was free on bail. He never served time, for he died of a
morphine overdose in California on August 3, 1966. One of the New York assistant prosecutors
later expressed regret for his role in the case, stating that they had used the
law to kill him.
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| Lenny Bruce's grave in Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California. Paul Neugass |
I suspect that the presiding judge was
right in asserting that Bruce’s act was offensive to the community, for that
community was not confined to the East and West Village, but extended to all
five boroughs. (But were all five
boroughs in the audience that night?)
Whether or not the act appealed to prurient interest, I can’t say, not
having witnessed the performance; I doubt if it would have fired me up. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I would
have found it funny or socially significant.
This was the late Lenny Bruce, drug-ridden, unfocused, obsessed with his
drug busts and obscenity arrests – not Lenny at the peak of his career. But there is something very moving in his
appeal to the judges, just prior to sentencing, to see his act just once.
Today New York City and State derive scant
satisfaction from the prosecution of Lenny Bruce. In 2003 a group of prominent lawyers,
scholars, and entertainers sent a letter to Governor George Pataki asking that
he issue a posthumous pardon of Bruce to show the state’s commitment to free
speech, free press, and free thinking.
And the governor granted it – the first posthumous pardon in the state’s
history. So the last laugh is Lenny’s
after all.
Those who defended Bruce at the time of
his arrest, and who argued for a posthumous pardon, are a good indicator as to
who define and shape the New York sense of humor. They include:
- Live-wire activists who write letters and sign petitions
- The “in” people, the “with-it” crowd, the hip (or those who think they are)
- The young in spirit (if not in years)
- Manhattan professionals (who often commute from the other boroughs)
- People who spend little time in churches, synagogues, or temples
- People who read the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Mother Jones
- People who spend time in museums and galleries, but give little attention to sports
- Hardy souls who think of themselves as unshockable (until some event proves them wrong)
Needless to say, this leaves out a lot of New Yorkers who do spend time in churches, synagogues, and temples, who do follow sports, and have never heard of Mother Jones. But they don’t define New York humor.
Goodreads giveaway: I have listed one copy of No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World as a giveaway on Goodreads, the website for people who like to read books. The free copy will be given to one of those who sign up for it; Goodreads will pick the winner. So far, 124 people have entered their names. In addition, 53 people have marked the book as "to read," though I know from experience that this doesn't mean that all 53 are going to read it. (A confession: Long ago I marked three books as "to read," but still haven't found the time to read them.)
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Coming soon: Bedford Street: Edna St. Vincent and the
Wobblies, an old witch selling Egyptian chandeliers, and drinks laced with LSD,
courtesy of the CIA.
© 2015 Clifford Browder
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