Heard a good joke lately? Had a good laugh?
Deprivation shadows the land and though laughter may not be considered as essential to human life as food, water, safety or a hug from a loved one, laughter is not a mere distraction.
As Mel Brooks once put it, humor is “a defense against the universe.”
When your universe seems out of control, as it surely does now and has with jarring frequency in the past, I have observed that laughter so often coexists with tears in some existential balancing act.
I have been exploring this matter, seeking some enlightenment, for decades.
I have had Mort Sahl, the greatest living stand-up comic and political satirist, tell me, “The reason people laugh, I think, is in response to the country’s politically correct climate. This humor taps into the suppression of people’s innate rage.”
I have read this in the provocative 2017 book “The Importance of Being Funny” (Rowman & Littlefield), by local author, professor and radio personality Al Gini: “We need humor to fight off our fear of living. Joke-telling is an attempt to keep at a distance our fear of the unknown, the unanswerable, and the unacceptable.”
I have had Jim Brogan, one of the dozen “Tonight Show” writers during its Jay Leno years, tell me, “It seems there’s one thing to do in a tragedy — either cry or laugh. Laughing helps you distance yourself from the tragedy.”
One person I have consulted frequently through the years is Bert Haas. He started as a waiter at Zanies, the comedy club in Old Town, in 1980 and soon became its executive vice president, which is his current position, overseeing three clubs. He has heard millions of jokes about thousands of topics and he told me some time ago that, “When we are confronted with tragedy, we use laughter to release tension.”
The Zanies Wells Street outlet has been back in business since July, with health and socially distanced protocols in place, thereby diminishing its usual 125-seat capacity. A few days ago, Haas told me, “the rolling laughter throughout the room may not be as easy to come by without people sitting elbow to elbow. But if the physical space is altered a bit, on the plus side that is compelling the comics to take more risks.
Longtime Zanies stand-up staple Larry Reeb was in last week “and his act was filled with a lot of COVID-related material. It worked just great. People going out want to laugh and the comics are working harder, more creatively that ever to make that happen.”
The number of places in which to find humor has been dramatically reduced due to COVID, with clubs closed or out of business, movie theaters struggling to figure things out, theaters doing the same and TV doing its best under the conditions. The internet keeps churning along, with Zoom-aided events and by spitting out all manner of good and bad and tasteless material on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram et al. In New York and a few other cities, comics have been offering al fresco shows in parks.
Baby steps to be sure, but still something.
Haas expects to have the Zanies in Rosemont open in October and he is optimistic about the future of his clubs and comedy in general. “Society needs laughter,” he says. “When the world is hurting the most, that’s when laughter becomes almost essential.”
Just as COVID seems to have worked its way onto the comedic landscape, we have been confronted with less easily translated realities, from protests to riots to looting to shootings, from statues being toppled to buildings in flames. Racial inequities have taken center stage. What was once known as political correctness has intensified into a cancel culture.
Is there humor to be mined from any of this?
That seems inevitable. Nothing has ever been out of bounds.
Over the years I have heard “jokes” about the Holocaust, John Wayne Gacy, Sept. 11 and every other misfortune or monster. I can vividly recall being in a comedy club as people shouted “shuttle jokes, shuttle jokes” only days after the Jan. 28, 1986, explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, a tragedy that killed seven people.
The comic happily obliged: “What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts.”
As people howled, I cringed.
Again, I consult Gini, who writes, “My steadfast belief is that humor is an attempt to deal with the palpable absurdity of life. Although humor cannot always resolve all our dilemmas, questions, and terrors, it can ease the pain of our perplexities and allow us to carry on as best we can.”
One very painful day was Nov. 22, 1963, when President John Kennedy was assassinated. That night, the comic Lenny Bruce was to appear at a night club. Those in the audience sat in the dark, wondering if he would show up and if he did, what he might say.
He did show up and his first line was this: “Boy, is Vaughn Meader (screwed).”
Meader was a comedian who imitated JKF on a mega-selling 1962 record titled “The First Family,” becoming rich and very famous. But Bruce was right. Meader faded into obscurity.
Which brings me to Ronnie Marmo.
Until the pandemic hit, he was selling out every performance for five months of his highly praised one-man show, “I’m Not a Comedian ... I’m Lenny Bruce,” at the Royal George Theatre.
“My last show was on March 15 and I was gone,” he said earlier this week by phone from his Los Angeles home, where he is currently in the midst of a fundraising festival in which he produced seven 10-minute plays with his Theatre 68. These shows will be running every night through Sept. 27. “I hope to come back. I fell in love with Chicago and I think that Lenny’s voice is even more important now than it was 50 years ago, seven months ago. He always represented man versus the establishment. He spoke truth to power.”
Indeed, but times change, and quickly. One of Bruce’s most famous routines, which Marmo performed on stage in Chicago, focused on the N-word, a verbal riff intended to rob that word of its painful power. Hearing Bruce’s routine for the first time in 1962, Black comic Dick Gregory reportedly said, “This man is the eighth wonder of the world.”
Will Marmo keep that in his show?
“I am not sure,” he said. “I do know that comedy is what we need. It is more than a distraction and if we can’t laugh, our other options are to remain neutral or cry. There is nothing wrong with a few moments of escaping from the pain and confusion around us. If we can’t find ways to do that, even for a while, we’d go insane.”
We live, always have and always will, in a world that tosses at us terror, chaos and uncertainty. We do our best to cope, to carry on.
“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy,” Bruce said.
In ways familiar and sure to transform, that will not change. And we will be better for it.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
