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Painstaking, exhaustive and occasionally just the tiniest bit exhausting, Professor Kercher’s mammoth study focuses on the 20 years or so of US history between Harry Truman and LBJ, a time of outward national consensus and seething inner disquiet. In doing so, it also gestures at what might be called the two main theories of comedy. Like history, and to a certain extent English literature, comedy has a Tory theory and a Whig theory. The Tory theory, upheld by people like Howard Jacobson, declares that humour consists of elementals – the banana skin, the bodily function – that will always raise a laugh, whatever the wider social landscape. The Whig theory, on the other hand, believes that as society (supposedly) improves, so jokes follow the same (supposedly) upward path, satirising reactionary folly and, inter alia, ameliorating the human lot.
Eisenhower-era America, caught in the grip of a Red scare and anxieties about the Bomb, was clearly in need of some Whig enlightenment. In the age of Joseph McCarthy, radical laughter, as Kercher shows, was in itself suspect. Cartoonists talked of the ‘emasculation of American humour’, squashed out of existence by paranoid politicians and timorous admen. Satiric rage, Kenneth Rexroth lamented, had been usurped by the ‘New Yorker joke’ — populist, inoffensive, more likely to consider suburban man’s problems with his lawnmower than the surface-to-air missile. It was this air of uncomplaining cosiness that the new wave of liberal satirists, ranging from left-leaning cartoonists to the Chicago ‘Second City’ theatre group and the creators of MAD magazine, set out to disrupt.
Half a century on, some of what got said and written still seems bracingly outspoken – Robert Osborn’s famous 1956 cartoon of Nixon, in which Eisenhower’s vice-president turns into a jackal from frame to frame, or the stand-up comedian Mort Sahl’s remark that CIA and American foreign policy occasionally coincided. On the other hand, Kercher is particularly good at showing the difficulties that any kind of satire has in sustaining its attack or maintaining its distance from the things it is trying to lampoon. Kennedy, having assembled an obliging court of liberal gag-writers around him in the run-up to the 1960 presidential election, had no qualms about throwing over any malcontents who subsequently made jokes about his family: Enrico Banducci, owner of the hungry i, a club known for its support of Sahl (‘the Kennedys started ruling and I started attacking them’), was investigated by the IRS and effectively put out of business by presidential fiat.
There were some curious bedfellows, too. Significantly, one of the new satire’s most influential supporters was the lately founded Playboy magazine, in whose pages much of it appeared. At this point the fundamental illiberality of Hefner’s take on sexual relationships tended to be overlooked in a wave of bromides about ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’. Similarly, despite his deep-dyed contempt for every post-war right-wing ideologue from McCarthy to Goldwater, Kercher is honest enough to admit that what emerged from a culture made up of angry cartoons, Tom Lehrer’s songs about eating your girlfiend and Dr Strangelove was essentially a rather exclusive humour, knowing, sophisticated, primed to reflect the outlook of its middle- to upper-middle-class audience but without much interest in the constituencies that existed beyond it. Come the mid-60s, the age of mass protest and not giving a damn about Vietnam, even this catchment area seemed to have been blown apart: by 1965 most commentators diagnosed a retreat into silliness. A wider point remains. However well aimed and well intentioned, the varieties of comedy subjected to Kercher’s patient analysis tend not to mature with age. If the many examples of liberal post-war American humour quoted in Revel with a Cause have a defining characteristic, it’s that they aren’t funny.
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