The rich can’t afford to be funny because power is closely associated with dignity.
It’s one of the reasons that the independent film The Aristocrats found such a wide audience. As one reviewer put it, the film “is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.” When you can make use of the profane while attacking the privileged, you have an explosive combination.
Which makes it easy to see why so many comics takes aim at the ruling classes: authentically edgy comedy wants to shake things up. As Bakhtin puts it, such humor seeks to “uncover, undermine, even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have the final word about the world.”
That’s one of the reasons so many of the newer voices in comedy emerge from various “outsider” groups. Some are alternatively sexualized (which is the only way I can think to describe the brilliant Eddie Izzard, my new heartthrob who just happens to wear a dress); some will be part of two distinct cultures and eager to comment on both (such as Shazia Mirza, a self-described moderate, devout Muslim, who regards the “whole point” of her standup comedy as being “to help reduce Islamophobia”). Issues of class are inevitably mixed with issues of sex, gender, and race — and pretty much any performer who isn’t Conan O’Brien, Jerry Seinfield or Steve Martin is going to see that the powers-that-be deserve a lack of tenderness.
Everybody wants to laugh at the ruling class. The secret lives of those with inherited money and power enthrall us because we suspect that they are feeble and weird. Their inner lives are private, classified, unlike ours, and so when earthy humorists expose the sophisticated classes as loony or corrupt, as in Down and Out in Beverly Hills or The Wedding Crashers, our hopes are confirmed.
That’s because so many of them are about ourselves. Comic Jeff Foxworthy: “If your watchband is wider than any book you’ve ever read, you might be a redneck.” The same holds true “if you have a full set of salad bowls and they all say ‘Cool Whip’ on the side.”
Another Blue Collar Tour comic, Larry the Cable Guy, offers the following: “I got a vasectomy at Sears. When I get excited, the garage door opens,” crafting a joke out of the very elements that have made country music popular: sexual matters and vehicles (and vehicular accessories). Adding Sears to the mix tweaks it perfectly, along the same lines of a classic Roseanne bit: “I’ll start doing housework when Sears invents a riding vacuum cleaner.” Replacing Sears with Restoration Hardware would not have a comparable comic effect.
Contrast that kind of humor with the kind found in the supremely narcissistic personal essays read regularly on National Public Radio, inevitably followed by music from a reed instrument.
The powerless classes, by virtue of being powerless, have a built-in comic view of the world. They can make fun of themselves and their “betters” without damaging their position (which is nonexistent anyway). It comes with the territory; it’s a viewpoint. You either have it or you don’t. And if you have a whole lot of inherited dough, then you probably don’t. Don’t feel too bad — after all, you have everything else.
In an unfair world (what other kind is there?) where you can secure a fancy education if your family has enough money (Remember the line from The Wizard of Oz? “I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.”), where you can buy beauty through fitness, cosmetics, and, if all else fails, plastic surgery — where you can even learn to imitate sympathy, compassion, and affection through the use of letter-templates or the wholesale acquisition of greeting cards — isn’t it sort of great that you can’t steal or buy shares of humor?
Maybe that’s why, when it comes to being funny, the poor will always have an edge.
