The poor are funnier than the rich.
If you’re looking for a good time, you’re better off in the working class world of Rabelais, Homer Simpson, Benny Hill, or Roseanne than you are in the company of Flaubert, Dynasty, Amis, or Updike.
Downstairs, in other words, has a far better time than upstairs. Humor falls under the ownership of the working class in a way few other mediums of expression can claim.
To test your own perspective on this subject, which of the following do you prefer?
Roseanne: What’s the worst that can happen? So the tornado picks up our house and slams it down in a better neighborhood.
or
Q: What does an economist use when calculating constant-dollar estimates?
A: Deflator mouse.
If you prefer the second, with its reference not only to the intricacies of finance but also to an opera by Strauss, you’ll perhaps take issue with some of the points I’ll be making; if you prefer the line from Roseanne, with its implication that even if disaster strikes it can only make life better, then we understand each other.
The idea of comedy being a “low” form and tragedy being a “high” form of art follows comedy around like a piece of toilet paper stuck to its heel. As James Kincaid, the Aerol Arnold Professor of Literature at the University of Southern California declares in Annoying the Victorians, “We imagine that it is natural to regard comedy as inferior to tragedy, natural at least for educated people who have acquired postgraduate taste, despising spectator sports, and never watching television . . . when we say that comedy is inferior to tragedy, we join hands with Pat Buchanan, Marie Antoinette, Rush Limbaugh, and Caligula.”
“Comedy is not demanding — It does not demand or take,” Kincaid argues; “it gives and we know that any agency that gives cannot be worth much.” He continues: “Tragedy is sleek and single-minded; comedy rumpled and hospitable to any idea or agency. Tragedy stares us out of countenance; comedy winks and leers and drools. Tragedy is all dressed up; comedy is always taking things off, mooning us.”
You can probably tell by the way I use the word that I have no “class” myself. Not so that you would notice anyway. I grew up in a big Italian family in Brooklyn, New York. We were funny. And we were poor, which is why I am comfortable using both the word and the generalization.
Humor for the poor is a way to keep track of both blatant and subtle injustices perpetrated by a political and economic system that does not have their best interests at heart; humor is a way, in other words, to make a record and perhaps to keep a score.
The uneasiness that the poor feel in the presence of the rich, the rich feel in the presence of the poor.
In other words, making humor is a way of making trouble. And if personal power can be defined as the ability not to have to please someone else, then humor is clearly something the poor have in abundance. At least on their own time.
For Chris Rock, being wealthy means having financial holdings so immense that they can be passed down through generations. “Shaq is rich,” he said, referring to the Los Angeles Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal, “but the white man who signs his check is wealthy. Oprah is rich, but Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates suddenly woke up with Oprah’s money, he’d slit his throat.”
The poor are funny because they have to be, given the absurdities and imbalances of the world. “If you don’t laugh, you cry” was a mantra invoked by ladies who pinned their weekly wash on the line just before it rained, or by guys who duct-taped their shoes in order to wear them a little longer. The poor make their own humor for the same reasons they made their own clothes or their own wine: because nobody else was going to give it to them.
The poor forage for humor — hunt and gather it — which means they get it in its raw state. It’s more delicious, fresher, and because it is free, there’s a lot of it to go around. It’s also sometimes a little rougher, maybe tougher to digest.
