Laughing to some purpose

As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly by. The other was the opening salvo of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, then featuring Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner; never broadcast on this side of the Atlantic, alas, but periodically written up in that hip young person’s bible, the New Musical Express. One of the advantages of Revel with a Cause (one of the worst titles ever devised for a book about comedy) is that it demonstrates where this second, and infinitely superior, strain came from.

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.