April 30, 2019--Trump Roast

Trump again Wednesday night absented himself from the White House Correspondents' dinner. The one where presidents traditionally are roasted but then have the last word. The chance to get even with the press and other attendees.

Most of the reporters claim that Trump avoids these affairs because he is still smarting from what Barack Obama said about him in his remarks at the 2011 dinner.

Recall that at the time Trump was still hustling his birther claims. That Obama was not born in the United States, rather in Kenya, and therefore should not have been allowed to run for the presidency. In other words, he was an illegitimate president.

Obama retaliated by mercilessly ripping Trump to pieces in front of the Washington establishment.

Here's a sample--

“I know that Trump’s taken some flack lately, but no one is prouder to put this birth-certificate matter to rest than the Donald. That’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"

It could well be that Trump doesn't want to open himself to more mockery. But it also could be--and this is my view--that Trump totally lacks a sense of humor. Not just humor at his expense (though with his ego that can't be much fun) but any humor whatsoever.

Can you recall one instance, just one, where he said something funny or laughed heartily at someone else's amusing remark? At most with Trump we see an occasional frozen smile that is more grimace than chuckle.

In contrast, recall how much FDR, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama enjoyed a laugh or two. Even those at their own expense.

Also recall that all of these presidents had dogs. Even humorless Nixon had one. Checkers. 

So Trump has no dog and no sense of humor.

It also may be that Trump's total lack of humor suggests he has Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.

Humor, specifically jokes, involve cognitive capacities that are often challenging for individuals with Asperger's.  According to researchers who have studied the nature of humor, flexible thinking is important to understanding jokes. Punchlines in jokes are funny partly because they are unexpected. Additionally, according to these researchers, big picture thinking is essential in understanding jokes, as it allows the listener to understand how the surprising punchline coheres with the joke's set up. 

As individuals with AS often demonstrate rigid thinking, a desire for sameness, and difficulty with sustained thought, it seems that individuals with Asperger's would have difficulty reacting to and employing even simple forms of humor.

About humor, at the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen looks directly into the camera and says--

"It reminds me of that old joke--you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, 'Hey doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken.' Then the doc says, 'Why don't you turn him in?' Then the guy says, 'I would, but we need the eggs.'"

Allen was talking about how no matter how crazy they can be we need relationships.

We also need humor. But when it comes to Trump, I wouldn't expect any eggs.

June 3, 2014--Take My Wife . . . Please.

I always thought the roots of Jewish humor were those described by Sigmund Freud in his book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

He argued that most Jewish jokes indicate Jewish people's ability to (a) engage in a thorough self-criticism of themselves, (b) advocate a democratic way of life, (c) emphasize the moral and social principles of the Jewish religion, (d) criticize the excessive requirement of it, and (e) reflect on the misery of many Jewish communities.

If you think of Woody Allen as the quintessential schlemiel and self-mocking jokester, only (a) and (e) pertain. Jewish humor is all based on self- and communal criticism and the resulting inner turmoil, misery, and self-pity. There's nothing in Woody's humor or any really funny Jewish humor about democracy or the moral principles of the Jewish religion.

It's hard to think of anything funny to say about any of these high-minded concepts. But Freud was a theorist without much of a sense of humor and so . . .

Recently, I have come to a very different conclusion--

Much of Jewish humor is derived from Jewish food.

Not the food itself, which when ingested can cause all sorts of inner misery and gas (both subjects of many jokes), but the names of our favorite traditional foods--from Bagels to Knishes to Tsimmis.

What other food traditions have so many foods with funny names? Veal Parmigianna? Cog au vin? Meatloaf? Corn beef and cabbage? Not even close to being as funny as Flanken, Ruglach, or Gedempte Fleisch.

A crepe is not funny, but a Blintz is. A porterhouse steak may bring you culinary pleasure, but not as many laughs as Brisket. It could be worth lingering over sweet and sour soup but Matzoh Balls, though tasteless, are funnier.

Neil Simon has a theory that words beginning with K's (or hard Cs) are funny. In the Sunshine Boys, one of the Boys, Willie, an old vaudevillian, gives his nephew a lecture about what's funny--

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know words that are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say "Alka Seltzer" you get a laugh . . . Words with "K" in them are funny. And with Cs. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.

People who study what's funny agree. There are some sounds in English that are by their nature funny. Those that begin with P's, B's, T's, D's, hard-C's, and especially K's.

These sounds are called by linguists plosive consonants because they are plosive, they "start suddenly." And thus for some reason make us laugh.

Though not funny, this helps explain why Jewish foods, the plosive names of Jewish foods, are so funny. Also, since Jews spend a lot of time dealing with phlegm, often the result of eating the wrong thing, we thus specialize in sounds and words that make creative use of it. Think, for example, of Felix Unger's honking in Neil Simon's Odd Couple.

P-foods include pickled herring, pirogue (dumplings ), pletzel (flat bread), p'tcha (calves foot jelly) and of course pastrami.

B-foods are among the most familiar to non-Jews (and gentile New Yorkers)--babka (two b's plus one k), bialy, borscht, blintz, brisket, and the universal bagel.

T-foods include teiglach (small sweet pastries) and tzimmes (a stew of carrots, yams, and raisins). Both delicious and funny.

Foods beginning with G's are the well-known goulash and gefilte fish as well as chicken skin cracklings called gribbenes, perhaps my all time favorite Jewish food name.

And finally there are all the funny food names that begin with K's--kasha varnishkas (groats with farfalle pasta), kichel (egg-dough cookies), kneidlach (the Yiddish name for matzoh balls), knishes, kreplach (similar to pierogi), kugel (a sweet and savory casserole with lots of broad noodles), and kishke (beef intestines that also is used in expressions such as the alliterative, "Kick him in the kishkes").

When you grow up eating food with these kinds of names (and don't forget lox), a predisposition to humorous stories and jokes is inevitable. Couple this with self-mockery and gas and, Freud aside, there you have the real roots of Jewish humor.

March 4, 2014-Oscars

I think I figured out why the Academy Awards are so boring.

It's not because neither Bob Hope nor Johnny Carson are available to serve as hosts. Though for me almost anyone other than Ellen DeGeneres would be an improvement.

It's not because the actresses are so afraid of what Joan Rivers will say the next day about their gowns on Fashion Police that they tend to pick and wear ones that are so safe and predictably "glamorous."

The show is not awful because there are so many technical awards--after all films are a technical medium and camera work, sound, editing, and special effects are much about what makes movies special. Besides, without all these awards the show would be over in an hour and a half and we would miss all the commercials.

And, though the winning songs tend to be the worst of the ones nominate (this year's for Frozen a case in point), this too is not why the Oscar's show is so forgettable.

It's because the winners are so interminably borrrrring.

If I had thought to do so, in the tradition that it's all right, even expected, to be bitchy about the Oscars' show, I would have used a stop watch to calculate how much time was spent by the winners thanking people. They get a couple of minutes to make their acceptance speeches before music is played to get them off stage and for the most part, with the exception of Jared Leto, who won for best supporting actor, and Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, every winner spent virtually all their allotted time thanking everyone from their parents (inevitable) to their hair person.

This left no time for anyone to say something funny or pithy. Forget memorable.

I was left to thinking that Jared Leto saying a few words about AIDS and Ukraine was courageous and wondering if Cate Blanchett would have the "courage" to thank her director, Woody Allen. He's in trouble once more because one of Mia Farrow's 100 children two weeks ago again accused him of molesting her when Woody was living with Mia, which must have been a nightmare. I mean, living with Mia Farrow.

Cate did manage to muster enough courage to mutter something about how Woody was good enough to cast her for the film. Cast, take note, not direct. I guess that made what she felt compelled to say seem more benign.

So here's my suggestion--as an experiment, next year, tell all nominees that if they win they are allowed to thank only their families and God. (Thank God this year only Matthew McConaughey pointed to the heaven and gave thanks before lapsing into incoherence.)

This way, they could get someone to write something funny for them or, who knows, maybe even something clever, witty, or meaningfully political. Or they could just wing it and look ridiculous. That would give people like me more ammunition to make fun of the whole thing.

By the way, the best performance by an actor was Bruce Dern's in the best film, Nebraska.

February 11, 2014--Again Mommy, Again

Some years ago I listened in as my New Jersey sister-in-law read a story to her four-year-old daughter.

What struck me was not so much the story--I think a weasel was prominently featured--but the rapt attention my niece paid to it. Also, though she could not as yet read, she appeared to be mouthing all the words. Clearly she had heard the story before. Certainly, many times to be able to lip-sink it so seamlessly.

And then at the end, I was fascinated to hear her say, "Again, mommy, again." At which time her mother without a shrug or sigh, read it again. And again. And then again. By which time my niece was fighting to fend off sleep.

That contributed to my lifelong interest in stories. Not just my loving to listen to them, or telling them, or attempting to write them, but by the seemingly universal interest all peoples have in stories. More fundamentally, appear to need them. Perhaps particularly those they have heard before like my niece, many, many times.

Can you name one society, one culture, one tribe--pre-historic, ancient, or contemporary--that does not depend upon stories? Not just for pleasure, not just for tribal or communal bonding, but perhaps even for survival.

Because if stories are so ubiquitous in evolutionary terms they must be "adaptive," which means they are needed for species survival. Equally as important as food, language, music, belief systems (which all have stories at their heart), rituals, mores, and social arrangements.

If true, all humans have, actually must have the same propensity, the same, may I say, biological need for stories as my four-year-old New Jersey niece.

Some claim that we shape our sense of personhood by the stories we tell and exhibit about ourselves. We shape into stories experiences for the purpose of sculpting a Self. There is no Self possible, it is thought, if one does not do this. There is no reality about ourselves except that which we create in this story-generating way.

Since post-modernists assert that reality is socially constructed--and not discoverable in any absolute way and then passed along as Truth--to me a persuasive contention--this fits the notion that we each socially construct who we are. Stories are the warp and weft of that life-long effort.

My earliest experience with this transformative, self-building process--beyond the stories my mother must have read to me that I was too young to recall--were the accounts of adventures my Cousin Chuck pursued as much for the stories he made of them as the adventures themselves.

There was one time when he and I camped overnight in a state park in the Catskills. I was a cub scout and knew about making fires and pitching a tent. He knew about neither. In fact, he was the least out-of-doors-oriented person I knew. To him, the out-of-doors was the neighborhood schoolyard. But he insisted on going camping.

So my father drive us to the site, said his goodbyes, wished us well, and said he'd be back for us in the morning.

I pitched a tent by myself, having sent Chuck out to gather firewood. He asked if he could have my cub scout knife in case he needed to defend himself.

I told him there were no bears for at least 20 miles but to indulge him and to get him out of the way so I could pitch the tent without his interference, I gave him the knife.

He returned after 15 minutes with a few twigs and branches. Barely enough for me to heat up the baked beans and grill the hot dogs my mother had packed for us.

As only beans and frankfurters cooked and eaten in the woods can taste, we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner, scattered the embers, slid into our sleeping bags, and proceeded to sleep like proverbial logs.

My father arrived right on time and found us packed and ready to go.

On the way home, during that 45 minutes, Chuck, in response to my father asking how we did, told a story, created a story worthy of James Fenimore Cooper. How the evening began with his struggle to subdue a grizzly bear that had penetrated out campsite and attempted to steal our food and how, after driving the bear back into the woods, we were attacked by swarms of bats and later lay awake all night listening to the howls of a nearby wolf, Chuck ever on-guard, protecting me, his younger cousin, with his 12-inch Bolo knife.

And then when we got back to the house the family was renting, my Dad had him tell the story over and over again to assorted cousins and aunts and uncles who had gathered for the weekend.

By the fifth telling, every one of which I listened to and savored, the one bear had become three, the lone wolf had become a pack, and his knife had grown to 14 inches.

This story lives on in family lore though Chuck prematurely departed this life. It not only reflects the self Chuck constructed but also has helped define our larger family. In the alchemic possibilities of America (also largely created through a national narrative more fiction than fact), we transformed ourselves from shtetl Jews into full-blooded Americans. Eager to take on whatever came our way. To become who we wanted to be. To become how we defined ourselves largely through our shape-shifting stories.

This all reminds me of Woody Allen's joke at the end of Annie Hall--

A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, "Hey doc, my bother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken!" 

Then the doc says, "Why don't you turn him in?" 

Then the guy says, "I would, but we need the eggs."

Indeed, we need the eggs.

January 2, 2014--WARNING: Sports Action Violence

This holiday season we've actually gone to the movies three times. Out to the movies in a movie theater, not just watching them at home on DVDs.

Thus far we've seen--Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, 12 Years A Slave, and the Coen brothers Inside Llewyn Davis.

All were disappointing.

Blue Jasmine felt like a series of two-dimensional cliches about the rich and poor. The rich vapid and hollow, the working poor violent and virtuous.

12 Years A Slave, though it reminds one of the unspeakable cruelty of that "peculiar institution," also was superficial, with the slaves essentially noble and the owners psychopathic. Of course there are elements of truth in this; but, I felt, if you want a more moving and insightful view of this American nightmare, get hold of Roots on disc or, if you'd like something brilliant and unsettlingly controversial, take a look at Django Unchained.

As for Inside Llewyn, if you're searching for a mean-spirited portrayal of the folk music scene in 1961 Greenwich Village, this flick is for you. Even the music in the film, which in real time was often clever and full of fun, was turgid. And the Coens' picture of the Village back then was far from what I remember. To them it was empty and grim; to me it was tumultuous and exciting, with of course the usual down and dark sides.

To distract myself, especially during the disappointing Llewyn, for some reason I found myself thinking about the movie rating system. The one that warns potential moviegoers about nudity, sex, and violence. Or at least the old G-to-X system that prevailed until more recent years when the list of warnings, especially to parents, increased dramatically.

For example, the preview we saw for what I suspect will be a leading candidate for the stupidest picture of the year, the Robert De Niro-Sylvester Stallone film Grudge Match, has among its warnings "Sports Action Violence." I doubt if the really good Rocky I, which Grudge rips off, had such a warning even though Sly spent a lot of time in a meat locker beating up on bloody sides of beef.

Midnight Cowboy, the first mainstream X-rated movie, back in 1969 received an X because of its "Homosexual Frame of Reference." How far we've come. Today it would probably be rated PG-13.

On the other hand, moviegoers are now warned about "Unsettling Images," "Sexual References," "Drug Use," "Smoking," and, my current favorite, for the film Walking With Dinosaurs, "Creature Action and Peril."

This proliferation of warning categories reminds me of all the safety labels on things such as step ladders, bicycles, and kiddy car seats. Some of this is because of litigiousness; some because we have devolved into a culture that over-coddles children; and, more generally, we have become a people paralyzed by all sorts of unknowable threats.

But when it comes to new categories for Motion Picture Association warnings, those I would welcome include--

For Blue Jasmine--Pervasive Cliches.

For 12 Years A Slave--Superficial Social Issues.

For Inside Llewyn Davis--Only for those Who Know Nothing About the 1960s.