For what is really striking about all the “rebel” comedians of the time, hard and soft, is that their main target was almost never the excesses of the right wing in power. From Tom Lehrer’s “Love, love love me, I’m a liberal” and Shelley Berman’s nervous flier to Woody Allen’s mockery of CUNY ethics and Nichols and May’s sublime catalogue of the sounds of tolerance (“Well, Al Schweitzer is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I personally have never dated him”), their subject was liberalism and its pieties. As Nachman sees quite clearly, though he seems not always to see the centrality of his own observation, the bulk of Mort Sahl’s material, beyond a couple of anti-McCarthy jokes long after McCarthy was out of power, wasn’t political—and, to the degree that it was, it mostly mocked liberal saints like the Kennedys. Rather, it was social and sexual: “There are no women in the Beat Generation, just girls who have broken with their parents for the evening.” Lenny Bruce may have been victimized by the police and the judiciary, but he seldom made fun of them—partly because he had a twisted, junkie’s respect for anyone who had contempt for him, but mostly because there wasn’t enough life in what they did to be very funny. “What can a man Eisenhower’s age say to me?” he shrugged memorably and then joked about liberal hypocrisies and liberal conventions (“I used to go to civil-rights marches, but Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles keep bumping into people”). Nichols and May are funny because they have perfect pitch for the holy words of progressive culture (“I can never believe that Bartók died on Central Park West”). Well past the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the comedians were mocking liberalism, implicitly recognizing that this was the ideology in cultural ascent.The book and this review were published in 2003, but we've seen what Gopnik describes in subsequent decades on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. We see it in contemporary streaming shows like Hacks and The Studio, in which characters who earnestly or cynically embrace progressive ideas are depicted as somewhat ridiculous.
I thought about all this again when a friend on Bluesky pointed me to Jake Tapper's Substack page, where we learn that his book tour with Alex Thompson for that Biden "cover-up" book will continue for several more weeks and feature quite a few public appearances with friendly interviewers:
THURSDAY MAY 22 in WASHINGTON DC with Maureen Dowd at the 9:30 Club;If you think of the contemporary version of the liberal culture Gopnik describes above as a belief system, Tapper and Thompson are about to appear with several of its most prominent clerics (Jon Favreau! David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker!), and at some of its most famous cathedrals (the 92nd Street Y! WBEZ, home of This American Life and Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!).
TUESDAY MAY 27 in NEW YORK, NY with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y;
THURSDAY MAY 29 in PHILLY with Tamala Edwards at the Free Library;
SATURDAY MAY 31 in SEATTLE with Mike Pesca at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival;
MONDAY JUNE 2 in SAN FRANCISCO with Marisa Lagos at the Commonwealth Club;
TUESDAY JUNE 3 in LOS ANGELES with Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett at Writers Bloc;
THURSDAY JUNE 5 in CHICAGO with David Folkenflik at WBEZ Presents, at the Vic Theater.
More to come!
What does it mean when liberal culture embraces a book that bashes the Democratic Party and its former leader this way?
Up to a point, I respect liberals for being willing to engage in self-criticism. Do Republicans ever do that? How many Republican-bashing books have Republicans bought in bestseller numbers? How many jokes does Greg Gutfeld tell on Fox that are at the right's expense? But past a certain point, this impulse leaves many liberals unable to fully take their own side in an argument. They'd rather attack their own allies.
Maureen Dowd will chat with Tapper and Thompson in D.C. next week. Her latest column bashes Biden and the Democrats using the language and ideas of the Tapper/Thompson book. Gratifyingly, most of the reader picks among the comments are having none of it:
Looks like we're back to the old pastime of observing that Joe Biden is old. Never mind that Donald Trump is also old, but is also a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and barely able to string two coherent sentences together. And he's also crashed the economy and is wrecking the federal government. Plus, he's got those strange ties to Vladimir putin. Instead, let's beat up on Biden again. I'd take Biden's peace and stability, and the economy running like a well oiled machine, any day over the chaos we have now.I guess these readers are capable of taking their own side in an argument.
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I believe that Joe Biden should never have declared for a second term. I also believe that Joe Biden’s worst day with mental decline is preferable to any day under Trump.
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Be that as it may, whie Biden was President in the last year, he made no major gaffes, said nothing outlandish, was not vengeful - despite was Dowd offers up here. And most important in this "cognitive decline narrative", BIDEN STEPPED ASIDE; HE DID NOT RUN. Meanwhile, Trump messes up every single day, lies every day, grifts every day, insults every day. BUt here we are, still blaming Biden for everything.
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I was with you, Maureen, until I read this:
"Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming — as the Republicans are now with Trump’s egregious assaults on the Constitution, his cringey grifting..."
Republicans are screaming about Trump's corruption? Who? Where? When?
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Yes, Biden should’ve dropped out earlier or not run at all. But in November 2024 voters had a clear choice between a qualified woman of color and chose the grifter instead, so the current ongoing catastrophe is on them. Leave Biden alone.
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Cool! Do we have this fully off our chests now? Can we not hear another peep about Biden from this newspaper and bring the focus back to Israel's destruction of Gaza and Trump's rendition of US residents to El Salvador?
