From the Easy Chair

Humor

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 32-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AQ78

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AQ78, Humor from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 184, December 14, 1988.

Well, tonight Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a very different subject from those we have been discussing over the months and years. It is going to be an evening on humor.

Now humor can be and is variously defined. And I suppose we have to say like Freud finally did that humor cannot be defined. What constitutes humor varies with different people. But I want to say there can be such a thing as a malicious sense of humor and an affectionate one. I am going to tell a story which indicates that humor can be a lovable perspective on human foibles.

Now one of the things some of us like Otto and myself who are of a respectable age have occasional problems with is forgetting something. And we are sometimes also told that our memory is selective, because we remember what we want to. Well, I have a story about an elderly couple. The man was not feeling too well, ailing a bit. And this morning he woke up and he told his wife, he said, “Honey, I just don’t feel well this morning and I don’t feel like breakfast, but I would like and I think it would help me greatly if you would bring me a dish of ice cream.”

And as she put on her robe and went out the door he said, “Put some chocolate on it.” And then he called out a second later, “And sprinkle some nuts on it.”

And he waited about 10, 15 minutes and his wife came in with a tray and some scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee. And he looked after her and bellowed, “Woman, can’t you remember anything? You forgot the toast?”

[Scott] You made that up.

[Rushdoony] No, I did not.

Well, why don’t you tell yours about the accident?

[Scott] Oh, yes. Well, I read that. And I thought of you when I read it. I thought, this is a Rushdoony joke.

This man was driving very sedately through a green light at an intersection and a woman in a car with 14 kids plowed right into his car. And he got out and he said, “What its he matter with you?” He said, “Don’t you know when to stop?”

She said, “They are not all mine.”

[Rushdoony] Well, now to me that is good humor, because it is not malicious. It is kindly and it is an affectionate laughter of human foibles. And I think that tells us one of our problems today. We don’t have any good humor.

Since World War II humor has changed quite a bit.

[Scott] It is a put down.

[Rushdoony] It is a put down and it is an ugly, nasty put down. I think you have called attention to the difference between the older comedians and the current ones, Otto, and I think that is important to go into.

[Scott] Well, it is. Will Rogers was a famous humorist. Although men of a previous generation didn’t appreciate him. I did. I thought he was awfully good and he said he never met anyone he didn’t like. And there were lots of variations of that comment which weren’t very pleasant later on. But Rogers meant it. And he brought comfort to an awful lot of people. During the Depression it was astonishing as you look back on it, the Depression of the 30s that there were so many comedies.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that they dealt with people of wealth and instead of evoking envy, jealousy and anger and class hatred, they made everyone feel better.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because it was a vision of a kinder world, you might say. And humor is supposed to make you feel better. I often think that people who forget to laugh at their situation wind up in the laughing academy. And if you can’t laugh at what is happening, you will cry.

[Rushdoony] Well, think of the humor of men like Jack Benny as contrasted to the black humor of today.

[Scott] Well, Benny was very funny and I remember once I had to write some gags for a series of commercials using puppets and I think the client was the Merkel Meat Company of Chicago and they had a fellow from the ad agency. On that occasion I was out of the agency business and doing something else named Mr. Stifle. You know, one of the skits for the puppet was the burglar puppet put a gun in the back of the other puppet, the citizen puppet and said, “Your money...” Well, this was, “Your Merkel meat or your life.”

And the victim puppet didn't say anything for a while, just looked at the audience and the burglar puppet said, “Come on, come on. What are you waiting for?”

And he said, “I am thinking.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, Jack Benny.

[Scott] That was Jack Benny’s favorite gag. And Mr. Stifle said, “Well,” when he heard the gag he said, “Well, I appreciate New Yorker style humor myself, but are you sure the audience will get it?”

Somebody said, “They have been getting it from Benny for 30 years.”

And he said, “You mean you stole it?”

I said, “No.” I said, “He stole it from us.”

[Rushdoony] Well, the great comedians laugh at themselves.

[Scott] They were all losers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was the big thing.

[Rushdoony] And they called attention to the fact that you were not unlike them. Laurel and Hardy, for example, never popular with women, but very popular with men, because they came out as losers. They were always trying something that they were not capable of doing.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] Something that didn't work.

[Rushdoony] And they were though.

[Scott] It didn't work.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And they enabled men to laugh at their own foibles, their own failures, their own weaknesses and particularly in the Depression when so many men were not succeeding. They enjoyed Laurel and Hardy.

[Scott] Well, they were ... American humor used to be quite elaborate. It... it was a narrative. It had its setting. It built up and so forth. And now we have a discontinuity.

[Rushdoony] One liners.

[Scott] ... in humor. We have one liners that come out of no place and the next line is different and diverse and it something like the scrambled commercials that you begin to see now. The argument is that they have destroyed concentration, that there is no more linear thinking, that people are bored of the long story. They don’t want to wait to hear the end of it and so forth. It is the pressures of time we are told. But they... it is also a difference in attitude.

There are hardly any of their jokes that you can make now about the group. It is an insult to laugh at anybody, even yourself. And the racial political situation has gotten into humor.

So we are hearing scatological humor. We are hearing blue humor of a type that many groups introduced years ago in the late 50s or early 60s. And a lot of this is very rough, very rough. And a lot of it is not really basically very funny.

[Rushdoony] No, no. The older humor, because it was an affectionate look at human failings evoked a response from all men.

[Scott] And it also actually helped the relations between the groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because there was an affection... an affectionate underlay involved.

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] What can you say now about the feminists? You can’t make a joke involving a woman that the feminists don’t get very angry about. I was looking at the Wall Street Journal yesterday I think it was, or today. It was a letter from a woman who was a president of a corporation writing very... in a very irritated little article about the fact that she receives a great many letters that begin dear sir, business letters. And she says, “After all, I am not a sir and there are many women like myself in high executive positions.” And this is building up a great resentment in her. What a big problem.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the president of a company. I would hate to work in a company like that. You would have to be very careful what you said to her.

[Rushdoony] Well, I read the other day that the great classic of humor since World War II was Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

[Scott] Oh...{}

[Rushdoony] Which I thought was a non book.

[Scott] Well, it was about as funny as typhus... typhoid fever.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was about a runaway boy who was out of place in New York City which the writer fairly accurately, I think, for the period, portrayed it as a fairly sinister place.

[Rushdoony] And it was said to have replaced the great similar classic about a boy, Tom Sawyer.

[Scott] Oh, no.

[Rushdoony] And yet Tom Sawyer had a universality in depicting a boy, a boy’s day dreaming, a boy’s activities. It was something that boys identified with for generations until, of course, for supposedly racist attitudes...

[Scott] It has been barred now.

[Rushdoony] It has been barred now. And people don’t know about it.

[Scott] Because he had the runaway slave with him.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Jim. And I will never forget that professor who at that time was a Montana and is now, I think, at Cornell. I am not sure or Rochester. Who held up Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer as great homosexual classics.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] That was a {?}

[Rushdoony] It took a warped mind to think that one up.

[Scott] That was... he is a great man. He... he was arrested in a drug bust later. And he said it was a frame up. They were after him because of his unfashionable ideas. But his ideas were very fashionable in academia and he was highly praised and his...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... assessment has now gotten ... is accepted as valid in academia. But you mentioned Freud. I... I read Freud’s monograph on wit and humor. And I read it right after World War II when I was on a bus, a Greyhound bus going somewhere, from somewhere to somewhere. I have forgotten now. And it made me laugh out loud while I was reading it and I remember somebody on the bus got intrigued and said, “What is it?”

And here it was the essays of Sigmund Freud or something and they looked at me with awe. But it was. It was... It was one of the most unconscious funniest things I have ever read in my life. He had a series of jokes which he quoted and I remember one of them. They were almost all Jewish jokes. In fact, they were all Jewish, very Jewish jokes. One was about an Irish broker who was trying to convince a young man of some substance that this girl who had no money should be just the one for him. Well, he said, you know, you don’t really... he said he has no money.

Well, he said, “Money isn’t everything. What you want is a good girl, a virtuous girl, a girl who will be able to cook and this and that.” And then he showed the picture. And he said, “Well, she is cross eyed.”

Well he said, “Now if you talk that away.” He talked away the fact that she had a limp. He talked away the fact that she had a hump. And then the man found some other defect and the broker said, “What do you want, perfection?”

Well...

[Rushdoony] Yes, I remember that.

[Scott] And at the end of all this—and I laughed at these Jewish jokes that are undoubtedly old with Freud... when they... by the time a joke gets in print it is usually at least a generation old.

But at any rate, at the end of it his conclusion was that the reason you laugh at a joke is in relief because you see the point.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I remember that. I... I thought was the funniest thing in the book.

[Scott] It was hilarious. No more sense of humor than a doorknob.

[Rushdoony] You know at our staff breakfast, I believe, this morning, I was mentioning Mark Twain’s letters to his brother, I believe, when he went to Virginia City. And he wrote his brother and he said, “This is without doubt a sinful city, the wickedest city in all of America. It is no place for a good Presbyterian. Therefore I have stopped being a good Presbyterian.”

Well, that is funny.

[Scott] Well, the Depression had jokes. I remember this story about the fellow who left home looking for a job in the city and they didn’t hear from for six or eight months and then they got one of those one penny post cards. Do you remember them?

[Rushdoony] [affirmative response]

[Scott] One penny post cards. And written in pencil on the back of the postcard to this brother it said, “Dear Jim, meet me under the railroad trestle tomorrow night at eight o'clock. Bring a shirt, a pair of pants, a tie and a cap.” And it said, “P.S., I have got shoes.”

[Rushdoony] I had forgotten the... the flavor of depression jokes. That is a vintage one. Choice.

[Scott] It came out. It was part of that period.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I can’t forget all those old jokes and I remember my grandfather Scott telling jokes about of World War I vintage and earlier and they were all fairly sophisticated. I mean there is the one about the Frenchmen or the... the man in France who had a hat store. An Englishman came by and looked in the window at the... all the hats. And then went in and ordered what he thought was a black hat in French, but he said instead of {?} he said {?} and in French that is a condom, black condom. And the proprietor said, “Well, sure.” He thought he was insane. He said, “Perhaps you could try the pharmacy or some other place. We don’t handle those objects.”

And the English man drew himself up and said, “Nonsense, the all in the window. I see them.”

Well, then Frenchman thought he is... maybe he is a mild lunatic. Now I will humor him. He said, “Well, we could send out for one if you have to have it, but I think the black,” he said, “is very rare. Why does it have to be...?”

The Englishman said, “It has to be black.”

He said, “Well, why should it be black?”

He said, “My wife just died.”

He said, “Oh, what beautiful sentiment.”

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] Told with great aplomb. And the whole thing hinged not on the sex so much as on the difference between the two countries, the two cultures and the language.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the things I realized early was how different the sense of humor is in different cultures. Armenia humor that I grew up {?} stories, the stories of the dumb Turk.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] In ... among the Turks {?} is the all wise Turk.

[Scott] I see. And not the Armenians he is a simpleton.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He is the incredibly stupid person. Men run the Chinese... my years in Chinatown. They had a particular sense of humor which was quite different. And the American Indians, my years among them.

[Scott] The Irish sense of humor is different than the American. It is a bloody sense of humor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there was a very famous joke about the Irishman who went to fight in the English army in World War I. And he was brought back without arms, without legs and without eyes in a basket. And his wife who didn’t know what had happened to him went over and looked at him and said, “Johnny, I hardly know you.” And they thought that was so funny they made a song out of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I had forgotten that. Well, there was one Chinese story. This goes back to the late 30s which is good in English, too. To get the point of it you have to realize the Chinese are the original and the ancient pragmatists. For example, when I was on the reservation, one of the things I learned that used to drive in the 30s the FHA people crazy was this. If an Indian died in the house it was believed his ghost would haunt it permanently.

[Scott] So they took him out.

[Rushdoony] So they... they would take him out, but if he died before they could, they would light a match and burn up the house.

[Scott] Oh, my.

[Rushdoony] And on some of the reservations the federal officer would be racing whenever he saw smoke to try to put the fire out and save the federal loan.

The Chinese had a similar belief that if a person died in a house or an apartment the place would be haunted. But pragmatically they said for 30 days.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] So they would move out for 30 days.

[Scott] And then it was all right.

[Rushdoony] Then it was all right. In the San Francisco Chinese YMCA someone drowned once. So for 30 days the pool was closed by them so that nobody would have any trouble with the ghost.

[Scott] I see.

[Rushdoony] Well, at any rate, things always have time sequence. And according to this story this drunken white woman was leaning out of her apartment window to look at something down the street and she lost her balance and fell down into an open garbage can. And just then two elderly Chinese rounded the corner and saw the woman in the garbage can and they shook their heads in dismay. And the one said to the other, “Americans, very wasteful. This woman good for 10 more years.”

Now that doesn’t have the same flavor in English that it does have in Chinese or did in those days. But that caught something about the Chinese pragmatism very tellingly.

[Scott] Well, it... it is true. There is different in every culture. One of the reasons the German army decided that it had lost World War I was that the morale of the troops and particularly in the last year was very poor and they admired the English fighting men very much and they said also that one of the earmarks of the English was their sense of humor. And they took—and this was in the German army manual, took for officers who were advised to inculcate a sense of humor into the troops. And they had a cartoon by Bruce {?} a very famous cartoonist which showed one English private in a great shell hole and another one saying to him, “What caused this hole, do you suppose?”

And the first one said, “Mice.”

And they reproduced this together with the dialogue and then underneath it in italics they said it was really not mice, but a shell.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the problems today is that when you turn on television you don’t get humor anymore.

[Scott] Well, you do, but it is a different kind.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is right.

[Scott] Now... now the ... a playwright whose name I can’t think of at the moment wrote a one act play, a very interesting play called Barclay Square which played in the 30s. Only one act. And the point of the play or the theme of the play was that a wealthy businessman in London in the 1880s or so found in an old book a way to summon a demon. And he chose {?} the god of laughter on the theory that that would be the most benign that he could summon. And when {?} appeared and said, “Well, what do you want?” He said, “All I want is the newspaper for tomorrow,” figuring that he would be able to anticipate the market and make his fortune.

Unfortunately when he saw the newspaper for the next day it had his death listed. And the ...in the wings you heard the laughter of {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the point is that you are what you laugh at. And laughter is an instrument of cruelty and contempt as well as enjoyment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The... we are seeing the dark side of laughter today in the United States.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the dark side of laughter is what is being accepted in all jokes.

I ... I told a couple of jokes at a dinner party in ... in the East one night and there was a ... it was mixed company and there was the young wife of a young executive present and she came over to me afterwards and said, “Do you realize that one of those stories you told was a very sexist story? And I don’t think you should be telling stories like that.”

And I said, “Does your husband know that you are talking to me about this?”

And she looked surprised.

And I said, “I don’t think he would be pleased with you if he knows that you came over and told me.”

And... but she obviously felt well equipped to do it and a perfect right to tell an older man how he should conduct himself this social occasion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A very strange turn of events.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is going on here. And the Sadism that we see in the movies is being reflected in our humor.

[Rushdoony] Very much so. It is ugly, vicious humor. It is more than a put down. It is venomous.

[Scott] Well, if you make a figure of fun out of the president, if you portray the President as a clown... now we can’t do this to the Prime Minister of England or to any other country. Various national groups would rise up in great wrath if we began to denigrate the leaders of other countries. But we have diminished the office of president and by diminishing the office we have diminished ourselves. We have diminished our nation. And I think that humor is worth more attention than it has been receiving.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely so. And I think humor is a good index to the spiritual condition of a people.

One aspect of the subject of humor has always been of concern to me. In Psalm two we are told of God’s laughter as he views the pretensions of men. And yet we have had a vein in the western world within Christendom of churchmen who have felt that levity is somehow ungodly. And this goes back to Greek, neoplatonic spiritually which is very much warped some Christians so that humor is frowned on and it is seen as somehow untenable. This has cropped up in both Catholic and Protestant churches periodically. And you have had people who felt that a solemnity of a pompous officious sort represented godliness and that humor was somehow undignified and indicative of a lack of intelligence or lack of seriousness.

But I think to the contrary some of the finest minds within Christendom have had a good sense of humor. I think also we need to recognize that humor is a necessity spiritually, because a good sense of humor means that you don't take yourself seriously. It means that you laugh at yourself and your own foibles and follies and pretensions. So a lack of a sense of humor can lead very directly to Pharisaism and has again and again.

[Scott] No question. It is a serious defect.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is a really a serious defect, because it means that you ... you lack a certain sense of proportion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What is ... what... what becomes funny is what is inherently disproportionate or ridiculous in a situation.

I... I mentioned before that humor, you know, runs in fashions. There are fashions in jokes. Your remember the knock, knock jokes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then there was... there was a period, I think, in the late 50s of early 60s of Colonel Culpepper stories and they were just ahead of the civil rights movement, but part of the civil rights argument.

Life magazine sent a photographer and a reporter down to the South to interview people and they interviewed Colonel Culpepper and they said Colonel Culpepper, “Are you in favor of desegregation?”

And he said, “No sir.”

And they said, “Are you in favor of segregation?”

He said, “No sir.”

They said, “Well, what are you in favor of?”

He said, “Slavery.”

And there was a whole stream of these. And they were... they were devastating in their effect.

They... they interviewed a black man. They... they were driving along and the fellow said, “Stop the car. There is a black man. He is behind a plow. Let’s go over and ask him what he thinks.”

So they went over and this was in the heart of Georgia and they said to this black man behind the plow, “Can we ask you a couple of questions?”

And he said, well, he didn’t know, but maybe they could.

He said, “Well, what do you think of the community here and how are you being treated?”

And he said, “Well, you know, what is that think you are holding in front of my face?”

He said, “Well, this is a tape recorder.” And he said, “We are going to play this tape and your answers when we get back up north. You can say anything you like. And nobody around here is going to know what you are telling us.”

He said, “I can say anything I like?”

He said, “Yes.”

So he leaned closer to the microphone and he said, “Help.”

[Rushdoony] Oh, I remember during the Roosevelt years and Truman years a story that was told here in California. And in those days the farmers felt that the Democrats had saved them. So you have seen a switch in 32 of the San Joaquin Valley famers who had been overwhelmingly Republican into the Democratic folds so that for a while you were afraid to admit in some areas that you were a Republican.

At any rate, this minister who was a Republican was out calling one hot summer day and he was on the ... in the Fresno area and the temperature was running 100 to 105 and his car broke down. So he didn’t see any cars in sight and started to walk back perspiring and finally a farmer came along in a pickup and gave him a ride. And the farmer talked about the upcoming election and started damning the Republicans and the pastor interjected a word and he said, “Now, friend, we mustn’t be too hasty in our condemnation of everyone. I myself happen to be a Republican and I think there is a good case for the Republican party.”

And the farmer reached across the man and opened the door and said, “Get out. You call yourself a preacher and you are the enemy of your people if you are a Republican.”

So the poor farmer got out there in the 100 plus temperature... first... the minister got out and continued to walk and he thought when another pick up or car comes along I will keep my mouth shut.

And before long another farmer came along in a pickup and gave him a ride and started talking about the election and the minister’s only comment was, “Well, you may be right, friend. You may be right.”

So he didn’t get thrown out, but then the came abreast of a melon patch and the farmer said, “Why don’t you duck under that fence and get us a melon. It is an awfully hot day and I am thirsty and a melon would taste good.”

And the farmer said... or the minister said, “Well, friend, I am a minister and I believe in God’s law and it says thou shalt not steal.”

And the man interrupted him angrily and he said, “Now, look. I am giving you a ride and all I am saying is get one measly melon. If you don’t want to get the melon, get out and walk.”

And he said, “Don’t be hasty. Don’t be hasty. I will get it.”

So he started crawling under the fence and since he was on his knees he figured it was a good time to pray. So he prayed. He said, “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me. Only five minutes a Democrat and already a thief.”

[Scott] I like the ending better than the beginning. Sometimes some of these things stick in your mind for years.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I remember that Eli Wallace the actor was raised on the East Side in New York when that was poor and Jewish and he said his only memories of his mother all through his childhood he said was she was always over the wash basin washing clothes. And he came in one day and he said, “Hey, ma.” He said, “Did you see in the papers John D. Rockefeller died?”

And she said, “He should care with his money.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think one of the things that we should make note of is the relationship historically of humor with morality. The classic example of that is Aesop’s fables. There is no relationship between Aesop’s fables and the Aesop of Greek history. His name survived and Aesop’s fables as we know them are medieval fables coming from monks. And the accounts of them were very interesting because the originals have been traced back to India and to China, folk tales that have...

[Scott] ...traveled by word of mouth around the world.

[Rushdoony] Traveled by word of mouth around the world. And some scholars have traced the individual ones written monographs on them. Very interesting.

But the end result is what is very, very telling, because in their final form as they passed through the Christian matrix they were honed to the magnificent format they now have, which used to be in all the textbooks when we went to school.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] I grew up on Aesop’s fables.

[Scott] Oh, oh, King Loud and the frogs.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And... and a whole host of them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And now ask any school child and he will look at you blankly. He has never heard of Aesop’s fables. But they were not only funny, but they had a moral point. They showed folly as ludicrous. And that was very, very important in the upbringing you and I and those of our generation and countless generations before us had.

[Scott] Yes. They were linked...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They were linked with the basic patterns of behavior.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you have now kids who don’t know the difference.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Just as we spoke at an earlier tape about people who don’t understand what they are sinning. We have people now who don’t know when they are ridiculous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this means that the ridiculous is parading around without self consciousness and ... and look at the ... the business of trying to create a genderless language. Do you realize that there isn’t a genderless language in the whole world?

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And in the whole history of the world there has never been a language without gender.

[Rushdoony] I feel that something should be done to restore Aesop’s fables to schools, to Christian schools, because they do give you a perspective on life. Now there is nothing mentioned in them about Christianity.

[Scott] Not directly.

[Rushdoony] But there is a moral perspective in all of them that is totally Christian.

[Scott] No, that is true. And humor is very refreshing because you see yourself in it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is... it is... we... we all fall into the pit from time to time. And it is good to be reminded of it.

[Rushdoony] Well, when people take themselves too seriously, when they are humorless they find it difficult to forgive themselves their blunders.

[Scott] Well, then it is taken as a sign of hostility. It is now taken as a sign of hostility since we have racial politics we can no longer tell jokes about races.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I have mentioned on more than one occasion the fact that I grew up in a Swedish community and in the 30s there was a radio comedian Ole Olson.

[Scott] Yes, I remember him.

[Rushdoony] Who spoke very broken English.

[Scott] And wasn’t it after 1950 what? Do you remember that? There was a movie he made.

[Rushdoony] Oh. That I didn’t know, but...

[Scott] And 1950 was the future. Everything was going to come out of machines including babies. He said, “I like the old way best.”

[Rushdoony] Well, nobody enjoyed Ole Olson more than the Swedes did.

[Scott] Of course.

[Rushdoony] They would look forward to it. You go to school the night after he was on radio and that was all that he Swedish kids were talking about with delight and imitating him.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Now today they would say that is racist humor and it is poking fun at a people, but it was an affectionate thing.

[Scott] Well, the last stronghold of ethnic humor is the Catskills and Florida where most of the humor is Jewish and anti Christian. And they laugh and I have listened to it and I have laughed with them, because I have thought some of the jokes were very funny.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I heard Bill Robinson in the Cotton Club in New York and he was a very great entertainer. He was a great tap dancer. He tap danced up a small step ladder, up one side and down the other. And while he tap danced to the music he told jokes at the same time. And I will never forget one joke that he told about... and I have forgotten now what the term was for his race, whether it was a colored ma or a negro. I ... I have forgotten. In those days never black. That was considered an insult.

Was driving a car from New York City to Florida and he went through a red light in a town called Keep on Going, Georgia. And he was a... he was immediately stopped by a policeman who said, “What is the matter with you going through that red light?”

And he said, “Oh,” he said, “I just saw a white lady going through the green light and figured the red light was for us colored folks.”

And he got the point across very neatly. Lots of things can be said in the guise of humor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And lots of things are said in the guise of humor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But... and the same thing is true, of course in writing. Writing without wit is witless.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there is nothing worse. Psychiatry is humorless. There is no room in psychiatry for a joke. Everything has a secret meaning.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you know the famous one, of course, with the one psychiatrist said, “Good morning” to the other one and the other one said, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is very good, very telling, too. And it means, by the way, that the world of total meaning has been transferred from the mind of God to the mind of man. That is its significance so that psychiatry is Humanism gone mad.

[Scott] Just about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is a very good definition, because the assumption is that one man can read another man’s mind.

[Rushdoony] Also that your mind in its every manifestation, its dreams or an expression is infallible. It is an infallible index to your subconscious.

[Scott] Not so.

[Rushdoony] So that infallibility has been transferred from God to man.

[Scott] Well, you know, for a while they were saying that you subconsciously recorded everything and that that could be recalled under hypnosis. Further experiments have disclosed the fact that hypnosis simply evokes fantasies. Your mind does not recall everything, because you are not omnipotent.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And you are not infallible. And your mind is imperfect.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But they haven’t publicized that kind of conclusion. And they still continue to operate on the assumption that your psychoanalysis will reveal the truth about you from what you say and what you dream and so on.

[Scott] Well, when humor in the psychoanalytic jargon is evidence of hostility. If you are making some group because you are hostile to them. So I remember various jokes in which you would simply switch the target around so that it wouldn’t be the one you are talking to. They would laugh as long as it was a third party that was the object of... of merriment, but not their own. But humor is not... it is a... it is a safety valve. It is a release.

[Rushdoony] Well, getting back to this type of psychiatric analysis, it assumes an absolute and total meaning and that everything you say is revelatory of something or is concealing something and therefore it is revelatory.

[Scott] Everything has significance.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Rorschach ink blot test.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The... a series of ink blots would be shown to a person.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And you were to say what it was and that would reveal something about your character.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] But if you looked at a particular ink blot that didn’t look like anything and you said, “It doesn’t look like anything to me,” What are you concealing?

[Scott] Well, you know, the famous one and that is that {?} the fellow saw something sexual in every inkblot without exception. And then when he was leaving he said, “By the way, doc, where did you get all those dirty pictures?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But... and I have a ... a professor of psychology tell me many years ago that his worst student was one who didn’t see any sex in any of the ink blots. And he said... he said, “I regarded him with deep suspicion thereafter... ever after.”

Well, I thought that was funny.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is no wonder that as a result of the influence of Freud, humor has taken a very sick turn.

[Scott] It has political and racial and ethnic significance today that it didn’t have a time when racial and ethnic and political jokes were much more widely told than they are now.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is an interesting thing. The American people had great freedom of speech in the 20s and 30s. Since World War II that area of free speech has been progressively narrowed. And it is an interesting thing that as the area of speech has been progressively narrowed for reasons that only the social scientists can make sound reasonable, the humor of the country has gotten uglier.

Now presumably the social scientists and all these new and liberating laws and equalizing laws and so forth would have led to a kinder and gentler nation, to quote Mr. Bush and would have led to a lot more open and easy fraternity and humor, but it hasn’t.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] We have more dissention today than we have ever had before. We have more divisiveness than we have ever had before. And we have humor that is uglier than we have ever had before. I thought the sick jokes that appeared in the wake of the nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the sick jokes that appeared in the wake of the Ethiopian starving... oh, there were a whole flood of them. There were a whole flood of them. And they appeared within days of these stories. There is an underground humor that circulates through the United States which is ... it began quite some time back, you know, that the real... outside of that, how did you like the show, Mrs. Lincoln?

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] It was... it was a mild one compared to the things that have been coming out since them. And you really wondered. It is really enough to ... to make you wonder, because there is a dark side to humor.

[Rushdoony] Yes and it is the dark side we see mainly in our times.

Well, I think there is a very, very important place in the Christian perspective for humor. I think one of the things that struck me very forcibly recently was that someone when I was on a trip said that they wished they could sit in on our staff breakfasts, because they had heard from so many people about the both intelligent discourse as well as the humor of those meetings. And...

[Scott] Well, they are somewhat like Mad Hatter tea parties, you know. The conversation is never organized and ... but what surprises me is that sometimes some solid things come out.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, this person said you never find any good humor anywhere. And it makes you feel envious that anyone can sit in on a happy exchange.

[Scott] Well, I think that is true. We have professional humorists and our comedians that... I think Fred Allen was one of the last who wrote his own jokes. Now they all have writers who brainstorm jokes.

[Rushdoony] Well, I believe Fred Allen was really outstanding and his ability to laugh at himself was phenomenal.

[Scott] Well, I always liked his definition of the vice president on the networks. He said every morning a vice president comes to work and they place a molehill on his desk and it is job to build it into a mountain by five o'clock.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, too many of the contemporary younger humorists are not only salacious, but they act as though they have an even dirtier story that they would like to tell you and they are just plain repulsive.

[Scott] It is interesting. I don't know how things are going in other countries, whether the humor in other countries is going the same way as ours, but I have a feeling that it is.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I read something in I... I am not sure, but I think it was in Punch, recently where the writer said had there ever been a generation that has endured as much disruption and stress as we live under today in the ordinary turn of events, the velocity of traffic, the calls upon our attention, the harassment of the media, the noise. The movement, the elements of discomfort, the demands on our time.

I mean, for instance, the poster that you got that you are not going to give me a lie detector test. So if you do I will turn you in. And the whole business of constantly feeling that the government is after you, directing you, harassing you, instructing you, educating you and so forth.

[Rushdoony] There is one area— and we are running out of time—of humor that is remarkable in our day, the cartoonists.

[Scott] Ah.

[Rushdoony] And some of them like Hagar the Horrible are very good and I think, for example, the cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal. He had a classic recently and I will close with this one. It showed a man at the gates of heaven and Saint Peter looking at the record and then shaking his head at the man and saying, “I know that you were told the meek shall inherit the earth, but the law doesn't say anything about the apathetic.”

[Scott] You would like that.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.