Dark Humor: America’s Pastime

The history of our country is a series of wars interspersed with a dark humor appropriate for a frontier society. We are a violent people; our dark humor allows us a grim smile at our catalogue of conquests and atrocities. And yet we see ourselves as the last best hope of the world for a better society purged of aristocracy, slavery and now trying to add plutocracy to the list of dead-end paths we have avoided. We may achieve this with peaceful facilitation, but I doubt it. It will come with violence and a few good jokes and anecdotes which currently pass for media journalism. We are frightening in our capacity to wreak vengeance for wrongs done to us or perceived as such. We preach the New Testament but practice the Old Testament parsing history with a dark humor necessary on a frontier on earth or above to justify our actions.
When Lincoln was campaigning in New England for the Presidency he appealed to the dark humor of fishermen telling the story, one might say parable, of the lobster fishermen who went out to sea to set his traps in stormy November. After three days, his body washed up on the evening shore and was taken to his home and laid on the kitchen table where his wife and her female friends could cut off his oilskins to prepare the body for burial. As they labored, eels began to wriggle out of all his orifices causing a neighbor lady to exclaim, "What shall we do?” The practical New England wife rolled up her sleeves replying, "Take out the eels and set him again.”
Lincoln was appealing to the New Englander’s appreciation of practicality and disgust with foolish questions which had no place in a frontier society where death was too common to be invited into the parlor.
Dorthy Parker told a similar anecdote on herself disparaging pretense and praising practicality. When her husband died, her friends gathered to console her. One of them asked if there was anything she could do to assuage Parker’s loss to which Dorthy shot back, "Bring me a new husband.” To which the shocked woman replied she could not do that. Dorthy responded, “Then run down to the deli and get me a ham on rye.” Not kosher, but there it is; a dark sense of humor in a society that purports to disparage anything military or at odds with our view of ourselves as the bastion of liberal morality, a phrase epitomizing an oxymoron.
We tend in America to preach one thing and laugh at another. We see morality as something we are told is right or wrong and ethics as what we know in our hearts is right or wrong, despite our lip service to liberal morality, arts and progressive politics. I am reminded of the aphorism, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Rather like sharing a pool with a crocodile.
And yet, we see ourselves as a nation dedicated to peace and opposed to any sort of military influence in government. Perhaps our habit of rejecting military influence explains why MacArthur winds up in exile in the Philippines while FDR pioneers the greatest social change in government intervention since the Reconstruction. Both of which involved some military influence in American society from occupation of the South to CCC infrastructure. Though both failed, both were ballast when we needed it. The Reconstruction failed to find a viable place for the black man in the South or a viable place for the South in the United States. The New Deal failed to raise the country out of the Great Depression. But both allowed us to get through a dangerous period without a military takeover; a concept so foreign to our national psyche we refuse to even admit of the possibility.
Our dark humor in war and peace has allowed us to joke about what we cannot admit about our violent society and ourselves; we are ruthlessly practical under necessity. We do not, as Bismarck noted, hesitate to shake the iron hand of fate. Our faith in ourselves as a nation is a light in the dark humor with which we armor ourselves while practicality is our most prized if I admitted virtue. To arouse us as a nation would be unwise for any tyrant.