Three Founders walk into a bar . . .

A theory of humor and history

I once gave a talk on presidential humor. It was a painful experience. Of course I had to tell jokes, and the jokes weren't working. Abraham Lincoln regularly made fun of his own appearance. He responded to a charge of being two-faced by saying, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?" Slightly amused smiles among a few people in my audience; blank stares on the rest.

And Lincoln had a reputation as a funny man. Nobody accused Andrew Jackson of being a jokester. Harvard awarded Jackson an honorary degree, to the dismay of most of the faculty. They responded by ridiculing him at the award ceremony in long-winded speeches in academic Latin, which of course he wouldn’t understand. He stood up and said, "E pluribus unum. Sine qua non,” and sat down. My audience was mystified.

I remarked that humor is often edgy. At a cabinet meeting, Theodore Roosevelt defended his actions in fomenting a revolution in Panama to acquire the right to build a canal. "Have I made my case?” he asked the group. "Mr. President,” said Elihu Root, the secretary of war. “You were accused of seduction. You have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that you were guilty of rape.” Several shaking heads in the audience at this one.

Things got slightly better as I approached the present. Comedian Chevy Chase had a regular routine on Saturday Night Live making fun of Gerald Ford for once having stumbled on the stairs of Air Force One. When they finally met in person, Chase said he hoped there were no hard feelings; Ford was actually a very good president. “And you are a very funny suburb," Ford replied. Huh? among my audience.

Ronald Reagan performed poorly in his first debate in 1984 against Walter Mondale. People began to question Reagan's advancing age. In the second debate, Reagan brought down the house by promising, in response to a question about age, “I will not make an issue of my opponent’s youth and inexperience." Some in my audience remembered this line and nodded appreciatively. Those who didn't, didn’t.

I wasn't really surprised at the audience reactions to my talk. In other lectures and in my classes, I would use some of these same stories, but I would take care to set them up and unpack them. I would point out, for example, that even though Lincoln was known for relating anecdotes to make political points, many of his contemporaries would groan when he started in.

The Andrew Jackson story makes sense only if the listener knows the background. At that moment, in the early 1830s, Jackson was engaged in a great debate with John Calhoun over whether the state governments or the federal government took precedence. Calhoun's theory of nullification emphasized the states, and had the corollary of constitutional secession. Jackson's succinct response to the pretentious professors was actually a response to Calhoun. And honesty compelled me to say that the whole story may have been apocryphal.

The Gerald Ford response to Chevy Chase worked for a Washington DC audience, some of whom lived in that Maryland suburb. The Reagan one-liner prompted a real-time response of relief as much as of amusement, for at a moment when the president's election was all but certain, it offered reassurance that the man who would be governing the country for the next four years wasn't losing his faculties. If he could crack a joke, how bad could things be? The Theodore Roosevelt story went over better in an era when government was a boy's club, and often frat boys at that. 

Which gets to the heart of the reason why jokes from the past are often not funny today. Appreciation of jokes requires a shared culture between the teller and the listeners. It often rests on an understanding of where the boundary of the acceptable lies. Culture changes over time, and the boundary moves even more. Satire is a common form of humor, but it is especially time-bound. With a straight face it pokes fun at people and institutions. But if you don't know the conventional wisdom on those people and institutions, you don't even realize you’re hearing satire. Satire can easily be overtaken by events, when what once seemed absurd becomes all too true.

I'm frequently asked how famous figures from history would fare in the present. What would Madison and Hamilton think of our implementation of the Constitution they had such a large hand in writing? Would Theodore Roosevelt be as bullish on bigger government today as he was at the beginning of the 20th century? Could Ronald Reagan win the Republican nomination if he were alive in 2024?

My stock answer is I don't know. Success in politics, especially democratic politics, depends on a good fit between the politicians and their time. Take them out of their time, and they probably wouldn't do so well.

Kind of like their jokes.