by Richard M. Berthold
Daily Lobo Columnist
At first glance it might not appear that I and Terrel Owens, the premier wide receiver for San Francisco, have much in common besides a connection - as fan and player - with the 49ers.
But watching any number of sports pundits chastising him for pulling a pen out of his sock after a touchdown and autographing and handing the ball to a fan, I realized that I also have been constantly on the receiving end of such hyper-seriousness and heard that inevitable phrase of the stuffed-shirts: inappropriate behavior. We are both victims of an increasingly humorless and serious society.
The NFL has certainly become depressingly serious, with rules against excessive end zone celebration, taunting and other generally fun things. Sure, it is a multi-billion dollar industry, but it is also a game, something traditionally associated with fun and a certain lack of seriousness.
And more than any other prominent sport, it is like war, with two tiny phalanxes smashing into one another and attempting to capture territory. You need to get emotionally pumped for this sort of tribal activity, and this exuberance typically manifests itself in the need to celebrate when victorious, part of which is humiliating the defeated foe and hearing the lamentations of their women (or cheerleaders in this case).
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
A major reason why America has become, at least officially, so humor-challenged is, of course the growing conviction that absolutely no one (with the possible exception of able-bodied white men and the French) should for any reason ever be offended. Unfortunately, being to some degree offensive regarding persons and things is a critical component of most humor, from crude sexual and ethnic jokes to subtle political and social satire. Telling anything but the blandest sort of Barney joke is now frequently labeled inappropriate behavior.
There is another reason, however, one that has to do with certain kinds of people. There are of course those curious humans who are apparently genetically humorless (there is one in the history department), but I am referring to categories of people who are inclined to excessive seriousness. Some are perhaps obvious: political and religious extremists and ideologues and a great many do-gooders, intent on making our world a better place whether we like it or not.
There are also those people in positions of petty power, like university administrators and motor vehicle employees, who seemingly must be ultra-serious in order to convince us (and themselves) that the power they exercise is both real and important. (People with real power and no principles, like Stalin and Clinton, are often funny guys.) The same understanding appears to apply as well to vast numbers of people who engage in pointless or silly activities; they must be utterly serious in order to mask the inherent emptiness of what they do. This is especially the case if children or national security are involved. The College of Education springs to mind.
Academics must fall into this latter category or it is otherwise difficult to explain why humor is such an unusual commodity among faculty and administrators. We engage in many silly activities, creating pointless committees, writing mission statements of interest to no one, and most especially, doing "research." Now, research in something like high energy physics is important to understanding the world about us, but the articles and books written in soft fields like English and history are for the most part of extremely limited significance. Understanding and teaching the broad sweep of history, for example, is of course very important, but publishing another tedious and opaque article on how many bastard children Jefferson produced is not.
But many, if not most academics are far more concerned with their research and their university service than with teaching, and consequently they must be particularly serious lest someone, including themselves, realize what unimportant or foolish activity they are engaged in. There actually seems to be a direct correlation between the triviality of the activity and the seriousness of the person engaged in it. And vice versa: if the work or the process is funny or entertaining, then it must not be important or seriously intended.
Well, everything is funny at one time or another, and there is no subject that is not on some occasion proper material for a joke. Humor is clearly an important defensive mechanism, especially in circumstances that the outsider might consider entirely inappropriate. Jews in the camps made jokes about their lot and I watched Palestinians laugh about things being done to them that only made me weep. The Soviet Union was clearly not a funny place, yet it was nevertheless a rich source of humor. It is a way to cope, but the drones and ribbon clerks are increasingly telling us it is inappropriate. To hell with them.
So, a Jew, a Catholic and a Muslim go into a bar.
