LUDIC LOG

Comedy, noted comedian Krusty the Clown once opined, ain't funny anymore. Of course, he's a sorry old hack with a small-town kiddie show; his opinion can't be trusted. In fact, comedy is stronger than ever in many areas; there's some top-flight comedy films being made (thanks in no small part to the death of melodrama and a long-needed expansion of the criteria for what constitutes acceptable comedic topics and approaches) and this trend will probably continue. Additionally, television comedy is better now than it ever has been. TV, a medium whose ad-driven time constraints are death to dramatic and documentary forms, is tailor-made for comedy. No matter what the decaying traditionalists say about Lucy and her ilk, television comedy has never been funnier. From hugely popular shows like "The Simpsons", "Seinfeld" and "South Park" to brilliant and subversive hidden treasures like "Mr. Show", "Strangers with Candy" and the Adult Swim lineup on the Cartoon Network, there's more opportunities than ever for seriously funny comedy to reach the public and more employment possibilities than ever for humor writers.

That is, unless they're humor writers.

While audiovisual comedy enjoys a new Golden Age, humor designed for the written word is in the middle of a long, slow, painful spiral down the drain, and it's ugly to watch. The humor writer Ellis Weiner (who, tellingly, has moved on to television) once said "comedy is easy; humor is hard". He meant to call attention to the difference -- one that doesn't glorify one over the other, but is nonetheless quite profound -- between humor writing for the page and comedy writing for the screen. His theory was that while 'comedy' was an extremely worthwhile pursuit, 'humor' was much harder, because it had to not only be funny, but extremely well-written; it couldn't fall back of the ability of a talented actor to sell the joke. Apparently, humor is too hard for both the public and the producers of cultural capital; there's a dearth of humorists in America today that has gone unmatched in this century.

You needn't look far to see evidence of this. The Harvard Lampoon is a pitiful shadow of its former self; its bastard stepchild, the National Lampoon, sputtered to an ignominious death some months ago after innumerable attempts at reinvention. Spy, once the funniest magazine in America and the heir apparent to the great humor publications of the past, died out due to lack of money; it came back to life only to die again almost immediately. Its imitators did no better; The Nose never really got off the ground, and the truly inspired Might also fell victim to money woes and its writers were so traumatized that they founded the New Sincerity movement, a betrayal akin to that of the Trotskyites in its enormity. Our most talented humorists are completely marginalized: Ellis Weiner has sold himself to Hollywood; Henry Alford has fallen off the map; Merrill Markoe's book are modestly successful, but she'll always be a TV writer at heart; Cynthia Heimel has fallen from savage satirist to maudlin relationshipper; and the truly brilliant Ian Frazier makes more money off his non-fiction than he does his humor. We don't have any more Robert Benchleys or Dorothy Parkers or S.J. Perelmans; we don't even have any Kurt Andersons or Fran Lebowitzes. There's not a single national humor magazine of any prominence (The Onion doesn't count, since it's a weekly). We're left with people like James Lileks (who's really more of a critic than a humorist, like Mort Sahl or Will Rogers), Molly Ivins (who's a purebred Jane One-Note), and Dave Barry (who isn't funny) to carry on the tradition.

What's going on here? Plenty. First, the big problem, the one that's behind most unfunny situations: money. There's simply far more money to be made in the high-roller's game of television or film than there is in writing, which is why terrific humor writers like Tony Hendra and Roy Blount have opted out of the "small joke trade" and into the Hollywood machine. Second, there's the market. The massive influx of content providers via cable, video and the internet means lots more work, but diffused over much smaller markets. Third, there's the audience; television and the web have taken eyeballs away from newpapers and magazines in massive quantities, and over the last generation or two, the audience for all manner of written material -- novels and non-fiction as well as humor -- has greatly decreased. In the days before television, people certainly weren't any more or less smart, but they were more patient, simply because of the nature of mass communications; they were a lot more willing to sit through a lengthy humor piece in the paper for their daily chuckle. Now, with a half-dozen 24-hour comedy channels and a million websites to comb through, who's got time to read? And last (and probably least, but it's still a factor), there's the reality of a changing aesthetic. Writing students, more often than not, get the message that "serious" writers don't do humor, and if they want any sort of critical respect, they must dispense with the jokey material. It's rare for a university to graduate a humor writer anymore, and humorous novels are rarer still. Even comic books, in their quixoitic quest for respect, have all but excised the "comic" part; I'd be hard pressed to think of a single well-known humor title.

All is not lost, of course. Times change, and tastes are cyclic; the economy dictates the most minor aspects of our cultural landscape in unpredictable ways. The Onion already took America by surprise in the middle of a horrendous humor dry spell. Britain continues to provide an example of a country that takes humor seriously. And with cable content scaling itself back and the internet bubble bursting, there's not quite so many people giving it away for free any more, which may (it may not, but it may) lead to a fresh restocking of the written humor pond. But for now, hoard your Bloom, your Shoales and your Shepherd; who knows when we'll see their like again?