This week The New Yorker had some shocking news: Andy Borowitz is only their second least funny humorist. In his “Shouts and Murmurs” piece “The Pences Visit Manhattan“, Douglas McGrath takes the blue ribbon. He begins:
Governor Mike Pence was having a romantic dinner with the love of his life, Mrs. Mike Pence, at the Red Lobster in Times Square. The Governor knew that as Vice-President he would have to attend foreign banquets, so he and Mrs. Pence were trying to broaden their palates. Luckily, they had already found a couple of dishes at the Red Lobster which they liked. Governor Pence was saying a blessing over their chicken wings and mozzarella cheese sticks when the first three notes of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” chimed on his phone, signalling a text. As he read it, Mrs. Pence popped a sizzling cheese stick into her mouth and blew out little puffs of steam. “Look at me!” she said gaily. “I’m a steamboat!”
It’s downhill from there.
Now, my disagreements with Governor Pence on policy matters could fill a book, and his choice to be the running mate of Donald J. Trump is unconscionable. If writers want to have at him on those grounds, you go.
But that’s not what McGrath is doing here. His mockery is not of Governor and Mrs Pence, it is of rubes from the Midwest, and those rubes’ preference for comfort food in a big city environment, their religion, their lack of style.
In the years that I have been following artsjournal.com I have seen, at last count, 653,807 articles on how there is a need to diversify audiences for the high arts beyond the well-educated elites. Any organization that seriously wants to do that has to not just “reach out”, but to understand where their targeted new audiences are coming from, how their cultural preferences have been formed, why they like what they like and don’t like what they don’t like, and to respect them as people with agency.
You can do that, or you can throw in the towel where this topic is concerned, stick with the patrons you have, and get a chuckle out of people who would rather eat at Red Lobster than the new fusion place on 6th street.
But you can’t do both.
The irony of the New Yorker ridiculing Pence as a hick, is that Trump could not be a more iconic embodiment of the tacky side of New York – or more accurately the larger region of New York City, Long Island, Northern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut referred to as the Tri-State Area.
The NYer’s shtick has always been a kind of commercialized urbanity that positions itself as superior by ridiculing regional America, even though the largest concentration of low class Americans—who are all too often economically and culturally debased — live in the Northeast. Trump is a direct manifestation of this long history of degradation.
Out of a kind of politeness and decency, the media has avoided discussing that Trump’s tackiness has a peculiarly New York character. So it’s ironic when the New Yorker jumps at the opportunity to attack Pence as a hick. His Midwest provincialism pales in comparison to Trump’s Tri-State tackiness.
Eustace Tilley is the name of the New Yorker’s icon, that man in the top hat disdainfully looking down his nose through a monocle at the oh-so trashy world. There could not be a better or more telling symbol of the classism that permeates America’s cultural plutocracy. It is a completely unique cultural phenomenon found in no other developed country – not even in the UK which like the rest of Europe has been a social democracy for close to a century.
Autonomous public funding systems based in the states could be used to replace this classist and plutocratic form of American culture. But that is where the interesting socio-economic questions arise. A corporatocracy requires a homogeneous culture of mass markets created and enforced by a strong Federalism.
Regional culture, by contrast, inevitably creates a stronger desire for more strongly based regional economies. The homogeneity of mass markets is weakened and regional economies and autonomy are strengthened. I think most Americans do not realize that this is one of the major reasons regional culture in the USA is suppressed. It weakens the homogeneity of the mass markets and financial systems required by a corporatocracy.
As an addenda, I enjoyed this video of Robert De Niro denouncing Trump using the candidate’s same Tri-State style of American English:
Also, there’s nothing wrong with a little Red Lobster.
I do not come to ArtsJournal for the humor, but it does seem to me that most of the articles and posts here are as bleak and dour as a Calvinist sermon. While I agree that Shouts & Murmurs is hardly ever amusing, the piece by McGrath is certainly meant as satire, which means it is supposed to offend, and to amuse. It is perfectly legitimate to call out Mike Pence for being a hypocrite and to make fun of him for it. As a regular reader of ArtsJournal, I know exactly how unpopular the idea of making fun of anything or anyone is (there’s a certain leftist totalitarian slant to a lot of what is linked or written here: “Down with Turandot”!), but I will admit that I laughed out loud when McGrath wrote:
“He found himself outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Before he joined Mrs. Pence’s megachurch, he had been a Catholic. How fondly he remembered the games he’d played with Father Molloy. He went inside and asked God if he and Trump had a chance. Not hearing anything, he opened a Bible for guidance. His eye fell on Mark 15:30—“Come down from the cross and save yourself.”
“He knew then that there was no hope. Yet he did not despair. He thought of Mrs. Pence back in their room at the La Quinta Inn and Suites. She would be in her Lanz flannel nightgown and blue lace cap, preparing their nightcap of warm beef bouillon. They would figure out the future as a married couple should, with him deciding and her obeying.”
The question isn’t so much whether the article is funny, but how humor is used to express power and dominance and mask aggression. I enjoy Andy Borowitz’s articles, even if he has made a big mistake in trying to keep up with the writers at “The Onion” (which I love.) He’ll never beat them at the own game. McGrath is less clever, and gets into some quicksand with his religious insults — seldom a very good idea.
Sometimes the humor about NYC can be a bit inadvertent. About 10 years ago, I met a German businessman who was stationed in the city for a year. When he first arrived he couldn’t for the life of him find his local subway station. In reality, he was just confused. So many people had pissed in stairwell leading down to it that he had been mistaking it as the entrance to a sewage treatment facility.
Pretty funny, and an absolutely true real-life story.
Thanks all for the comments. William I agree that Trump’s tastes are more ripe for satire than anyone’s, and Bob I agree that we all could use more humour in these columns (I try sometimes, I really do). My point was that if one wants to mock Governor Pence, by all means, but there’s nothing objectionable about his being from small-town Indiana, and the tone of the article missed the mark, so to speak.
I haven’t been to a Red Lobster myself in years, and only have foggy memories of the time I did go, though there is one here in Bloomington. Joanna, maybe I should give it a try.
How could I have forgotten that Beyonce also enjoys taking friends there?
Michael–please don’t think that I was singling you out. I always enjoy (and learn from) your posts.
But joylessness seems to be the ground state at ArtsJournal, though I think this is more the case with the links than the bloggers themselves. You would never know, from so many of these links, that the arts are meant to entertain and delight! I think politics (and not just political correctness) is the reason. Perhaps audiences would grow if we could find ways to demonstrate that going to a concert, an exhibition, etc., is primarily for the pleasure it gives, not the political lesson it teaches or the moral uplift it provides. It’s depressing to see how many artists think it’s their duty to show the ordinary theatergoer (or whoever) how terrible life is and how shallow their (the audience’s) understanding of it is. (The imperative to be edgy.) Artists didn’t used to be scolds; they used to be people who tried hard to make other people happy!