The Critic

And comedy

Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz

The social critic is an odd person, half participant in life and half standing in opposition to it. Observing the strange things people do. I spoke recently to someone I’ve known all my life who said that a great benefit of working in an office is not only that you see how manifestly unsuited most people are to do their jobs — goes without saying — but also that you gain a store of anecdotes. The people you work with are so weird, are such freaks, that the only way to justify the experience is to turn your time spent in this purgatory into a series of funny stories.

In some ways, living in a city is the same thing. You see strangeness on occasion, unpleasantness even more rarely, but each one becomes copy, becomes an example of grit that you can use.

When Woody Allen wrote in his humorous essays about the insane, vapid, self-regarding stuff that the New Yorkers he knew or could imagine were doing or spending their money on, there was this implicit criticism hanging over everything. No matter how much you think you matter, Allen effectively wrote, you do not. You’ll vanish soon enough, and all your tasteful furnishings, your philosophy book groups, your university degrees, will count not one whit then or ever after, when they are given away or sold or cleared from your place in a job lot.

Fran Lebowitz does not have quite the same perspective. In her excellent book, she does not appear to dislike people quite so much. She does not relish their irrelevance. Instead, Lebowitz finds people funny. Their foibles are funny. Their pretensions. Everything about them is funny. If you let yourself be amused.

What I won’t do now is to tell you all the funniest jokes and the best lines from the book. That would be a mistake because it would be immoral — and it might cut into sales and reading time. Something I couldn’t justify or allow. Instead, I’d like to think about why there are so few people in the twenty-first century successfully writing things like this. I don’t say there’s no one trying. People, and especially writers, are certainly trying. They’re so trying, aren’t they, folks?

But it just does not land like once it might. I wonder why that is.

It’s possibly about politics. Everything is politics these days. And if you’re not saying the thing your type of people are meant to say, a humour that looks at life more broadly is suspicious and disdained.

And this all might be the product, in America at least, of wealth. In a situation where some people are truly wealthy, a lot of Vanity Fair style gawking and a lot of social criticism becomes bogged down in numbers and square footage and precisely how tasteful a certain diamond is, set on a certain ring. There’s no shared culture to laugh at, no shared humanity to demonstrate and prove. Some people live lives unimaginable, and much of culture is directed to trying to imagine them.

Our era is one where some critics get famous and rich endlessly going after a certain caste of people — in America at the moment, it’s the rich. You can get very rich yourself going after them. Some commentators — Swisher, Zitron — laugh at the madnesses of the tech elite. And there’s some runway there, but not as much as they might think.

And other people laugh at the traditionally wealthy, or the politically-connected rich. No one has ever lost their shirt laughing at Jeff Bezos’s taste in women, or Donald Trump’s revealed preference for cosmetic surgery. It’s an easy game, easy money.

But all this does mean that, when it comes to it, our best comic minds are corpsing at Kristi Noem’s face and possibly her politics. And the kind of commentary we might all like about simply living in cities, trying to get by, all the while pretending we matter and have taste — all that has fallen away.

Instead, this is a world of irony and performance. Some people pose photographs of all the pretty books they say they like in window frames or surrounded by coffee cups and lace. Some people pose with what is supposed to be cocaine piled up on the cover of a book by Hegel. And other people laugh at them both.

But no one learns anything from either side of this dichotomy.

I’m not saying we can go back. Nowadays, humour is made and dictated by the phone and human agency no longer really applies.

Comedians are boring, TV is boring, life is boring. We all implicitly know this. Someone like Lebowitz herself is dessicated by the process of modern life. At the time of writing, Lebowitz plays herself on TV, or in documentary films. She doesn’t write.

What have we learnt from all of this? I don’t know about you, but I’ve learnt nothing. Nothing at all. Glimpses into the culture of the past can be instructive, can be amusing, can be entertainingly different and a bit of good fun. But you can’t go back. You can’t even copy. All you can do is participate in whatever it is you’ve got going on. You’ve got to take the devil’s bargain of living in the world before you.

And if you want to crack a joke every now and then, it’s best you do so in the medium that seems most natural, in a time and a place that seems appropriate, and one won’t cause you to lose, like many people lose worldwide for making jokes, your job or your home or your life.