First, let me apologize!
It's been nearly three weeks since I've posted.
Here we go.
I love humor. I am
sometimes healed by it.
I understand things about political correctness, and not all
of them are good.
When I grew up in the late fifties and sixties and high
school into the seventies, we had a different term for it. We called it manners. We listened to Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt,
and Judith Martin (Miss Manners) on how to behave with our fellow humans,
because according to them, manners is what keeps the human race from barbarism,
from the fate left to us as described by one of the great novels in the English
Language Lord of the Flies.
I, too, believe that William Golding had it right while
still believing that Political Correctness (PC) can take things over the edge
and has.
Manners tempers that edge to my mind.
What manners allowed for, that PC does not, is the ability to
laugh at ourselves and our own foibles. Humor. Sometimes to laugh is to look inside and
really see. And things that we laughed
at back in the day, folks would chastise us for laughing at now.
I'll offer a modest example.
Foster Brooks.
Do you know him? If
you're my age in the US, you probably do.
If not, let me give you a little bit on Foster Brooks, known in his
heyday ad "The Loveable Lush."
His act was that of a drunk.
He hit the big time a number of years after he took his last
drink, being well into his 50's. During
his act, he was stone cold sober, yet he forced us all to look inside, with
amazing humor ... and insight. I've met
a couple of folks who said they understood their own alcoholism from watching
the act of Foster Brooks.
Humor, to my mind, can do so much more than make us laugh. It can make us look hard at ourselves and see
the demons within without feeling like a cyclops in the world of two-eyed
people.
What I love about manners, and hate about political
correctness, is that the former allows for humor, the latter does now. Check out this bit from the old Dean Martin
Roast of Don Rickles, featuring the late, great Foster Brooks.
I know it's hard to watch with alcoholism being such a
problem in the world, but do we solve it by taking away the humor?
It's just a question.
I am looking for guidance.
Please comment and let me know what you think, regardless of
what thoughts you may have.
How very adroit. I'd never have thought to compare manners to political correctness in relation to humor but you are spot on with this one. What a depressing world it would be if we didn't laugh at our own human foibles.
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