Week 11: Comic Relief (Comedy and History, Part II)

Pictured: hilarious?

As Joseph Boskin notes in this week's reading, comedy can be thought of like a language in and of itself, as both are used to create and organize meaning through symbols and analogy. Like any language, humor binds individuals together as a culture while distinguishing them from outside groups. It is also one of the ways in which members of a common generation articulate the values that they share and which separate them ideologically from their parents. As most of you can probably attest, we tend to laugh at very different things from one generation to the next. If you don't believe me, watch a Jerry Lewis movie or a Bob Hope standup routine sometime. 

In this respect, comedy can also nurture an "us versus them" mentality by creating inside groups consisting of people who laugh at the joke, versus those who do not get it or simply fail to find it humorous. As we discussed back on week one, friends tend to be people who laugh at the same things, but comedy can also be used to ridicule and ostracize. In that sense, humor is used both for the sake of inclusion and exclusion. This is an idea that we will return to in coming weeks, but for now, I'd like to focus on how comedy can help a generation define itself as a cohesive group, despite the inherent diversity of its individual members. 

People who are born around the same time and place tend to experience cultural events from a similar perspective. For example, children who endured the hardships of the Great Depression had a much different experience than those who grew up in the era of the American superpower. Similarly, those of you who have only ever known a post-9/11 world tend to see things differently from those of us who distinctly remember these events and have witnessed their effects on our nation. We are, in large part, products of our environment.

One of the most interesting books that I have ever read deals with this basic premise in extraordinary detail. In Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, first published in 1989, authors Neil Howe and William Strauss discuss how history essentially repeats itself because of recurring generational cycles. If we consider that historically, the average American tends to live around eighty-eight years, give or take, and that every twenty-two years or so, a person enters a new phase of his or her life, then one's life can be thought to consist of four parts. The authors further contend that American history can be conceptualized in precisely the same manner. That is, it can be more or less neatly divided into eras of approximately eight-eight years, each of which consists of four distinct, recurring phases. The authors refer to these as "turnings," but they can be thought of much like seasons, and the social climate during each of these "seasons" tends to affect people who are roughly the same age in very similar ways. They also point out that throughout American history, every one of these cycles (with one noted exception) has included a "secular crisis," as well as a "spiritual awakening" that comes about forty-four years or so later, followed by another secular crisis at roughly the same interval. Wash, rinse and repeat. 

According to the authors, these secular crises have included the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, as well as the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II, each of which happened roughly eighty-eight years apart. Similarly, the spiritual awakenings, which include the "Great Awakening," the "Transcendental Awakening," and most recently, the "Consciousness Revolution" of the 1960s, also each occurred approximately eighty-eight years apart and at roughly the same temporal distances from the secular crises that preceded them and eventually follow. A person's age at each of these cultural events is largely what defines them as part of a generational cohort, and the primary reason that history repeats itself (or "rhymes," as Mark Twain once put it), is because the generations that have the most in common (that is, every four generations), rarely have the opportunity to learn directly from one another, and so the mistakes of our great grandparents are repeated ad infinitum. 

The authors also contend that every one of these cycles (again, with the one exception of the Civil War period) contains four generations, depending upon the "turning" within the cycle in which they are born. They identify these generational archetypes as Idealist/Prophet, Reactive/Nomad, Civic/Hero and Adaptive/Artist. The idea is that members of these cohorts share similar characteristics in terms of how they respond to these crises and spiritual awakenings. For example, Millennials would be an example of a Civic/Hero generation, and in that sense, they share many characteristics with the G.I. Generation, just like members of the so-called Generation X have a lot in common with the Lost Generation of the early twentieth century, both of which the authors believe are examples of Reactive/Nomad generations.

The "turnings" that they describe occur in the following recurring order: "High" (when social institutions are strong), "Awakening" (when personal fulfillment takes priority), "Unraveling" (when people grow to distrust the institutions), and "Crisis" (which is when these institutions are dismantled and eventually rebuilt). The authors describe how an Idealist generation is born during a High and comes of age during an Awakening, the Reactive generation is born during an Awakening and reaches adulthood during an Unraveling, the Civic generation is born during an Unraveling and comes of age during a Crisis, and the Adaptive generation is born during a Crisis and reaches adulthood during a High. According to Strauss and Howe, these shared experiences are precisely what defines a generation as such. 

Although I must point out that this is by no means an exact science, it does provide some very interesting insights into why American history falls into certain patterns. As it relates to this class, this also helps to explain why subsequent generations have very different senses of humor. If we subscribe to the notion that comedy is a way of dealing with dominant cultural anxieties, then it would make sense that such anxieties are particularly common to one generation over another because of their positions in life at the historical moments that these events take place.

Of course, it's not just these major events that define a generation, but also, all of the other experiences that they face together along the way. As I will explain shortly, I believe that the early Cold War period in particular had a profound effect on an entire generation of Americans and may help explain, at least in part, why Baby Boomers tend to hold a particular worldview, which is significantly different from every generation that came before or after (within this historical cycle). However, in order to get there, and ultimately, to help you better understand the movie that we are watching this week, I need to first offer some historical context. 



In the United States presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy won the popular vote by a margin of less than one fifth of one percent. In the electoral college, it was Illinois and Texas that put him over the top. The race was so close that Nixon did not concede until the following day, after which Republicans requested recounts in eleven states, claiming rampant voter fraud. Many commentators have argued that Kennedy only won because he appeared more photogenic than his rival in the first ever televised debates, which was watched by seventy million viewers and gave him a four percent boost in the polls. According to historian H.W. Brands, “Nixon seemed part of the tired status quo, while Kennedy cast himself as the vigorous exemplar of the new generation” (103). Many historians have also noted that it is also unlikely that he would have carried Texas or much of the deep south had his running mate not been a fixture in southern politics. 

Despite these factors, in his inaugural address, Kennedy boldly proclaimed that, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.” He then famously concluded his speech with a reminder that success in the Cold War era is only attainable when an engaged citizenry puts their country before themselves. "Ask not," and all that. 

Having narrowly won the election on a platform of being tougher in foreign policy than the incumbent party, Kennedy held true to his campaign promise to contain the spread of communism in the eastern hemisphere. When he took office, the U.S. had about nine hundred troops stationed in Vietnam, and by late 1963, there were over sixteen thousand. As one generation inherited our public institutions, another generation was sent off to war. So it goes.

Meanwhile, Berlin was a city divided, nearly serving as a flashpoint for direct military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The wall that separated East from West was built just months after Kennedy took office, and in October of 1961, what began as an armed escort for an American diplomat in East Berlin soon escalated to a full-scale standoff between U.S. and Soviet tanks situated on opposite sides of Checkpoint Charlie. Both battalions had orders to fire if fired upon; it is therefore no exaggeration to say that something as simple as a hair-trigger could have been the catalyst for World War III. The nation anxiously held its breath as the tank standoff continued. Even after sixteen hours, when the situation was resolved diplomatically, tensions lingered for months to come as Khrushchev and Kennedy exchanged veiled threats wrapped in increasingly hostile rhetoric.

The following year, in what many have interpreted as an attempt to recover lost ground in the ongoing battle against communism, the CIA staged a failed coup of Fidel Castro by training and arming fourteen hundred Cuban rebels for the now infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco. When the siege was launched, the rebels were almost immediately overwhelmed by the Cuban military. To make matters worse, U.S. air support stationed in Nicaragua failed to account for the time difference and arrived an hour late, at which point almost all of the rebel soldiers had either been captured or killed. The twelve hundred and nine survivors were then held for ransom in exchange for about $53 million dollars worth of food and medicine, which the United States meekly obliged after about twenty months of negotiation.

To Khrushchev, and indeed, to much of the world, the Bay of Pigs invasion made Kennedy appear foolish and inexperienced in matters of international relations. This impression was only reinforced at the Vienna Summit, where they argued about the fate of Berlin and Laos. Even Kennedy knew that the attack on Cuba was an unmitigated disaster, a wrong move that only heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the Cold War continued to heat up, total nuclear annihilation was no longer just a vague hypothetical in the minds of many Americans; it was now a very real possibility. 

For fourteen days in October of 1962, such a scenario seemed all but imminent. When U.S. spy planes collected evidence of Soviet-built medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba (in what has commonly been referred to as the Cuban Missile Crisis), the world’s two nuclear powers nearly took arms. As the crisis quickly escalated, humanity soon found itself looking down the barrel of a loaded gun; Kennedy and Khrushchev had their fingers on the trigger and each was fully prepared to return fire, but to the benefit of everyone, that first shot was never fired. 

However, one should not underestimate the significance of this event upon an entire generation of Americans. The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only a moment of truth for humanity, but it also fundamentally changed the way many Americans thought about their future prospects. Consider that this was a generation that grew up participating in “duck and cover” drills throughout elementary school, who now faced the very real threat of absolute global destruction. Armed only with the knowledge that the world could end at any moment, it stands to reason that many Americans at this time also become more myopic in their ambitions. “Live for the moment” thus became more than a mantra; it was now a principle component of the American ethos. 

The following year, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, which Strauss and Howe consider to be the event that marks the end of the post-war High and the beginning of the Awakening. In many ways, the dreams of the generation that Kennedy served to represent died with him, and the international and domestic tensions created during his presidency only lingered. Meanwhile, Americans built bomb shelters in their back yards with the hopes of surviving the nuclear fallout that seemed increasingly likely to occur. It was a dangerous time to be alive in America. 

At the very height of this insanity, Stanley Kubrick made the film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which we will be watching this week. I believe that it is particularly important to understand the historical context when viewing this film because it is very much about using dark comedy in order to address and ideally ease some of these tensions that existed in American society at that time.


Kubrick grew up in New York City, and as a young man, his biographer claims that he often played chess against old men in Central Park, usually with some money at stake. He was also a reasonably accomplished jazz drummer and worked as a photographer for a popular magazine after graduating from high school. As a filmmaker, he was extraordinarily precise, and because I believe that the primary role of a director is to make decisions that lend the film a certain degree of aesthetic, stylistic and tonal cohesion, personally, I think that Kubrick made some particularly interesting choices as a director. Compare his work, for example, to Steven Spielberg, who has built a career on obvious decisions, which is precisely why his films have such broad appeal but which I would argue are void of any real emotional depth.

That said, I am personally not of the opinion that all of Kubrick's films are great, either. I have owned Barry Lyndon for almost twenty years, and beautifully shot though it is, I have never made it all the way through, simply because I don't care about any of the characters. On the same token, I respect many of the decisions that Kubrick made in directing Eyes Wide Shut, but I still can't get past the fact that it features Tom Cruise playing his standard issue Tom Cruise character. As an actor, I tend to think of Tom Cruise in much the same light as Steven Spielberg in that he makes obvious choices that don't really engage the audience with any degree of intellectual or emotional complexity. In any case, critics and audiences generally agree that Dr. Strangelove is one of Kubrick's best films, and I think that to understand the historical context will only heighten your appreciation of it.


This is the first week in which your assigned reading is in the form of a PDF under Files on Canvas. "History and Humor" by Joseph Boskin is probably my favorite essay ever written on comedy, and it has essentially served as the jumping off point for my dissertation. That said, I hope you enjoy it as well. After you have read it and watched Dr. Strangelove, please answer the following screening question:

How does this film reflect the time and place in which it was made?

Support your answer with examples from the film as well as quotes from this week's reading. However, the following people are exempt from providing a response to the screening question, as they are assigned blog posts:

Michael Bretigan - Review of Reviews (9 to 5)
Ian Opaczewski - Social/Historical Context (20th century feminism)
Caleb Richardson - Biography (Billy Wilder)