Writing seriously about comedy is a thankless challenge. Only an idiot, or somebody who’s used to thankless challenges because he’s a freelance critic, would bother. The risks are high, the rewards low. Overanalyze your subject and you’ll kill it. Treat it too indulgently and you’re left with a jumble of second-hand bits. Clearly, jokes say something important about the society that laughs at them, but woe to the writer who takes them too literally or too earnestly. They are, after all, jokes.
Sometimes, comedy changes so profoundly that it’s worth risking some kind of grand, straight-faced interpretation. And mainstream American comedy has changed profoundly in the last thirty-ish years. It’s gotten thinner, lighter, you could almost say healthier. The style of humor that nourished America for decades has dried up—it’s still possible to find it if you know what to look for, but it’s become the exception where it used to be the rule. To put it another way: comedy has been drained of chicken fat. Where did it go?
If my subject is chicken fat, I have to start with Mad Magazine. No humor source—not SNL, not Carson, not Lenny Bruce—had as much influence on America in the back half of the 20th century. This is impossible to prove, and almost certainly true. Mad was founded in 1952 and lasted until 2019, when it announced it would stop printing new material. At its peak it had two million subscribers. It made its reputation poking fun at McCarthy and Khrushchev and lasted long enough to take on Trump and Putin.
Unlike Lenny Bruce’s standup or The Tonight Show ca. 1962, early issues of Mad are still laugh-out-loud funny. Their style of humor is familiar but unnerving—you have the sense of sampling a potent, not entirely pleasurable drug that you’ve otherwise only tasted in watered-down forms. In a 1954 feature called “Restaurant!”, the splash includes a couple dozen rubbery bodies squishing against each other like blobs of color in a lava lamp. The title is the only simple part—there’s nowhere in “Restaurant!” to rest your eyes. Every square inch is lousy with stuff: hieroglyphics; a pair of kids slugging it out; a tower of dishes that’s about to fall over; more gaping, black mouths than you’ll find this side of Francis Bacon; an orangutan.
This was a comedy of abundance, of jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes—in other words, chicken fat. Its inventor, or at least the one who named it, was a cartoonist named Will Elder. He was born in the Bronx in 1921; his real name was Wolf William Eisenberg, but like a lot of pragmatic Jews of his generation, he opted for something Waspier. A self-described student of Bosch and Bruegel, he has a fair claim to being one of the greatest draughtsmen of the last century. He was a very funny guy, and also a huge pain in the ass. I suspect so, anyway. As a child he convinced his neighbors that a man with a knife was trying to kill him. He once painted a portrait of his young son and then added two tiny, vampiric dots to the neck. On Valentine’s Day he’d send his sweetheart beef hearts from the slaughterhouse.