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Tuesday
A recent column by the Washington Post’s Brian Broome about comedian Jerry Seinfeld has me revisiting one of my all-time favorite works, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. I should add that this column has more to say about the 18th century novel and the nature of comedy than about Seinfeld’s complaints about woke audiences but I promise you that it’s all connected.
Apparently Seinfeld has been complaining that our “woke” culture doesn’t have a sense of humor because they aren’t laughing at him anymore. Broome begins his column by informing us that he was never laughing:
I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny. Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.
Rather than taking shots at Seinfeld, however, Broome’s major point is that comedy has to change with the times. He provides two examples, the second of which puts me in mind of Tom Jones:
Blackface, for example, was considered funny at one time, and I’m positive that, when it fell out of fashion, there was some old White guy complaining about how nothing is funny anymore and people have lost their sense of humor and it’s a shame he can’t say the n-word like he used to. “Punch and Judy,” a violent puppet show for children in which one of the puppets (Punch) would lay into his wife (Judy) and others with a stick, sometimes beating the daylights out of them. Punch was popular in its time. When it was called out for being problematic, I’m sure there were people who complained about that, too.
Now, I suspect that Seinfeld might make the same critique of Broome that Tom Jones makes of a puppet-master who decides to censor his own Punch and Judy Show. The entertainer does so in order to please the moral censors of his day, and at first he is applauded. Instead of Punch and Judy, he offers his public a morally correct comedy about a “provoked husband” chastising his philandering wife:
The puppet-show was performed with great regularity and decency. It was called the fine and serious part of the Provoked Husband; and it was indeed a very grave and solemn entertainment, without any low wit or humor, or jests; or, to do it no more than justice, without anything which could provoke a laugh. The audience were all highly pleased. A grave matron told the master she would bring her two daughters the next night, as he did not show any stuff; and an attorney’s clerk and an exciseman both declared, that the characters of Lord and Lady Townley were well preserved, and highly in nature.
The applause leads the puppet-master to discourse on how the age has progressed:
The master was so highly elated with these encomiums, that he could not refrain from adding some more of his own. He said, “The present age was not improved in anything so much as in their puppet-shows; which, by throwing out Punch and his wife Joan, and such idle trumpery, were at last brought to be a rational entertainment. I remember,” said he, “when I first took to the business, there was a great deal of low stuff that did very well to make folks laugh; but was never calculated to improve the morals of young people, which certainly ought to be principally aimed at in every puppet-show…
Tom, sounding like Seinfeld, is unimpressed, “I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession,” he replies, “but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance master Punch, for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by leaving out him and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet-show.”
Tom’s complaint elicits the puppet-master’s contempt:
[W]ith much disdain in his countenance, he replied, “Very probably, sir, that may be your opinion; but I have the satisfaction to know the best judges differ from you, and it is impossible to please every taste. I confess, indeed, some of the quality at Bath, two or three years ago, wanted mightily to bring Punch again upon the stage. I believe I lost some money for not agreeing to it; but let others do as they will; a little matter shall never bribe me to degrade my own profession, nor will I ever willingly consent to the spoiling the decency and regularity of my stage, by introducing any such low stuff upon it.”
As is his wont, however, Fielding immediately upsets these high moral declarations by introducing some low comedy of his own:
A violent uproar now arose in the entry, where my landlady was well cuffing her maid both with her fist and tongue. She had indeed missed the wench from her employment, and, after a little search, had found her on the puppet-show stage in company with the Merry Andrew, and in a situation not very proper to be described.
The “wench” proceeds to blame the puppet-master’s seemingly moral production for her behavior:
Though Grace (for that was her name) had forfeited all title to modesty; yet had she not impudence enough to deny a fact in which she was actually surprized; she, therefore, took another turn, and attempted to mitigate the offence. “Why do you beat me in this manner, mistress?” cries the wench. “If you don’t like my doings, you may turn me away. If I am a w—e” (for the other had liberally bestowed that appellation on her), “my betters are so as well as I. What was the fine lady in the puppet-show just now? I suppose she did not lie all night out from her husband for nothing.”
This prompts the landlady, who had before been praising The Provoked Husband for its high sentiment, to turn her fire on it, calling the puppeteers “lousy vermin” who have turned her inn into a bawdy-house. Modern-day puppet shows, she says, “teach our servants idleness and nonsense,” and she longs for puppet-shows from the past:
I remember when puppet-shows were made of good scripture stories, as Jephthah’s Rash Vow, and such good things, and when wicked people were carried away by the devil. There was some sense in those matters; but as the parson told us last Sunday, nobody believes in the devil now-a-days; and here you bring about a parcel of puppets drest up like lords and ladies, only to turn the heads of poor country wenches; and when their heads are once turned topsy-turvy, no wonder everything else is so.
Fielding revels in recounting how the self-censoring puppet-master has been hoisted with his own petard, as the saying goes. The point to be made here is that there is no placating self-righteous guardians of morality, as anyone encountering purists will quickly discover, whether they come from the left or the right. Give them an inch and they’ll take it a mile. Therefore, it’s satisfying to see the man effectively silenced:
Nothing indeed could have happened so very inopportune as this accident; the most wanton malice of fortune could not have contrived such another stratagem to confound the poor fellow, while he was so triumphantly descanting on the good morals inculcated by his exhibitions. His mouth was now as effectually stopt, as that of quack must be, if, in the midst of a declamation on the great virtues of his pills and powders, the corpse of one of his martyrs should be brought forth, and deposited before the stage, as a testimony of his skill.
It should be noted that, in arguing for Punch and Judy, Fielding has his own art in mind. His comic novel elevates an indecorous hero of unknown parentage and sends him boozing and womanizing through the countryside and on into London (although we love him for his good heart and strong sense of honor). In fact, barbs similar to those directed by the puppet-master against Punch were directed against Tom Jones by multiple critics. Among these were Samuel Johnson, who feared that the novel would corrupt young people. As the great moralist argued,
These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.
So should we use Fielding to defend Seinfield against so-called woke culture? Possibly. But much as I admire Fielding’s comedy—Tom Jones is the reason I focused on 18th century British literature in grad school—he is not exempt from Broome’s criticism. There are parts of Fielding’s comedy that haven’t aged well, starting with his incessant old maid jokes. Sometimes I find myself wincing in ways I didn’t in 1973, when I first read the novel.
I don’t think it’s because I’m a humorless moralist. It’s just that certain jokes now seem somewhat cheap, flaws in what is otherwise a brilliant comic diamond. Which brings me back to the conclusion of Broome’s article:
So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women, or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you. And I don’t think it’s because they “don’t have a sense of humor.” I think it might just be because you’ve been living in a bubble and they are tired of playing Judy to your Punch.
There’s plenty to laugh at in our world without hitting down. Seinfeld just sounds like a curmudgeon whose act has worn thin and who can’t keep up with the times.
Further thought: The same thing happened to Henry Fielding. In Tom Jones, he pulls off an amazing comic balance between the traditions of the landed gentry and a rapidly changing England that is characterized by a new acquisitive spirit and urban chaos. In the end, the old values prevail as Tom returns to the country to become gentry himself, uniting two country estates through his marriage to Sophia. But Fielding needs a certain ironic detachment to pull this off, which he achieves through a framing narrative where he comments on the novelistic devices required to pull off a happy ending. In other words, even as he gives us the romantic fantasy we desire, he does so with a sly wink, comparable to what occurs in the novel and movie The Princess Bride. In his later Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, by contrast, Fielding sounds increasingly petulant and out of control. The world is changing in ways that challenge his brand of comedy and he doesn’t like it.