Paul McDonald

Laughing at the

DarknessPostmodernism and Optimism in American Humour

Paul McDonald

Contemporary American LiteratureGeneral Editors : Christopher Gair & Aliki Varvogli

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Laughing at the Darkness: Postmodernism and Optimism in American Humour

Paul McDonald

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

© Paul McDonald, 2010

The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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Contents

Series Preface 6

Introduction 12

CHAPTER ONE

Postmodernism, Humour and Jewish American Ethnic Identity 25

CHAPTER TWO

Humour and the Social Implications of Postmodernism 64

CHAPTER THREE

Postmodernism, Humour and American Romanticism 90

Conclusion 129

Bibliography 134

American Humour 11

Acknowledgements

A number of people helped in the production of this book and I’d like to thank them here. They include Dr Mick Miller and the late Dr Charles Swann, both of whom helped shape my thinking about American humour. Early versions of some sections of the book have appeared in various journals, and I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of American Studies in Turkey, the Journal of Eco-Criticism, and the Journal of Popular Culture. Other sections first appeared as conference papers and thanks are due to the follow-ing conference organisers and editors of conferences proceedings: Franca Bellarsi, Hans Krabbendam, Klaus Martens, Paul Morris, Derek Rubin, Jaap Verheel and Arlette Warken. I would also like to thank Dr Chris Gair and Dr Aliki Varvogli for their help in develop-ing the manuscript for publication.

Paul McDonald

Introduction

This book explores the relationship between humour and postmodernism within the context of American culture. It proceeds from the premise that there is a fundamental link between humour and postmodernism, and its principal aim is to explore what bearing the former has on the issues raised by the latter. My key terms – postmodernism and humour – are both notoriously difficult to define, of course, but for the most part the simplest definitions of both will suffice. When I use the term postmodernism I refer to ways of thinking about the world that emphasise doubt, chaos, and relativism, and to the cultural products that embody such concerns. When I use the term humour I refer to anything that seeks to elicit mirth.

Postmodernism is Not Something to Laugh At

The impact of postmodernism – with its emphasis on doubt, chaos, and relativism – has been pervasive throughout the humanities, sciences and social sciences. While some have embraced it and its apparent liberating potential, others have been disturbed by what they feel are its bleak implications. Jurgen Habermas and Christopher Norris, for instance, express concerns about postmodernism’s incompatibility with truth claims, and the Enlightenment ideal of progress. Norris disparagingly sums up what he feels is the pernicious relativism of postmodern thus:

our last hope as ‘postmodern’ intellectuals is to cultivate the pri-vate virtues (compassion, tolerance, a measure of irony with regard to our own beliefs) and renounce all those grandiose Enlightenment ideas of setting the world to rights.�

Postmodernism limits us to local, personal beliefs that we are not

�  Christopher Norris, The Truth About Postmodernism, 278.

American Humour 13

allowed to take seriously. For Norris such relativism is a dangerous dead end, heralding a world in which it is impossible to make moral evaluations, and where the possibility of progress is compromised. This is characteristic of the kind of pessimism that has dominated the debate about postmodernism.

The fact that postmodernism is so strongly associated with American culture probably hasn’t helped its bad press over the years.� Baudrillard, for instance, identifies America as a postmodern dystopia:

the anti-utopia of unreason, of deterritorialization, of indeter-minacy of language and the subject, of the neutralization of all values, of the death of culture. America is turning all this into a reality and is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way.�

While the U.S. might reflect some positive aspects of postmodernism such as cultural heterogeneity and egalitarianism, many of its philosophical implications conflict with the values underpinning American civilization. Most commentators would agree that optimism and utopianism are fundamental to how America conceives of itself.� Surely any challenge to the idea of progress will be particularly unsettling in the land of manifest destiny, a concept that, as Anders Stephenson notes, still powerfully influences American ideology.� Indeed, the response to postmodernism from U.S. critics has tended to reflect the general ambivalence. Fredric Jameson, for instance, associates it with cultural decay, superficiality, and the loss of history and individual identity. Like Norris, Jameson sees postmodernism as a negative dead end:

The whole point about the loss in postmodernism of the sense of the future is that it also involves a sense that nothing will change and there is no hope.�

�  Many critics cite America as the country in which postmodernism emerged, both as an aesthetic, and as a topic of critical enquiry. See for instance Hans Bertens, ‘Postmodern Culture(s)’.

2  Jean Baudrillard, America, 97. For Baudrillard it is America, ‘which will provide us with a complete graphic representation of the of the end of our values’ (98).

�  For this view see Mauk and Oakland’s American Civilization: An Introduction, 5.�  See Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. 5  Fredric Jameson, ‘Regarding Postmodernism’, 52.

14 Paul McDonald

Others despair at the cynical quality of the postmodern experience in America. Jaded irony is often seen to accompany the ‘postmodern attitude’, which is itself said to have its origins in American culture. For writers such as David Foster Wallace the ironic, world weary tone associated with postmodernism developed as a response to the banal and hypocritical nature of American TV culture in the 50s and 60s. The ironic attitude was born of consumers’ desire to seek an antidote to the trite and often cloying distortions of the mainstream. According to Wallace, the problem is that irony became the dominant mode in American culture; irony was co-opted by a mass media that turned it on itself, precluding genuine expressions of value, and pro-ducing a culture in which all statements are ironic:

the most frightening prospect for the well conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betray-ing passé expressions of value, emotion or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naiveté.�

In the late twentieth century we all became ‘well conditioned viewers’, including the producers of TV culture who themselves exploit irony. In this way irony has become pervasive and, for the individual, inhibiting. Postmodern irony seems to negate the possibility of ingenuous expression, critical engagement, and change. Thus there is the charge that postmodern art and thinking have developed into a conservative or reactionary force. In his article ‘Post-postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Modern World’, for instance, Robert McLaughlin sums up the implications of Wallace’s view:

In a culture of irony and ridicule no assertion goes unmocked, and no assertion can be sincerely uttered and heard, nothing positive can be built. As [David Foster] Wallace puts it, ‘irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks’. The culture of irony and rid-icule that postmodernism has wrought, then, is essentially con-servative, negating the possibility of change at the same time as it despairs of the status quo.�

�   David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction’, 67.2   Robert L McLaughlin, ‘Post-Postmodern Discontent’, 70.

American Humour 15

While there might be something healthy about postmodern scepti-cism, then, it does not offer answers and it undermines the possibility of progress. McLaughlin calls for art that might allow us to step out of the strait-jacket of irony: a post-postmodernism that can acknowl-edge the necessity to debunk, avoiding the charge of naivety, but still offering a way forward. One purpose of this book is to show that, for a number of artists, humour serves exactly this constructive function. I want to show how some artists use humour to address and amelio-rate some of the negative implications of philosophical postmodern-ism, and to explore ways of reclaiming value.

Humour and Postmodernism

Humour and postmodernism complement one another for a variety of reasons. One has to do with the fact that the postmodern condition, as many define it, is characterised by cultural exhaustion. John Barth noted in the early 1960s that story-tellers of the mid century faced a crisis of originality because of the degree to which everything had already been said.� The proliferation of television and subsequent cultural acceleration compounded this phenomenon and created what Umberto Eco famously identified as the ‘postmodern attitude’. It is that

of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solu-tion. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.�

This is a facet of the postmodern position identified by Wallace above: individuals do not want to be seen as the dupes of mainstream culture and they are reluctant to tolerate clichéd or hackneyed narrative. Humour is very often part of the tone postmodern texts adopt when

�   John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’. 2   Umberto Eco, quoted in McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, ��5.

16 Paul McDonald

they seek to signal their cultural sophistication; in other words, when texts acknowledge the already said, and when they strive to avoid seeming vulnerable, emotional, twee, etc. – the consequence is often what might be termed ‘hip’ humour.

The Simpsons is frequently cited as an example of postmodernism, and anyone familiar with the show knows that it exhibits cultural sophistication of this kind: it creates comedy via overt intertextual-ity and cultural self-awareness.� It parodies scenes from Hollywood movies, it references the conventions of sitcom and cartoon narrative, and it makes comic use of media stereotypes: the vain newsreader Kent Brockman, the over-the-hill B movie actor Troy McClure, and so on. This style of knowing humour is pervasive in contemporary American culture.� It can be observed in American TV shows from Larry Sanders to Family Guy, and in movies from Pulp Fiction to Shrek. Some see the endless, self-conscious recycling of cultural con-ventions and clichés as indicative of the kind of superficiality and stasis that Jameson observes in postmodernism: a depthless celebra-tion of pre-existing tropes which keeps narrative mired in the past, precluding the possibility of originality or development. And, as sug-gested above, what begins as cultural awareness can easily become weary and pessimistic, characterised by a tone that seems to regis-ter that it has nowhere to go. As will be argued in chapter three, this features in the irony and ennui of Slacker humour; however, I also aim to show that hip humour can also create a frame for meaningful epiphany, and the articulation of authentic statements of value.

Another reason why humour is compatible with the spirit of postmodernism has to do with what Jean-Francois Lyotard identi-fies as postmodernism’s scepticism toward grand narratives. In The Postmodern Condition he writes:

We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives – we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipa-

�  Intertextuality is one of many features of The Simpsons that have prompted crit-ics to identify it as postmodernist. For a discussion of the postmodern charac-teristics of the show see, for instance, Mattia Miani’s article, ‘The Simpsons and Tradition’.

2  See for instance, William Irwin and J.R. Lombardo, ‘The Simpsons and Allusion: “The Worst Essay Ever,” 8�–9�. 

American Humour 1�

tion of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific dis-course. But … the little narrative … remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention.�

Lyotard sees an attenuation of the so-called myths of political emancipation and scientific legitimation. This scepticism toward all-encompassing narratives is matched by a privileging of the little narrative. It is the local, limited or tentative statement that tends to take precedence over essentialist or totalising assertions in the post-modern world. Thus the value of humour is clear – comic, humorous and ironic narratives can avoid becoming authoritarian and absolutist because they are forever undermining themselves. As the comic nov-elist Howard Jacobson has written, ‘a joke is a structured dialogue with itself’, and as such, ‘cannot, by its very nature, be an expression of opinion’.� Humorous statements are always potentially ambivalent because assertions made within comic contexts are, in a sense, under erasure: their status is invariably that of the little narrative.

Thus humour is central to the postmodern aesthetic, and this has been the case from the beginning. Think, for instance, of the major-ity of writers associated with the first phase of literary postmodern-ism: John Barth, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut are all humorists of one kind or another. The humour or playfulness in postmodern texts reinforces the moral ambivalence that anti-relativists find so problematic of course. Narratives like Pulp Fiction and The Simpsons refuse to take any-thing seriously and the consequence, according to some, is a trou-bling lack of moral clarity.� For instance, Carl Matheson suggests that the moral ambivalence of The Simpsons is inextricably linked to the nature of its humour:

does The Simpsons promote a moral agenda? My answer is this: The Simpsons does not promote anything, because its humour

�  Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition,  60.2  Howard Jacobson, Seriously Funny, �6.�  The films of Quentin Tarantino are a much discussed and obvious example of 

moral ambiguity in popular postmodern texts. What some see as moral ambiva-lence in his movies has been linked to their playful, humorous tone, and they have often been criticised for their lack of moral clarity. See for instance, Anthony Lane’s ‘Degrees of Cool’, and Tom Whalen’s ‘Film Noir: Killer Style’.

18 Paul McDonald

works by putting forward positions only in order to undercut them. Furthermore, this process of undercutting runs so deeply that we cannot regard the show as merely cynical; it manages to undercut its cynicism too.�

In other words the show does not have a clear moral position or centre. For Matheson it reflects a ‘crisis of authority’ in American culture where ‘there are no higher purposes to which comedy can be put, such as moral instruction, theological revelation, or showing how the world is’(Matheson, 120). Again, according to some critics, this undermines the possibility of social improvement, buttressing the dominant conservative ideology. As James Wallace writes:

While The Simpsons – unlike traditional satire – hints at no con-cept of a better world, it can perhaps be viewed from a Marxist perspective as an accurate reflection of life in America at the turn of the millennium. Rather than challenge the prevailing ideol-ogy, The Simpsons…reflects the material and historical condi-tions of the age in which it was created; reflects, in other words, the ideology of capitalism in late twentieth century America.�

The show reinforces the status quo, rather than offering the possibility for change. Wallace’s complaint, like Matheson’s is that the show offers nothing other than humour (‘only the joke survives’(Wallace, 14�). In this sense the humour of The Simpsons might be said to reflect the postmodern predicament: when every position is undermined, we are left without a moral centre and, of course, Norris and McLaughlin’s anxiety.

Some critics have identified what they see as a distinctive postmod-ern humour – that is, a particular kind of humour that could be called postmodern. Lance Olsen in Circus of the Mind in Motion (1990), for instance, suggests that:

The postmodern basks in the proliferation of micronarratives. It holds itself in opposition to all that is static, and it attempts to decentre, detotalize, and demythologize while taking nothing, including its own (non)premises very seriously. In this way, post-

�   Carl Matheson, ‘The Simpsons, Hyper-irony, and the Meaning of Life’, ��8.2   James M. Wallace, ‘A (Karl, not Groucho) Marxist in Springfield’, 2�7.

American Humour 19

modernity interrogates all that we once took for granted about language and experience. It is easy to see that such a perspec-tive jibes nicely with the comic vision, whose goal is to topple the authority of any monologic view and delight in the infinite free play of polyphony and plurality – a circus of the mind in motion…postmodern humour focuses on question rather than answer, process rather than goal.�

Olsen’s definition of postmodern humour is a useful one. For him it reflects the essential characteristics of postmodernism in that it undermines hierarchy and absolutist discourse, and it is comfortable with chaos and plurality. This is clearly in line with Jacobson’s assessment of humour as something without opinions and, in its refusal to take anything, including itself, seriously it complements those aspects of postmodernism that terrify its critics. However, Olsen attempts to defend postmodern humour from its detractors:

What it striking about postmodern humour…is its refusal to see truth as something that exists along an either-or axis. Consequently postmodern humour at the same time becomes both negative and a positive perspective on the world. It simul-taneously holds within itself the destructive nihilistic force of absurdist black humour (Duchamp gratuitously defaces and del-egitimises a ‘masterpiece’ by Leonardo) and the constructive and affirmative force of free play (Duchamp revels in such an imaginative and ultimately weightless act). Postmodern humour delights it its own sense of liberty. It delights in its own sense of process. Indeed, process is everything because the goal is at best uncertain, at worst nonexistent (Olsen, 19).

Olsen is right to suggest that humour can be a ‘constructive and affirmative force’ – as will be seen, this notion is central to my argu-ment throughout. However, that positive dimension does not in my view reside solely in the anarchic potential of humour as such. Olsen sees the weightlessness of ‘free play’ as a positive thing, but this is exactly what disturbs many people about postmodernism. If values melt into laughter then what do we have left? It is doubtful if Olsen’s attempt to put a positive spin on postmodernist humour would cheer �   Lance Olsen, Circus of the Mind in Motion, ��8.

20 Paul McDonald

Christopher Norris, nor does it help Wallace and McLaughlin out of the prison of irony. However, I do believe that Olsen is onto some-thing: humour can have a positive function in relation to the difficult issues raised by the postmodern attitude. I aim to develop Olsen’s argument in order to demonstrate that the relationship between post-modernism and humour is one in which the latter can be seen to redeem the former, reasserting or re-establishing the values that many see as incompatible with postmodernism. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate that humour and laughter can often work to add weight to the weightlessness of postmodernism. When it comes to the rela-tionship between humour and postmodernism, in other words, the former can facilitate answers as well as questions.

I have chosen to examine some examples of American humour that in my view usefully illuminate the connection between humour and postmodernism. This does not necessarily mean that the texts dis-cussed can be considered obvious examples of postmodernism; few, for instance, are obviously experimental in form, which some critics seem to see as a defining trait of the postmodern aesthetic. Rather, I have focussed on a number of American humorists who address the implications of postmodernism, and who bring humour to bear on the moral, social and spiritual issues it raises; I am interested in how humour functions in their various responses to these issues. Thus the humorists I’ve chosen take the postmodern world as their subject, identify the crises of value associated with it, and use humour as a means of interrogating, and even solving them. Indeed, in each chap-ter I will offer examples of work in which humour itself constitutes a solution; I will show how humour can work to resolidify those values which so readily melt into laughter in postmodern culture.

The Themes of American Humour.

At this point it is worth saying something about the nature of American humour and how this relates to the focus of my criticism. Obviously examples of American humour are numerous and diverse and the problem of selection is massive. The first question to ask, perhaps, is: what is American humour? A nineteenth century critic called HW

American Humour 21

attempted to explain the idea of a national humour in the following way:

Humour is national when it is impregnated with the convic-tions, customs and association of a nation…. National American humour must be all this transferred into shapes which produce laughter. The humour of a people is their institutions, laws, cus-toms, manners, habits, characters, convictions, – their scenery, the city, or the hills, – expressed in the language of the ludicrous.�

This definition seems as good as any, and I would suggest that all my examples of humour are American in this sense, including those produced by the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland, whose work I address in chapter three. As will be seen, the latter is so thoroughly immersed in American culture that its zeitgeist features in his material even when it is set outside the U.S.�

The themes of American humour are also diverse, of course, but there have been many attempts to identify recurring areas of scru-tiny. For instance, Nancy A. Walker offers one of the more succinct summaries of the history of American humour in the Introduction to What’s So Funny: Humor in American Culture.

From its earliest days American humour had largely been a response to the practical realities of settling a wilderness, experi-menting with a democratic political system, and negotiating the needs of different groups of people within a common national experience. Seldom has our humour been merely for fun, with-out serving some socio-political purpose, and what we might call the humour of reality – as opposed to the humour of fan-tasy – has maintained its dominance throughout American liter-ary history.�

She goes on to discuss the principal preoccupations of American humour and argues that:

�  Quoted by Walter Blair in ‘The Requisites of American Humour’, 92.2  So while a novel  such as Girlfriend in a Coma might be set outside  the US, 

America becomes the subject. As Robert McGill points out, Vancouver can be seen to represent California here. See ‘The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland’s Geography of Apocalypse’.

�  Nancy Walker, What’s So Funny?, ��.

22 Paul McDonald

certain widely shared values, such as the freedoms put forward in the Bill of Rights, stand in contrast to our many differences, and this leads to a final conclusion about American humour: the para-dox that while humour declares nothing to be sacred, Americans have used it to press for those ideals of equality, opportunity, and freedom that gleam so elusively in the distance (Walker, 64).

Walker sees American humour as always having a purpose. This notion is itself at odds with the concept of postmodernism as most people define it. As seen with The Simpsons above, postmodern humour is generally viewed as valueless – the joke is its sole raison d’être. However, the material I address in this book is rarely just ‘for fun;’ it can almost always be said to have a purpose. For Walker, the key themes of American humour seem to relate to three main areas. One is the ethnic experience, implied by her reference to ‘different groups’; another is social interaction and the possibility of social harmony, suggested by the term ‘socio-political purpose’; and the third is the American Dream of ‘equality, opportunity and freedom’. Thus in this study I have chosen to examine examples of humour which, broadly speaking, survey these themes.

The book breaks into three chapters: the first explores postmodern-ism and ethnic identity, focusing specifically on how some key Jewish humorists deal with the impact of postmodernity on the inherited master narratives of ethnic heritage and religious faith. Here I consider the work of Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The chapter takes a chrono-logical approach to post-war Jewish humour, beginning with material produced in the 60s and �0s, and ending with a discussion of Foer’s twenty-first century novel, Everything is Illuminated (2002). My pur-pose, as in all three chapters, is to study the relationship between their postmodern preoccupations and the humour accompanying them.

Chapter two focuses on texts which examine postmodern society, with a particular emphasis on male/female relations. It begins with a discussion of David Mamet’s play Oleanna (1992). I have chosen this because its theme is political correctness, one of the clearest social consequences of postmodernism. It is the one text in the book that is not an obvious example of humour, but I include it because it

American Humour 23

makes a powerful statement on behalf of humour. I compare it to one of Mamet’s early comedies, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (19�4), to illustrate the point the author seems to be making about the sig-nificance of humour in the postmodern world. Oleanna is about a breakdown of communication between the sexes and, in this respect, shares a theme with American Little Man humour, which I go on to discuss in the second section of this chapter. The Little Man is a recurring character in American humour and again I take a chron-ological approach to this phenomenon. I explore the differences between Little Man humour of the early twentieth century, and the postmodern Little Man of the late 20th Century in order to demon-strate those features which distinguish the latter from conventional forms of satire.

In chapters one and two we will see that in some texts humour offers a route back to significant values, and a potential corrective to pessimism. So, by the time we reach chapter three it will be clear that humour can be a positive agency in postmodern American culture; indeed, I argue that for some humorists it constitutes an answer to the problems raised by postmodernism: it reasserts value and reveals a degree of optimism in the midst of a phenomenon so often associated with relativism, chaos and cynicism. In chapter three I survey this notion again, this time with reference to the American Dream, and American core values and ideals. As seen above, in Nancy Walker’s view this is a key theme in American humour. Other critics have also identified this as central to the American comic imagination. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., for instance, sees the disparity between the promise of the American Dream and the reality of the American experience as being at the very heart of what he terms the ‘Great American Joke’. For Rubin, all distinctive American humour proceeds from ‘interplay between the ornamental and the elemental…the democratic ideal and the mulishness of fallen human nature’.� In this third chapter I too am interested in the American ideal, and particularly in how it features in postmodern countercultural humour. The discussion cen-tres specifically on how humour is associated with forms of counter-cultural idealism that celebrate American core values. I begin with

�   Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ‘The Great American Joke’, 118–19.

24 Paul McDonald

a discussion of perhaps the most interesting and celebrated stand-up comedian of the late twentieth century, Bill Hicks. In the first section I show how the apparently world-weary, knowing humour associated with Wallace and Eco’s ‘postmodern attitude’ manages, paradoxically, to facilitate optimism in Hicks’s comedy. I construct Hicks as a postmodern poet who reclaims the idealistic sentiments of the Transcendentalists and the Beats, articulating the egalitarianism enshrined in the Constitution. I then develop this argument with a discussion of the humour of Generation X, the late twentieth century sub-culture which – in its various incarnations of Slacker and Grunge – belongs in a similar Romantic tradition to Hicks. Again I explore various types of humour, showing how the world-weary irony of Slacker culture can have different forms and functions. While this humour can be conservative and self-defeating, apparently confirm-ing Wallace’s fears about the shortcomings of postmodern irony, this is not always the case. It also offers a way of evading the controlling narratives of society. I expand this argument with reference to the most important novelist to be associated with Generation X, Douglas Coupland. In the final section of chapter three I examine some of his mature fiction to show that, here too, humour and value are one and the same, and laughter is associated with potential progress and pos-sibility for the future. As with Hicks, Coupland puts a spiritual spin on the American Dream, using humour to frame and enable a utopian thesis.

CHAPTER ONE

Postmodernism, Humour and Jewish American Ethnic Identity

Jewish American Satire and the Society of Spectacle

If the function of satire is, as Andrew Stott suggests, to ‘denounce folly and vice and urge ethical…reform’,� then it is hardly surprising that post-war Jewish American satirists have felt compelled to refer-ence Hitler and World War II. What is surprising is that, when they do so, it is less likely to be to indict anti-Semitism or fascism, than to criticise American popular entertainment. This criticism is associated with a style of humour that has been linked to postmodernism, and the discussion in the first part of this chapter will attempt to answer two questions: what is the precise nature of these satirists’ discon-tent, and is it legitimate to use the term ‘postmodern’ to describe the comedy that articulates it?

In this first section I will focus on five of the best known Jewish American humorists to have emerged in the late 1950s and 60s: Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Philip Roth. Their work exhibits characteristics that link it to a first phase of postmodernism, observed in 19�0 by Leslie Fiedler. In ‘Cross the Border-Close the Gap’, Fiedler argued that creative people had been experiencing ‘the birth pangs of postmodernism’� for twenty years, pointing to the emergence of a new aesthetic which embraced the energy of mass culture. Since then many have identified this period

�   Andrew Stott, Comedy, �09.2   Leslie Fiedler, ‘Cross the Border, Close the Gap’, 270.