Dear Hannah,
I wouldn't call myself a fan of Sarah Silverman's, but I'm definitely a fan
of some of the things she says. And when she said a short while ago that comedians
have to change with the times and accept political correctness, I
don't think it's possible for me to agree with her more. In fact, when I
woke up this morning to check my Facebook I asked myself what day it was, and
when I figured it out, I told myself I would have what everyone else was
having.
The chief benefit of having what belongs to today is that it's something
other than what we had yesterday; which means it is definitely better, because
it's impossible for things to ever get worse. If this sounds like we
should just skip all the way down to tomorrow then you've got it all
wrong. Not only are we incapable of telling the future, but whatever
we'll have tomorrow isn't better yet, because it isn't happening today.
But it will be happening today. And when it is, then we'll throw
today away, because today will have become yesterday. I apologize if this
sounds confusing -- it's the truth. For the weekend.
The great difficulty of changing with the times is that you're never really
sure when or how the times are changing. For this we go to statistics.
We want to see numbers and graphs and lists of people who are doing
things so that we know what to say out loud and when to keep quiet so that we
can be popular -- especially amongst our college students, whom Sarah Silverman
claims are always right. And if the majority of students say we ought to
stop using a term like queer we quit it, even if queer means weird
and the overwhelming majority of people aren't gay. And if the majority
of students turn into Dominicans and start burning our heretics (who would have
been orthodox centuries before and probably burning the Dominicans), we help
them gather the kindling. No society of students has ever gone wrong --
not in Russia, not in China, and especially never in Italy or Germany.
Nobody ever woke up and realized his child turned into a backward ass.
Our teenagers are our saints; which is why they regress by turning into
adults.
The one kind of person you never want to be is the person who starts a
historical trend. You want to be the kind of person who jumps on board
right when it's gaining speed. The first person to start a trend has to
do all kinds of uncomfortable things, like nailing the 95 Theses on the door of
the church in Wittenberg, or the person who refuses to move to the back of the
bus. It requires thinking and bravery and fortitude and the horrible
realization that you have something worth fighting for. And the trouble
with fighting is that you'll be fighting against the trend of the time, which
as we have already agreed is the trend we ought to be following.
Nobody was ever a genius by thinking the things that nobody else was
able to
think. Nobody was ever a savior by doing the things that nobody else
was
willing to do. And nobody was ever funny by pointing out the things we
ought not to be thinking and doing. The comedian doesn't need any new
material, which is why the most successful comedians are only making fun
of our
grandparents and ignoring our contemporaries. They focus on the things
we already knew, instead of introducing new ways of thinking about the
ways we
already think. They find nothing absurd about us, because there isn't
anything absurd to find. The best jokes are philosophically
conservative; which is
why conservatives are known primarily for their comedians.
There is of course an objection to all of this, and it's about the most
backward thing anyone could ever say. It's that statistics are for
cowards and dishonest politicians. It's that -- trends be damned --
a man ought to think for himself and do whatever is right; that even if the
whole world starts wearing their pants on their heads and praising tyranny and
calling ugly things beautiful and beautiful
things ugly, he can stand alone because he's a man with dignity,
intelligence, and a conscience. It's that the greatest comedy means
telling the world why you think everyone's got it wrong, and telling it because
you are the minority. That is how we get majorities. We make
the things our college students think seem ridiculous. At least, that's what I once
heard an old man say -- yesterday.
Your father,
-J
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