Humor

HUMOR. In written and graphic forms, humor has played a great role in the US Left, although a role rarely recognized in strategic, tactical, or theoretical discourse. Humorists have for the most part warmed up audiences or filled the back pages of Left publications, with the marked exception of the cartoonist’s front-page status in some papers. These humor workers have, nevertheless, been among the most beloved figures in the Left movements, warmly embraced by the rank-and-file.

Left literary humor dates to well before 1870. James Russell Lowell’s Bigelow Papers (1848) savagely criticized the US-Mexican War. David Ross Locke, whose “Petroleum V. Nasby” protagonist epitomized the reactionary stupidity of Confederate sympathizers in the Union states, was considered required reading at Lincoln’s White House. Russell B. Nye, writer of comic histories of the United States and a good personal friend of Eugene Debs, could at times engage in racist caricatures, but was also militantly anti-war and enormously skeptical about patriotic claims in general. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Marietta Holley added many volumes of proto-feminist satire, skewering male and female resistance to woman’s rights. Mark Twain, the greatest of American humorists and in old age an avowed socialist, assaulted the US invasion of the Philippines and in many works captured the banality of a feckless materialism.

Building upon these traditions, hayseed socialist commentators beginning in the 1890s wrote affable jests at American resistance to socialist ideas. The best of the writers, Appeal to Reason editor J. A. Wayland, had fun assaulting the aristocratic pretensions of the American new rich, and the vacuity of public democratic rhetoric. Oscar Ameringer swiftly emerged as the stage comic and literary comedian par excellence. In a long career spanning the early years of the twentieth century to the verge of the US entry into World War II, “the Mark Twain of American Socialism” wrote monologues for many publications, most of them edited by himself\, important humor agitation pamphlets, and one vastly popular comic history, The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam (1938).

Ameringer had many imitators during the “golden age” of native-born socialism, 1900–1915, the best known of them Henry M. Tichenor, columnist for the National Rip-Saw and editor of his own satirical free-thought journal from Saint Louis, the Melting Pot. The lyrical counterpart to this literary comedy, emanating from satirical Wobbly songs in The Little Red Songbook (1908), reached as many listeners as any document in American radical history. Humorous Wobbly soapboxers also abounded, and a few, but especially T-Bone Slim, became famous for their newspaper or magazine columns.

Cartoonists drew more broadly upon international traditions, but by no means entirely so. Although little cartoon work of note appeared in the nineteenth-century socialist papers, the traditions of Bruegel, Hogarth, Daumier, Goya, and the contemporary artists of the popular German Simplicissimus and its socialistic sister publication, Die Wahre Jacob, had an impact in creating an artistic climate of wide commercial work for cartoonists.

Art Young, the most renowned of the old-style newspaper illustrators, had made a name for himself in the commercial press before shifting his activities full-time to socialism around 1910. He went on, after the decline of the socialist movement, to found a short-lived comic weekly, Good Morning (1921–1922), and to draw occasionally for the New Masses while preparing his own book-length Dantesque version of hellish modern civilization. His mostly younger colleagues at the Masses magazine, including Kenneth Chamberlain, Stuart Davis, Henry Glintenkamp, Boardman Robinson, and Robert Minor, fairly invented the “artistic” cartoon later adopted by the New Yorker among other publications, of crayon-style sketch and spare, often wry and unconsciously self-satirical, dialogue. Most devoted themselves to artistic work after 1920, also becoming leading figures in the 1930s American Artists Congress, while the volatile Robert Minor evolved from militant anarchism to Communist ranks where he devoted his attention to his functionary status within the Communist Party.

Amidst the wide range of the Socialist Party and IWW papers, styles evolved closer to the commercial daily comics, albeit oriented toward class consciousness and working-class enlightenment generally. Ryan Walker, publisher for a short time of the Michigan monthly the Billygoat (retitled Prophet and the Ass), became a staff cartoonist on the daily New York Call, and a frequent contributor to the National Rip-Saw among other publications. His notable inventions, The Rip-Saw Mother Goose, also bound separately and widely distributed, and the un-class-conscious worker “Henry Dubb” (many strips would end with the painful admission, “I’m the Henry Dubb!”), had a considerable following. The IWW cartoonists, drawing for a semiliterate audience often on the move, dedicated themselves to ridiculing capitalism as an economic and moral system, including within its appendages the “American Separation of Labor.” Unlike the socialists, whose cartoon talent largely dissipated after 1920, the IWW had a wealth of mostly self-taught artists whose work continued for decades after.

Immigrant humor followed an almost entirely different path, with only an exceptional crossover such as German-American Oscar Ameringer. From the 1870s, popular German-American theater included socialistic farces, almost invariably set in the old country but sometimes dealing with issues of immigrant life. A number of outstanding poets and journalists wrote and occasionally played in these dramas, which were enthusiastically received by local working-class audiences. Johann Most, who had abandoned an early thespian career after contracting a disfiguring jaw disease, was undoubtedly the most noted stage raconteur of radical “dirty jokes.” (One survives: the difference between a toilet and a stock market crash is that in the stock market, the paper falls before the crash.) After the turn of the century a variety of new immigrant groups, reputedly among the most enthusiastic the small Bulgarian following, ventured into satirical theater aimed at neighborhood audiences. Finnish theater, the most avowedly “workerist,” carried comical antibourgeois dramas into many fraternal halls of the northern Midwest’s copper-mining districts. New York-based Yiddish theater, vastly popular and tinged with Left views, emphasized mainly social melodrama with only a light sprinkling of radical farce.

A portion of this comedy reached the immigrant socialist press, along with translations from Mark Twain and other capitalism-jibing authors. Morris Winchevsky, the founder of the Yiddish socialist press, contributed the most popular single column, “Di Meshugina Filosofer,” the Crazy Philosopher, writing on the foolishness of capitalism and its willing wage slaves. Immigrant radicals attained their earliest satirical publication in Der Tramp (1879), satirizing the newly rich German immigrant. The next and most important of all distinctly radical immigrant humor magazines, the Groysser Kundes (1909–1927), held the Lower East Side in rapt attention, while providing literary work for many young radicals. When after World War I the Kundes turned against the Russian Revolution, one of the more promising young writers, Sam Liptzin, founded and edited the shortlived Der Humorist (1921–1922) en route to becoming the staff humorist of the Yiddish Freiheit and author of nearly thirty Yiddish volumes of folksy humorous commentary. The most long-lived immigrant humor publications, the Finnish weeklies Punikki, later Lapatossu, made the transition from socialist to communist and lasted into later 1930s. Italian antifascists aimed several ephemeral 1920s publications at ridiculing Mussolini and his American supporters.

Other radical humor also made a troubled but at first generally successful transition to the newly ascendant Communist movement of the 1920s. Communist literary comics and cartoonists, such as Fred Ellis, tended to be less humorous and more heavy-handed than socialists or Wobblies in their class-struggle treatments. But in the Yiddish press especially, the burst of creative enthusiasm inspired by the appearance of the Freiheit helped put a younger generation’s talents to work. Moshe Nadir, after Shalom Aleichem the greatest comic writer in Yiddish, gave his full talents to the Freiheit during the 1920s and 1930s, with feuilletons, literary sketches, and poems. Nadir and a younger contemporary, Chaver Paver, a pen name for Gershom Einbinder, created popular children’s books in Yiddish with humor and political pathos mixed. Cartoonist William Gropper, who also drew frequently for the Daily Worker, gained wide reputation or notoriety for his puncturing of Jewish socialist moderates’ labor misleadership in the needle trades. In the micro-world of Yiddish puppetry, popular Yiddish cartoonist Zuni Maud thrilled audiences with his collaborator Yosel Kutler in the Modikot troupe of social satire.

The appearance of the Popular Front created a rallying point for talented artists and literary comics, most especially but not only in the New Masses. Robert Forsythe’s weekly columns also collected in the 1935 volume Redder Than the Rose imitated the New Yorker style or that of Canadian left-leaning Stephen Leacock, sophisticated and light-handed. At the New Yorker, on the distant liberal end of the Popular Front, Robert Benchley lent his talents to the Spanish Civil War, and the darkly ironic Dorothy Parker became a longtime supporter of Left causes for the rest of her life. When Forsythe took a leave from his New Masses columns, William Saroyan or S. J. Perelman, best known for his screenwriting of several Marx Brothers films, occasionally filled in.

The New Masses, like the Masses, possessed a special attraction for artists only peripherally involved with politics as such. A wide proliferation of styles and themes, abstract or didactic, worldly, near-cynical, and evangelistic by turns, became a principal feature of the weekly. Few noted artists remained after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the subsequent decline of the magazine. In these days, however, even the Daily Worker acquired staff comic artists, the most talented of them Maurice Del Bourgo produced Little Lefty, a popular children’s strip.

Through the War and a few years after, left-wingers cheerfully supported the leftwing leadership of the Radio Writers Guild, and the influence of the Left helped to shape a later generation of prominent and leftish Jewish writers for radio and television, including Carl Reiner and Frank Tarloff.

For the smaller Left movements with their weekly papers, an individual cartoonist often gained almost an exalted stature. These artists took special pleasure in skewering the Communist movement and the Soviet Union, Stalin in particular, for betraying the cause of the Left. Thus Jesse Cohen, pen-named “Carlo” in the Trotskyist movement’s Labor Action, not only concentrated the political message of the paper into one terse line-drawing, but reputedly also served as a teller of difficult truths through his verbal repartee. Laura Gray, drawing for the orthodox Trotskyist Militant, reached the rare status of a leading woman humorist. Artists working among the eldest political groups, the Socialist Labor Party’s Walter Steinhilber and the artists for the IWW continued to cling to the historical themes such as capital stealing from the workers’ pockets.

Hollywood, with all of its prohibitions and political-artistic limitations, gave left-wing humorists their widest audience. Charlie Chaplin, a left-wing sympathizer, had thrilled audiences of the silent years and added his anti-Hitler classic for the intellectual crowd. During the 1930s young writers who shaped various genres, including some of the most prestigious “women’s films,” also delivered outstanding screwball comedies. Donald Ogden Stewart, a playwright known in the 1920s as “the funniest man in America,” later created scripts for Katharine Hepburn marked by gender-conscious humor, as Ring Lardner, Jr., would author her role in Woman of the Year (1943). Communist activists Robert Lees and Fred Rinaldo, writers of award-winning shorts in the 1930s, became Abbott and Costello’s leading writers in the following decades. At less prestigious slots, left-wing formula screenwriters treating picaresque gangster themes, proletarian romance, war comedy, or even Blondie and Dagwood and “B” westerns found ways to ridicule bourgeois pretensions. Silenced by the Blacklist, these writers often reemerged under pseudonyms in television, writing for The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Donna Reed Show, and Bachelor Father along with many episodes of various Norman Lear vehicles later. Lardner Jr’s return to the big time with MASH, the film, set the pace for the most popular antiwar television comedy in media history. Perhaps it is also notable that a blacklisted writer proposed and took a role in creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which fostered the rise of Ed Asner, future Screen Actors Guild president and militant opponent to the hawkish labor bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the vanishing theatrical farce had taken new form within folk music. Woody Guthrie, the most creative and popular of the artists, wrote a folksy humor column in the Daily Worker and loaded up his often woeful lyrics with wry asides about bourgeois politics and technological fantasy. Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and others reproducing rural songs and adding to them a revived genre of labor tunes, wove humor into generally serious themes, while widely entertaining the children of the Left.

The Cold War and McCarthyism made radical humor difficult to perform safely. Talented humorists lost their radical connections or were isolated. Ventriloquist Paul Winchell (whose dummy, Jerry Mahoney, was named after a Tammany politician) went from public appearances for Vito Marcantonio to success on television. Zero Mostel, a comedy standout, suffered a prolonged blacklisting, as sitcom actor Philip Loeb, at the peak of his fame as a co-starring member of The Goldbergs, was driven from television and committed suicide several years later. “Professor” Irwin Corey, later a performer at leftwing events, held fast to Jewish progressivism while devoting time to Cuba. Numerous other radical-minded humor writers and actors in Hollywood and elsewhere, simply languished in their careers or steered clear of all political commitments.

“The Investigator,” a most unusual 1954 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program lampooning Joseph McCarthy, was written by Reuben Ship, a former leader of the Radio Writers Guild and a known Communist. Ship, who had been writing comedy for the radio version of The Life of Riley, returned to his native land and extended his talents carefully, because US prosecutors could not reach him. The broadcast, printed as a record in a few thousand copies, passed from left-wing household to household in the United States, describing McCarthy’s appropriate treatment by celestial authorities after his death.

With the rest of the Left, radical humor went into hiding. Mad Comics, which developed the technique of satirizing commercial mass culture through a close examination of its details, was developed by Harvey Kurtzman, child of the Yiddish Left and teenage assistant to the Daily Worker illustrator Lou Furstadt. Around 1950, publishers crushed an effort to create a cartoonists’ union. But EC Comics, run by neophyte Bill Gaines after his publisher-father died suddenly, took a chance on young comic artists with talent and drive. Several key artists, under Kurtzman’s editorial leadership, came together in Mad Comics (some, but not all, continued to Mad Magazine), which ridiculed postwar American hypocrisies and bravely flayed Joseph McCarthy. Paul Krassner, close friend of the Mad staff, began a nightclub stand-up act and launched The Realist in 1957. His determinedly tasteless and vulgar approach to contemporary political-cultural hypocrisy would be followed, some years later, by the Lower East Side musical group the Fugs, whose lyricist, Tuli Kupferberg, had wide, mostly anarchist political connections. Tom Lehrer, a Yale mathematics instructor whose concerts and records mocked 1950s bomb-culture, racism, and consumerism, inspired a largely campus following. But perhaps Jules Feiffer, more civil libertarian than radical, made the most popular dissenting statements, generally about the status of artist or intellectual under a capitalism run rampant.

Some of the same satiric activity took place among the small number of African American Left humorists. Langston Hughes, whose “Semple” series of barroom dialogues on social topics circulated widely in the Black press, received little recognition in the mainstream for his biting humor, and himself eased away from open Left involvements. Ollie Harrington, whose radical-humorous Bootsie ran for many years in the Pittsburgh Courier, moved to East Germany and began decades of drawing mostly bitter issues-oriented cartoons for the American Communist press.

Kurtzman’s Help! magazine of the early 1960s introduced to a wider public two of the most famed dissident cartoonists of the New Left days. Gilbert Shelton and R. Crumb. Shelton, a former history graduate student at the University of Texas, had first gained wide recognition drawing for the Rag, one of the earliest and most political-minded underground newspapers. Shelton moved between political-cultural satire and a celebration of the hippie lifestyle. Crumb, obsessed with many subjects (especially sexuality), made extended commentaries on social pathology, and nurtured a mostly hidden socialistic sympathy. Along with many of the other underground cartoonists, the two provided the alternative press a staple attraction and created a new genre of mostly satirical, sometimes broadly political, often ecologically minded, occasionally feminist-inclined comic books. The earliest outright political venture, Radical America Komiks (1969), edited by Gilbert Shelton, appeared as an issue of the informal journal of Students for a Democratic Society. Of more straightforward cartoon work in the underground press, Ron Cobb’s mordant commentaries on self-destructive techno-war culture became a signature of the times.

Leftish comedy found its way to performance more difficult, but not impossible. Barbara Garson’s MacBird! (1966) traveled to dozens of campuses and community performances, with most impact before the close of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential administration. The San Francisco Mime Troupe put on a larger and more sustained road show. In later years, a series of avowedly radical-political performers who toured many localities with leftish raps included Flo Kennedy and lesbian Robin Tyler (herself briefly a major television performer). A “First Radical Humor Festival” at New York University, in 1982, sought—sometimes successfully—to combine performers, artists, and audience in a mix of generations and styles.

Somewhat closer to the mainstream, the albums of the Firesign Theatre reflected anti-war, anti-establishment values. Among the mainstream radical-minded comic performers from the later 1960s to the early 1970s were the Smothers Brothers (one of them of a particularly socialistic sympathy) and Dick Gregory. In television, the tastes of the sixties-style baby boomers had become the mainstream, so that an anti-war or anti-racist message could be delivered within existing comedy-drama formats. Hollywood Blacklist victim Ring Lardner, Jr., thus proved instrumental in a critical turn of the media via Larry Gelbart’s adaptation of Lardner’s M*A*S*H film to anti-war progressive Alan Alda’s talents. Later, Robin Williams and Richard Dreyfus made comedy statements in a variety of films considerably to the left. Stand up comic Richard Pryor challenged manners and morals of white America in winning ways through television appearances and a stunning performance film.

By the 1980s, Left humor had already taken on an emphatically postmodern edge. Processed World, a Bay Area quarterly, characteristically drew upon Situationist styles that had barely made an appearance in the 1960s. to describe and satirize the world of new-age office work under high-tech conditions. Avant-garde and sometimes leftish “punkzines” with circulations from a few hundred to a few thousand assumed the post-industiral, catastrophic reality as fixed and sought to locate a space for humor within it. The Onion, a tabloid founded in Madison, Wisconsin in 1988, carried the playful assault upon mainstream banalities to an extreme. From another and yet more fantastic angle, the Texas-based “Church of the SubGenius” spun out tabloids and held “Devivals” from the early 1990s onward, mocking evangelism, representations of “sales” as American glory, through heavy use of repurposed old magazine advertising.

The later breed of dissenting comic artists to have their work printed in the radical and liberal as well as mainstream press, Nicole Hollander, Matt Groening, Berke Breathed, and most of all Bill Griffith, among them, focused on the layered world of images and the surreality of the forgotten icons, good or bad, that had not become swallowed up by an image-world now patently out of control. The emergence of Groening as a major figure with The Simpsons and another animated series, South Park, reinforced this sensibility. While a small handful of comedy actors identified with left-wing or feminist causes, most of Hollywood’s laugh machine went politically silent, as if waiting to refocus on the familiar targets of class privilege and bourgeois banality.

The darkening reality of young people’s lives in particular, but also the lives of many others, in a dysfunctional society made worse by the Great Recession, returned politics to the forefront in the new century. Postmodern gags and ironic commentary about the tedium of daily life diminished as direct political assaults upon the Establishment increased. In the years leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential election, leftwing or socially critical comedy thus found its place on the Comedy Channel. A handful of other animation hits followed The Simpsons in building upon the ironies of declining life choices for young people in the richest society on earth. By 2015-2016, social media became the prime mode for satirical creativity, this time creativity of ordinary Bernie Sanders enthusiasts, reaching an apex of sorts with memes around the issues of the Sanders versus Clinton primary presidential campaign during. New, witty image-humor memes appeared by the hundreds on Facebook.
The return of satire from form to substance gained infinitely more ammunition with the ascent of Trump to the White House. Each day or week brought into the open revelations of corruption previously unthinkable, along with an outright worship of wealth and power that seemed distant from anything resembling formal Judeo-Christian ethics. The staggering popularity of retrograde views on race, gender, gun control, global warming and so on, seen literally through the lens of the Fox Channel, accelerated satirical responses in kind. “Saturday Night Live,” which had pulled itself out of a slow drift or decline by attacking Republicans who were attacking Obama, now found a target of almost unimaginable size. “The Nib,” an on-line series of cartoons and short comic strips on the web, took on a wide range of issues and introduced many young talents in their iconoclasm.

Clearly, satirists drew a deep breath with the election of Joe Biden kin 2020 and pondered when and how to move. Sacha Noam Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) perfectly captures the mixture of compulsive globalism with an American barbarism, very far from being banished into a historical memory.

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Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood. New York: Verso, 2003.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory History of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Reiner, Carl. How Paul Robeson Saved My Life. New York: Harper-Collins, 1999.