Humor, Heart, and Hillary

Back in the days when Johnny Carson used to host “The Tonight Show” he occasionally featured a comic who joked that “I do impersonations of people, and I’m often mistaken for one.” Although we’ve long since forgotten the comic, we were reminded of the line by a New York Times report about Hillary Clinton’s most recently revised campaign strategy.

The Times isn’t so impolite as to say that she is going to attempt an impersonation of a actual person, but its headline does hilariously promise “Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say.” According to the lead paragraph the humor will include “no more flip jokes about her private email server,” and the heart will supposedly be demonstrated by “no rope lines to wall off crowds, which added to an impression of aloofness,” as well as “new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes wooden and overly cautious.” If she’s looking for some intentional humor as well she’s welcome to that old line, but we doubt that her aloof and wooden delivery would put it over.

A woman who hasn’t driven a car or microwaved a burrito or figured out how to send an e-mail for the past 25 years is hard-pressed to convince anyone that aw shucks, she’s just a regular gal at heart. One that has ruthlessly dealt with her husband’s serial sexual harassment victims and too-honest White House travel office managers and obscure anti-Islamic videographers and any big-money donors to her family’s foundation, and not nearly so ruthlessly with the likes of Vladimir Putin and the Chinese communists and the mullahs of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood almost everywhere, will find it a particularly hard act to pull off. Clinton was never any good at it, even before all the baggage and the years of pampered living accumulated, and her crack team of public relations experts seem no more suited to the task than they were back when her inevitable candidacy lost to a little-known radical back in ’08.

The little-known radical Clinton currently trails is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose humor and heart are such that he’s a self-described socialist and a plausible advocate of all sorts of Democratic craziness that Clinton’s many corporate boards and big money donors won’t allow her to pursue, so no matter what folksy accent she might try to impersonate Clinton will be hard pressed to match her opponents insane but undeniably authentic appeal. There’s also talk of Vice President Joe Biden getting in the race, who would immediately enjoy the apparent imprimatur of the same Obama administration that is currently pursuing a criminal investigation in the matter of Clinton’s suddenly humorless private email server, and although even his most ardent supporters admit he’s something of a buffoon even his harshest critics concede that he’s a humorous and heartfelt buffoon. No matter what Democrats might decide to enter a suddenly winnable race, Clinton will be at a disadvantage regard humor and heart and the ability to impersonate an actual person.

The problem is such that some polls show Clinton trailing the top Republican contenders, even the ludicrous front-runner Donald Trump. This situation is dire not only for Clinton but for the country at large, which would be faced with a choice that makes Nixon versus McGovern look like a golden age of American politics, but it does suggest a more realistic strategy for Clinton to pursue. Although we have no use for the bombastic braggadocio of Trump we will concede that he’s at least honest enough to eschew all that aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-regular-guy hokum, and that it seems to be working for him. He flashes the bling and dishes the disses with all the sneering disdain of the most hard-core gangsta rapper, and well enough that he’s getting an uncanny-for-a-Republican 25 percent of the black vote, although we suspect his hard-line stance on illegal immigration also has something to do with that, and it suggests that the public isn’t necessarily looking for a regular guy to be president.

The guy who served the last two terms ran on the exoticism of his life story, emphasizing the interracial birth and the hauntingly absent father and the hippie grandmother and the Indonesian madrassa schooling and the typical white people grandparents who sent him through an elite prep school and Ivy League education, with the strange halo effect in all the press photographs and the crowds chanting his name as if he were some of maharaja, so the Democrats are at least as susceptible such nonsense as Republicans. In the past Clinton has brusquely assorted her immunity from criticism, such as that time she scolded a congressional committee looking into those four deaths at an insecure consulate in the anarchic country of Libya by sneering “What difference, at this point, does it make,” and all the Democrats stood and cheered. A bold declaration by Clinton that she’s still immune to criticism, and still entitled by some birthright to her rightful place on the American throne, and too frightening a harridan to be opposed, might well be the winning argument. It’s worked so far, at least among the Democrats who will be nominating the party’s nominee.

In any case, it would be more convincing than her impersonation of a person.

— Bud Norman

Harold Ramis, RIP

The recent death of Harold Ramis set us to thinking about comedy. Not because there’s anything funny about the death of Ramis, who by all accounts was a decent sort of fellow who deserved better, but because he was the most influential comedic filmmaker of recent years.

As a screenwriter, director, or actor, and oftentimes taking on all three jobs, Ramis had a hand in such hugely popular and widely imitated movies as “Animal House,” “Ghostbusters,” “Caddyshack,” “Stripes,” and “Groundhog Day,” as well as the “SCTV” television series and the “National Lampoon Radio Hour.” This is an uneven oeuvre, to our old-fashioned tastes, but there’s no use denying its lingering effect. Get almost any white male of our age group drunk and he’ll sooner or later start quoting cherished lines from Ramis’ movies, perhaps even reciting the entire script of “Caddyshack” verbatim, complete with a mush-mouthed imitation of Bill Murray’s Carl the Groundskeeper character, and the smart-alecky anti-authoritarianism that defined a Ramis movie is still the default style of almost every aspiring comic. Commentators on both the left and the right have also acknowledged the inevitable political influence of Ramis’ movies, although they predictably disagree on whether it was for good or bad, and we suspect that Ramis would have found it all quite amusing.

So far as we can tell from his rare public political pronouncements Ramis was a conventionally liberal Hollywood baby-boomer, but his movies were inadvertently conservative enough to have thoroughly annoyed much of the left. Over at Salon.com the noted writer Thomas “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Franks did his best to live up to every detail of the humorless liberal stereotype with a scathing obituary, claiming that Ramis’ sense of humor “liberated Reagan and Wall Street” to unleash all the supposed catastrophe that humorless liberals have always associated with those stock movie villains. We once thought Franks was the funniest writer of his generation, until we realized that everything he wrote was intended in earnest, but we suspect his characteristically high dudgeon is at being the butt of a far better joke than he’ll ever write. The joke wasn’t written by Ramis, though, but by the strange cosmic shift over the past 40 years that has transformed Ramis’ movies into a conservative cause celebre.

Ramis came of age in the 1970s and the “National Lampoon,” and you really had to be there to understand what that meant. It was a post-Vietnam and in-the-middle of Watergate era when being young meant snidely questioning authority or being hopelessly square, and nobody questioned authority with the slide-splitting cynicism of the “National Lampoon.” The magazine was raunchy and irreligious and disrespectful of every convention of polite society, but just as irreverent toward the constraining pieties of the emerging counter-culture. Chafing at even the earliest restrictions of feminism and the civil rights movements the magazine was brazenly and hilariously sexist and racist, and it had a deliriously liberating effect even on readers who had to keep the latest copy out of sight of their disapproving parents. We recall issues devoted to mocking The Beatles and the Kennedy clan with a particular nostalgia, and proudly retain the courage it gave us to laugh at anything. Ramis was similarly affected, apparently, and had the good fortune to begin his career with the magazine’s radio show that somehow got past the Federal Communications Commission’s censors and onto the national airwaves.

Ramis’ first big movie hit was “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” which he co-wrote with the magazine’s Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller, and at the time no one would have considered it a conservative movie. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen it, “Animal House” is an admiring account of a fraternity of drunken, horny, aggressively rude students at a typically staid early-‘60s college campus. A pretentious pot-smoking professor and a guitar-strumming folk musician are among the satiric targets, and some believably menacing black males figure in one of the gags, but the leading bad guys are from the Reserve Officer Training Corps and the blue-blood houses and the oh-so-establishment administration. This is hardly the stuff of right-wing propaganda, and doesn’t sound like an appealing premise for a comedy, but the passing of time can change a movie. “Animal House” has been so frequently re-made in one form or another that it would be hard for anyone encountering it on Netflix or the late show to appreciate how shockingly fresh and laugh-out=loud funny it was in 1978, and only in retrospect can Franks can accurately complain that it made fraternities cool again and that the Dartmouth fraternity “Animal House” was based on was a pipeline to Wall Street sinecures.

Franks and his fellow liberals have more plausible gripes with “Ghostbusters,” a silly little special-effects comedy that libertarians have embraced as a classic. The heroes in the movie are entrepreneurs who have bravely left the cozy but constrained confines of academia, despite one’s worry that “I’ve been in the private sector, and they expect results,” and the villain is a self-righteous and utterly incompetent Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat. This does sound like the stuff of right-wing propaganda, and the premise for a first-rate comedy, but for some reason we never liked the movie any more than Franks did. The public loved it, and we defer to its judgment on the matter, but Franks’ opprobrium makes it all the more appealing.

“Caddyshack” is a class-conscious comedy about a proletarian lad who clashes with the bourgeoisie at an obscure country club, but even that seemingly Marxist pitch contained enough subversive comedy to offend the refined sensibilities of the left. Franks shrewdly notes that “country club Republican” is now a pejorative more often used by the Tea Party right than the respectable left, and that Rodney Dangerfield’s heroically slobbish character is a self-made businessman striving to crash an enclave of the crony-capitalism that conservatives now rail against, but we can’t share his view that is a fateful fault in the movie. “Stripes” was a frequently amusing tale of two fiercely individualistic losers who wind up in the strictly-regimented army, which spared it Franks’ scorn, but if he’d wanted to Franks could have griped about the grudging respect that the protagonists eventually gave to their old-school drill sergeant.

Any movie is best judged on its aesthetic rather than political merits, and on these grounds we found most of Ramis’ movies flawed. At the risk of sounding like the sort of cinephile snobs that Ramis could have cannily ridiculed, our notions of comedy were influenced by an earlier and more serious school of comedians. The Ramis movies gave us a lot of laughs, but rarely provided a fully satisfying movie-watching experience. They lacked the cinematic inventiveness of Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd in the silent era, the elegant sophistication of Ernst Lubitsch in the ‘30s or the carefully considered satire of Preston Surges in the ‘40s, or any of the great comedies made in the ‘50s and ‘60s before the heavy hand of the political correctness that the “National Lampoon” had to resist starting in the ‘70s. As much as we admire the slapdash anarchism of the Marx Brothers’ tweaking of Margaret Dumont’s propriety or W.C. Field’s drunken surrealism in “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break,” most of Ramis’ films seem merely sloppy with chaotic endings and a good-enough-for-Hollywood feel.

There were a lot of laughs in those movies, though, and we appreciate that so many of them annoyed the liberals. If there really is any political lesson to be learned from Ramis’ work, however, it is that the liberals are now in authority and that a properly anti-authoritarian impulse should be directed toward those bastards. The great “National Lampoon” writer an editor P.J. O’Rourke has unabashedly embraced conservatism, and we see no reason why Harold Ramis shouldn’t be posthumously inducted into the ranks of right-wing bastards even if it would have annoyed him. President Barack Obama gave a respectful eulogy, saying that because of Ramis he and his wife “Questioned authority,” so one can only hope that Ramis will also inspire late-show viewers to question this president’s authority.

Ramis’ only true masterpiece, however, invited viewers to consider more important matters than the passing the political controversies. “Groundhog Day” is a deeply philosophical and fully-realized film about a man who finds himself trapped in the same day and only manages to escape the monotony of his selfish existence by rejecting the smart-alecky rebelliousness of Ramis’ other films and seeking a more spiritual existence. It’s funny, too, and will long survive the squabbles that Ramis would have laughed at.

— Bud Norman