November 26, 2024

You can fool all of the people all of the time

Jokes are one of the foundations of language and understanding. You can tell, for example, that you are getting good at a language if you can make or understand a joke in your newest tongue. As a child, I remember the pride I would feel when I understood a joke that I perceived to be for someone older (something from Frasier, maybe). I felt sophisticated, able to weave together my general understanding of an issue with the metaphor that surrounded it.

There isn’t a lot of comedy for children, so my parents would buy me comedy from the past. (The past did not have swearing.) I listened to a lot of Burns and Allen or Abbot and Costello radio hours. But my first real comedy love was The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. I fell asleep to it almost every night and, when my brain turns to mush, I’ll still be able to recite his routines.

Bob Newhart’s breakout album was a smash hit, winning Grammys and a place in the Library of Congress. Newhart is still the only comedian to have ever won the Grammy for “Best New Artist.” Recording the album was one of Newhart’s first live performances. The album, in my opinion, has a perfect sound. You can hear the plates clinking in the Texas dinner club at which it was recorded. You feel as if you are there.

It also features one of his most enduring routines: Abe Lincoln versus Madison Avenue.

For those who have never listened to Newhart, he does not do the style of standup we typically see today. Like his radio predecessors, Newhart focuses on two-man routines. But his are performed by one man. He plays the straight man in most of them, with the zany character filled in by the minds the audience. His routines are half a conversation.

In Abe Lincoln versus Madison Avenue, a routine inspired by the book The Hidden Persuaders by cultural critic Vance Packard, Newhart plays a “press agent” talking to Abe Lincoln. Lincoln is a bumbling fool who marketing men are trying to package into the perfect person to lead the Union through the Civil War. They fight, Newhart insisting that Abe keep the beard and stovepipe hat and stop talking to reporters. Newhart tells his Lincoln not to remove the line “people will little note nor long remember” from the Gettysburg Address. He assures Lincoln: people will remember.

In 1997, when Newhart re-recorded his most famous album for Nick at Nite records, he said the routine was “more viable now than at the time [I] wrote it.” And he was right, of course. It is ridiculous to think of Lincoln having a speech writer or a gag writer. But every presidential candidate now does. The shock of a packaged candidate is gone. Every candidate is packaged, whether or not voters are able to see it.

It seems pretty clear voters were not able to see through the façade of Trump. He had his usual voters and other, low propensity voters also turned in his direction. It makes sense. He was famous as a “successful businessman” for years on his reality show The Apprentice. AOC, in the wake of the election, did a poll on her Instagram and several people who voted for both her and Trump said they did so on the basis of “authenticity.”

Authenticity is a word we’ve all seemed to adopt in recent years. It is a marketing word. It is the kind of word a network executive says about a morning talk show host who, despite earning millions, is still able to relate to her middle class audience. Every celebrity these days is trying to be “authentic,” with varied success.

As we each carve out our own little fiefdoms of influence in the attention economy, we all begin to worry about “authenticity.” Is this authentic to my voice? Is this authentic to my brand? Was that YouTuber’s apology video authentic?

Authenticity, like its predecessor “relatable,” speaks to a veneer. Celebrities like Busy Philips or Chrissy Tiegen were once considered “relatable” before being cast aside because millionaires can never be relatable. My least favorite conservative podcaster has a podcast of the same name. But, in searching for authenticity or relatability, we have given up on my favorite deeper alternative: integrity.

In a world where we are both consumer and product, we have adopted wholesale the marketing which was so new when Newhart joked about it in 1960. We try to use these empty buzzwords to put name to our feelings. But, as none of us are the living embodiment of Coca-Cola, these words fall short.

Integrity is someone who says what they mean and means what the say. It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of relatability. If you are acting with integrity, your ideas may be unpopular, your values leading you to places where the consensus may not have yet traveled. It is the kind of un-market-tested approach which “authenticity” hints at. But it comes with a moral code. A person with integrity will act the same if the spotlight is on them, or not.

Language has limited capabilities, to be sure. I believe in words (obviously). Actions supersede words in overall efficacy. But when we eat (and regurgitate and eat again) the words of those systems which bind us, we lose something. We lose the ability to talk about what’s beneath the surface and, perhaps, see it at all.

Or, as Newhart’s press agent tells Lincoln, “Abe, don’t you see that’s part of the image?”