American Fun (51 page)

ONE MORE STORY
. (One more joke.) America’s original punk allegory was published by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1831, four years before his “May-Pole of Merry Mount.” Now a staple in high school literature courses, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” tells the revolutionary-era tale of Robin, a “
shrewd youth,” who comes to Boston from his home in the sticks expecting a break from his kinsman, the governor. As it turns out, Major Molineux is nowhere to be found. Robin starts asking around, and at first he is puzzled by the citizens’ coarse reactions. Shouldn’t his connections get him some respect? He is indignant toward the gentleman who offers to throw him in the stocks. Despite his Puritan upbringing, he feels warmth for the drinkers he finds conspiring in a tavern, and vows to join them when he has earned some money, but they turn hostile when he mentions his kinsman. Next, a pretty wench in a “scarlet petticoat” tries to drag him through her door, insisting his kinsman dwells within, but then a night watchman scorns their impropriety and prods Robin along, leaving him more frustrated than ever.

Long story short, he spends the night in the streets, bemoaning his outcast fate and listening to an approaching band of merrymakers. Talking with a stranger about this “multitude of rioters,” he proposes that
they, too, should take their “share of the fun.” But when the musical procession rounds the corner, he is quickly intimidated by their savage democracy: some are “wild figures in the Indian dress,” others “fantastic shapes without model,” and all of them—both spectators and participants—raise “shrill voices of mirth or terror.” More to the point, at the head of their procession, carted along like an obscene punch line, is Major Molineux himself, “in tar-and-feather dignity.”

The crowd goes silent while Robin takes it in. The disgraced kinsman is pitiable, to say the least: “His whole frame was agitated by a quick, and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.” But then as Robin locks eyes with his elder, “a bewildering excitement” fills his head, and as the members of the crowd start to chuckle, then to laugh, the “contagion” of hilarity soon envelops Robin:

As in his tale of Merry Mount, Hawthorne seems ambivalent about all this fun. “On they went,” he continues, “in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man’s heart.” And in the orgy’s postcoital aftermath, Robin rather dejectedly wants to return home, but a crowd member urges him to stay on a few days, suggesting his participation in the “congregated mirth” may help him to “rise in the world, without the help of [his] kinsman, Major Molineux.” Robin has contracted the wild power of the people. In getting the joke, Hawthorne seems to say, he is on his way to becoming a citizen—a DIY citizen, of course.

The story’s “senseless uproar” and “frenzied merriment” pretty accurately depicts the seventeenth-century “
rough music” with which colonists tarred and feathered outcasts. The fun was scary, one-sided,
sadistic, and often it did the Puritan authority’s bidding. Rough music was in most cases glorified bullying, and it seldom advanced democratic virtues—even when it was employed during the Revolution to overthrow Royalists. But the governor’s humiliation is only part of the pleasure. Hawthorne tells us how to become an American citizen. You become a citizen by getting the people’s joke. In Robin’s case, the joke is complicated. He comes to town thinking he will cash in on the monarchy. But at the same time he develops a taste for the people’s joys—their taverns, their brothels, their
riotous fun. So when it turns out that authority has fallen, and that the joke is on him, he finds himself laughing louder than anyone because self-rule is what he wanted all along. The rioters crack the joke, but Robin takes it best because it means most to him.

And so it has gone throughout American history. The “Merry, Merry Boyes” got Thomas Morton’s joke that
Plymouth Plantation was a joyless prison—and that people were made for frolic and freedom. The American colonists got the Sons of Liberty’s joke that England didn’t have a clue—and that government should rise up from the streets. Antebellum blacks got Brother Rabbit’s joke that the master was himself a trickster, if a duller one—and that the purest freedom was in having fun. And the
forty-niners got each other’s joke that the United States was turning stiff and stodgy—and that civility was only stifled by manners. All of these American citizenry-building jokes took aim at some humorless authority or other: if you laughed at the joke, you either got it or
took
it, or—as in Robin’s case—both. More powerful and personal than even ideology, these American jokes created steely citizens out of their most chest-racking pleasures. They hard-wired an electric sense of humor into the national character.

Their twentieth-century beneficiaries got the big American joke: that fun—especially fun in the midst of struggle—is the personal and communal experience of freedom. All it requires is a cavalier attitude toward killjoys, tyrants, limits, and timidity. In these terms, the 1920s and the 1960s were arguably the nation’s
funnest
decades. They were also decades of extreme upheaval. This is no coincidence. But while many Americans responded to upheaval (clashes in values, race-and-culture wars) with hardheaded resistance and bloody rioting, the ones who got the joke had
the times of their lives. (It was like
surfing in the rubble under the P.O.P. pier.) All the better if a square majority thought they could shut the rebels down—that was what made it a joke to begin with! That was what made it a laugh riot! Laughter, in these cases, is a powerful metaphor for how such citizens responded to struggle: with ebullience—dancing, capering, cracking jokes. Laughter, as such, is the perfection of citizenship. It is the joy of the one joining the joy of the many in a powerful wave of common purpose.

“Congregated mirth.” “Joyous revolt.” “Revolution for the hell of it.” These are fundamentally American phrases. They capture citizens being born of laughter at moments of widespread social struggle: the Revolution, the Jazz Age, and the sixties, respectively. Such snapshots of citizens coming of age, and recognizing their exhilarating power, have inspired Americans during the barren periods, when democracy itself can look like a joke, but these images may be more than inspiring snapshots. They may be the nation’s most enduring icons, alongside Old Glory and Lady Liberty. For as the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon brilliantly argued,
a nation’s “consciousness” and its most binding “culture” isn’t created during the easy times, the peaceful times, when it can seem as if the arts and the public flourish. They are created during the periods of highest struggle, when the people’s liberties are under attack and their identity is under reconstruction. So it is that Americans have embraced fun—
the playful practice of threatened liberties—
during the eras examined in this book. So it is, too, that the blackface minstrels and the Buffalo Bills who amused Americans during times of leisure simulated and packaged pure American fun. As these entertainers seemed to know, such wild acts of liberty and rebellion were among the nation’s great treasures, and audiences loved to kick back and relive them.

But
nostalgia isn’t the same as fun. Nostalgia, a dreamy and passive pleasure, may even be the death of fun: it is the vicarious enjoyment of your
ancestors’
fun. The pioneering youth of the 1970s showed a healthy sense of the past: They dismantled it. They made it useful in the moment.
Funk artists cracked gunpowder from black culture’s firecrackers; they packed it into a big, fat space-age bomb. B-boys and B-girls used their parents’ records to jimmy a head-spinning street-corner art form.
Z-Boys stripped the hotdogging from sixties surf culture and retrofitted
it for their urban reality. And punks, inspired by primitive rock ’n’ roll, repurposed its native thrills and rebellion to suit their own fuck-you attitudes. Each of these classes of DIY pioneers spawned a billion-dollar industry that, left to its own devices, would have erased its humble origins. But the fun they invented was so pure, so raw, that it still hits the people where they live—not out of nostalgia, but in practice. The practices themselves have become global ambassadors for radical American fun.
George Clinton’s
P-Funk All Stars are as mad as ever, and they still inspire insanely grooving crowds.
Skateboarding and its many extreme-sport spin-offs still inspire thrashers young and old to shred, carve, rail-slide, and fly. The heritage of punk is visible everywhere—from the mainstreaming of piercings and tattoos to the guerrilla distribution of music. And breakdance crews, taggers, MCs, and DJs have become unshakable institutions among the world’s youth; indeed, hip-hop (in its many cross-pollinating forms) has become the global instrument of celebration and protest. To be sure, hip-hop was the dominant cultural expression during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

The
legacy of these 1970s thrills raises an important question: Is it still fun if you’re paying for it? Is it still fun if you buy a Burton skateboard and carve the half-pipe at your local skatepark? The answer, of course, is yes. It’s a scream. Even wearing the regulation pads and a helmet, you can tear it up on your $200 deck, and you can hone your thrashing skills. But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the
Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system.

P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else
could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking
real
risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage
real
rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins.

In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “
Port Huron Statement” and the
Digger Papers, in the
flapper’s slang and the
Pinkster Ode.
In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and
computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like
The Simpsons
and
South Park
to
Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits,
Jon Stewart and
Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

Computer screens are more pernicious yet, since they seize on our native DIY desires. They offer narrow,
fascinating
involvement—in a safer, simpler, duller realm. In this age of iPhones, iPads, and so on, tiny screens shape our consciousness from early infancy—when babies have yet to find their footing in the risky, exciting world of things—and
cleverly precede our 3-D reality with flashy, lifelike 2-D simulacra. Before we can draw or read or write, we swipe and tap and click like pros. After that, from early childhood to post-retirement, we learn to funnel our entire lived experience through chintzy hand-held pixillated screens—snapping photos, shooting videos, e-mailing, texting, tweeting, updating, mapping, Googling, Foursquaring, ad nauseam. Our free time (mealtime/playtime/facetime) is forever interrupted by “snack” entertainment: bite-size junk-food games and gifs and sugar-salty puffs of news. At night, our quiet and docile crowds resemble eerie blue candlelight vigils, but our downturned faces are staring at Facebook. And when Google has its way—coming soon!—all of us will see the world through the hyperreality of screen-colored glasses.