Amerika

Someone pointed out the other day that almost all Boomer humor seems to revolve around men resenting their wives but being helpless in their dependency on them. The mythical wife, in the Boomer lexicon, must be obeyed and tolerated, but will be quietly and persistently scorned when she is not able to do anything about it.

Perhaps the original vein of this humor came from a generation before when Jewish comedian Henny Youngman put his finger on a rising mood:

A plea for an usher to seat a comedian’s bride minutes before a radio broadcast 50 years ago started a one-liner institution when Henny Youngman asked, ‘Take my wife, please?’ the king of one-liners recalled Wednesday.

Youngman claims never to write jokes, only to buy them, but when his wife showed up with eight friends 10 minutes before a CBS radio ‘Kate Smith Show’ in 1940 on which he regularly appeared his most famous line of all was born.

Youngman asked an usher to her off his hands.

Each time there is a war, women get more power and money domestically, and each time there is a surge in democratic feeling, women get more power. Then men come to resent them because the family has become politicized, with the two parties — Mom and Dad — vying for power.

The things that destroy human society like democracy, equality, atomization, diversity, and socialism are deadly not because they fail immediately, but because they steadily and slowly degrade everything over time. Socialism for example rewards the unproductive, and leaves behind populations of people without initiative or critical thinking.

Democracy as it turns out alienates people by making them fight for power. Equality removes the caste system, which turns people into economic actors who are in the bourgeois sense always trying to advance themselves, making them into hateful “capitalists” who care nothing for each other.

At first, diversity seems harmless; then it becomes clear that in order to avoid offending people from other groups, culture and traditions must become personal which means not shared by the group. This abolishes culture, leaving only a permissive wasteland where people are selfish because they distrust everyone else.

Boomers emerged in a world where women were powerful but men were also powerful, so the two fought, with women having the advantage of civil rights law on their side, quickly leading to a one-sided bias. The roots of modern misogyny and all Boomer humor appear to be found in that social phenomenon.

Tags: baby boomers, feminism, henny youngman, misogyny