We Started a Joke

Sunday, November 17, 2024

The comic strip Dick Tracy (1931-1977) and his gallery rogue of Villains have always given me terror, primarily because they were always grotesque looking. The creator of Dick Tracy, Chester Gould, had a knack for inventing villains that reached into my subconscious and my imaginary journey into a carnival freak sideshow at some two-bit circus located outside the town limits. I don’t want to go there in my waking and dream life. Yet, Donald James Trump insists on doing his version of the Chester Gould rogue of villains by organizing his staff and cabinet, which are equally shocking but also predictable on his part. But in truth, l prefer to the art than the reality, or the representation of the real, which is the art.

Slowly but surely, I’m reading a collection of short stories by the poet of Broadway, Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings (Penguin Classic). If you take away William S. Burroughs’ narcotics, science-fiction bits, and homoerotism, then you pretty much have Runyon. These outlandish characters only lived on Broadway/Times Square in the 1930s, and it was a world of its own making and rules. The criminal class has its ethics and is a cracked mirror reflection of the straight world, which, by its nature, is always dull. The Dick Tracy villain is not always brilliant, but when in doubt, they double down on their freakiness, very much like the characters that hang around Trump.

For the first time in my life, I have seen satire fail because someone like Trump is beyond satire. Writings, TV skits, and even films have made fun of him, but they all fail because there is no one funnier than Trump himself. It was in 2011 at the White House Correspondents' Dinner when Obama made fun of Trump, who was in the audience, and one could see on his face that he didn’t take the joke well. I suspect that this was the spark that led to where we are now with the upcoming Presidency and his years as the President of the United States. Like the song I Started a Joke, recorded by the Bee Gees and written mainly by Robin Gibb, we are facing a joke that is not funny, and to counterbalance the harm, it seems the humor has failed. So we are left with a group of goons shockingly lacking their sense of humor, and the world is frozen, unsure when to laugh or not.

Culture, to me, is the reflection of the world, whether it is bad or good, and the inability to laugh it off is now a bitter pill to take. The world of Dick Tracy is the cracked mirror of a reality that is now in place. Another popular image of culture is that of the Batman world, which is the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and all the inhabitants of this asylum have now taken over the powerful as well as the political landscape of America and elsewhere.