By Mickey Friedman
February 27, 2015
Je suis Mickey. I am Mickey. Certainly not Charlie. When I get anywhere near Paris, the little French I learned at eight in the morning at City College goes running for the Spanish border.
But I sympathize with Charlies everywhere: the comics, cartoonists, satirists, and social critics who poke fun at our pomposity, arrogance, and stupidities.
After a few days of outrage that cartoonists were killed by some so offended by taking their Lord in vain that they deserved death, there’s a backlash. Somehow they crossed that invisible line between acceptable satire and offense. Well, the problem is the Emperors/Emperesses take offense at it all. That he/she is completely naked is just the last straw. But sadly that many rulers large and small are arbitrary, stupid, unkind and much-too-powerful is pretty much the way it is.
I mean really do you believe there is a valid religious precept that justifies not letting little girls learn to read? Do you want to honor or respect that belief? Or counter it? Mock it if necessary. Is it really OK for Saudi bullies to keep their wives and mistresses from driving the family car? OK that our own illegal immigrant colonists gave smallpox blankets to Native Americans? For Montana to ban yoga pants?
There are Kings and Queens, Czars and Ayatollahs, nasty Mother Superiors everywhere around us. In the offices and retail stores and non-profits we work, the armed forces, elementary schools and universities, the social, political and religious movements to which we belong. I imagine all of us have had to deal with one or two along the way. The petty people with power, who choose to enforce the silliest of rules, and punish those who protest the mistreatment of others. Whose egos rule the day.
Comedy at its core opens the curtain behind which hide the Wizards of Oz. Exposing the powerful. Using laughter not knives. Irony. Sarcasm. Exposing our elemental foolishness, the ways all of us pretend to be better than we are. The best standup comics create a bond with those they poke fun of. Making fun of themselves as well.
One of the best was Will Shakespeare. Call them “fools” but those ubiquitous servants of kings and queens, lords and ladies, with their various and sundry learning disabilities, used words as rapiers, used mimicry to mock and undress the most pompous about them. The foolish truth-tellers.
So too Shakespeare gave us women pretending to be men so that we could see the many delusions that circumscribed the life of women. So much more illuminating because those stupid conventions required male actors to play the women in the first place. Irony upon irony. Obliterating the pretentious assumption that men are more competent. Because right before us is the puffed-up man so devastatingly outsmarted by a woman he can’t really see. Even though she’s standing right before him. As he goes on and on about loving her. A love that is clearly mostly about himself.
And, of course, the inflated patriotism, the boastfulness and bravado that Shakespeare so clearly exposed but haunts us still.
For me Shakespeare is the master of us all when it comes to the extraordinary power and prowess of comedy.
So let me try again. There is a vast difference between exposing the hypocrites than insulting the faithful. How, if you criticize, even mock, those who use their self-proclaimed allegiance to Islam to kill innocent children, behead aid workers and journalists is that an insult to those who humbly practice a religion that values human life?
How, if you make fun of born-again TV evangelists who raise millions preaching the Commandments yet betray their wives in a heartbeat, is that possibly an insult to Christianity?
If you mock the Reverend Al Sharpton’s pathological need to be at the center of every social protest imaginable are you really diminishing the work of black ministers providing solace and hope to their congregations?
The fact is there is so much dishonesty and dissembling we need a million more comedians brave enough to expose the growing phoniness. And it is, we’ve seen, an exhausting and dangerous task. Comics are our canaries in the coal mine. More aware than most of what is really happening around us. And yet they are able somehow to mine the madness and sadness to find a laugh, some light amongst the ever increasing dark. Imagine what takes from you; imagine the toll it took on Robin Williams to find so much laughter amongst all the crap. Cartoonists imprisoned; cartoonists killed.
I’m sorry but the track record of those who proclaim themselves the most holy is written in the blood of others. The most “pious” of Christians who slaughtered the infidels; those most pure of race who burnt Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals in their ovens; those most white who hung blacks. No cartoon comes close when it comes to offending.
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For more information on critics and cartoonists in danger:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/2/11/political-cartoonists-face-threats-worldwide.html?
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