The Death of Curmudgeon Comedy
The time David Sedaris did a “Karen,” and Joseph Epstein said hold my beer
The other day, humorist and longtime New Yorker contributor David Sedaris joined the ranks of famous creatives cancelled on Twitter after offending people with a monologue arguing that customers should be able to fire service personnel. But this outrage moment was quickly eclipsed by a bigger uproar over a Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative essayist Joseph Epstein chiding First Lady-to-be Jill Biden for using the title “Dr.”
Sedaris and Epstein are poles apart, politically and culturally. But there is a common thread in these two episodes: a spectacular flop of curmudgeon comedy.
In Sedaris’s case, the scandal was caused partly by the clumsy, menacing CBS News headline under which his monologue made the rounds on the social media: “David Sedaris demands the right to fire others.”
It’s possible for a headline to be accurate yet inaccurate at the same time. Sedaris demanded this as a joke. He’d done a comedic bit about having the impulse to fire, among others, a retail clerk at an upscale shop he was patronizing who refused to wrap dishware to prevent it from breaking. It’s a meandering fantasy about consumer tyranny. It has the air of a successful artist’s later, complacent work, which is a way of saying I remember him as very funny, but this felt to me like the creation of someone running on autopilot. (His new book, whose publicity cycle appears to have prompted the customer service monologue, is an essay collection called The Best of Me.)
Following on the heels of Sedaris’s tragic faux pas came Joseph Epstein, conservative writer and longtime attempted chuckle-inducer, with a viral Wall Street Journal essay that opens as follows:
Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.”
It is difficult to read this and not land on a great big who cares. I do not care if Jill Biden is honorific’d or not, and cannot imagine anyone having a strong opinion on this matter. (I have a humanities doctorate, do not ask for “Dr.”, and I’ll leave it to Epstein to decide whether the dissertation title, “Jews and Intermarriage in Nineteenth Century France,” meets the bar for promising.) Is Epstein’s article offensive? Insulting? Sexist? Or too dumb to qualify as any of those?
What follows in the article is an on-brand curmudgeonly rant — weaving between personal reminiscences that will not surprise anyone who’s read anything else from Epstein, and stale culture war complaints about academia being Not What It Once Was.
The piece is rife with gratuitous reminders of where Epstein sits in said culture wars: “If you are ever looking for a simile to denote rarity, try ‘rarer than a contemporary university honorary-degree list not containing an African-American woman.’” Edgy.
Sedaris was oh so edgy too, expressing a desire to fire customer service workers during a pandemic. Recall that “you’re fired!” is Trump’s catchphrase. But then came Epstein, finding a petty grievance with the incoming First Lady, calling her “kiddo,” and fussing about the diminished grandeur of honorary doctorates. Epstein’s grievances made Sedaris’s concern about upscale cups and saucers breaking seem positively virtuous.
Sedaris’s diatribe elicited a never-liked-him-anyway critique on Twitter: “I wouldn’t mind putting David Sedaris out of work. He never was funny.” Which, look, he was. Epstein is another matter. I am not triggered, I am simply bored.
Curmudgeon comedy — the humor of an old man making trivial complaints about customer service or young people today — seems pretty much done. Expressing everyday frustrations, no matter your age or gender, is tantamount to announcing you have no real problems. At this point we all know the formulation: Imagine being so privileged that the worst thing that ever happened to you is you got a latte instead of a cappuccino. Nuance is dead, trivial complaints require humor-killing disclaimers that bang the audience over the head, reminding how deeply aware the speaker is of their triviality. But anything that hints of nostalgia crosses its own set of lines. Or pettiness crossed with an unapologetic punch down, mixed with a dose of proudly un-self-aware pomposity.
Is this a case of good riddance? It’s occurring to me that the curmudgeon humor I do like (Fawlty Towers, One Foot in the Grave, All in the Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show) tends to involve fictional (or fictionalized) curmudgeons. It also involves situations in which the audience is meant to partly sympathize with the aggrieved middle-aged or elderly man — or occasionally woman, such as Downton Abbey’s show-stealing Dowager Countess — but not to be fully or even mostly on his team, exactly. It’s possible to laugh with and at him simultaneously.
The Sedaris-Epstein brand of curmudgeon humor aims at edginess — which is to say, at inspiring a response so scoldingly humorless that one is tempted to conclude there must be something to the jokes themselves. But, alas, there is not.
Just because humor managed to cause outrage doesn’t mean all non-laughers were triggered. Sometimes an attempt at humor simply falls flat.
