Why It Isn't Funny

The New Yorker’s cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as militant haters of the United States is a joke. Like all jokes it is likely going to offend someone. And like all offensive humor the people it offends may not be the people who most ought to be offended. I call this principle "Joke Displacement" and you may call it something else, but here’s the point: Baby Boomers have mastered the surgically displaced joke because, well, they haven’t mastered much else.

I first knew my generation was in trouble when Arlo Guthrie got on stage at Woodstock and said with evident satisfaction that the throngs of hippies trying to make their way to the music festival had "shut down the Thruway" and everyone applauded wildly. People were cheering because they’d created a vast traffic jam which meant, in the collective mind set of that moment that something of great significance had happened.

This was like the toddler who was proud of his deposit in the potty. Alas, those are your Boomers, then and now.

"Look what I did!"

The people who should be offended by the New Yorker are instead quite happy with the whole business.

"Look what I made!"

Joke displacement is a form of conceptual art and the great master of the idea was Marcel Duchamp who created art from the commodified junk of the Industrial Revolution—a bicycle wheel protruding from a bar stool, a urinal tipped on its side with a sign declaring "water Fountain" etc.

The idea was that such displays would offend someone and in turn those offended people might have a Zen flash of insight about their existences.

But the problem is that the leisure classes who might have enough disposable income to be edified in this way are not interested in the joke. Only those who are uncomfortable with being middle class will be bothered by the humor and the fact is that Baby Boomers are not sufficiently uncomfortable with their accumulated wealth to feel much of anything.

So the Boomers laugh at the working classes and the working classes know it.

And so Joke Displacement becomes easy decadence and you can take this to the bank.

S.K.