Hope is of real value as a chronicle of a career. For even though Bob Hope’s work is no longer capable of holding the attention of modern audiences, it is still interesting to learn the details of how he turned himself into a star and then managed to stay on top of the mass-culture heap long after most of his less-driven contemporaries had vanished from sight. But Zoglin, for all his admirable thoroughness, inexplicably fails to emphasize the central fact about Hope and his career—one that not only goes a long way toward explaining why he was so successful, but also why we no longer find him funny.
Simply: He wasn’t Jewish.
What was missing from his style? Even though Hope was a first-generation European immigrant, there was nothing remotely ethnic about his stage manner. He was among the few successful WASP comics of his generation, and despite the fact that he hired such Jewish writers as Larry Gelbart and Mel Shavelson, the jokes they penned for him lacked the sharp ironic tang of Jewish humor that is to this day one of the essential ingredients in American comedy.
During World War II, when Americans shared both a common culture and an iron determination to prevail over their common enemy, such a comedian could speak for millions of listeners from coast to coast. But that America no longer exists, and the Americans of the 21st century demand more from comedy than mere reassurance. That is why Bob Hope is forgotten today, and will remain so. All he had to offer were punchlines that no longer have punch.
As one commenter mentioned, this appears to be an attempt by the Dutch Teachout to curry favor with the inward-focused aging Jews who read Commentary and think Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce are the epitome of humor. Hope held up a hell of a lot better than either Allen or Bruce have, and Allen isn’t even dead yet. Let’s face it, the funniest thing Allen ever produced was his self-parodying, quasi-incestuous marriage.
I’ve never been able to stand what is described as “Jewish humor” myself; I disliked it long before I had any idea that the stupid sort of sex-and-toilet “humor” produced by the likes of Mel Brooks and the whiny tedium of Woody Allen had anything in common, let alone were claimed by a particular ethnic heritage. Later, I tried watching “Seinfeld” and completely failed to see what was supposed to be funny about Jerry Seinfeld whining all the time.
Joan Rivers could be amusing in small doses, but one of the main things I’ve noticed about “Jewish humor” is that it seems to have a strong tendency to beat a joke to death. “Hey, did you think that was mildly amusing? Let me repeat it three more times and that will make it HILARIOUS, right?” Well, no. That’s actually one thing I wish non-comedians would understand. If you told a little story and you found the reaction to be underwhelming, don’t repeat it. It’s not going to be any more amusing the second time.
Now, I’ve always assumed there was a great divide between those who found Monty Python amusing and those who thought Benny Hill was a riot. “Jewish humor” strikes me as being more akin to an American form of Benny Hill, as it tends to involve a lot of mugging and sexual themes.
Then again, the second-funniest comic in the world, Frankie Boyle (Simon Evans, two of whose clips are below, is the funniest in my opinion), utilizes a lot of sexual themes, although usually in a very dark way. “Watching gymnastics is just pedophilia for cowards.” But there is an enormous gap between that sort of black humor and Woody Allen whining to his therapist or Mel Brooks’s masturbating cavemen. I remember people talking about how funny Brooks’s History of the World: Part I was so I rented it one night; I don’t think I made it more than 15 minutes before ejecting the tape from the VCR in disgust. Keep in mind that this scene is supposed to be THE most HILARIOUS one from the movie. Notice, in particular, the repetition I mentioned; The very lame joke on French pronunciations is hammered home no less than TWELVE times at the very start. Yeah, that’s just fucking brilliant. Then contrast that sort of production, complete with writers, sets, and actors, with the following examples of Simon Evans utilizing nothing more than a microphone.
Of course, it’s pretty much pointless to view comedy as anything but subjective, something that is much more apparent when you live in continental Europe. German humor is freaking ghastly, it’s like black comedy without the comedy. Italian humor is bawdy and straightforward; they simply don’t recognize sarcasm at all. French humor is similar to Italian humor, although a bit more relaxed and less silly, and I haven’t figured out Spanish humor yet. It’s no surprise that English humor has such an impact on American humor; it’s not because they speak the same language, but because it’s broad-spectrum humor that is often appreciated by non-English speakers.
“I’m just a comedian goes first!” I would have loved to see Evans skewer the Jon Stewart Show, as Stewart, unlike Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, can be funny, but like Russell Brand, hides behind his comedian’s mask whenever his serious arguments fall short.
UPDATE: I found this pair of Twitter exchanges to be more personally amusing than the entire oeuvre of either comedian mentioned:
Vox Day @voxday I’m curious how anyone could have ever thought Woody Allen was amusing. The only funny thing he ever did was bang his ugly stepdaughter.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ Yes, Annie Hall won the Oscar for no reason -_-
Vox Day @voxday So did Titanic. And it had more genuine laughs.
——–
Vox Day @voxday And who finds Mel Brooks funny? This is said to be the funniest scene of his funniest movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3e8Qw9hhs … It’s BRUTALLY stupid.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ @voxday Are you anti-Semitic?
That for Freedom of Speech (and Written Word) to be free, that Freedom must be sacrosanct, nothing is off limits, nothing is too offensive
That Freedom of Speech does not mean freedom not to be Offended, nor to impose your Offense on behalf of others.
That Freedom of Speech comes with consequences and others may Consequence your nose if you are too offensive.
That Writers must be free to write what they please and that no one has the right to tell them they may not or should not.
Read the rest of it there. But for me, it is the fourth point that is the most important, and the most offensive to the SJWs. If they want to play the numbers game and see who can flex the most muscle, that’s fine. Our side invented the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after all, and we can play that game better than they ever could.
But we’d rather not. Our side also invented free will and freedom of speech. That’s what we’d prefer. The pinkshirts and SJWs cast those concepts aside at their own peril.
No matter how many times they are wrong, stock market watchers are just going to keep throwing out the same old line out, looking to catch the little fishies.
The Nasdaq is rapidly approaching the 5,000 level and is less than 4% away from all-time highs that were set 15 years ago. These landmark levels are bringing back bad memories of the late 1990s, when people went crazy over money-losing tech stocks (and bad pop songs). The good times ended when the bubble popped in March 2000, causing huge losses for investors and making many tech companies to disappear.
All of this begs the question: Does the fact that Nasdaq has joined peers like the Dow in record territory signal another bubble is brewing in tech stocks?
No, this tech party doesn’t appear destined to end in tears. That’s because today’s tech stocks look all grown up. They’re more fundamentally sound than their 1999 peers, and their valuations are based on something the dotcom stocks of the past never had: real earnings.
“There’s no bubble when it comes to technology stocks,” said Scott Kessler, head of technology equity research at S&P Capital IQ.
Counterpoint: Twitter is valued at $31 billion. Facebook is valued at $223 billion. And the world is rapidly plunging into war from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.
The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilisation, and maybe the end of the human race.
This is idiotic. It isn’t human aggression that threatens to destroy us all, it is science and scientists. Hawking demonstrates a complete inability to correctly utilize basic logic.
Scientists created the threat. Rather than work to remove the threat, some of the very people who created it now want to EXPERIMENT WITH THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE in order to do something that won’t remove the current threat and might well create some that are even worse.
Scientists love to posture as if they are the good guys responsible for saving the human race, but they are the party primarily responsible for endangering it in a variety of ways.
It’s going to become very, very hard to dismiss the genetic basis for intelligence, or its implications for racial policies, if it is eventually determined that average intelligence is essentially a proxy for a population group’s greater or lesser amount of Neanderthal DNA:
Researchers also have found a peculiar pattern in non-Africans: People in China, Japan and other East Asian countries have about 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans.
Last year, Sriram Sankararaman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues proposed that natural selection was responsible for the difference. Most Neanderthal genes probably had modestly bad effects on the health of our ancestors, Dr. Sankararaman and other researchers have found. People who inherited a Neanderthal version of any given gene would have had fewer children on average than people with the human version.
As a result, Neanderthal DNA became progressively rarer in living humans. Dr. Sankararaman and his colleagues proposed that it disappeared faster in Europeans than in Asians. The early Asian population was small, the researchers suggested, and natural selection eliminates harmful genes more slowly in small groups than in large populations. Today, smaller ethnic groups, like Ashkenazi Jews and the Amish, can have unusually high rates of certain genetic disorders.
Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and the graduate student Benjamin Vernot recently set out to test this hypothesis. They took advantage of the fact that only some parts of our genome have a strong influence on health. Other parts — so-called neutral regions — are less important.
A mutation in a neutral region won’t affect our odds of having children and therefore won’t be eliminated by natural selection. If Dr. Sankararaman’s hypothesis were correct, you would expect Europeans to have lost more harmful Neanderthal DNA than neutral DNA. In fact, the scientists did not find this difference in the DNA of living Europeans.
Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot then tested out other possible explanations for the comparative abundance of Neanderthal DNA in Asians. The theory that made the most sense was that Asians inherited additional Neanderthal DNA at a later time.
In this scenario, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans split, the early Asians migrated east, and there they had a second encounter with Neanderthals. Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot reported their findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
We shouldn’t get too carried away with a scientific hypothesis that merely happens to be in line with some computer modeling; if I was inclined to that sort of thing I’d be deeply concerned about global warming. But it is a little ominous; those who think that the third world invasion of the West is harmless should keep in mind the lesson of the Neanderthals. They may have been smarter, but they’re not around anymore and Homo sapiens sapiens is.
For all we know, there were once Neanderthals who claimed any Neanderthal who thought those nice Homo Sapiens who moved into the cave next door would be a problem were sub-speciesist, and besides, weren’t their spiced triceratops eggs ever so tasty?
It’s amazing that people are talking about how excessive finance and credit money warp the economy to its detriment without ever managing to mention the vital Austrian concept of “malinvestment”. But at least they are starting to talk about it, as it will lead them there eventually.
A new study from the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ central bank, as it is dubbed) shows exactly why rapid finance sector growth is bad for the rest of the economy.
The study, by Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, is a follow-up to a 2012 paper which outlined the negative link between the finance sector and growth, after a certain point. When an economy is immature and the financial sector is small, then growth of the sector is helpful. Enterprising businessmen can get the capital they need to expand their companies; savers have a secure home for their money, making them more willing to provide finance to the business sector; and so on.
But you can have too much of a good thing. The 2012 paper suggests that when private sector debt passes 100% of GDP, that point is reached. Another way of looking at the same topic is the proportion of workers employed by the finance sector. Once that proportion passes 3.9%, the effect on productivity growth turns negative. Ireland and Spain are cases in point. During the five years beginning 2005, Irish and Spanish financial sector employment grew at an average annual rate of 4.1% and 1.4% respectively; output per worker fell by 2.7% and 1.4% a year over the same period.
The new paper examines why this might be. One part of the thesis is a familiar complaint, neatly summarised in the 2012 paper
people who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers
In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral to pledge.
I’m reading the paper now, and will review it once I’ve finished digesting it.
Final tally: over 1,500 books sold. Thanks very much to everyone who participated! Final Amazon rankings:
One Bright Star to Guide Them: #359 Big Boys Don’t Cry: #411 Other Heads: #883
This means that nearly twice as many people bought a Sad Puppies-recommended novella as cast a Hugo nominating ballot in 2014. Larry’s campaign to increase reading is clearly working, as longtime fan figure Mike Glyer of File 770 not only read Tom Kratman’s novella, but reviewed it as well:
I plunked down $2.99 for Tom Kratman’s novella “Big Boys Don’t Cry” during yesterday’s ”book bomb” pushing novellas on the Sad Puppies slate, because I just can’t stand on the sidewalk when the parade goes by. Sometimes this leads to good things. I bought Redshirts a couple years ago because of the social media campaign and it turned out to be pretty good. Can lightning strike twice?
Maggie, the protagonist of “Big Boys Don’t Cry,” is a Ratha — a sentient armored weapons platform, the human race’s ultimate ground combat unit. Spoiler warning: She’s not a boy. And apparently she can cry.
As a big fan of Keith Laumer’s original Bolo stories, as well as Elizabeth Bear’s 2008 Hugo-winning ”Tideline”, I find Kratman’s variation compelling because he asks important questions about intelligent, self-aware tanks the earlier classics never investigated.
Like: Why do artificial intelligences subject themselves to human command? Why do they sacrifice themselves for human interests?
Stay tuned. There will be more activity on this front.
Obama’s drone campaign has killed more people during the six years of his presidency than were killed the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.
In his speech on Thursday, he said:
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
Fair enough. But how is Obama himself doing on that score?
Well, on Monday of this week the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published their annual study of deaths from U.S. drone strikes, and reported the following:
At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals…. So how does that number of 2,464 killed in Obama’s drone program — not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan — compare to, say, the Spanish Inquisition?
About 2,250 people were tried and handed over to the crown, then executed, in the 356 years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Obama administration is nearly 50 times more murderous on an annual basis than the medieval institution he was criticizing. And whether or not you are convinced that the Inquisition’s victims got a fair trial, it should be noted that they did get a trial.
I always find it curious, too, when men conspicuously avoid mentioning the name of Jesus.