If you went back in time a few hundred years, I’ll bet people told lots of funny jokes about having to use the outhouse on a cold, rainy, moonless night. (You provided the moon.) There were probably hundreds of hilarious stories: “toilet humor” predates toilets by thousands of years. In fact, the world’s oldest joke was a (weird?) one-liner about flatulence.
So that’s how it was a few hundred years ago: You’d ride your horse to the saloon, drink and gamble with the boys, and people surely told jokes about trotting out to the stinky, smelly outhouse. (Actually, “toilet humor” was probably even more trendy back then, when food sanitation — and thus, the subsequent gastral “unpleasantness” — wasn’t quite up to snuff, if you know what I mean. Not a lot of antibacterial soap in Cowboy Country.)
It’s too bad: As a society, we’ve lost all those wonderful jokes… and all we got in return was indoor plumbing. (It’s a wash.)
A few thousand years before that, the Greeks probably goofed on Aesop for all his stories being derivative: “Really, Aesop? ANOTHER talking animal story? C’mon.” Aesop was churning out fables like they were superhero movies, and most of his plot twists were kind of predictable. (“Boy Who Cried Wolf,” I’m looking at you.)
In today’s culture, “Aesop’s fables” refers to very old moral parables, often with talking animals. But maybe a few thousand years ago, they were shorthand for “hack.” We don’t know.
That’s because certain jokes — and specific forms of humor — are a byproduct of their times. And when those times are over, so is the humor.
We’ve witnessed this phenomenon in recent #MeToo times, particularly with “edgy” entertainment, á la Eddie Murphy, Sam Kinison, Howard Stern, and Andrew Dice Clay in the 1980s: All four were edgy entertainers, and by definition, edgy entertainers are at the “edge” of what’s socially permissible.
But when society changes, so do the boundaries of permissibility. And suddenly, the exact same comedy routine that earned you standing ovations in the 1980s is getting you in hot water in the 2020s.
One obsolete, deader-than-a-doornail form of humor is the letter gag: You write a ridiculous letter to someone, they can’t tell if it’s a joke or not so they send you an honest reply, and then you publish the results. They’re amazing!
And the all-time king of the letter gag was Lazlo Toth.
Not the Lazlo Toth who vandalized Michelangelo’s Pietà. (That guy sucks.) I’m talking about the pen name of the great Don Novello, a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci of “Saturday Night Live” fame. Between 1977 and 2003, he published three books: “The Lazlo Letters,” “Citizen Lazlo!: The Lazlo Letters Vol. 2,” and “From Bush to Bush: The Lazlo Toth Letters.”
All three are phenomenal, but his earlier work is the best. Using the name Lazlo Toth, Novello wrote letters to Richard Nixon, the McDonald’s corporation, and various world leaders. (And, oddly enough, they usually wrote back.) If you’re a political junkie, these books are all wonderful snapshots in time — a callback to a much different culture.
(Go buy his books. Seriously.)
In 1977, he sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter. And it began with this line:
The main reason we’re having all this trouble today with the Panamanians is because of the name. We should’ve called it The American Canal instead of The Panama Canal — no wonder they think they own it!
(In the rest of the letter, he proposed building a rival canal through Galveston, but let’s not focus on that.)
A good idea is a good idea.
The Panama American Canal was an American project. Between 1904 and 1914, we dug it out and built it up. In the palindrome “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama,” the “man” was the American President Teddy Roosevelt. At the time, it was the most expensive construction project in U.S. history.
Nearly 6,000 U.S. construction workers lost their lives. When combined with the French fatalities, each mile of the Panama American Canal resulted in the deaths of 500 men.
With this in mind, during the current kerfuffle between President-elect Trump and the Panamanians over the Panama American Canal, Trump should look to Don Novello for PR inspiration.
And just call it the AMERICAN Canal.
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