I bring it up because I am often struck by the similarities between the Gilded Age and today—which I ascribe to the more-or-less consistent nature of human nature. ‘Times change, but people don’t’ is my usual motto. As concerns humor, however, what tickles our funny-bone today is night and day from what got Gilded Age folks laughing out loud.

Perhaps the best way to begin is with a few examples of thigh-slappers from the 1890s.

Warden to prisoner in electric chair: “I push the button. You do the rest.”

Certainly that’s at least as grim as grandpa sleeping through the best part of the flight, and yet even more terrifyingly real.

 

Here’s another rib-tickler:

Lady to ragged urchin: “Will you sell me that pretty puppy?”

Ragged urchin to lady: “Lady, he’s worth at least two bones.”

Lady, handing the boy a quarter: “Here’s a quarter. That will buy a lot of nice bones.”

Ragged urchin: “Aw rats! Dontcha understand? He’s worth two dollars!”

“Bones” being old-tyme slang for “money”. (If you don’t like the rather unflattering word ‘urchin’ employed for anything other than the spiny sea creature, that’s because you don’t live in 1895.)

 

Last one for now:

Man 1: “My girlfriend, the person I loved most on earth, has sailed for Europe!”

Man 2: “Well, I don’t see why you can’t love her just as much on the ocean!”

 

Ba-dum-DUM. These old chestnuts were not plucked from the 1000 Worst Jokes of the Gaslight Era book, either. (There is no such book, though there ought to be.) Rather, these are pretty typical of the range of humor in the late Gilded Age, which ranged from what we would consider today as either cheesy or hair-raisingly offensive.

On the other hand, it’s a safe bet that Gilded Age people would find Seinfeld impenetrable, though I think it’s a very clever show. And also modern comedy’s liberal use of profanity and explicit language would have been quite outside the pale in 1895, and would have gotten you arrested.

Because I personally don’t find the great majority of Gilded Age humor funny—and there’s much about the Gilded Age that does resonate very positively with me—it brings me to the crux of this post: that our society, culture, zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it, shapes our thinking and perception in ways we don’t understand or control. 

We laugh at modern jokes because that's what we were brought up to think as funny. We like popular music because it’s . . . popular. These unconscious preferences tend to make it difficult to understand the past in more than a cursory way. Jokes and music change, and our preferences evolve to match them—or vice versa.

I’m reminded of Lenny Bruce, the celebrated comedian of the 1950s and ‘60s. More than any other single person, I think, Bruce changed the face of comedy (for good or ill)—he was, after all, arrested several times for what was considered, at the time, obscenity. One arrest was for using the word ‘schmuck’, a Yiddish word for penis. Another was for using ‘c**ks**ker’ in a monologue. Today ‘schmuck’ wouldn’t rise even to mildly offensive, and the other word isn’t exactly a rarity, either.

Bruce was acquitted, or had his conviction reversed, each time he was charged, and these acquittals or reversals paved the way for other comedians and personalities to become more blunt, more ‘edgy’, and more profane—all of which got (and still get) big laffs. Now even politicians who, as my father used to say, ‘wouldn’t say sh*t if they had a mouthful of it’, use casual profanity as a laugh line or as a (mainly cringeworthy) attempt to seem like a regular person. And many or most of us are either okay with it or perhaps simply numb—just as Gilded Age people were either okay with, or numb to, racist, sexist, or (fill in your favorite third rail) jokes that today would fall very flat indeed.

We all act according to (and largely consistent with) the times we live in—and as they say, the times, they are always a-changin’. What makes us laugh as good an example of that truism as I know.