Political Humor, 1962

Floating among West Coast cabaret tables is a new line about a fellow who is writing a play. The scene is the United Nations and the title is U Thant, Take It With You.

That anonymous masterpiece typifies the current brand of topical and political humor as practiced in a growing number of U.S. nightclubs, a form opened wide by acerbic Mort Sahl and still growing in popularity from Manhattan's Greenwich Village to San Francisco's North Beach. Even in Washington, where political humor has heretofore been of the unconscious kind, four night spots are now flourishing with topical jokesters. Manhattan's The Premise has just opened a Washington outpost, where distinguished audiences (including, on occasion, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Senators Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield, Kenneth Keating, "Scoop" Jackson) have been neighing in the aisles while a performer playing Mahatma Gandhi turns over slowly in his grave after Nehru tells him about Goa, or Chief Sun Cloud, a new Senator from Wyoming, calls up the admissions committee of the Cosmos Club and the committee chairman sighs. "If it isn't one thing, it's another."

Subversive CIA. In all the clubs, Molotov has been boffo lately. The Washington Premise last week presented a scene in which the Czechoslovakian ambassador to Moscow rushes into Khrushchev's office saying "I bring you condolences on behalf of the entire Czechoslovakian embassy on the death of Mr. Molotov in the automobile accident this morning." Says Khrush: "Thanks, but it's tomorrow morning." In Manhattan and Chicago, other Khrushchevs were being asked (by participating audiences) the whereabouts of Molotov. Says Manhattan's Khrush: "Mr. Molotov is on vacation--he is neither here nor there."

Barry Goldwater is big these days, too. In San Francisco's hungry i, for example, Comedian Mark Russell tells his audiences about the movie version of The Conscience of a Conservative: "It's going to be a silent, sponsored by Pierce-Arrow." Then, of course, there's the John Birch Society. And at Manhattan's Upstairs at the Downstairs, a Birch sextet nightly sings a sort of battle hymn of the reactionaries, with verses like:

The CIA's subversive

And so's the FCC,

There's no one left but thee and me

And we're not sure of thee.

Join the John Birch Society,

There's so much to do;

Have you heard they're serving vodka

At the W.C.T.U.?

At Chicago's Playboy Club, Negro Comedian Dick Gregory has begun to branch out from his basic civil rights themes into such topics as the depletion of U.S. gold reserves. "The average, typical American," he says, "is someone who is sitting in his home right now, sipping Brazilian coffee out of an English cup, eating Swiss cheese. He has Persian rugs on his floor. He probably just got out of his German car after seeing an Italian movie. He's sitting at a foreign-made desk writing his Congressman a letter with a ballpoint pen made in Tokyo, asking 'What the hell is happening to the gold?' "

Perhaps the best of all the current political humor is coming from Second City, the cabaret group that started in Chicago (TIME, March 21, 1960) and now has a subdivision in New York, too. In both cities last week, Second City actors performed a skit wherein NBC's Ned Polsky interviews a U.S. Army colonel in West Berlin. The colonel sets off on a superb monologue, describing what happens "when the Communists get hold of one of our boys and brainwash him." Punctuating his remarks with a nervously disordered blink, he tells how the Reds drill information repeatedly into captive brains. "Why, Ned, these boys don't even know what they are saying. They are just repeating these phrases parrotlike. They don't even realize these phrases have been planted there by atheistic, totalitarian aggressors." Blink. Polsky inquires about U.S. training techniques. "We use the very finest audio-visual tools," says the colonel. "We drill it into them, day after day, after day, after day. We show the boys those films 80 or 90 times a day, and they get the picture." Blink.

Orbit & Opportunity. Even more popular with audiences are Second City's celebrated press conferences with Khrushchev and Kennedy, with the actors answering questions from the audience.

Question: "Would Mr. Kennedy comment on the slogan 'Better Red than Dead'?"

Kennedy (hemming and hawing): "These are obviously both extreme positions. I have tried to keep my Government on the solid middle road between them. That is to say--half dead and half Red."

Question: "What will Mr. Khrushchev say at the next disarmament conference?"

Khrushchev: "We in the Soviet Union believe that total disarmament is necessary for peace. We are always for peace. Anybody who stands in the way of peace will be destroyed."

Against that eventuality. Second City (Chicago) is also ready with a hard-selling force of bomb-shelter salesmen. "Here's your chance, fellows," says the sales manager, "to get into orbit with a 100-megaton opportunity. Fallout shelters--how does that grab you?" The company is offering double-your-money-back if the shelters do not work, the manager adds expansively. "There is only one thing that could possibly screw us up."

"What's that?" asks an eager drummer.

"World peace."

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