Bob Muzelle never laughed unless the dog got his head caught in the doggy door, stupid little bugger, always ahead of himself, never a thinker, but there must be too much Setter in him, dumb as stone dogs, but a nice, silky coat which Arfuls never got. Pound dog, mongrel, just about everything except intelligence in the street mix, but we love him, Bob thought.
His married daughter had chickens as pets, five of them, clucking and shitting all over the deck, but that was some laugh-worthy menagerie, flipping and flopping, nudging and pecking on the roost when the sun went down, gaggling up to the door for brioche or mealy worms in the morning.
Other than that, life was far too serious for laughter, too many serious problems, too much ignorance, refusal, and hatred. Climate change denial alone was enough to make it clear that environmental health was no laughing matter; and the plight of the black man, still suffering in penury and virulent racist hatred, was no cause for amusement. Laughter, in fact, had become a signifier, a conservative tracker, a marker for anyone who took the country's problems lightly.
Except of course when watching the Marx Brothers, Sid Caesar, or The Three Stooges - slapstick was allowed, approved, and in fact healthy after a day of somber consideration of the state of the world. Of course Bob did parse the comedy before laughing - wasn't there something abusive about Moe, Larry, and Curly's violence thinly veiled in rubber hammers?
No, they all passed muster, and Bob treasured his VHS tapes made of those old television shows, went down into the basement to watch them like some closet pedophile. His wife wondered what the guffawing was all about. She found The Three Stooges the dumbest cavalcade ever - three retards banging each other on the head, chortling and chuckling like the drooling inmates at St. Elizabeth's.
Other than that minor difference, the marriage of Bob and Corinne was a good one, a serious one of progressive causes, commiseration, and absolute fidelity to doing the right thing. Nothing in their long career as social justice advocates had deterred them from the path of reform, nor never once gave them anything to laugh about.
There was nothing funny about the misery of the inner city, Mississippi blacks, closeted gay men and lesbians, Wall Street's predatory, manipulative callous exploitation of the poor, the noxious gases still poured into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling Suburbans, or the fate of Palestinians. In fact the whole course of human history was one of racism, misogyny, exploitive territorialism, and hedonistic disregard for the common man. There was not one period of history that was a happy-go-lucky, slapstick affair.
Bob was not a religious man, but identified with Jesus nonetheless - a man on a mission to set the world to rights, to rid it of sin and moral neglect, to create a more verdant, compassionate, and harmonious place. In a strange way Bob felt anointed, a Christian despite himself, a soldier in arms, a militantly righteous prophet.
Of course, had he been a bit less idealistic in his vision and ambitions he would have seen God's abysmal failure in such progressive ambitions. Unhappy with the way the world he created turned out, killed every living thing on the planet save for Noah and two-by-two animals. The Flood was historic, monumental in proportion and a clear sign to Noah and his descendants that God was no easy mark.
The earth repopulated and returned to its godless ways, the worst offenders living in those dens of iniquity, Sodom and Gomorrah; and so God once again decided to act decisively and destroy every last living creature, men, women and children.
When that didn't work, and humanity continued its barbarous, godless ways, God sent his son, Jesus, to preach a message of love and forgiveness, the lessons of right behavior. That didn't work either and two thousand years later the world is no better off than it ever was.
Undeterred by this Biblical history and the secular chronicles of wars, mayhem, and civil disorder, crime, and horrific slaughter, Bob and his fellow progressives never gave up. Because it hadn't worked before, there was no reason why enlightened evangelism wouldn't work now.
Of course the rest of the country thought the whole kit-and-kaboodle progressive thing was funny. Transgendered men and women were hilarious. Who could take these cross-dressing, eyeliner, blush, and sequin buggering tarts seriously? And each time one of them took the podium in official Washington, all hairy legs and truckdriver biceps in sleeveless short dresses, the nation howled.
Every time Pharoah and LaShonda, ghetto king and queen, now members of the Democratic coterie yelled 'racist!' and recalled the native dignity of the black man, man of the forest attuned to the high spirituality of Nature, and the oppressive, bulldog ignorance of the white man, the nation laughed again and again.
It was the posturing that was hilarious, the naked presumption, the arrogant self-assurance when the goodies in the grab bag were cheap, Made In China, airy-fairy baubles of no substance whatsoever, that made people laugh.
Each time progressives went out of their way to be serious, composed, and righteous about the most absurd propositions, the more the rest of the country laughed. The ghetto's street culture as the New Age expression of high cultural identity when the place was a miasma of dysfunction and anti-social blasphemy? The gender spectrum as the final reordering of sexuality, decommissioning heterosexuality and replacing it with a hundred possibilities of sexual expression when queer theory, pronouns, and gender affirming surgery were the epoch's moral travesties?
Despite his rock-solid commitment to progressivism, Bob was worried. The Trump juggernaut despite the opposition of the Left, was making headway and disassembling the architecture they had so carefully constructed. Worst of all, Trump was laughing at him, joking at the most sensitive issues, sharp with one-liners and ad hominem asides worthy of the Borscht Belt.
The President was not only opposing liberal programs, he was making fun of them, laughing at their preposterousness. His comedic partner, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana says the stones in his driveway have more sense than the Democrats on the Senate floor and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is the reason there are instructions on the shampoo bottle.
The Internet has opened up and nothing is sacred. Woke is gone, all black people are not the inheritors of God's promise but locked up in Angola and Folsom. The sexual antics practiced by gays and lesbians are no longer 'the true expressions of a sexually liberated people' but circus acts, high trapeze loops, clown shows, boo in the Barnum & Bailey fun house. No Means No is not the heralded deal-breaker, the off-ramp, the blockade to sexual indiscretion progressives have claimed it to be, but a twisted distortion of sexual reality - the free market of sexual behavior.
The lid is off, the veil removed, the nakedness of the Emperor revealed - the progressive agenda is not only politically errant but laughable, hilarious in fact. Perhaps the most significant change brought to Washington by Donald Trump is his sense of humor thereby opening the long closed floodgates of hilarity.
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