If reporters didn’t have a warped sense of humor, we probably couldn’t do what we do. Humor, even dark humor, helps us deal with the often tragic, often weird, often absurd things and people we have to cover.
Perhaps that’s why I used to have a series of offbeat posters that I changed monthly at my desk in the Missourinet newsroom.
These posters, from a company called Despair, Inc., are the opposite of the supposedly inspirational posters found in many workplaces. Beautiful pictures with some saccharine sentiment beneath them.
The folks at Despair turn that concept on its head.
I suppose this could be seen as a blatant plug for this company’s products. Actually, it’s more of a paen to the creative folks who tell us that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.
We badly need those who try to tell us that. We wonder if a sense of humor can be found in our today’s politics. Everybody is so blasted serious—-and for those of us who abhor all of the divisiveness in our system today—-Good Lord, we have reached the point of physical confrontations in the hallways of the House of Representatives in Washington to an instigated near-brawl in the Senate committee hearing—there is no shortage of seriousness. One of my reporters once told me, “They have it all backwards. They take themselves seriously, not their jobs.”
We need a Will Rogers IN the government, the guy who remarked:
“The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.”
“The more you read and observe about this politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
“On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.”
“If all politicians fished instead of speaking publicly, we would have peace in the world.”
Or Mark Russell, who used to entertain us at the piano, on PBS from 1975 into 2004, whose death last March 30th escaped our notice. He was 90. He was introduced once by someone who noted, “Before there ws a John Stewart or a Stephen Colbert, there was Mark Russell.”
That was 2018, when Russell told the audience, “I’m not going to do any new political humor. Why? Because there’s no material.”
He once asked about the Adopt A Highway program, “If a gay couple adopts a highway, will the highway grow up straight?”
The difference between Republicans and Democrats: “A Republican says,’We’re in a recovery.’ A Democrat says, ‘You shouldn’t enjoy it.’”
“A fool and his money is a lobbyist.”
Here’s a compilation of some of his performances:
The story is told of the day in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln called a special meeting of his War Cabinet. When the members filed into the room, they found Lincoln reading a humor book. He laughed as he shared a story from the book. When nobody else laughed, Lincoln read another story. Again, no response. Lincoln looked at his cabinet and asked, “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”
And after that, he showed the cabinet the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
And so we need people like those at Despair who turn our contemporary cares on their heads with their demotivational posters.
There’s one I wish was available in my working days. It shows a stack of papers and the poster is entitled “Media.” The text reads, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”
I think I’ll buy that one for the good folks in today’s Missourinet newsroom