Democracy and humor are dying of the same disease

“Have Americans lost their sense of humor?” by Nicholas Lynch, The Spectator, December 22, 2025

Humor has become serious business. A nation of anxious primates trapped in a silicon casino of likes, retweets and dopamine-soaked drudgery, America is suffering from what the comedian Norm Macdonald called a “crisis of clapter.” Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It’s the old stink of a well-mannered aristocracy, and very un-American indeed.

From his beginning, the ugly American – wild-eyed and rabble-rousing – rankled the Old World. A pandemonious lot of yahoos set loose upon a land of virgin forests and free-for-all plenty, Americans were insubordinate, with a sense of humor to match. As Matthew Arnold, disgusted by a people with too many kings and not enough crowns, wrote:

“If there be a discipline in which the Americans are wanting, it is the discipline of awe and respect … In truth everything is against distinction in America, and against the sense of elevation to be gained through admiring and respecting it … The addiction to “the funny man,” who is a national misfortune there, is against it.”

The tall tale – distinct enough to, for the first time, qualify as an original art form – gave shape to a new kind of nation. Unlike the satirical critiques of the British essay or the witty comedies of French theater, the American tall tale was funny without a point. It wasn’t social commentary. It didn’t exist to prove genius. It was laugh-at-me tomfoolery. As Mark Twain saw it: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.”

Meant to be heard rather than read, the tall tale was a kind of story that – pretending not to know – brags big, falls flat, gets in its own way, speaks past the point, wastes the audience’s time and doubles back to waste it again, concealing its punchlines and playing dumb all the while. Twain contrasted this with the self-important European habit of advertising comedic effect with “whopping exclamation points” and explanations in parentheticals.

It was a “very depressing” thing, Twain explained, to find joy in the sublime, the beautiful, the useful and the orderly and yet be unable to find it in the incoherent, the elusive and the unexpected. The American sense of humor, in his view, was animated by a frank affinity for the imperfect, making sense of a people who preferred the patchwork pursuit of a more perfect union rather than the sterile fixity of a perfect one to start.

This democratic sense of humor was not some dainty old comedy of manners – a museum of wrongly-held forks, counterfeit airs and the thousand other fragile trinkets of aristocratic life, all such cultured amusements of a buttoned-up society where social climbing was a passion. No – the American creation was instead what historian Henry Steele Commager called “comedy of circumstance,” that made fun of every man, who “at one time or another aimed too high, adventured too boldly, boasted too loudly.” It mocked rich people like poor people, made fun of smart people in the same way as dumb people – because in the US no man is allowed to stay king. Only here was humor let off the leash, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought to leave the order intact. In Europe, mockery operated within a fixed aristocratic structure – as a pressure valve in a system not designed to change its fundamental hierarchy. Here, ridicule was integrated into a self-correcting democratic project – an informal mode of checks and balances powered by short memories, mixed company and freedom.

Monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, Plato’s philosocracy – every way of government the human species has thought to design was, in the beginning, born of utopian aspirations; and in the end, kept alive with nothing less than first-rate hypocrisy. Believing we could perfect it all, we sought to codify a world without error – by purging its flaws, cleaning its mess and setting it all in stone. But in 1789, a new generation of men on a new continent chose to work with our flaws and use the mess and admit that our Constitution could not stay unamended forever.

Few of their ideas were original. Most of their genius took up no more than a dozen seats at Independence Hall. But so different was the character of all the men in Philadelphia and New York and Boston and Virginia from any nation of men so far conceived that the old idea of democracy, long trapped on paper, at last found a people funny enough to make it work. A people who laughed at pretension, heckled certainty and made a sport of nonconformity.

But now: a Botox-bleached nation of caped crusaders wearing noise-canceling headphones, deaf to anything but our own theme music and the imagined sound of unseen eggshells cracking beneath, Americans are slipping back into the Old World habits we once escaped. Democracy and humor are dying of the same disease.

Folk culture, high culture, and industrial devolution to mass culture

From “America’s future looks vulgar” by Chilton Williamson, The Spectator, February 19, 2026:

The principal enemy of the supremacy of the intellect in a civilized society is not, as anti-democratic critics over the past 200 years have argued, democratic systems of government. It is, rather, industrial economies which destroyed aristocratical governments and cultures by creating the mass societies which emerged from the industrial ones and on which the latter depend, as high culture depended on agricultural societies and the aristocracies that shaped and controlled them.

It is true that agricultural civilizations of the past were comprised of an upper minority stratum, the cultural elite who were both the creators and, as we say today, the consumers of the achievements of a high culture, resting upon a majority lower one consisting of the ignorant and unlettered, just as the industrial ones of the modern era are.

The difference between the two – and it is a critical one – is that ever since the arrival of industrialism the division has been between a high culture and a mass culture, whereas in the countless ages before it the distinction was between high culture and folk culture, whose contribution to civilization throughout recorded history has been in every way as valuable, rich and significant as that of the former. Indeed, in many instances, the two are indistinguishable – Beowulf, for example, or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the fables of Aesop and La Rochefoucauld, or the English madrigals and the French rondelays.

What differentiates the two – the folk culture of the aristocratic-agricultural past and the mass culture of the democratic-industrial present – is that the first was created spontaneously by the “folk,” the people themselves, whereas the second is artificially generated, carefully and cynically according to commercial calculation based on prevalent consumer tastes determined by statistical surveys consulted by “creative” hacks and their employers who expect to satisfy and profit from those tastes, after having created them themselves. 

The result is that while children in the not-so-long-ago invented their own games and entertainments and their elders wrote their own stories and composed their own songs and playlets to perform for their families and neighbors, today they buy them out of a box or imitate the popular “artists” they see and hear on television, radio and the antisocial media.

David Cannadine, the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, correctly noted that many British aristocrats were philistines. Still, the aristocracy constituted a socially and culturally stable class that was the chief preservative element in high British civilization over a full millennium; a role that the unstable financial and industrial plutocracies that succeeded the old aristocracies and whose members rapidly ascend to and as quickly drop out of them as business and social conditions fluctuate – thus virtually ensuring that they pass little if anything of tradition and high value on to their successors – cannot fill.