SOMETHING
FUN, FOR A CHANGE
A Sermon Delivered to
High Street UU Church, Macon, GA
11/16/2025
“The greatest enemy of authority…is
contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter…I’ll tell you this: I
read the transcripts of [Eichmann’s] police investigation, thirty-six hundred
pages, read it, and read it carefully, and I do not know how many times I
laughed—laughed out loud!” Hannah Arendt
“I used to be disgusted
but now I try to stay amused.” Elvis Costello
Let me tell you a little about an avatar of protest
silliness, Wavy Gravy. Unless you’re
like me and spend much of your life in tie-dye, you’re likeliest to know him
not by name but by his most famous line, uttered in the documentary Woodstock: “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” This was the second
morning of the festival, after the rains and the mud came, the New York State
Thruway closed and the fences came down. Wavy and his companions from the Hog
Farm, the commune in New Mexico they had been living at for some years, had
agreed to act security for the weekend. When asked, “How do you plan to enforce
security?” he responded with “Seltzer bottles and cream pies.” They didn’t
actually use those, of course. What they did was to create the practice that’s
still used at events like that, called the Hug Patrol. I’ve taken part in some
of those and you may laugh at the idea but it’s really hard to fight when your
arms are pinned to your sides by a dozen hippies crowding you until you chill
out.
Wavy, born in 1936, making him nearly 90 now, doesn’t
appear in public as often as he used to. I’ve never met him, but I have seen
him from a distance a couple times. He’s an overpowering presence even from
yards away, decked in his traditional tie2-dye from head to oversized feet, his
bright red clown nose and white face paint, and floppy hat. People treat him
the way I think people who listened to them probably treated Jesus or Buddha:
they swarm him, wanting just to be next to an incredible presence.
Wavy, who describes himself as “clad in the crumbling
remains of my original Prankster can’t-bust-me jumpsuit with the ‘kick
me’-style sign on [his] back”, will try to appear serious by removing his giant
clown nose in a confrontation. He is one in a long line of folks confronting
wrongdoing by laughing at it.
He’s the first to acknowledge he is a clown. Wes ScoopNisker, the author of Crazy Wisdom, states “We laugh because the clown is one
of us, pathetic and lovable, trying hard but always flailing and falling…[He or
she] shows us our awkward human condition and encourages us to laugh at
ourselves…We climb the ladder only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong
wall. We search for hats that are already on our heads. We plan our days only
to find the days have other plans.”
And
while Wavy would characterize himself in the noble clown tradition of Charlie
Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, he is really akin to the archetype of the jester,
who are “the wits and critics. They expose the establishment’s lies and make
light of the contemporary social scene.” However, as playwright Jane Wagner
writes, “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”
Nisker continues, “Because jesters are ‘nay-sayers,’ they
often speak the truth, saying no to obvious lies, absurdities, and injustices.
In the worldly realm of relative truths, jesters are the champions of crazy
wisdom.”
Interestingly, the only recorded historical pranks and
jokes are those done by kings and emperors, often on guests and courtiers. In
the parlance of jokes, this is known as punching down, the superior political
figure taking shots at someone with no power. A prime example from the past few
years is when Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas bussed migrants from the
border with Mexico to New York City and Washington and then unloaded them
literally on the street. In 2022, he even sent a busload to then Vice President
Kamala Harris’ home to be unloaded in front of it, leaving them stranded and
freezing. This is actually a time-honored Republican stunt, having originated
in 1962 in what became known as the Reverse Freedom Ride, when southern Black
families were bussed to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, a move calculated to
embarrass JFK, and to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Civil
War.
Pranksters
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, having first gotten publicity by throwing dollar
bills from the balcony of the NY Stock Exchange onto the trading floor below
where they were stuffed into trader’s pockets, memorably gathered thousands of
Yippies together at the Pentagon with the intention of lifting it several feet
off the ground by pure force of will, thereby signaling the end of the Vietnam War. While they didn’t
end the war that day, or budge the building, in a nod to today’s political
climate they enthusiastically claimed to have succeeded. The next year Abbie
helped draft a pig they called Pigasus to run for president. The campaign was
guided by the statement, “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We
nominate a president and the people eat him.”
From the 76 to 88 elections Wavy helped nominate another
candidate, Nobody. The Nobody for President campaign ran with the slogan,
“Because Nobody is working right now in Washington for you.”
I was of course too young to have known about some of these
pranks when they happened, but I do recall the Pigasus and Nobody campaigns, as
well as a few later ones. In the early 90s a group called the Barbie Liberation
Organization managed to switch the recordings on the voice boxes of hundreds of
Barbie and GI Joe dolls so that they said what the other was meant to say. Since
the late 80s a group called Gorilla Girls, female artists wearing gorilla masks
in their public appearances, bought billboards, electric marquees, and posters
descrying the dearth of women artists in major museum collections. Their most famous
line is “A woman has to be naked to get into the Met.”
Author Andrew Boyd writes, “Humor is a great equalizer. It
can puncture the aura of authority. It can pull the wealthy, powerful, and
pretentious down into the mud where the rest of us live.” One of the best
examples of this is the 1992 work of Nanjunda Swamy in India. Influenced by
Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, a Sanskrit term meaning “pressurizing for
truth,” constitutional law professor Swamy gathered 50,000 farmers on the lawn
of the Karnataka state secretariat to “laugh the government out”. This was in
response to the flagrant abuses of multinational corporations and their
ownership of certain politicians, specifically Karnataka Chief Minister S
Bangarappa.
“The farmers, surrounded by policemen, just sat on the lawn
and told jokes against Mr. Banarappa…’They were puns, actually,’ Mr…Swamy said.
After warming up the farmers with a little word-play, it was enough to simply
say ‘Bangarappaj’ [in Sanskrit, “Bangarappa is inflexible”] over the megaphone
and the farmers would shake with laughter.”
This is punching up, holding the powerful for ridicule, and
while it may not change anything in the here and now, it reminds people that
their opponent is not impregnable and his policies are not to be taken
seriously.
This refusal is known as frivolous tactics and it has a
long line in history, from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which wives refuse to
provide, um, physical comfort to their husbands until they give up warring, to
Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing royalty and religion
scatalogically, to the 17th Century Levellers, who emphasized
equality, popular sovreignity, and religious tolerance, to the Diggers, a San
Francisco theatre troupe out of Haight-Ashbury, whose best-known alumus is
Peter Coyote, often a voice one hears narrating PBS documentaries, and on whose
antics the Yippies and Wavy Gravy cut their teeth. Today, punching up is
located in the inflatable frogs and unicorns appearing at in No Kings and ICE protests
in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago, and the aerobics classes and
dance lines held at the South Waterfront ICE Detention Center in Portland. It
continues despite the arrest of clarinet and cello players, the pepper-spraying
of people in costumes, the attempts by the trump administration to equate day
care teachers with M13 gang members.
So what can we do? Well, here’s a suggestion, taken
directly from the example of Mr. Swamy. Make fun of Donald trump’s policies,
his administration, and him personally. We can do so in big and little ways. A
retired farmer whose wife I used to visit during trump’s first term referred to
him as The Canary, a jab I thought was on the mark. My own practice is to write
out his name using lower-case t, because I don’t think he deserves being
upper-case anything.
Now, a caveat. There’s an argument to be made, and it’s a
legitimate one, that to point out the physical or mental flaws of another
person in a joke also points out those same flaws in people who aren’t the
target. Disgraced comedian Louis CK, of all people, reminds us that “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get
to decide that you didn’t.” But I also think it’s legitimate to note those
flaws when they are projected on others by the target. For instance, a French
joke of the 1930s noted the discrepancy in Nazi propaganda by saying that Aryan
types were as blond as Hitler, slim as Goering, and tall as Goebbels.
Thus,
I feel no compunction with noting that trump supporters are as innovative as
Ivanka, as independent as Eric and Donald Jr, and as trim as trump. I can go
on: They are as scientific as RJK Jr, as athletic as Steve Bannon, as
conscientious as Pete Hegseth, and as law-abiding as Tom Homan, Peter Navarro,
Charles Kushner, Mark Meadows, Wilbur Ross, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, James Flynn,
Steve Bannon (again), Roger Stone, Linda McMahon, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth
(again), Elon Musk, RFK Jr (again), Rudy Guiliani, and of course Donald trump
himself. When you tout yourself as being 6’3” and 224 lbs. people expect you to
look similar to others of the same height and weight, say, Chris Hemsworth who
plays Thor, or Tim Tebow who plays football.
The rumors suggested by the release of emails this week are
a perfect example. Being gay or performing a sexual act on another man is not
funny. But striking at the very heart of trump supporters’ machismo, knowing
that, whether it’s true or not, it’s experienced by them as a blow below the
best? Now that’s funny.
Here are several others. Feel free to utilize them as often
as necessary.
- ·
There was a terrible fire the other day
that destroyed the site of the trump library. It decimated the collection,
burning both books, including one he hadn’t started coloring in yet.
- ·
Obama’s Affordable Care Act turns 15 this
year. No wonder trump supporters are messing with it.
- ·
Trump walked into a bar. And then he
lowered it.
- ·
Trump has suggested that when he finally
leaves office he wants to go back to TV with a show about running the
government. An interviewer asked, “You mean like The West Wing?” Trump said,
“No, more like the Sopranos.”
- ·
I’ve heard a lot of people saying they
like what trump says, but they prefer it in the original German.
- ·
Trump is being interviewed by Dan Rather
who asks, “You’ve told so many lies, Mr. President, which is your favorite?”
Trump says, “I don’t lie.” Rather says, “Yes, that’s one of mine too!”
- ·
Voting a progressive ticket in this day
and age means you’re fighting truth decay.
- ·
How many trumps does it take to change a
light bulb? Just one. He holds it in the air and waits for the world to revolve
around him.
- ·
You might have heard about the bad
reception trump received attending te Washington Commanders NFL game the other
day. Someone even chucked a beer at him. It was a draft so he dodged it.
- ·
Trump was asked once, “Boxers or briefs?”
He answered, “Depends.”
If
the devil’s greatest trick is to convince us he doesn’t exist, trump’s great
trick is to convince us to take him seriously. Now, is laughing at them likely
to force the trump administration to run like rats from a sinking ship of
state? Alas, no. Trump and others have proven rhino-skinned. If that alone was
going to do the job, it would have by now.
What
it is is a tool, a part of our arsenal that reminds his supporters that they
are the only ones responding to his bleats, that the rest of us see through the
gauze of their attempts to turn back the clock a century or more, and that they
will be the only ones standing naked in the light of history,
This
is not to say we should laugh at the things being done at his command. There’s
nothing funny about people being grabbed off the street, their homes, or their
work, or zip tying kids. But separated from their actions, these people deserve
nothing but scorn, these Gravy Seals and members of Meal Team Six. The impetus
behind their cruelty is itself a joke. They can’t strongarm their way into
respectability and honor, and the mark they know is that they cover their
faces, their badges and their names. They know they should be ashamed of what
they do. As others have pointed out, if you have one Nazi holding forth at a
podium and nine listening to what he has to say without contradiction, you have
ten Nazis.
Give
them what they deserve, what they’ve earned. A good, solid belly laugh. Underneath
the silliness is something serious. We will not surrender. As Wavy Gravy
himself says, “It only hurts when I don’t laugh.”
