![]() But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. ![]() Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That’s the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans’ “vast descent into triviality,” and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. Postman worried that Americans’ great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He might warn, with a Cassandric sigh, that there is something delightful and also not very delightful at all about a trio of Tyrannosauri who, in the name of saving the world, try their hardest to go viral on Facebook. He might suggest that fun is fun, definitely, but, given its amorality, a pretty awkward ethic. ![]() He might whisper that, in politics, the line between engagement and apathy is thinner than we want to believe. Postman died in 2003 were he still with us, though, he would likely be both horrified and unsurprised to see protesters fighting for the fate of the planet with the help of a punnified Labrador-or, for that matter, to see the case for women’s inalienable rights being made by people dressed as plush vulvas. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way- Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny-but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda. (“Remember polio? No? Thanks, science!”) And then I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Scrolling through Instagram to see the pictures from the March for Science, I marveled at the protest’s display of teasing American wit. Jokes, in other words, with their charms and their appealing self-effacement and their plausible deniability ( just kidding!), are helping people to do the messy work of democracy: to engage, to argue, and, every once in a while, to launch a successful bid for the presidency of the United States. They-we-turn to memes to express both indignation and joy. Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. Jokes have informed many prominent, though certainly not all, political protests they have also, more broadly, come to shape the way people understand the world around them. They needn’t have fretted: Irony-satire-political discourse that operates through the productive hedge of the joke-have not only evaded death in past decades they have, instead, been enjoying a renaissance. There was a time when irony was supposed to have died-when Americans, frightened and weary, worried that the world had robbed them of their constitutional right to laughter.
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