“The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.” — W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing-Up
So says Maugham in his notes on a writing life in which he was a successful novelist, playwright, and shot-story teller. The quote came to mind after reading a column today by Matthew Hennessey of The Wall Street Journal titled “Jim Gaffigan, Donald Trump, and The Death of Laughter.” The analogy here would have Maugham’s “veterinary surgeon” correspond to stand-up comedian, writer, and actor Gaffigan, while Trump corresponds to “a prime minister.”
The WSJ column deals with Gaffigan’s recent twitter tirade, where the normally clean, avowedly religious, and familial comedian uses the F— word to show his disdain for Trump. I have heard Gaffigan credit his wife for his religious faith and read that he apologized to her for his recent language. Hennessey’s point seems to be that Gaffigan has made a category error by joining the angry fray about Trump because comedians provide a therapeutic outlet for people stressed by just such a fray. I recall the recently deceased great 20th-century comedian Don Rickles saying in an interview that he deliberately did not do political humor.
It is interesting that much of Gaffigan’s humor is self-deprecatory (eg. the title of his best-selling book Dad is Fat). I noted in a past blog that self-deprecatory humor is controversial because many of the comedians who were great at it, like Chris Farley and John Belushi, had tragic personal lives. To me, Trump’s humor is cruder, simpler, and often cruelly directed at other people. I suppose Maugham would say it is the humor of the “great man.”
Self-deprecatory humor reminds me of advice from one of my first bosses after college: “Never apologize.” I still wonder about the wisdom of this imperative.