Don't Get Mad, Get Funny

Using Your Power of Humor for Good

There’s a famous quote about humor that goes: “Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog. You learn a lot in the process, but in the end nobody laughs and the frog dies.”

This may have been said by Mark Twain, but an internet search shows me that it’s been attributed to many other people, too. It probably wasn’t Mark because I don’t think “dissecting a frog” was a big thing in the 1800’s. I’m pretty sure his junior high biology class pals didn’t slice open frogs and then puke in their lockers like mine did in the 1980’s. Plus, frogs were more often used as sport figures back then, like in Twain’s famous short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Today’s newsletter feels like it’s sitting on a porch drinking Country Time Lemonade with an unhinged 90-year-old named Cletus.

In my book I’m Wearing Tunics Now I mention that humor helps me make sense of the world. It’s the lens through which I process something, and then I try to find a way to write about it and get it published. This doesn’t always work, of course. There are loads of rejected pieces despondently sitting in a desktop folder. A desktop folder named “SUSAN LUCCI.”

I hope you got that joke. Cletus liked it.

Humor is a powerful tool. It’s been said that “Humor is a rubber sword. It lets you make your point without drawing blood.” Meaning, you disarm someone when you make them laugh, and then they’re more open to learning a lesson about the focus of your joke.

To quote Vladimir Nabokov: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Or to quote someone in a really earnest high school play about George Carlin: “First you make them laugh, then you make them think, bro.”

Here’s a recent example of what I’m talking about: My friend and frequent collaborator Johanna Gohmann noticed the rise of the Traditional Wife and sent me a few links about these apron-clad throwbacks. The Trad Wife, in case you’re lucky enough to not know, is a woman that boasts about embracing patriarchal gender roles in her marriage. Meaning, rather than pursue a career, she cooks, cleans, caters to her husband, and dolls herself up to look like an extra from Mad Men. Here’s one of the better known tradwives.

Canning beets, scrubbing toilets, and yet she still has time to TikTok

Of course it’s fine if someone wants to do this, but the Tradwife movement has been widely criticized for its association with alt-right beliefs and white supremacy. Basically the worry is that it’s eroding women’s power and setting feminism back a few or fifty decades. Yes, I know that feminism means women can make their own life choices, even if it’s a stupid ass one, but this particular choice seems to involve a lot of calling your husband “the king of the castle” and cooking homemade jam at 4 a.m.

It’s The Stepford Wives with Wi-Fi.

This Tradwife phenomenon was also brought to light when Alabama Senator Katie Britt gave the GOP rebuttal to Biden’s SOTU from her creepy kitchen. Senator Britt spoke in what’s widely called a “fundie baby voice” and she was brilliantly parodied on SNL by Scarlett Johansson. I’m guessing Scarlett didn’t worry about her husband Colin Jost making his own dinner that night.

Again, it’s fine if any woman chooses to spend her life scrubbing her husband’s gross socks instead of using her college degree. Knock yourself out, Marge. I myself was a stay-at-home mom for a number of years, so I know it’s not easy to take care of the kids and an entire household all day. (Mine wasn’t by choice so much as by an ad agency laying me off when I was five months pregnant. Thanks again, assholes!)

But here’s why, as Cletus would say, this whole Tradwife thing got stuck in my craw:

Women in America are losing and have lost reproductive rights and control over our own bodies. Forced birth is happening, without exceptions for rape and incest. There are scary predictions about the banning of contraception. We’ll maybe lose basic gynecological health care if/when certain political groups take power. And there are even some lawmakers shouting that women should lose the right to vote and America should instead switch to “a household vote.” Dear god.

After learning about the deeper meaning to Tradwives, I kept trying to just ignore Sally Oven Spray and her 2 million followers on TikTok. But I couldn’t because to me, women proudly sharing their subservience to men and encouraging others to do the same isn’t a harmless movement or trend. It’s scary.

But how can you make any of that funny? How can you make more people aware of the insidious danger of something as silly as a busty woman in an apron showing you her recipes?

Here’s how: you make it seem as real and also as ridiculous as possible, and you put yourself in the situation.

I knew the way into satirizing this topic was to think about how horrified my husband would be if I suddenly announced that I’m giving up my career ambitions to stay home and make him pot pies. And not the frozen Swanson ones, either. Like actual homemade pot pies. Then I told Johanna my idea and she was immediately on board, knowing her husband would be equally frightened if she started obeying his every command. He’d probably call 911.

Then we wrote this and sent it to McSweeneys:

There’s a lot of rubber in the piece, to make you laugh, but also some sword. To make you think, bro. But mostly to encourage you to tell the people in your life that they can’t sit out the upcoming elections because equality is at stake. And there’s nothing funny about that.

Thanks for reading!

—Wendi

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