Dirty Jokes and Freedom in America

Two years ago Frank Rich was moved from his op-ed column to a space in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, and that was generally taken to be a demotion. Insiders said his one-note snarl and sneer was just too much on a page that also features Maureen Dowd, the mistress of the manner. But in March it was announced that Rich is back on the Sunday op-ed pages (there are now two of them). I admit to checking out Frank Rich’s columns from time to time, just to see what has sparked the latest snit. His reactions are old reliables most reliably outraged by the nefarious doings of the oppressive prudery of the mindlessly homophobic religious right.

Today’s column by Mr. Rich is entitled “The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told,” and it rails against the censors of the right who are enlisting the government to restrain pornography and related smut on television. He is further appalled by the decision of PBS to delete profanity from a documentary on American soldiers in Iraq. The First Amendment is on the ropes as the religious ayatollahs have taken control of the Bush administration’s assault on the artistic expression of real life. This is very serious. The freedom Mr. Rich is defending is represented by the aforementioned great dirty joke he heard at a Friars Club roast. A family comes to a talent agent who asks them what kind of act they do. Mr. Rich writes, “What followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality, and almost every conceivable body function. The agent asks the couple the name of their unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: ‘The Aristocrats.’”

The joke as it was actually told, Mr. Rich assures us, is hilarious, and he complains about the current Comstockery that forced its omission from the television broadcast of the Friars roast. But why doesn’t Mr. Rich give us the “marathon description” that made the joke so funny? The obvious answer is that the Times would not publish it, and the Times pays Mr. Rich’s large salary. Mr. Rich does not complain about being censored. Presumably the Times does not publish what he thinks should be broadcast to the general public because it would offend its readers and hurt advertising sales, which is the business the Times is in. Unless, of course, the Times has been taken over by the religious right, which seems improbable. Neither, for that matter, did the Times, in its story on the PBS documentary, tell us what had been cut. Mr. Rich and other free-speech zealots do not complain about being censored or having to practice self-censorship by resorting to euphemism and evasion in their own writing. That is required by the discreet “respectability” of the Times and is in no way to be compared with the oppressive “decency” that concerns those religious fanatics.

The readers of the Times are properly protected from the smut that, in the name of the First Amendment, should be thrown in the face of the booboisie that is the general public. I do not say that Mr. Rich is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy, properly speaking, requires a certain clarity of thought in feigning to be or to believe what one is not or does not believe. I have no doubt that Mr. Rich is sincere, which requires no clarity of thought whatever. He has a job to protect and he plays by the rules. Perhaps he dreams that one day, just maybe, he will manage to smuggle the f-word into a column. In the journalism of arrested adolescence, that would be to die and go to heaven. Absent that great achievement, Frank Rich will play by the rules, among the chief of which is to pander to the felt sense of moral superiority among readers who share his contempt for the insufferable decency of fellow-citizens who consent to the oppression of being denied the dirty jokes that Mr. Rich will not tell. Those to whom he panders are similarly denied, of course, but that is a small price to pay for reading a really respectable newspaper. Such respectability, once again, is in no way to be confused with the right-wing decency-mongering that has all but destroyed freedom in America. This is very serious.