Now that psychological, intellectual and emotional sado-masochism flood the popular culture—just watch reality TV—what are we to make of the life of Rodney Dangerfield?
If humiliation is entertainment—call it "humili-tainment" (and tell your friends you read it here first)—he was destined for it from the moment he was born and the doctor slapped his mother. And he didn't need to get booted off the island, tossed out of the house or fired by a 6-foot lump of ego with a comb-over they could surf in SoCal.
All Rodney needed was Rodney.
Long before the Fear Factors and Bachelors, Obnoxious Fiancés and Survivors, Big Brothers and Apprentices, Wife Swaps and Makeovers, extreme or otherwise, before TV linked the words "amuse" and "abuse," the only person Rodney humiliated was Rodney. If that ethos still existed, perhaps we wouldn't be quite the nation of smug, superior smartasses we've obviously become. (Who says Dubya isn't the right man for our times?) It's a wonder we're not in an epidemic of stiff necks, given how many hours we spend looking down on each other in prime time.
Rodney, longtime/part-time Las Vegan (with digs at Regency Towers), Strip headliner, Gotham club owner, unlikely movie star, padrone of young comedians and stand-up legend, died last week at age 82, taking his self-deprecating ... self-lacerating ... self-loathing ... hell, self-immolating humor with him. And a comedy signpost slips from America's rearview mirror as we slam pedal-to-metal toward ever-nastier pop-culture terrain.
No one put himself down with as much comic vigor as the collar-yanking, tic-ridden shlemazel with the goggle-eyed glare and voice like a foghorn off the Brooklyn loading docks. In pure volume, velocity and intensity of ruthlessly funny self-mockery, the man was a pioneer, a humiliation junkie.
As are we all nowadays.
But the difference between Rodney's at-his-own-expense japes and today's at-everyone-else's-expense voyeurism is striking, as Rodney's passing underlines. When he did it, it was shtick. Now it's sport—a national pastime.
Babble effusively of his comic genius, his impeccable timing, his precise, exquisitely crafted one-liners, his matchless delivery, his unique persona, his pure stamina on stage. He was all that and more. The "more" was that Rodney's self-inflicted smackdowns earned our empathy and allegiance because he was the exaggerated Us, the mopey mook slouching through life, struggling for a sliver of self-worth in a world that finds ways to shred it almost daily. In the psychology of comedy, putting himself down was sticking up for us, because he was our dumpy, wrinkly, nonplussed poster boy.
Our surrogate self-loather.
When he turned against himself, he brought us to his side. In a strange way, it spoke to our better angels, tapped our more humane instincts. His affected pose of comic misery was a shared joke between performer and audience, which neutralized any poisonous aftertaste from laughing at another's misfortune.
Post-Rodney, humili-tainment operates off an uglier impulse, and it's no joke. Reality TV is not out to engender empathy or foster a sense of identification, but to snicker and deride people exposed at their worst, without the shield of the professional performer to excuse us being entertained by it. Sure, these preening yahoos volunteer for public disgrace, but that doesn't let us off the hook for consuming their idiocy. They're still genuine people in often hurtful situations, emotionally and physically, and their naked embarrassment is our guiltless pleasure. Empathy-free. Sympathy-free. No redeeming subtext or emotional exchange. Just that dirty little rush when we feel elevated by someone else being diminished. We can't deny it exists. Neither do we need to court it.
It's a raging, media-spread virus for which many of us in this business, this writer and this publication included, are culpable—see how clever we can be at the expense of someone else, just because we can?
Both strains of humili-tainment offer us a sort of catharsis. Rodney's was kinder. Reality TV's is callous.
In his later career, Rodney became a symbol of anti-authoritarianism in such goofy manifestos as Caddyshack and Back to School, maintaining the American spirit of individualism and even anarchy—reaching back to when we suggested King George take his empire and shove it—that's so under siege by that bullshit corporate boogie we all dance to, the Teamwork Tango. (If NBC has any brains, whenever it finally cancels The Apprentice, it should climax with one of those brown-nosing little bastards pulling their puckered lips away from the Trump Rump and laying him out, to the cheers of a grateful nation. Rodney would've.)
But it was as the vessel of our collective insecurities, and his willingness to reimagine them as self-mocking punch lines and make us laugh them away, that rendered Rodney Dangerfield unique. And if we've turned the humili-tainment he perfected into something darker he didn't foresee, his pop-culture signpost lingers, at least in memory and old clips, to point us back if we ever so choose.
That's a legacy you can respect.