Why isn’t Conn. funnier?
The simple answer to “Why isn’t Connecticut funnier?” is that very few of its residents came directly from the shtetl. Not many Connecticut residents left Minsk and headed straight for Madison.
Most immigrant families stopped for a couple of generations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They were in the pushcart rag trade, or sold produce, or bargained for what “fell off the ship” that day from guys at the docks.
This largely contrasts with the original and longterm residents of the Nutmeg State who came from families that owned those ships, docks, garment factories and tenement buildings.
By the time the people who didn’t own the docks and factories could afford to live in Connecticut, they had forfeited the street smarts and ferocious shamelessness that often ignite the flames of humor. As their ancestors made it up the Connecticut shoreline, their family wit-quotient went down.
Just as you can’t light a match on a polished surface but instead must strike it against something coarse, comedy emerges from the rough. Smooth surfaces don’t produce sparks.
Humor, in other words, is often born from strife and not from ease (exactly the way actual children are often born). Tough times make for great comedy.
That’s one reason comic sensibility is not what you would consider a signature trait of the Nutmeg State. In fact, no state with even the slightest sense of humor would call itself the Nutmeg State because the line is a joke waiting to happen.
Consider that Connecticut’s young are at a disadvantage in the humor arena right from the start: lovely yet earnest and fussy Emma (or Noah) begins to explain why nutmeg was important in the spice trade. Did anyone explain to Emma/ Noah that “Nutmeg State” was an insult right from the beginning, because it’s based on the bad reputation of Yankee peddlers who sold cheap carved wooden pieces to unsuspecting rubes by telling them they were real nutmegs? No.
Nobody ever explained anything to Emma (or Noah) except that nice people don’t laugh with their mouths open.
If one of the first things you learn about laughter is that good manners dictate that you should repress it, how are you going to develop the life skills that humor provides?
Which is to say, if you say that nice people don’t laugh with their mouths open, you’re basically saying nobody should laugh at all, because how exactly do you laugh with your mouth closed?
You can only manage this if you speak without moving your jaws, which fancy people have indeed made stylish: They go around enunciating rounded vowels through clamped teeth in much the same way that humpback whales use baleen plates to filter plankton. These are the folks who still play contract bridge. They refuse to believe Christopher Buckley started voting for Democrats back in 2008.
The competing theory concerning Connecticut’s humorlessness is revealed when examining our state’s other, non-spice related, unofficial motto: “The Land of Steady Habits.” Who came up with that doozy?
Until they reach the state of borderline neurosis and become interesting, steady habits don’t even brush up against humor. That’s one reason people who are funny move away. Hilarious, vulgar, 1960s comic legend Totie Fields was born in Hartford. She didn’t even make it through high school before she crossed state lines and started performing in Boston clubs. Hartford was not going to be home to a woman who described herself as “breaking all the rules” and wearing everything from ostrich feathers to fox coats because “You look fat in fox anyway, so if you start fat, you only look a little fatter.”
You’re not supposed to be fat in Connecticut any more than you’re supposed to laugh with your mouth open. These are signs that you lack selfcontrol. And if you lack self-control, you probably lack breeding, which might mean you’re poor.
You’re most certainly not supposed to be poor in Connecticut, although a whole hell of a lot of people are: Our cities have wealth disparities so egregious that they can be no laughing matter. My hope is that the children of those cities, striving and making noise, telling stories and making trouble, will provide us with the next wave of Connecticut humor. I hope they will revive in us the knowledge that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow” and remind us that “there is no humor in heaven.”
I thought the great Connecticut humorist Totie Fields said that, but it turns out it was Mark Twain. Go figure.
No state with even the slightest sense of humor would call itself the Nutmeg State because the line is a joke waiting to happen.