HUMOR

As a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon and the National Lampoon, I’m writing to set you straight on a few things regarding “But Seriously, Folks . . . “ by Edward A. Gargan.

First: Even by journalistic standards of hyperbole, American humor is not on the wane. There always has been American humor, and there always will be. It may change, and it may suffer at the hands of its practitioners, but it will not die, and it will always be a part of the American scene.

I agree with your article’s premise--that we are in the tail end of a glut of humorists--but the 1990s will prove to be a shakeout period, not the end of laughter in America. What we are facing is the aging of America. For the first time we will have a population that has “seen too many jokes in its time,” owing to TV and mass-market magazines. So what we are seeing is not so much a decline of quality but a decline of the ability to see a joke, satire or parody with fresh eyes.

Humor, as it is practiced for the mass market, is not and never was meant to be subtle, fresh or anything more than a diversion. Humor is essentially a conservative phenomenon that, while it may play “bad boy,” does so with little expectation of true revolution.

BRIAN MCCORMICK

New York