He’s at Wits’ End Over the End of Wit

The New American Humor was defined for me last night.

It consists primarily of explosive body sounds and scatological asides offered by young men for the benefit of the young women who accompany them.

The young women, in turn, respond to the outrageous sounds with screeching laughter, which, of course, encourages the young men to go for it again, as it did in this particular situation.

The sound and laughter continued for as long as the group was in our presence. Rarely have public sensitivities been so defiled.

We were at an outdoor restaurant overlooking Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. It was otherwise a quiet time on an evening softened by whispers of autumn.

The four young people gathered at a table nearby. They were in their late teens, and none manifested the wary, haunted look often associated with victims of bipolar distress. All, I would guess, pride themselves on possessing IQs somewhere in the high 80s. (That’s a C-plus, isn’t it?) In other words, they fell within normal bounds.

Shortly after they were seated came the bodily sounds, mostly loud belches. One man accompanied his own oral explosions with humming, no doubt feeling the combination contained elements of musical humor, like the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, perhaps, sans lyrics.

It wasn’t until after about the fifth chorus that I began to think I would like to toss them off the terrace onto the street of shoppers below.

But my wife cautioned that it would probably not be a good idea to attempt it since today’s young are both strong and mean, conditions created by an unnerving combination of good nutrition and lack of moral discipline.

“They’ll punch your lights out,” she said.

We were occupying the only table in sight, so there was no place to move. My only recourse, since I couldn’t rise and beat the hell out of them, was to go home and write the hell out of them. It was a suggestion offered by Cinelli when she came to realize that my temper had at last, due to age, exceeded my physical ability to act upon it.

So here I am, all sour-faced and grumbly, criticizing that which obviously animates our young. Thanks to people like Howard Stern, scatology has been elevated to the level of mass public entertainment on radio, television and in the movies. It contributes to a general devolution of comic standards among adults as well, and, due to its wide acceptance, is often performed in public places.

I mention Stern specifically because he was a forerunner, with his Fartman, of that which energizes people like the four washroom wits who sat near us, burping and shrieking and other things.

A few days before my encounter with those practitioners of new humor, I had seen the movie “Zoolander,” which should have prepared me, in a way, for what was happening at the restaurant in Santa Monica. I went to see it in the first place not because I expected any kind of cosmic entertainment but to help me define the comic impulses that guide the audience for which I write.

It was quite possibly the most unrewarding “comedy” I have ever seen, and yet some critics praised it as a masterpiece of parody. Was there something I was missing? I saw it a second time to double-check myself and emerged again regarding it as beyond stupid. By comparison, the Three Stooges live as paragons of sophisticated wit.

Do not point to me as dour and unreceptive, despite the fact that mine is obviously a minority opinion. I worshipped the likes of Woody Allen, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer and others who performed in San Francisco’s North Beach clubs when I was in my late teens. They said something. And I can laugh like a loon at movies like “Best In Show,” which was a true parody.

The routines of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, with their rich subtleties, were also among my favorites. That leads me to wonder what strange influence must have diverted their son, Ben, to cause him to co-write, direct and star in a movie such as “Zoolander.” What went wrong?

I could turn to a cultural anthropologist for an answer, but I think I have one. The best humor is born in dark places of the soul, and when times are good, there are few fearsome ironies on which to build. When times are bad, it emerges with depths of laughter and terror we cannot begin to fathom.

Humor that offends should also alert the conscience. I’m thinking now of a line offered by an e-mailer who wondered at the Pavlovian response that sequentially dropping bombs and food in Afghanistan must create. “Do the people salivate,” he asked, “when the bombing begins?” The duality of satire was implicit in the question.

Laughter born in chaos offers an escape from reality while embracing reality. So though we are left for a little while longer with burps and flatulence, it is bound to change, as a dismal new reality prevails. As times get worse, humor gets better. But even burping, I suppose, beats crying. In the end, it’s whatever gets us through the night that counts.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.