Congress as the Recession's Laugh Track - Send In the Clowns!

by Steven M. Cohen  •  Mar 21, 2009 at 11:35 am

http://www.buyselljump.com/2009/03/congress-as-the-recessions-laugh-track-send-in

Americans love all sorts of entertainment and welcome the distraction it provides during hard times. It has been estimated that 80 million people, or 65% of the population at the time, attended movies on a weekly basis in 1930, right after the stock market crash as the economy really began to unravel. Movies throughout the Great Depression provided a level of escapism that helped the country cope with truly hard times.

Americans during the Depression found the movies an inexpensive form of escapism. These days they are more of an extravagance. Fortunately, we don't have to spend the $12 a ticket or so to be entertained just like audiences in the Thirties; we only have to turn on our televisions. There we can find literally dozens of humorists delivering a high level of uproarious material worthy of the great comics of the Depression-era cinema, rivaling anything offered back then by, for example, The Three Stooges, with whom the present cast of comedians has much in common. Or think The Marx Brothers, but without any of Groucho's wit.

This present-day group of guffaw-providers is, of course, our very own Congress! (Come to think of it, don't you see an interesting facial resemblance between Barney Frank and W.C. Fields?) Congress is doing its patriotic bit to buck up public morale by providing some truly hysterical comic relief during these tough days. The members' comedy routine consists of convening every day and, in their own hilarious way, impersonating solemn legislators who take seriously their responsibilities to act in the best interests of the country.

Congresspersons (Congresspeople?) don't really make an effort to resemble authentic lawmakers; rather, their comic style is more in the manner of parody whereby they do and say things bordering on the ludicrous and slapstick. This approach is designed to produce belly laughs rather than a more subtle, clever kind of humor that the observer needs to process intelligently in order to appreciate. That is, Congress does its vaudeville routine devoid of any nuance or subtlety, providing side-splitting entertainment more in the banal vein of Laurel and Hardy rather than the sophistication of William Powell and Myrna Loy. Thankfully, while you don't have to think to appreciate their humor, they are nevertheless a real laugh riot!

Lately Congress has been giving Mel Brooks a real run for his money by equaling, if not surpassing, his uproariously funny recreation of the French Revolution in History of the World, Part I (pardon the abrupt cinematic time-travel from the Thirties to the Eighties). Braying with comical righteous indignation and waving the bloody shirt of Retention Bonus revolution, House and Senate members scream "off with their heads" as they parade an unhappy group of corporate executives through a series of show trials. (Speaking of show trials, it's surprising that none of the inquisitors suggested that immediately at the conclusion of the proceedings the defendants should be dragged behind the Capitol and shot, a takeoff on the speedy justice system in China.) In their latest effort to out-outrage each other, committee members spent hours beating on poor AIG CEO Edward Liddy, who from the first moment had the look of a man about to be dragged off to the guillotine. (As he headed toward the metaphorical chopping block, Liddy must have asked himself why, after a hugely successful career, he consented to come out of retirement and run AIG for a dollar a year, proving once again that no good deed shall go unpunished.) One august member took the humor to a new level by suggesting that anyone receiving a retention bonus should "commit suicide," thus bypassing execution altogether.

(Let's be entirely fair in awarding due credit to President Obama, who gave the chucklemeisters in Congress a real assist by jumping on their bonus bandwagon. Well, he sort of jumped on, then off, then on again. First he expressed outrage, but then his chief economic adviser said that these were legal contracts that could not be undone, and then our new president revved up his outrage quotient again by condemning this waste of taxpayer funds and vowing to go after the perpetrators.)

Other knee-slapping public lashings have included auto executives, bank CEOs, hedge fund managers, and the like. There seems to be no limit to the ability of Congress to instantly turn grave issues like national economic survival into real laughfests. This is actually a very clever gambit. To protect the public from having to think about really depressing developments like the collapse of the stock market, shaky banks, imploding home prices, mushrooming foreclosures, massive job losses, regulatory malfeasance, TARP/TALF bailouts, earmark-laden budgets, and monumental "stimulus" spending defended by economic forecasts that don't make sense to any rational economist, Congress provides merciful diversion by directing our attention to symbolic but inconsequential issues like bonuses, corporate jets, and the occasional company-sponsored golf tournament. That's got to be comic relief at its best!

It's also an effective sleight-of-hand for a Congress that features not only comedians but magicians as well. By whipping up a public frenzy that most likely would have abated in the absence of political cheerleading, our politicians have effectively executed the classic magician's trick of focusing the attention of the audience on a distraction while making an object "disappear." Thus the public remains fixated on collateral, irrelevant-to-the-big-pictures issues, while Congress makes its own culpability in the present crisis literally vanish before our very eyes. Business bashing, bonus-baiting, and competitive "outrage" have effectively masked truly unfunny misdeeds including the repeated failure to reform Fannie and Freddie, the misguided Community Reinvestment Act, outrageous and hypocritical earmarks, and a host of personal scandals involving the sponsorship of self-serving banking laws and sweetheart mortgage deals.

Oops, I almost lapsed into serious business even though Congress has not run out of jokes. The latest one ratchets the bonus-outrage factor to yet new heights, as the House has passed a bill taxing the targeted bonuses to the tune of 90% (yikes!). This is a riotous new take on contract law and is an exercise in ex-post-facto lawmaking that has Constitutional scholars rolling in the aisles.

The new administration has provided a few laughs but can't hold a candle to the funnymen in Congress. It could use some help from an academic luminary such as Groucho's Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush in A Day at the Races. You might recall that the mission of Dr. Hackenbush (originally Quackenbush, but an already litigious nation produced 37 Dr. Quackenbushes as potential plaintiffs in suits against MGM) was to rescue the Standish Sanitarium from bankruptcy (notice the connection to Congress?). If, say, someone of Dr. Hackenbush's academic prominence could join President Obama's economic team, already populated with Nobel laureates and assorted professorial types, the administration might challenge Congress for the title of Funniest Federal Branch—the 2009 version of A Race to the Bottom.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to steven m. cohen's free mailing list