A few decades ago, actors playing nitwits on television were all the rage. The mere appearance of buffoons like Ed Norton, Maxwell Smart, Barney Fife, Ted Baxter, Hans Schultz, Gilligan or Otis the town drunk brought forth gales of canned laughter, and most likely elicited similar responses from the actual human beings sitting at home watching the simpletons on their video screens. Nothing, it seemed, tickled the nation’s collective funny bone like conspicuously unconscious ignorance.
Today, there’s no need to pay performers to do or say stupid things in order to entertain contemporary America. Reality TV, Talk Radio, and YouTube have spawned hundreds of thousands of willfully rock-headed saps who are perfectly willing to perform the service for free.
But watching someone else’s real or perceived dimwittedness is a lot funnier than actually committing foolish acts yourself. Forrest Gump’s immortal words, “Stupid is as stupid does,” have relevance to every human being who’s ever survived infancy.
I’ve driven countless wrong-way miles on clearly marked highways while temporarily thinking “east” meant going left on the map and “west” meant going right. I’ve cut my hand open punching a campground shower faucet that wouldn’t release any hot water, and dented a ceiling trying (unsuccessfully) to dispatch an exceptionally evasive fly that was buzzing too loudly after my bedtime. I’ve piloted a moving car straight into the back wall of a garage when, momentarily unsure of which was the gas pedal and which was the brake, I froze and depressed neither of them. A column I wrote derided an author for his improper English usage; guess who learned after it was published that the dope was me, not him. (Or maybe it was I, not he; who can remember?)
Moments like these make me thankful for the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s first lady from 1933-45, who is credited with saying, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Heeding her advice came in handy when I told the service station attendant he had charged me too much for gas, only to discover I was looking not at the “dollars” indicator on the gas pump but the “gallons” figure. They helped me shrug off the snickers of my adult classmates when I earnestly read the word “paradigm” aloud as “pare-uh-DIDGE-um” (apparently the correct pronunciation is “PARE-uh-Dime”), and they prevented me from beating myself up too badly when it took me 90 minutes (and 44 miles on the odometer) to drive nine miles home from Portland, although to be fair I had just moved to Maine, and it was 3 o’clock in the morning.
But sometimes even Mrs. Roosevelt’s soothing words aren’t enough to prevent me from suspecting that I really am a moron, and from fearing that the rest of the world is on the verge of finding out.
Not long ago, I picked up a used copy of “End Zone,” a satirical novel written in 1973 that was nominally about football, which I used to follow back then. Its award-winning author, Don DeLillo, has been widely praised as one of the latter 20th century’s most influential writers.
Eagerly diving into the story when I got home, I kept waiting for the funny stuff to start, and because I was too cheap to not get my dollar’s worth, I kept on reading. But it was like plowing through several miles worth of hip-deep mud on a tricycle.
Like “Catch 22” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” two other much-praised books that I clearly “didn’t get,” slogging through “End Zone” and not understanding what was so great about it left two possibilities: either it was lousy, or I wasn’t perceptive enough to pick up on its brilliance.
Brief research revealed the book was considered insightful and scathingly funny by anyone with a brain in his (or her) head. The issue was settled. I’d have declared myself stupid, but then I thought of Mrs. Roosevelt and refused to give my consent.
It’s hard explaining exactly what stupidity is, but most people recognize it when they see it. One night two decades ago, my roommate was perched in front of the TV watching “Beavis and Butt-head,” a show I had snobbishly dismissed without watching on the grounds it was just too idiotic to waste my time on. However, that night I sat down attempting to be social, and subsequently laughed uproariously for the next half-hour. But after admitting I had been wrong about the show my roomie watched religiously each week, I had to satisfy my curiosity about something.
“Hey Jeff,” I asked, “how do you know which one is Beavis and which one is Butt-head?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he responded. “Butt-head’s the smart one.”
— Andy Young is a teacher at a York County high school. He is considered to be an expert on all things stupid, or at least that’s what his children tell him.
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