As the old joke goes, The Paris Review on humor is no laughing matter. Ninety-seven pages into its special issue, “Whither Mirth?,” Jeffrey Eugenides decides to posit a rib-tickler:

Humor is always generated by the leap from a premise to a logical but unseen conclusion. It works according to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-thesis dialectic. For example, take the vaudeville joke (reprised by Buddy Glass): First comedian: “I just spent two weeks in bed with an acute hepatitis.” Second comedian: “You lucky stiff! Which one? They’re both cute, those Hepatitis girls.” Here the thesis is hepatitis, a disease. The antithesis is the Hepatitis girls, two people. The final thesis— the humor—comes with the recognition of the unseen connection between these two dissimilar items.

The thesis is sounder than the joke. For the pun to work, the first comedian has to say, “I just spent two weeks in bed with acute hepatitis”—not “an acute hepatitis.” But, somewhere between Jeffrey’s pen and the printed text, that indefinite article has been inserted and the entire humorological foundation of the joke has collapsed. Of course, you could hastily improvise a rescue plan and make the two sisters Anna Cute-Hepatitis and Dolores Cute-Hepatitis, but, in vaudeville at any rate, I think you’d find you’d been given the hook by now and replaced by Otto the Wonder Poodle.

Happily, the world of letters is far less demanding. Humor is an act of precise but lightly-worn compression; analysis of humor tends to woolly but heavily-worn prolixity. The extraneous indefinite article in Eugenides’s joke is a whimsical reductio of The Paris Review’s endeavors: taken as a whole, the entire issue is a very indefinite article. You get to the end, and you wonder where the punch line was.

A joke has a kind of formal purity—so that, even if you don’t find it funny, you can respect its structural integrity. Here’s Weber and Fields in New York a hundred years ago:

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

That was no lady, that was my wife.

I like its portability. A year or two back, the British magazine Private Eye showed two gangsta rappers chillin’ in the ’hood:

Who was that ’ho I saw you with last night?

That was no ’ho, that was my bitch.

A century on from the original, you can see the difficulties the joke has run into. You couldn’t tell the updated version on network TV or in The New York Times without explaining that you personally didn’t regard women as ’hoes and bitches, but, equally, you weren’t implying that all African-American men were sexist braggarts. In the favored cliché of the society gossip columns, we “share a joke.” And, at a time when we share less and less, why should jokes be the exception to the rule? Hyphenation, the great evil of the age, extends to humor as much as anything else. Even the most cursory glance at the Op-Ed pages of our major newspapers makes plain the compartmentalization: here’s the African-American columnist on the Million Man March; here’s the Jewish-American on Israeli-Syrian peace talks; here’s the Latino-American on welfare payments to illegal immigrants; here’s the gay-American on government cutbacks in AIDS research; and, down at the foot of the page, here’s the Humorist-American on … electronic barcode scanners at the supermarket, or why men never change toilet rolls, or how come those sachets they give you on planes are designed to catapult the salad dressing over the guy sitting next to you. Because, after the heavyweights have claimed the Million Man March and the Middle East and welfare and AIDS, what’s left?

“Humor has to surprise us, otherwise it isn’t funny,” Garrison Keillor tells George Plimpton. “It’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it’s not a surprise anymore.” Worse, the very label shrinks your comedic license. “Humor is not about airline luggage or foreign taxicab drivers,” Keillor insists. I agree. But we shouldn’t deduce from that that he altogether disdains glib recognition-humor. “When I am funny,” he continues, no doubt to knowing chortles from his audience of Paris Review readers, “I hope to be funny about Republicans, not about Pakistani taxi drivers.” Which goes to show that easy laughs are mostly a matter of taste.

That’s the funny thing—maybe the funny thing—about The Paris Review. Although Plimpton has titled his “humor issue” “Whither Mirth?,” the “whither?” remains unwrung, the tone complacently nostalgic. The three big interviews grandly headed “The Art of Humor I, II & III” accurately convey the timidity of the enterprise: Calvin Trillin is best known for his small-town chronicles in The New Yorker, Keillor is holed up in Lake Wobegon, and Woody Allen spends his time, as he once said, “Looking for Cole Porter’s New York”—or anyway a New York where, if it’s not Porter on the soundtrack, it’s Gershwin or Benny Goodman. These are insulated worlds. Nothing wrong with that: P. G. Wodehouse’s world is an insulated one, and it’s the most joyously comedic landscape in literature. But Plum’s England and New York and Hollywood do far greater justice to the available range of socio-economic groups than Plimpton’s trio does: as Spike Lee and others have noted, there are no blacks in Woody Allen’s New York; there are no blacks or gays or Pakistani taxi drivers in Lake Wobegon. Again, nothing wrong with that. I’m just struck by the narrowness of The Paris Review’s humor horizons. In yucko veritas: we all know those sales execs who pay lip service to the company’s nonsexist behavior codes but can’t wait to start swapping stories about the chick with the big hooters. I wonder if Plimpton isn’t offering us polite society’s equivalent: the liberal, educated, NPR-listening middle classes—the ones who profess to be on the side of the Pakistani taxi drivers —can’t wait to flee the multicultural, multisexual utopia they commend so enthusiastically and retreat to the uncomplicated world of small town certainties. At the end of “Whither Mirth?,” The Paris Review does this literally, decamping for a symposium on the state of contemporary comedy to Menaggio, Italy. As battle-scarred British music hall veterans used to say, it’s not exactly the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night. The section is headed “Como Conversazione”—Como as in Lake, though Como as in Perry would be a more honest assessment of the state of contemporary comedy. Almost in inverse proportion to the escalating ugliness of every other sphere of American culture, humor has snuggled deeper and deeper into its cosy cardigan: rap, grunge, cyberporn, phone sex, daytime talk shows, natural born killers, homoerotic bullwhips and bodily fluids … and Dave Barry.

This isn’t how comedy thinks of itself. There’s a much-quoted story of the English actor on his deathbed being asked if dying is hard. He replies: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” That’s the received wisdom. A couple of years back, at some terrible awards ceremony or other, Joan Collins was supplied with the anecdote as part of a pre-scripted link before handing over a prize for Best Comedy. She swaggered out on stage, gazed into the teleprompter, read all the preamble—the actor, the deathbed, etc.--then said: “He replied: ‘Comedy is easy. Dying is hard.’ ”

There are two things to say about Miss Collins’s misreading: (1) She still got a huge laugh. That’s because she thought she was telling a joke and so she told it as a joke, and the audience was expecting to hear a joke and so heard it as a joke. Comedy uses forms and structures as a type of insurance. David Letterman’s nightly “Top Ten” list is only the most obvious example: the countdown, the drum rolls are designed to cue laughter anyway; if the line is actually funny, it’s merely a bonus. (2) Miss Collins’s version is funnier. That’s not because it’s necessarily truer but because it’s more subversive: it goes against received wisdom, which comedy is supposed to do but hardly ever manages—in this case, the received wisdom being the smug self-confidence with which comedians and writers and thespians deem their chosen livings as especially difficult.

Comedy is not hard, not now. Contemporary comedy may think of itself as directly descended from Lenny Bruce, but actually it’s closer to “Ozzie and Harriet.” Most comedy is pandering: it lets you know that you were right all along—about barcode scanners, salad dressing, Republicans. Its greatest weakness is that it’s scared to tell you things you don’t already agree with. For example, the contents page of The Paris Review lists something called “Yahoos,” page 198. You turn to page 198 and you find a list of “members of the U.S. House of Representatives who recently voted for the Stearns amendment, which in essence intends to abolish government aid to the arts.” And that’s it: a list. “It may be the funniest contribution in the issue,” giggles the editor. Well, yes, it may be. But it still isn’t funny enough. As an example of the laxness of humor, it’s hard to beat. Listing a bunch of Congressmen under the heading “Yahoos” doesn’t tell you anything about plans “to abolish government aid to the arts,” but it tells you everything about Plimpton’s assumptions about his readership: like the airline luggage, it’s the easy laugh, the recognition laugh, the laugh of the pandered to.

You have to be exceptionally strong-willed, careless, or downright perverse to throw that away. Personally, I find Garrison Keillor much more interesting when he starts in on one of his denunciations of Tina Brown and, for a moment, the measured Midwestern façade cracks a little as he trembles on the brink of a rant: here’s something Mister Mellowtone gets steamed about, that he has a stake in. But then he remembers the time and effort he’s invested in constructing the lovability of Garrison Keillor, and gets a grip. Everybody loves Lake Wobegon—except, in my experience, small-town townsfolk who resent New Yorkers driving through and going, “Gee, it’s just like Lake Wobegon.” But, when Keillor tackles a darker theme like male insecurity in The Book of Guys, the sense of an author who wants to say something yet who’s scared to say anything is almost palpable. As it was, even the ever-so-slight hint that Garrison might not be quite so nice and nostalgic and quaintly irrelevant to all the unpleasantnesses of life as we all want him to be rattled some reviewers. When Guys came out, Keillor was on the road in Burlington, Vermont, and did some stories from the book for his adoring fans. “Did he do the one about Vermont?” I asked a friend. “What one about Vermont?” she said. I showed it to her: for Keillor, it’s almost savage, mercilessly mocking the Green Mountain theme-park state, McDonald’s Golden Arches on pre-aged wood shingles, the Ben & Jerry’s school of caring capitalism—and all accompanied by an ongoing pledge drive for the very story as it’s being told. It would have taken a small amount of guts to do that in Burlington before an audience of pledge-drive-crazy Vermont Public Radio reconstituted arts’n’croissants flatlanders. But it would have unsettled them, and Keillor is too in love with his lovability.

The cosiness is even eerier in the Woody Allen chapter, where not a mention is made of the man’s recent difficulties. You sense the Review feels it would be in bad taste, and that bad taste has no place in humor. But the Fall of Woody is significant because it’s the clearest example of how we’ve divorced comedy from life: like the Times Op-Ed page, we put a border round it and seal it off in the corner. For years, the guy made movies where he played a middle-aged lecher with the hots for young babes, and we all said what a likable schnook he was. When it turns out he’s much the same in life, we’re aghast—as we would be if Schwarzenegger passed his weekends gunning down anyone who got in his way. At his first press conference, he made the mistake of essaying a one-liner or two, and was promptly denounced in the media for the inadequacy, the inappropriateness of the response. Today, when comedy meets life, the laugh dies instantly. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have transformed the court jesters into the eunuchs in the harem.

From time to time in “Whither Mirth?,” John Irving or Mordecai Richler will grumble about political correctness and the policing of humor, but the Review’s narrow selection and the bland, deferential interviewing of Allen and Keillor hint at its own difficulties with “non-approved” jokes. Over the years, Plimpton has never been one to shirk a challenge. Instead of letting him cuddle up to Keillor and Harold Bloom, why not toss him in with the “non-approved” boys, with Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh? Surely, as an assertion of comedic muscle, Limbaugh’s example is inspirational. It’s the jokes that gave him the edge on his competition (to hear that Mario Cuomo regards his own fumbling talk-show as an answer to Limbaugh’s is to marvel at liberalism’s determination to misunderstand the reasons for his success): the jokes drew the audience, and he delivered the audience to the Republican Party. At the very least, he fulfills Keillor’s definition of humor as surprise: pre-Rush, opening up the show, as Limbaugh did after the November ’94 elections, by singing along to James Brown’s funkadelic “I Feel Good” would not have fitted our definition of conservative behavior. “I’m sick of the old clichés,” complained Sam Goldwyn. “Bring me some new clichés.” That’s what Limbaugh’s done.

The trouble is the cliché pool keeps shriveling. A rich white man slipping on a banana skin is funny; a black pimp is too risky: you might get accused of making some offensive African-American/jungle primitive connection, like the department store Santa in New Jersey who greeted the little black boy, as he greeted the little white boys, with a playful “You little monkey!” and promptly found himself facing a massive Santa suit. In the Review’s “Birth of a Notion” section here, there’s a long two-page account of how Newsday’s Doug Marlette came up with a cartoon on affirmative action—in the course of which it becomes clear that he regards cartooning as an affirmative action program in itself. Well, yes, it ought to be, but not in the way Marlette thinks. One of the cruelest things you can do to anyone—black, lesbian, whatever—is to exclude him or her from the jokes.

Plimpton might have found it useful to chew the fat with Mort Sahl, a Sixties survivor disowned by his peers because he declined to join in the knee-jerk bashing of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Sahl on stage makes a sobering contrast with Keillor: the better disposed an audience is toward him, the more perversely he sets out to turn them against him. GQ’s David Kamp makes a reference to what he calls “pre-ironic humor.” I think that’s the difficulty the Review has with Limbaugh. Rush is a pre-ironic show on pre-ironic radio stations: he means it. Keillor’s is an ironic variety show on an ironic radio network. Its inverted commas seal it off from the world.

This isn’t a call for more topical jokes. For one thing, I’d dispute whether there’s any such thing. There are timeless jokes, and topical, passing politicians or celebrities who briefly attach themselves to them. If you wait long enough, as Bob Hope and his meticulous filing system have, you’ll be able to recycle those Hoover Administration one-liners on some boob in the Clinton White House. Jokes hardly ever change; only the targets do. A few years ago, a couple of British tabloid gossip columnists concocted a romance between me and my friend and colleague Carol Thatcher, the Prime Minister’s daughter. “Pity it’s not true,” a stand-up comic told me. “You’d have the ultimate music-hall mother-in-law act.” Yes, indeed. But, in effect, he and his pals had beaten me to it. In the Eighties in Britain, there was an “alternative comedy” movement which refused to do mother-in-law jokes on the grounds that they were sexist. In practice, all the mother-in-law jokes were slipped in disguised as Mrs. Thatcher jokes. Misogyny was okay in anti-Thatcherite garb; ageism was fine applied to President Reagan. I think the mother-in-law jokes underestimated Mrs. Thatcher, just as the stupid jokes underestimated Ronald Reagan. According to the comics, the President was a B-movie bozo asleep on the job, which was just as well because, in the rare moments when he woke up, he was a warmonger. Eat your heart out, Dean Swift. There has to be more to it than that.

We don’t have political humor, we have sound-bite humor, where each celebrity is permitted one trait: now, Bob Dole gets the age jokes, Ted Kennedy gets the drunk jokes. The President, being the President, is allowed two traits: he’s fat and he’s a womanizer. Halfway through a sluggish Top Ten list on the Clinton-Yeltsin summit, Letterman was forced to spell it out to the audience: “The one guy likes to eat, the other likes to drink. That’s all you need to know.” It’s hard to know which is more pathetic: the jokes, the audience, the explanation. “The culture is less literate,” says John Updike, and it echoes through “Whither Mirth?” like a vaudevillian catch phrase. Humor depends on a shared frame of reference: in Wodehouse, you can get Milton and “When the Silver of the Moonlight Meets the Lovelight in Your Eyes” within a single paragraph—though, if it’s Bertie Wooster, the Milton allusion will usually be covered with “if that’s the cove I’m thinking of” or some such. That kind of vernacular erudition is long gone. Who’s Milton? The new lifeguard on “Baywatch”? David Kamp deplores “the pop culture reference that substitutes for a punchline.” But what else remains? So on and on they roll, the trite allusions to “Leave It to Beaver,” Twinkies, “Wheel of Fortune.” And this stunted comedic vocabulary is so woefully undernourished that it barely sustains the airline luggage gags, never mind Bosnia or AIDS or Haiti, about all of which there are many fine jokes waiting to be made.

“We are not amused,” said Queen Victoria, and history has not been kind to her. But, in a demotic culture, humor has an even harder time. The most decisive victory in the Cold War was the final exchange, when the Soviets announced they were replacing the Brezhnev Doctrine in the Warsaw Pact countries with the Frank Sinatra Doctrine— “You do it your way”—and Vice President Quayle, responding on behalf of the United States, said that was all very well but he hoped Soviet occupying forces would remember the Nancy Sinatra Doctrine— “These boots are made for walking.” This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a titter. For, when everything’s a joke, nothing is. Today, when public discourse is conducted in one-liners, the sovereign is his own court jester. And Queen Victoria’s spiritual heirs are the joke-sifters on the sidelines, pursing their lips disapprovingly and genteely maintaining their standards. Feminists? Farrakhan? Oh, no, couldn’t possibly, some people might conceivably not be amused.

Humor is always a delicate flower but it withers and dies in isolation. There’s nothing more tedious than the saloon bore regaling us, unstoppably, with the one about the Englishman, the Irishman, the Scotsman/the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew/the virgin, the faggot, the transvestite … Divorced from context, character, situation, they’re just formulae. Unless he has Wodehouse’s command over language, in rhyme and reason and rhythm, a good funny man has to have the capacity for cruelty. Not bitterness or sarcasm, just cruelty—like Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust, when, after one hundred pages of bright young things larking about, the author turns the novel on a sixpence with Lady Brenda’s momentary gratitude that it’s her child and not her lover who’s been killed. The more we fence comedy off from all the complications in society, the less likely we are to get anything that good ever again. The best advice in the issue is that of a local disc jockey to the schoolboy Trillin: “Well maybe you could be in your family business and then just be funny when people come in.” He was picturing Trillin amusing customers in his diner or hardware store, but it works just as well when The Miami Herald asks you to be their new officially designated “funny writer”: “Well maybe I could be a writer and then just be funny.”