I had in mind a stronger word than ‘Jerk,’ but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to put it in a diary title. Also, I don’t know whether it says more about me or about the times we’re living in that I seem to have spent a lot of time on this site talking about comedians of late.
Anyway, for anyone who doesn’t remember, Denis Leary started out back in the 90s as a stand-up comedian. His big shtick was playing up what a stereotypical white male American asshole he was. He wrote and performed a catchy tune and put out a couple of reasonably successful videos and some specials about pretty much just that—being an asshole.
His routines were crammed with bitter complaints about all the newfangled things he didn’t understand or approve of and how things kept getting more inconvenient and uncomfortable for guys like him: plain black coffee and smoking areas getting harder to find, clueless kids walking around with their pants half off, red meat getting a bad rap, everybody talking about their feelings, et cetera ad nauseum. A lot of it hasn’t aged very well.
Although he says he’s a Democrat, and I don’t recall that he ever descended into bigotry, his habit of revelling in rude, crass, insensitive, angry-white-guy behavior makes it easy in retrospect to look at him as a progenitor of today’s internet trolls and MAGA cultists.
And yet...thinking back on the days of No Cure for Cancer and Lock ‘n’ Load, I can’t help but feel there’s a major difference.
Leary’s jackassery was self-aware, rueful and resigned. He complained and kvetched and grumbled and swore and occasionally screamed about all of his frustrations and his sense of growing obsolescence.
But what he did not do—and this, I think, is crucial—was demand that it all stop.
He didn’t say, We have to do something about this. He didn’t call on all the other frustrated assholes out there to rise up, band together and make the world safe for red-meat-eating, black-coffee-swilling, cigarette-smoking, unrepentantly obnoxious white dudes. He yelled Pull up your pants! but he didn’t add: Or I’ll pull them up for you. He held forth at length on what a bunch of morons and sissies the kids were these days, but never suggested that it was either his right or his duty to set them straight or take anything back that he felt they had stolen from him.
Instead, he said: Suck it up, buttercup. Nobody gets everything they always wanted or is happy all the time. Life sucks, so put on a helmet, appreciate whatever small joys you can find in everyday things, and get up again tomorrow and go to work.
He was, in short, an adult asshole who was clear on the fact that whether he liked it or not, the world didn’t revolve around him and wasn’t going to stop changing for his convenience. He reserved the right to vent about it, loudly and colorfully, but that was all.
Let’s face it, there will always be some assholes in the world. You can’t really outlaw being a big jerk. But what I want to know is—what happened? How did we get from a society where ‘your average white suburbanite slob’ who ‘liked football and porno and books about war’ was popular enough to make a living grousing about how much modern society vexed him and others like him, but didn’t spark a seditious cult movement, and instead made fun of his own frustrations and got people to laugh about it; to one exemplified by Donald Trump and Cliven Bundy, where they live in a state of arrested adolescence, possess no sense of humor or self-awareness at all, think they’re an oppressed minority, and believe that it’s their God-given right and mission to ‘take back the country’ at any cost?