Come Back Bullies, I Miss You
Top left: Kyle, Kandee, Tamara, Sherrie, Knute, Karene is on Loraine’s lap and George is on Kenneth’s lap
Kyle’s the one on the top left. Long before the invention of road rage, he spent three days in jail for hurling his enraged fist at some dude who was blocking the road. He’s also famous for decking a kid in a church spook alley who was too in character for his taste. I credit him with establishing the tradition of Kleven males thumping on their younger siblings. His own little brother Knute (the lad in the tie on the far right) was too young to receive instructions from him firsthand, but somehow the message was relayed. As soon as George reached the proper age, Knute gave him his first lesson in what a fist feels like.
I know the lessons continued because I saw those two wage war against each other. Not the polite Greco-Roman wrestling all brothers engage in, but the type of Ali-Frazier brawlery that lands you a time slot on ESPN Classic.
I know the lessons continued because I saw those two wage war against each other. Not the polite Greco-Roman wrestling all brothers engage in, but the type of Ali-Frazier brawlery that lands you a time slot on ESPN Classic.
In ten years time Kyle had passed away, my three oldest sisters moved out of the house and were replaced by three more boys. Darrell is in the red sweatshirt.
My older brother George (top row right) — always attentive to duty — taught his younger brother Jimmy (yellow shirt far left) how to absorb a blow and Jimmy, in turn, passed that knowledge on to me (blue shirt bottom right.)
Despite his early passing, Kyle’s legacy of brotherly violence lived on through each of the Kleven sons; however, my gut tells me that the further you get from Kyle’s native proficiency with the subject, the less proficient the boy. So although Jimmy would occasionally wrap me in a blanket and thump on me (just as his older brother did to him,) l could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He was simply going through the motions, performing an obligatory duty. There was little malice in the beat downs he administered to me. If l didn’t cry or squeal, he would eventually get bored with the ceremony and move on.
Now his friend Ray though was a different story entirely. Ray was a true sadist, possibly a trait he developed to deal with the fact that he was so short. As a six grader, he once delivered a knee shot to my third-grade groin that l can still feel today, which brings me to the topic of the neighborhood I grew up in.
My parents raised their kids just north of Dodger Stadium in a stretch of blocks the locals refer to as Frogtown. The neighborhood was largely Hispanic back then and during the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s it was run by a gang of the same name. Not everyone was a cholo though. Some of the kids I went to elementary school with were aspiring social justice guerrilleros who were decades ahead of the White-Privilege Recognition curve and set about adjusting for the advantages bestowed upon me by colonialism, or paleness or… whatever, by converting the term “white boy” into a slur that they would use whenever they felt that I needed to be brought down a peg, along with other gems of the era like “little faggot” and “pendejo.” Being the linguists they were they also knew that if they deleted the “u” from my name they could transform the label “Doug” into the much more useful word “Dog.” Doug — for those who don’t know — is my name, while Dog is a generic term often applied to Doug’s best friend, Kumba.
Despite his early passing, Kyle’s legacy of brotherly violence lived on through each of the Kleven sons; however, my gut tells me that the further you get from Kyle’s native proficiency with the subject, the less proficient the boy. So although Jimmy would occasionally wrap me in a blanket and thump on me (just as his older brother did to him,) l could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He was simply going through the motions, performing an obligatory duty. There was little malice in the beat downs he administered to me. If l didn’t cry or squeal, he would eventually get bored with the ceremony and move on.
Now his friend Ray though was a different story entirely. Ray was a true sadist, possibly a trait he developed to deal with the fact that he was so short. As a six grader, he once delivered a knee shot to my third-grade groin that l can still feel today, which brings me to the topic of the neighborhood I grew up in.
My parents raised their kids just north of Dodger Stadium in a stretch of blocks the locals refer to as Frogtown. The neighborhood was largely Hispanic back then and during the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s it was run by a gang of the same name. Not everyone was a cholo though. Some of the kids I went to elementary school with were aspiring social justice guerrilleros who were decades ahead of the White-Privilege Recognition curve and set about adjusting for the advantages bestowed upon me by colonialism, or paleness or… whatever, by converting the term “white boy” into a slur that they would use whenever they felt that I needed to be brought down a peg, along with other gems of the era like “little faggot” and “pendejo.” Being the linguists they were they also knew that if they deleted the “u” from my name they could transform the label “Doug” into the much more useful word “Dog.” Doug — for those who don’t know — is my name, while Dog is a generic term often applied to Doug’s best friend, Kumba.
Kumba: Legendary Dog
The important thing to note here is that I never ran to my Mom to tell her that Ray rubbed my face in the concrete or that Jimmy wrapped me in a blanket and slammed his fists into my rib cage or that she should have thought to schedule a dentist appointment for me on the day we learned that California used to be part of Mexico before I stole it from the other kids in Mrs. Casky’s 5th grade class and that’s why they live in the ghetto.
Just like every other kid in the neighborhood, I never reported my tormentors to the authorities because we assumed that if we weren’t already capable of handling our own affairs, we needed to quickly acquire that skill so that the rest of our lives wouldn’t suck.
I write that last line, partly to toss some “kids these days” insult at kids these days who demand safe spaces even long after they ceased to be kids, but mostly to point out that back then, most people — children and adults — handled confrontation differently. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we had it completely right, I’m merely suggesting that we might learn something useful by revisiting previous methods of conflict resolution.
I remind the reader of the way the world was not because I fear that the upcoming generation presents some existential threat to the republic or civil society or Major League Baseball. If it were simply a matter of a youthful urge to distort our centuries-old governing mechanism or dramatically alter societal norms or impose the DH rule on the National League, I wouldn’t interfere. But unfortunately, something much more serious is at stake.
If we don’t make a course correction, we are going to ruin comedy.
Comrades, our sterilized speech fetish, and obsession with curating both children and adults through a landscape full of conflict-free zones risks creating an environment devoid of the conditions that give rise to most of our comedy. Consider these three case studies: if alive today — given the contemporary zeitgeist — these two gentlemen would be out of work:
Just like every other kid in the neighborhood, I never reported my tormentors to the authorities because we assumed that if we weren’t already capable of handling our own affairs, we needed to quickly acquire that skill so that the rest of our lives wouldn’t suck.
I write that last line, partly to toss some “kids these days” insult at kids these days who demand safe spaces even long after they ceased to be kids, but mostly to point out that back then, most people — children and adults — handled confrontation differently. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we had it completely right, I’m merely suggesting that we might learn something useful by revisiting previous methods of conflict resolution.
I remind the reader of the way the world was not because I fear that the upcoming generation presents some existential threat to the republic or civil society or Major League Baseball. If it were simply a matter of a youthful urge to distort our centuries-old governing mechanism or dramatically alter societal norms or impose the DH rule on the National League, I wouldn’t interfere. But unfortunately, something much more serious is at stake.
If we don’t make a course correction, we are going to ruin comedy.
Comrades, our sterilized speech fetish, and obsession with curating both children and adults through a landscape full of conflict-free zones risks creating an environment devoid of the conditions that give rise to most of our comedy. Consider these three case studies: if alive today — given the contemporary zeitgeist — these two gentlemen would be out of work:
When I build the Comedy Hall of Fame, my first two inductees will be Archie Bunker and Mr. Jefferson
This man would have had all of his first amendment rights withdrawn:
Redd Foxx
And this cat would have been impaled long ago for jokes he hadn’t yet considered speaking out loud:
Richard Pryor
Now contrary to my own critique, I’ve invested almost two decades into training my children to never bully anyone, but as I look across the landscape I fear that the bully-less-leaning environment I helped create may be more nefarious than the bully-filled world we banned. We may be sinking by degree into a crueler pit than the one we pretended to escape.
At the very least it’s getting more and more difficult to tell a joke.
One need only check the news every now and then to understand why. Consider the effect of the endless train of individuals and organizations that we force to apologize to us for what they wore for Halloween, or for being a self-deprecating Canadian, or for being an opinionated Canadian, or for being a dumb Canadian, or for eating tacos, or for publishing satire, or for being “outdoorsy” (FYI: this is also incredibly lame,) or for imitating Japanese accents or Indian accents, or for wearing braids or sombreros, or for ribbing a kid who can dish but not take, or for watching Disney movies, or for being witty, or for having good taste in literature and last but not least, for dancing with a kangaroo during a comedy act.
Comrades, when we attempt to place a cotton-based buffer between every single human interaction we not only blast away at the pillars upon which comedy rests but we arrest the development of a crucial layer of the epidermis that everyone needs in order to survive in a sometimes cruel world. When we reward people without said layer of skin with attention, honor, and money we send a signal that thick skin is relatively useless and victim-hood is a marketable good. When we develop a market for sufferers, the law of demand will supply us with a surplus of victims. And once we’ve incentivized the receipt of harm, the crowd will start hurling itself under the bus, with the great tragedy being that no one will be allowed to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Because in a world where being offended pays, delivering punchlines gets very expensive.
Don’t get me wrong though, in a bubble-wrapped world you can still find comedy. You’re just limited to safe comedy that must be carefully pitched from within one of the following three following subcategories of humor:
At the very least it’s getting more and more difficult to tell a joke.
One need only check the news every now and then to understand why. Consider the effect of the endless train of individuals and organizations that we force to apologize to us for what they wore for Halloween, or for being a self-deprecating Canadian, or for being an opinionated Canadian, or for being a dumb Canadian, or for eating tacos, or for publishing satire, or for being “outdoorsy” (FYI: this is also incredibly lame,) or for imitating Japanese accents or Indian accents, or for wearing braids or sombreros, or for ribbing a kid who can dish but not take, or for watching Disney movies, or for being witty, or for having good taste in literature and last but not least, for dancing with a kangaroo during a comedy act.
Comrades, when we attempt to place a cotton-based buffer between every single human interaction we not only blast away at the pillars upon which comedy rests but we arrest the development of a crucial layer of the epidermis that everyone needs in order to survive in a sometimes cruel world. When we reward people without said layer of skin with attention, honor, and money we send a signal that thick skin is relatively useless and victim-hood is a marketable good. When we develop a market for sufferers, the law of demand will supply us with a surplus of victims. And once we’ve incentivized the receipt of harm, the crowd will start hurling itself under the bus, with the great tragedy being that no one will be allowed to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Because in a world where being offended pays, delivering punchlines gets very expensive.
Don’t get me wrong though, in a bubble-wrapped world you can still find comedy. You’re just limited to safe comedy that must be carefully pitched from within one of the following three following subcategories of humor:
- Juxtaposed incongruities: i.e., weird things walking into bars.
2. Hyperbole: simple exaggeration of an otherwise unfunny fact.
Mark Twain was a master hyperbolist
3. Physical Comedy: people colliding into things.
Buster Keaton rules over this genre
If you’ve scanned that list and feel like it’s sufficient, l assure you that you are mistaken. All comedy, even safe comedy, germinates in ground fertilized by mockery. Every joke, no matter the category, springs from the same exact soil; because all humor has a target. So clearly there must be at least one more category, one that provides us with the lion’s share of laughter:
4. Ridicule: old-fashioned making fun of people
4. Ridicule: old-fashioned making fun of people
Please understand though that the fourth category is not what happens when comedy goes wrong, it’s what happens when comedy wakes up in the morning, has a bowl of cereal, makes a deposit at the bank on the way to work, orders a pastrami sandwich at lunchtime, disagrees with her boss, texts her aunt, flirts with the dude in accounting, eats chili flavored Top Ramen for dinner and watches re-runs of What’s Happening with her grandma before falling asleep on the couch. There’s nothing inherently cruel about ridicule just like there’s nothing inherently criminal about narcotics. Context is everything.
A society that makes fun of itself isn’t necessarily inhumane. Just the opposite can be true. Mockery is often a sign, not of acrimony, but of harmony. In my own case, I generally only make fun of people I adore (celebrities excluded.) And I rarely am insulted by people who don’t like me (at least not to my face.) But I wouldn’t want to eradicate ridicule even if I were regularly the butt of jokes delivered by people who hate me. Far from ever asking for a ridicule exemption, I only ask for hilarious punchlines. I can take a joke and I don’t want to live in a society that can’t.
Unfortunately, these days, lots of people do.
I don’t know who raised this crowd that recoils at the thought that someone, somewhere might oppose them and that gets incensed every time the opposition cracks a joke, but I would like to recommend a solution to our problem of hypersensitivity. And no I’m not going to encourage elementary school kids to tease each other more than they already do or that siblings should dial up the internecine-violence. I’m not pro-cruelty, I’m pro-humor. But comprehending and digesting a joke often requires the listener to have an intellect trained to recognize nuance so that they understand that no harm was intended or done.
To acquire that type of wit I suggest we attempt a back-door solution to the problem and reintroduce a game that kids used to play in elementary schools all across Los Angeles, decades ago. The name of the game was (cover your eyes before reading further:)
Smear the Queer
Below is a recent photo of the handball court at Allesandro Elementary.
A society that makes fun of itself isn’t necessarily inhumane. Just the opposite can be true. Mockery is often a sign, not of acrimony, but of harmony. In my own case, I generally only make fun of people I adore (celebrities excluded.) And I rarely am insulted by people who don’t like me (at least not to my face.) But I wouldn’t want to eradicate ridicule even if I were regularly the butt of jokes delivered by people who hate me. Far from ever asking for a ridicule exemption, I only ask for hilarious punchlines. I can take a joke and I don’t want to live in a society that can’t.
Unfortunately, these days, lots of people do.
I don’t know who raised this crowd that recoils at the thought that someone, somewhere might oppose them and that gets incensed every time the opposition cracks a joke, but I would like to recommend a solution to our problem of hypersensitivity. And no I’m not going to encourage elementary school kids to tease each other more than they already do or that siblings should dial up the internecine-violence. I’m not pro-cruelty, I’m pro-humor. But comprehending and digesting a joke often requires the listener to have an intellect trained to recognize nuance so that they understand that no harm was intended or done.
To acquire that type of wit I suggest we attempt a back-door solution to the problem and reintroduce a game that kids used to play in elementary schools all across Los Angeles, decades ago. The name of the game was (cover your eyes before reading further:)
Smear the Queer
Below is a recent photo of the handball court at Allesandro Elementary.
Photo courtesy of Michael Corrigan (nice shadow work Miguel)
I don’t know how they do things now, but back in the day each class was assigned a section of playground (you couldn’t just wander all over the joint during recess.) When my class was assigned the handball court we would normally play a game called Butts Up (I‘ll explain some other day.) But if we didn’t feel like playing Butts Up we would pass the time with a few rounds of Smear the Queer.
That unfortunately named game required one kid to hold onto a ball while five or six other kids chased him. Inevitably the kid with the ball would get knocked to the ground (please note that we played the game on blacktop.) Once the kid was down the point was to hold onto the ball as long as you could as one or two kids tried to pry the prize from your arms while the others pummeled you with feet and fists (no headshots.)
I was nigh unto terrified of getting punched and or kicked so each time I went down I pretended that the impact with the ground jarred the ball loose (I would go on to graduate from High School with a bachelors degree in Pretending to be Tough.) But there was one kid in my class, I want to say that his name is Cesar, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong; whatever his name, he was a runt like me but twice as thick (not fat, just thick.) When that kid went down, he would never let go of the ball. You’d have two boys prying away at his hands while the rest of the crowd rained blows upon the Armadillo, but he wouldn’t let go. I would usually get in a few initial licks on him but I could never stomach the violence required to bring his turn to its conclusion.
I remember once standing above the scene, watching Cesar absorb shot after shot — no longer participating—and concluding that, based on the evidence, Cesar’s dad should be prosecuted for child abuse because there’s no way a kid could withstand a beatdown of that magnitude without putting in time after hours with a professional.
Anyways, the point of the story is that elementary-age amigos played Smear the Queer, not to exact revenge or settle scores, but to have fun. Smear made us better not worse friends. Believe it or not, but violence in the right context — just like ridicule — can be really fun for kids of all ages.
I know it’s heretical to suggest, but I say that we reintroduce the game to our children so that future generations won’t have to be raised on eggshells and comedy can live on until our galaxy is blasted to nothing. Of course, we would have to retire the name because heaven knows it’s far too problematic (an issue we understood even back then, which is why in the presence of adults we called it Smurf.) But with that tiny adjustment, I think that it would be safe to rear another generation of children educated in the finer points of Smurf. Let’s let our kids scrape up their elbows and bang their heads against the asphalt again. Let’s let them make fun of each other too, give each other nicknames based entirely on their foibles: tiny for the fat kid and mumps for the boy whose sister has chicken pocks. Of course, from time to time they are going to delete letters from each other’s names. This will hurt a little, sometimes it will hurt a lot; because every now and then they’ll get carried away. But the net effect will be positive, a dramatic improvement over our current society, increasingly governed as it is by neo-puritans who protest every time they come across someone whose sense of humor is not yet warped by sclerosis.
Hopefully, in time, our elementary schools will churn out entire platoons of kids capable of taking a punch and a joke (the two go hand in hand.) I know this makes you nervous, but trust me, it’ll be good for them. Our children are more resilient than we think. Let’s put a ball back in their hands and have a pack of them yell out SMURF! as they zigzag after that lone runner. But more important, when they finally knock the runner down, let’s teach that kid to hold onto the ball.
That unfortunately named game required one kid to hold onto a ball while five or six other kids chased him. Inevitably the kid with the ball would get knocked to the ground (please note that we played the game on blacktop.) Once the kid was down the point was to hold onto the ball as long as you could as one or two kids tried to pry the prize from your arms while the others pummeled you with feet and fists (no headshots.)
I was nigh unto terrified of getting punched and or kicked so each time I went down I pretended that the impact with the ground jarred the ball loose (I would go on to graduate from High School with a bachelors degree in Pretending to be Tough.) But there was one kid in my class, I want to say that his name is Cesar, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong; whatever his name, he was a runt like me but twice as thick (not fat, just thick.) When that kid went down, he would never let go of the ball. You’d have two boys prying away at his hands while the rest of the crowd rained blows upon the Armadillo, but he wouldn’t let go. I would usually get in a few initial licks on him but I could never stomach the violence required to bring his turn to its conclusion.
I remember once standing above the scene, watching Cesar absorb shot after shot — no longer participating—and concluding that, based on the evidence, Cesar’s dad should be prosecuted for child abuse because there’s no way a kid could withstand a beatdown of that magnitude without putting in time after hours with a professional.
Anyways, the point of the story is that elementary-age amigos played Smear the Queer, not to exact revenge or settle scores, but to have fun. Smear made us better not worse friends. Believe it or not, but violence in the right context — just like ridicule — can be really fun for kids of all ages.
I know it’s heretical to suggest, but I say that we reintroduce the game to our children so that future generations won’t have to be raised on eggshells and comedy can live on until our galaxy is blasted to nothing. Of course, we would have to retire the name because heaven knows it’s far too problematic (an issue we understood even back then, which is why in the presence of adults we called it Smurf.) But with that tiny adjustment, I think that it would be safe to rear another generation of children educated in the finer points of Smurf. Let’s let our kids scrape up their elbows and bang their heads against the asphalt again. Let’s let them make fun of each other too, give each other nicknames based entirely on their foibles: tiny for the fat kid and mumps for the boy whose sister has chicken pocks. Of course, from time to time they are going to delete letters from each other’s names. This will hurt a little, sometimes it will hurt a lot; because every now and then they’ll get carried away. But the net effect will be positive, a dramatic improvement over our current society, increasingly governed as it is by neo-puritans who protest every time they come across someone whose sense of humor is not yet warped by sclerosis.
Hopefully, in time, our elementary schools will churn out entire platoons of kids capable of taking a punch and a joke (the two go hand in hand.) I know this makes you nervous, but trust me, it’ll be good for them. Our children are more resilient than we think. Let’s put a ball back in their hands and have a pack of them yell out SMURF! as they zigzag after that lone runner. But more important, when they finally knock the runner down, let’s teach that kid to hold onto the ball.
