Comedy, satire and Gore Vidal

Al Capp

George S Kaufman was one of our most gifted Playwrights. He wrote comedies that made him rich, and satires that broke his heart. There was a difference and Kaufman never knew it until opening night. "Satire," he once said, "is what Closes on Saturday night."

Comedy is sleeping on a water mattress. Satire is sleeping on a bed of nails. Comedy requires no special recognition from the audience other than a passing acquaintance With the human condition. Satire; on the other hand, cuts so close to the bone it makes you a bit uncomfortable while you laugh, a bit ashamed for having laughed at all. The meanest of us doesn't really have a good time at satire. And so it closes on Saturday night.

There is one annual satire in this country which is always an enormous hit, possibly because it closes the night it opens. That is the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, an association of journalists based in Washington. On that night, and on that night alone, the mighty are disembowelled, and in their presences. It is an unforgettable sight to watch an unapproachable official of the United States en-lit a guffaw with enough conviction to sound real, at a song that flays him alive, or a sketch that, outside the dub, would be a cause for action, if not treason.

Satirical plays, satirical films are doomed, Just as George S. Kaufman said, and the fact that every now and then some producer will back one is a tribute to the unquenchable hope that has made us the mightiest nation in the world, and the most bankrupt.

An example is Gore Vidal, a writer so talented that when he chooses to write rubbish, it has more inescapable literary quality than any American writer. For decades Vidal has loathed Richard Nixon, as must every American writer who wants to be published. (The one exception is Allen Drury, who, since Advise and Consent; has turned out novel after novel with the wrong ideas. All are excoriated for that, by our book reyiewers, but they continue to be bestsellers. This, itself, is used to point out the execrable taste of an increasingly large segment of our literate public. No way has yet been found to get Drury to change his ideas, or his profession, but although Advise and Consent was a movie blockbuster, no producer has yet been found to make another one, as they continue to do with the works of Jacqueline Susann.) Vidal's loathing for Richard Nixon was robust and cheerful. Nixon was a loser, he was a clown, a man who wore square handkerchiefs in his breast pockets and whose hair was clipped by a veterinarian. Vidal treated him in the comic way one would expect the author of the exquisite Justinian to treat the author of the advertising folder Nixon called Six Crises.

He wrote a play called The Best Man. In it, the Nixon character wasn't human, he was a humanoid, and the spectacle of real people, a real country, not realising what he really was, was irresistibly funny. We all roared at it and it ran for years. But Nixon didn't think of himself as comic. He didn't think of himself as a robot.

He thought of himself as a serious man, and a human being. He ran against Kennedy and was beaten. He swallowed his pride and ran for the Governorship of California and was beaten. He gulped down his gorge and campaigned for his arch-enemy, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was beaten. In between, Nixon plodded the country speaking anywhere they'd have him, to anybody, about anything.

The press scarcely reported anything Nixon said. Vidal, on the other hand, was all over the press. He was writing a book about transves tites and the great issue of those times was, "Is Myra Breckenridge really Myron Breckenridge or is it the Other Way Around?" As for Nixon, the press paid so little attention to him that when the convention of 1968 was held, no one could believe that this man of threadbare ideas could be nominated, but he was. He'd accomplished it all when nobody was looking. But it could do no harm. The long-beloved Hubert Humphrey would beat him. And he would have done, if this had not been 1968, the time when our TV and press were dominated by middle aged men who told us our youth could do no wrong when they set out to tumble (other) middle-aged men from their jobs (except for TV commentators and popular columnists). If that convention had lasted two weeks longer, if the public had had two weeks more of watching the crazies — for it soon became evident that the yowling, bearded mob in Chicago had no more to do with American youth than Charles Manson with the Boy Scouts — . we would, beyond the slightest doubt, have sensibly resolved to vote for anyone and everything they were against. But for once, time was on Nixon's side, he was nominated by a Republican convention so well-mannered that it was a parody of the Democratic one.

Nixon's first term went, for Nixon, quite well. Vidal didn't like him any better, it seems to me, recalling his appearances on TV, but there wasn't anything much to sink his fangs in, and I cannot recall that he was hysterically enthusiastic about McGovern.

Then came Watergate, and then came Vidal's An Evening With Richard Nixon. And then came the old George S. Kaufman prediction about satire. After a few ,Saturday nights, it folded.

Why was The Best Man a success? Why was An Evening With Richard Nixon not one?

There is, in my mind, no debate about the literary merits of each. Unlike Walter Cronkite, I think men over forty, even Cronkite himself, are wiser than boys of twenty, and better playwrights, which is why I will not knowingly get on a plane piloted by a boy of twenty, nor see a play by one.

An Evening With Richard Nixon was about a real, on-going tragedy. The Best Man was an opinion. The latter was produced at a time when possibly half the country was pro-Nixon, whereas the former came at a time 'when the only pro-Nixon vote you could count on was his daughter Julie's.

Does comedy please us because it is basically good natured? Does satire repel us because it is merciless?

Does anyone set out deliberately to write satire and, if he does, is he doomed?

Does anyone set out to write comedy, and if .he doesn't catch it when it becomes satire, is he doomed?

If anyone sets out to write comedy and it comes out comedy, is he settled in for many, happy Saturday nights?

[ think so. In my own career I've set out to write satire and when I succeeded, millions of readers loathed me. But when I let some mercy in, when I portrayed my victim as a man with some dim conviction that the horrors he was committing were somehow quite nice, if you looked at them in the proper way, it was comedy and I've run for forty-one years of Saturday nights.