Editor’s note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency. She is the author of: “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Transformed American Politics in the 1990s” He is also the co-host of the podcast “Past Present” and “A complicated day in political historyThe opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Further comments On CNN.
CNN
—
When comedian Jerry Seinfeld gets nostalgic, he seems to lament the loss of two things that once dominated America: “agreed hierarchies” and “hegemonic masculinity.”
Courtesy of Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer
He made that longing clear in a recent interview with Free Press editor Bari Weiss, talking about the early 1960s, as the two broached issues like black civil rights and toxic masculinity, focusing on hegemonic masculinity and class society as “part of what made that period so fascinating.”
This outdated view of the past may not be an intentional reference to the revanchist politics of the present, in which women have no access to health care, professors have been fired for teaching black history, and Supreme Court justices have openly questioned the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Indeed, for him, at least, politics and politics are separate things, and Seinfeld openly despises them.
But like it or not, his vision of gender and masculinity, shared by many male comedians (and, unsurprisingly, conservative politicians), is highly political, and his prominence in comedy circles reinforces the outdated politics currently rife in much of the US.
Jokes about women have long been a staple of stand-up comedy, but the “give me my wife” comedy of the mid-20th century has slowly morphed into something more trenchant, a cultural commentary concerned with male emasculation and placing the blame on women.
Seinfeld alludes to this by linking the collapse of hierarchy to the end of hegemonic masculinity. Other comedians are more explicit. Adam Carolla put it bluntly in his 2010 manosphere rallying cry: “We’ll All Be Girls in 50 Years.” “Masculinity, however defined, is disappearing,” he writes in the introduction. For him, masculinity means both toughness and male dominance. He complains that he is often called a misogynist when “he’s just pointing out that men and women are different.” But this isn’t true. He tells his readers bluntly that women are dumber, softer, and less funny than men.
Like Seinfeld, Carolla imagines a certain period of the 20th century as a better time: for him, the 1950s was a time when “women cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, and mended torn dungarees, while men ran the household, fixed the cars, repaired the roof, and fended off intruders with baseball bats,” he explains. But thanks to developments such as the feminist movement, these clear gender roles began to change: women got more jobs and more power (though Carolla is “better at home with the kids than at work”), and men became metrosexual.
Unlike Carolla, some comedians celebrate the progress women have made in recent decades. Feminism, he blames, has lost its image of what a “real man” was like, what he does, and what he wants in the old days. Bill Maher offers a similarly nostalgic assessment in his latest book, “What This Comedian Says Will Shock You.” He points out that Americans are having less sex and blames feminism for destroying men and ruining sex. “This is the result of all these years of being taught that masculinity itself is toxic and horribly underdeveloped, and that women don’t like it…Women aren’t attracted to the effeminate men we’ve created,” he writes. “Maybe what we need now is more sex and less gender.”
Though it is primarily women who are the target of these comedians’ denunciations, their criticism is also tied to the anti-gay and anti-transgender panic that is rampant and visibly weaponized in the political arena. The masculinity they defend is resolutely heterosexual, threatened not only by women but also by gay men and gender nonconforming people. Carolla’s panic is explicit: “No father wants his son to be gay,” he writes in the first chapter. Though he claims to support gay rights, he does so with frustration: “I’m open-minded, but I feel guilty.” His anguish over metrosexuals (a now-outdated term for well-groomed heterosexual men learned from gay men) is a reminder that calls for a return to 1950s-style masculinity are based on anti-feminist, anti-gay politics.
Indeed, calls for a return to 1950s-style masculinity have found a number of prominent political advocates in recent years, most notably U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley. The Missouri Republican will be publishing a book in 2023 called Manhood: The Manly Virtues America Needs, arguing that “there is no greater threat to this country than the collapse of American masculinity, the collapse of masculine strength.” He blames this collapse on modern liberalism, employing the same truth-telling framework that comedians use: “Masculinity is a taboo topic,” he writes, positioning the defense of traditional gender hierarchies as transgression.
Get our free weekly newsletter
In his interview with Weiss, Seinfeld explains that the power of comedy is to penetrate society’s veneer and get to the truth. Like Maher and Carolla, he positions himself as one of society’s truth-tellers, and is “allergic” to the need for “consensus and consensus and mob control” to control other human beings. There’s no need for fact-checkers or analytical essays. A comedian’s accuracy can be measured by the laughter of the audience, an indication of the recognition that the comedian has hit the nail on the head, something we all know deep down but no one else is willing to say.
But sometimes “what we all know deep down” is simply “what we’ve all learned,” and it can be, and often is, wrong, cruel, and an advantage for the powerful over the powerless. Comedy can be subversive and liberating, but it can also be regressive and insular, and many comedians, even big names like Seinfeld, can’t always tell the difference.
Nor are they always aware of the political stakes of what they say. Seinfeld became a star with observational comedy depicting the banality of everyday life; his eponymous sitcom was famously absurd for having no politics, no stakes, no message, nothing. But his nostalgia, while less obvious than his traditional wife’s Instagram account or his “Make America Great Again” hats, flows in the same vein and carries with it the same toxic politics.
