Ninety years ago, Columbia Pictures released a film that transformed the trajectory of American screen comedy.

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night tells the story of spoiled Park Avenue heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), who meets newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) on a Greyhound bus in Miami. Ellie has just run away from her overbearing father, who disapproves of her recent elopement. Peter recognizes Ellie from the headlines and makes her an offer: He’ll help her return to New York to reunite with her husband if she gives him an exclusive scoop he can sell to his editor. Ellie accepts, and along the way home, they fall madly in love.

The movie, a tale of romantic yearning within a battle of the sexes dynamic, became one of the first screwball comedies, a genre born out of evolving socioeconomic and industrial strife that shaped Hollywood filmmaking in the 1930s and early 1940s. Screwball comedy depicted a world full of fast-talking dames, madcap antics, and romance, all set against the backdrop of economic upheaval. During its heyday, it drew in audiences who loved the genre’s unique blend of escapist romance and pointed social commentary. Today, it functions as a kind of time capsule, holding up a mirror to its era’s socioeconomic woes, capturing the bubbling cynicism that pervaded the American psyche in the mid-1930s. It also, paradoxically, continues to demonstrate a timeless appeal, having influenced generations of romantic comedies from 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? to 1999’s Notting Hill all the way up to recent releases like Anyone But You and Rye Lane. That’s because though the characters and settings may have evolved, the relationships featured in these screwy stories still have much to teach us about the universality of the human experience.

Screwball comedy emerged as the United States grappled with the Great Depression. In 1934, when It Happened One Night premiered, unemployment was still hovering at over 20%, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program could not help the populace fast enough. Hollywood wasn’t spared. America’s film industry had enjoyed some 20 years of unencumbered prosperity, capped by a late-1920s attendance boom fueled by the novelty of sound film technology. But during the Depression, dwindling audiences and falling ticket prices forced some major studios into receivership and others to sell valuable assets, like their theaters, to stay afloat. With the industry reporting a collective loss of nearly $250 million between 1930 and 1933, it’s no surprise that uneasiness took hold in the cultural zeitgeist.

The Depression rears its ugly head throughout the screwball genre, thematically puncturing some of its most jubilant moments. In a scene from It Happened One Night, Peter, Ellie, and the other bus passengers break out into a chorus of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Capra captures class solidarity with immense warmth and grace, but that joyful camaraderie falls back down to Earth with the fearful scream of a young boy whose mother has fainted from hunger. In Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), protagonist Mary Smith grudgingly breaks her piggy bank to scrimp together enough money to cover her $7 per week rent. And in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936)—perhaps the most socially engaged film of the classical screwball era—forgotten men become collectible objects in a scavenger hunt for Manhattan’s upper class.

In spite of the genre’s political grounding, screwball comedy didn’t aim to offer practical solutions to socioeconomic precarity. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once mused that screwball comedies were “fairytales for the Depression”—where else but screwball could a $58,000 sable fur coat fall on a working-class woman’s head and turn her life upside down? In the screwball fairyland, the Depression’s omnipresence is counterbalanced with kookiness and absurdity.

Screwball’s proclivity for the fantastic is also reflected in the genre’s approach to romance, which it navigated amid the constraints of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, informally known as the Hays Code. To stave off the looming threat of federal censorship laws, in July 1934, Hollywood studios uniformly implemented this series of guidelines. The Hays Code regulated everything from how scripts could approach topics such as crime, adultery, and sex. And it dictated that all movies must communicate redeeming social mores.

Cavell later dubbed screwball comedy the “re-marriage” genre because it included so many storylines about couples that reconcile after a period of separation. This recurring narrative arc was a direct response to the Code’s moral mandate; the head of its enforcement body, Joseph Breen, a staunch Catholic, believed that marriage was the foundation of a healthy society, and that American films should uphold traditional family values.

One of the genre’s most popular movies—Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937)—begins with duplicitous shenanigans that lead Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) to divorce. The couple realize their undeniable compatibility only after they date other people, and, as in a fairytale, reunite—just before the stroke of midnight, on the eve before their divorce is finalized. In the screwball world, divorce inspires metamorphosis and growth: Characters learn about themselves and their capacity for love. “For better or for worse” is the ultimate awful truth, and Jerry and Lucy’s separation reminds them why they fell in love with each other in the first place.

The classical screwball era lasted until the onset of World War II, when the spread of fascism and the horrors of war made the genre’s domestic politics quaint. Despite its brief window of production, the genre made an outsized impact on the film industry. Nearly a century has passed now since the birth of the genre, and it continues to prove timeless in what it can say about life and love, especially amid hard times. Screwball comedy celebrates silliness, even as it magnifies the razor-sharp line between luck and misfortune. It indulges our childlike impulses and celebrates the joy and whimsy of fun, particularly in moments of grief and uncertainty. In defiance of reality, it imagines up worlds of charming romantic entanglements, pratfalls, and play, where leopards roam free, bears ride motorcycles, and an anti-aging elixir opens up the wealth spring of youth. Most importantly, it speaks to camaraderie and the resilience of the human spirit.

Near the end of My Man Godfrey, the titular Godfrey Parke—a former upper-class playboy who’s disguised himself for much of the film as a forgotten man—returns to the garbage dump he had called home with a friend from his socialite days. After Godfrey introduces him to the people living there, he says triumphantly, “the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” Godfrey’s observation is fundamentally that we are stronger when we come together. And regardless of our circumstances, we all strive for love, compassion, and community.

This sentiment is why the screwball comedy and their rom-com successors are often considered comforting “feel-good” movies. Whether they’re screened at a Depression-era movie theater or viewed at home alone with a pint of ice cream, we love to watch them because, at their best, they tap into the universal ideas that bind us.

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Since 2003, Zócalo Public Square has been on a mission to connect people to ideas and to each other. Whether you visited us in person, streamed our programming live online, or watched on YouTube or Soundcloud later on, thank you for being part of our ongoing experiment to promote public curiosity and dialogue.

Join us as we take a trip down memory lane to relive five events (and one special musical performance) that our staff felt best encapsulated the spirit of 2022. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to learn about our very special, upcoming 20th anniversary lineup.

What Can We Laugh About?

Comedy has always been society’s release valve. Which is why we invited political satirist Bassem Youssef, and playwright, actor, and performance artist Kristina Wong to speak about the political and psychological power of humor. In partnership with ASU Gammage, this Zócalo event, moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, explored comedy’s great potential, and made the case for why the joke can be mightier than the sword.

Will Americans Ever Be in This Together?

The economist and social policy advocate Heather McGhee offered us a new story of American solidarity during her 2022 Zócalo Book Prize lecture. McGhee was our 12th annual winner for her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. In prepared remarks and a Q&A with LA84 Foundation president and CEO Renata Simril, she reminded us that everyone loses when we see prosperity and success as a zero-sum game.

How Do Homelands Cross Borders?

Can you leave your homeland while keeping your cultural and ethnic identity alive? At this Zócalo/Soraya event, presented in conjunction with a performance of Ragamala Dance Company’s Fires of Varanasi, we asked Ragamala Dance Company’s Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, Science Fiction Poetry Association president and poet Bryan Thao Worra, and deputy director of USC’s Institute of Armenian Studies Shushan Karapetian to reflect on the pain and promise of being a member of a diaspora in America.

What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns? with Keri Blakinger

Susanville, California, is one of many rural communities whose economic survival is currently tethered to incarceration. Which is why the city sued the state this year to avoid having its prison shut down. To understand the link between prisons and rural economies, we assembled Lassen Community College president Trevor Albertson, Parlier mayor and retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, and University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, to speak at this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event in Susanville. Moderated by journalist Keri Blakinger, the discussion explored how prison towns came to be, and how they might imagine new futures.

How Can Women and Girls Win in Iran?

Ongoing unrest in Iran, incited by the death of a young Kurdish woman detained by Iranian authorities for supposedly violating state dress laws, has become one of the top stories of 2022. For this Zócalo event, co-presented with the Goldhirsh Foundation with support by Pedram Salimpour, and moderated by author Porochista Khakpour, we invited Iran analyst Holly Dagres, artist Sahar Ghorishi, and anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi to discuss how months of mass protests have created a new movement—and what the world can learn from it.

A Special Zócalo Music Presentation: How Immigrants Composed L.A.

A first for Zócalo: A string quartet from the Los Angeles Opera visited the Public Square. In the historic lobby of the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner building, musicians Evgeny Tonkha, Roberto Cani, Ana Landauer, and Erik Rynearson performed to a packed house, bringing the music of L.A.’s immigrant composers to life during this special Zócalo/Artistic Soirées event, presented in partnership with ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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The prompt audience reply came in unison: “Who’s there?”

Arellano: “Zócal-OK, we can now laugh.”

There was playful booing from the in-person audience—a packed house at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles—but, though the joke bombed, it set off a wide-ranging, alternately funny and serious conversation around our comedic zeitgeist. The discussion brought Arellano (no stranger to humor, including in his long-running “¡Ask a Mexican!” column) together with political satirist Bassem Youssef (dubbed the “Egyptian Jon Stewart”) and performance artist, playwright, and actor Kristina Wong (who is currently touring her 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist work, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord).

In an era of public health and climate crises and deep political division, when many feel like they can’t laugh about what they used to, “What should we laugh about?” Arellano asked the two panelists.

“Humor must respond to its current moment,” Wong said—which for comedians means “thinking about where we need a sense of relief and not creating humor that’s a source of abuse.” She later highlighted the importance of a comedian using their platform to “push for something bigger” than crafting good jokes. (Wong’s latest play is in part about how she advocated for mutual aid at the height of the pandemic.)

The role of humor as a source of relief—not hate—was a common reprise throughout the evening.

But Youssef warned of keeping subjects or jokes off-limits. “The word ‘should’ is a dangerous word,” he said. “It’s always about drawing the line.” He recalled being jailed in Egypt and forced to flee after his political satire show Al-Bernameg “punched up” at the leaders of the country. Nonetheless, Youssef argued for giving comedians free rein—and for comedians in turn to take chances and “face the consequences” later.

But what about comedy that makes fun of everyone? Arellano used the 1974 film Blazing Saddles as an example of equal opportunity Borscht Belt-style humor that doesn’t offend. “The joke has to land,” he said.

The venue also matters. Theater audiences, Wong said, have “a lot more patience” for humor to align with social movements. She recalled her time doing stand-up 20 years ago where drunk people would demand her to “be funny” as a tray of French fries bobbed past the stage.

Youssef discussed the power and problems of satire. Yes, it offers opportunity for commentary on bad political leadership, but it also allows people to mistake funny protest march signs for activism and political involvement. Meanwhile, they delegate the fight to comedians. “Comedians are put on a pedestal,” Youssef said, imbued with too much hope and expectation. But “comedians aren’t leaders. My role stops at the edge of the stage.”

Wong agreed. “There is a missing line between the culture that shifts our thinking and the thinking that leads into the voting booth,” she said.  Governing “is so unfunny.”

Youssef does see one important political role for comedy, as a “litmus test,” he said, “to see what kind of people you have in power.” Youssef compared President Donald Trump’s boycott of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to President Ronald Reagan, who phoned in to the 1981 dinner after being shot and wounded in an assassination attempt. Comedy can show people if “you have a good ruler or a tyrant,” Youssef declared.

Wong also highlighted the social value of comedy in offering opportunity for healing. Prompted by a question from the audience, Wong said that marginalized groups she’s worked with, like undocumented immigrants and incarcerated people, “don’t want to trot out tragic stories of their existence.” She, and they, want “to find those moments of levity and laughter.” Arellano agreed, discussing the time he reported on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Orange County. He got criticized for making fun of the abusers and the people covering up the scandal. But the survivors themselves respected his jokes.

Playing the devil’s advocate, Youssef offered an example of a joke that might have helped heal old wounds only to open a new one—about the lack of representation in recent awards show seasons. He suggested that as a result, we can no longer be outraged when white people are cast in roles people think should go to people of color. Wong and Arellano pushed back before moving on; the topic continued in conversations throughout the post-show reception.

An online audience question brought up the topic of cancel culture. Both Wong and Youssef agreed that cancellation is more about resources than subject matter. If a scandal proves too toxic to the bottom line and an entertainer starts losing contracts, they may be effectively canceled. But Youssef pointed to Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey as examples of public figures making post-cancelation comebacks.

The final question of the night came from in-person audience member (and recent Zócalo guest) Josefina López: How do you make fun of your blind spots? She pushed Youssef to specifically speak about his economic and gender privilege. He was introspective, noting that he cannot see his blind spots “because they are blind.” But he employs self-deprecation around what he assumes people think are his blind spots in order “to protect myself and not get into the trauma of discovering who I am.”

“If you don’t have humor, the game is over,” Arellano said, as the conversation closed. Perhaps the healing power of comedy lies in the fact that a joke shows you that there is a life on the other side of things, even one filled with laughter. “Humor is what makes us human,” he said.

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One of Shakespeare’s conceits is the wisdom of clowns. From Feste in Twelfth Night to the Fool in King Lear, they speak truth to power, but tell it slant and do so at their peril.

The stabbing last month of Salman Rushdie, who lived under threat of a decades-long fatwa for his comedic novel, The Satanic Verses, and Will Smith’s Oscars stage assault on Chris Rock remind us that satire is risky business: One person’s hilarity is another’s sacrilege. Satirists, comics, and fools are ideological pathfinders, risking their reputations, and sometimes their health and security, to chart terrain for the rest of us. Comedians are America’s modular, detachable consciences, at times challenging the status quo, at times serving it.

In his critique of pre-Enlightenment culture, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that long before America’s Bill of Rights enshrined free speech, “comic rites and cults, the clowns and fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of parody” formed a sanctioned resistance to the “official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.”

Fools were stabilizing forces in downtrodden societies, enabling peasant classes to lampoon the rich and vent their discontent with poverty, disease, violence, and a totalitarian church and state—within the bounds of stages and jokes.

Americans, too, have relied on comedians for subversive apprehensions of our national circumstance. Thomas Paine’s wry voice of American common sense planted seeds of our first revolution. American humor also served a unifying function after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, and again in the face of expanding American imperialism in Mark Twain’s satire.

Nineteenth-century America’s jester was the blackface minstrel, his artform employing comic skits and dancing, and freighted with tragic irony. Most minstrels were white men—often Irish and Italian immigrants—who caricatured the physicality of African slaves and freedmen, who had themselves developed show dance forms like the cakewalk to parody the mannerisms of white people. Like Bakhtin’s fools, minstrels performed a kind of acceptable populist subversion that gave rise to blackface literature like, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a century later, dissident narratives such as Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, which called for (white) people to abandon postwar conformity for a more rebellious outlook, which Mailer associated with Black people.

Despite being compromised by the racist tropes of its era, minstrelsy amplified a bevy of art forms including jazz, tap dance, and the blues, which were also deemed subversive due, in part, to their origins in Black culture. Minstrel shows also featured authentic African American talents including Scott Joplin, who was known as the King of Ragtime; Gertrude “Ma” Rainey; and Charley Case, who is sometimes credited with inventing stand-up comedy.

Case’s father was an African American musician; his mother was Irish American. At a time when much of America fell under Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws, Case performed unadorned narrations about his mixed heritage family while casually twisting a bit of string around his fingers. He became one of the nation’s highest-paid performers, and yet, off-stage, Case was known for his brooding, morose nature. He shot himself to death in a hotel room in 1916.

Today, America’s comedians have assumed the mantle of public intellectuals. Whether or not one agrees with them, their collective voices are arguably more pervasive and influential than those of traditional intellectuals like Nicholas Kristof or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And like Bakhtin’s clowns, modern comedians play a dual role in our society—sometimes stabilizing it, and other times challenging cultural norms.

On the day Donald Trump was elected president, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock appeared on Saturday Night Live to leaven what seemed a hopeless situation for half of the country’s voters. Rock ridiculed liberals’ surprise that Hillary Clinton lost; Chappelle struck a conciliatory note: “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.” (Chappelle later apologized for his naivete.)

And after at least 59 people were killed in Las Vegas in 2017, victims of the country’s deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman, survivors appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show to make sense of the carnage.

In both instances, American stand-up comics helped smooth out high-stakes incidents. In other situations, comedians tested societal boundaries. DeGeneres herself went against the grain when she came out as a lesbian 25 years ago, depicting the first openly gay character on primetime television. As billionaire British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling desperately rejected accusations that she was a “TERF,” Chappelle defended her and said he identified with that title. Comedian podcaster Joe Rogan has interviewed some of the nation’s most canceled figures—from a vocal vaccine skeptic to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—inviting widespread protests and commanding ever larger audiences.

One of the reasons that comedians appeal to us so much, however, is that their intellectualism is played, first and foremost, for laughs. Comedy is performative, and whatever views they express may not be “real,” but all an act. “I talk shit for a living,” Rogan said in a stand-up routine earlier this year. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.”

Comedians’ riffs on sexual assault, gender identity, electoral politics, abortion, or any other off-limit discourses are creating new canons of critical literature, displacing the intellectual takes of popular academics of the past. But unlike treatises of old, when Jon Stewart rants about bat coronaviruses and burn pits, or Bill Burr takes on abortion rights, millions are listening, watching, guffawing, and sometimes, even agreeing.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you wanted to know what Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, or Cornel West thinks about a given topic? You’re more likely to wonder what HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher said about it. It’s no accident that America’s most popular cable news program, Fox’s The Five, employs comedian Greg Gutfeld to speak about current events. The second most-watched cable news show is Tucker Carlson Tonight, which bounces between rightward diatribes and satirical snark.

In the age of social media, where a wrongfooted sentence can conflagrate a career built over a lifetime, comedians are our ideological crash-test dummies. They press the limits of permissible speech and thought, they challenge social convention, they test our boundaries, and make us roar when they tell us what we’re really thinking (but dare not say aloud).

The comedic mask allows us the liberty of laughter, without any commitment to deeper subversions. Jokes reveal hypocrisies and incite us to laugh at the nakedness of our emperors—even in front of our emperors. American comedy is a sanctioned release of social and ideological pressure, often in service to more durable authorities.

Comedians are America’s public intellectuals, sure, but they’re also just joking.

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A joke can be the best way to present real-life issues. Comedians can poke fun at the absurdity of the human condition, even take on topics that feel taboo—like America’s brutal war in my home country of Afghanistan.

It took until I was in college, when Fahim Anwar’s “So, you’ve been invited to an Afghan wedding” dropped in 2007, to finally see an Afghan man who managed to do what other comedians were doing. Anwar, who was still working his day job as an aerospace engineer, racked up 500,000 views on YouTube for the “how-to” video, which quickly became a cult a hit among Afghan Americans. Finally, one of our own was talking about how ridiculous but endearing our practices and family expectations could be. It wasn’t heavy-handed, but rather put a humorous twist on the conversations we had with our cousins in our bedrooms, a safe distance from our parents.

But comedians like Anwar were outliers in a post 9/11 America. Mostly, we had to suffer through hackneyed, partisan pandering and racist jabs at Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims in general. Think of the Islamophobic jokes that Joan Rivers felt perfectly comfortable making about Palestinians, whom she infamously said “deserved” to die. Or her unfunny joke about there being “one outlet” in all of energy-poor Afghanistan. Plus Kathy Griffin’s dumb “the entire country of Kuwait smells like a fart” standup or her story of finding her “gay, even in Kandahar, Afghanistan.”

And then there is Bill Maher saying, “It’s that time of year again, April 15, taxes. I know it’s depressing, but just remember, you’re paying for roads, bridges, hospitals, and an army to keep the nation free. Unfortunately, that nation is Afghanistan.” He may have had a political point about the military industrial complex (a point he made in other comments following 9/11 that cost him his show). But the joke came off as smug and uncaring, considering his years of Islamophobic rhetoric. Not to mention the numerous reports of abuse, killings, and intimidation of Afghan civilians by U.S.-led forces.

As much as these comedians may have abhorred the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and even Donald Trump, their comedy was not that far off from what those men and their supporters have been spouting since the early 2000s. The jokesters presumably voted Democrat, but their jokes recalled Trump’s “shithole countries” remark.

However, in recent years, some political comedy has evolved beyond crypto-racist cringe to address the hypocrisy of America’s “War on Terror,” signaling people’s fatigue and anger with it. A month before the one-year anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, for instance, the comedian Andrew Schulz opened his comedy special Infamous with a joke about the politics surrounding the war: “Be honest, is there anybody here who loves Joe Biden? We have any Taliban here?” Schulz managed to break down the result of 20 years of U.S.-led occupation in Afghanistan with a single punchline.

At this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner Trevor Noah told a similar joke: “No president in my memory has given more marginalized groups opportunities. I’m talking about women, the LGBTQ community, the Taliban—the list goes on and on.”

These jokes bring some pointed humor where usually there are rushes of anger and resentment at the botched occupation and withdrawal. The humor works because it manages to be both subtle and direct. It’s political, not pandering. And it trades on political realities, not tired punchlines about chadaris, “burqas,” or beards.

Those of us who lived through the 20-year U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan know that it was President Biden who followed through with former President Donald Trump’s 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban. We also know that Biden’s poorly thought-out withdrawal from Afghanistan cost the lives of many Afghans, some trying to flee by clinging to the wheels of departing U.S. military jets days after the Taliban returned to power. Immediately after the Taliban retook the country, Biden instated sanctions, withheld Afghan assets, and cut back on aid, all of which was quickly followed by other Western countries and international organizations. This left the Afghan people unemployed, without money, and hungry just as a government accused of massive human rights abuses had taken control of the country.

That’s the kind of hypocrisy that hurts.

I appeared on a podcast produced by former Obama White House staffers shortly after the Taliban takeover, where I said: “Biden, in a lot of ways, has turned out to be a thousand times worse than Trump.” I stand by those words. For Afghans, Trump’s honesty about hating us lacked the hypocrisy of Biden pretending he ever cared. Especially since he called one of the most beautiful provinces of Afghanistan “hell on Earth” and reportedly told former President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan, whom Afghans have long accused of aiding and abetting the Taliban, is “50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”

My comment led to an online backlash from Democratic Party loyalists, who refused to criticize the 79-year-old politician’s policy on sanctions. My point instantly became lost to entrenched partisanship. Smart comedy, which is becoming more common, is moving in the direction of deriding the rigid partisanship in America and getting to the root of important issues.

In Kabul, where I’ve lived since 2013, we spent years watching sketch comedy shows like Shabak-e Khanda, a popular program that pulled no punches in its criticism of corrupt, self-serving Western-backed politicians and the hypocrisies and double standards of Afghan culture. Now, many of these comedians have left the country in fear of the Taliban. With their programs off the air, we’ve had to rely on our own family, friends, and social media for comedy. When the Taliban’s prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund, asked “Chi shai ghwari?” (“What do you want?”) during an Eid-day address at the palace in Kabul, we mockingly quoted in a multitude of crude punchlines about everything wrong with the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, presenting pressing real-life issues, some literal—we want jobs, we want our teenage daughters back in school—and others cruder and mocking—“You want to know what we want? We’ll show you what we want!” (among other things that can’t be printed in case the Islamic Emirate reads this). As always, each impression and response is a reminder that Afghans have not lost their sense of humor, and that jokes cuts through the most difficult and twisted of times—and is the steadiest hand to the truth.

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The New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post have all analyzed Zelensky’s comedy and performance to find some connection to his inspiring leadership style. “Indeed, watching Zelensky now,” the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote, “one does not think, Oh, wow, he once was a comedian! One thinks, This is what a comedian looks like in power.”

However, as the war has progressed and its horrors have become more evident, I think Gopnik’s observation should be flipped: Our thinking “he once was a comedian!” is the key to Zelensky’s moral authority during this crisis. Zelensky’s ability to pivot from silliness to seriousness, convincingly and completely, amplifies the power and gravity of his actions.

When examining the intersection of comedy and politics, it’s important to state a distinction: Volodymyr Zelensky is a funny person who became a politician, not a politician who happens to be funny. And the bar for being a “funny” politician is low. Consider a 1964 quotation compilation titled The Humor of JFK: It’s a mercifully thin book. (One line does still hold up: Kennedy joked that his rich father ordered him not to “buy a single vote more than necessary” because “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”)

Ronald Reagan made plenty of genial quips; Donald Trump was a fountain of caustic put-downs, and both were in the entertainment industry before they were in politics. But neither ever had to be hilarious for a living, day in and day out. While we have a sense of Reagan, Trump, or JFK without their humor, we can’t separate Zelensky’s rise from his work in comedy.

Our closest American equivalent is Al Franken, who was famous on Saturday Night Live before he won a Senate seat in Minnesota. Like Franken’s comedy, Zelensky’s ranges from purely silly (simulating playing “Hava Nagila” on a piano with his genitals) to thoughtfully satirical, on his hit television series Servant of the People. On the show, which aired from 2015 to 2019, Zelensky played Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko, a frustrated history teacher who delivers an anti-government rant to his class. The lesson goes viral, and Goloborodko is elected president of Ukraine, where he experiences the corrupting temptations of power and privilege and the inept bumblings of bureaucrats. Zelensky’s performance connected so deeply with Ukrainians that it launched him into real-life politics.

If the typical politician gets too much credit for being funny, I think the opposite is true for the comic-turned-politician, who has to impress by demonstrating seriousness. In office, Al Franken was a sober and earnest presence. Knowing that he had played the absurd self-help guru Stuart Smalley didn’t undermine Franken’s sincerity—it underscored that he had matured into a new role. Franken’s once having been a comedian, and his unusual path to government, often made him seem more, not less, authentic.

After Zelensky’s 2019 election, it would have been easy for critics to write off his presidency as a joke. Zelensky didn’t let them. He managed to pass anti-corruption legislation, and taking an unusual stance for an Eastern European politician, staunchly defended LGBTQ rights when confronted by a heckler during a marathon press conference.  He has approached war, too, with unwavering seriousness: remaining in his country in the face of great danger, galvanizing the world in a United Nations speech detailing Russian atrocities.

Humor may help a leader get votes, but once elected, a savvy and responsible leader knows when to evolve and find the right tone. “No leader wants to be thought of as ‘insubstantial,’ much less a clown,” said Patric Verrone, a comedy writer who served as president of the Writers Guild of America during its 2007 strike, which put thousands of his colleagues’ careers on the line. “The danger is making sure that you don’t ‘yuk it up’ so much that people don’t take you seriously,” he told me.

Playing against type is more powerful that trying to live up to it. Imagine if Zelensky’s hit show on Ukrainian television had been not Servant of the People, but Fury Force 5 or something similarly over-the-top, and Zelensky’s career had been more Arnold Schwarzenegger than Al Franken. Would his reported comment, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” have had the same impact? I doubt it. A fake action hero maintaining his persona in the face of actual danger seems out of touch, not inspiring. When Schwarzenegger was governor of California, his attempts to tap his fictional persona often fell flat. He has said he regrets calling legislators “girly men,” a term which originated, coincidentally, on Saturday Night Live. In contrast, Schwarzenegger’s recent appeal to the people of Russia, in which he spoke candidly about his father’s membership in the Nazi party, drew a positive reaction for being emotional and somber.

David Goodman, another comedy-writer-turned-serious-WGA-president, thinks that many comics have instincts that drive them away from leadership roles. “Politicians hate being laughed at; comedians or comedy writers, on the other hand, are not only used to being laughed at, they actually seek it out,” he said. Which makes it doubly impressive, Goodman added, when someone like Zelensky deftly handles a situation of such magnitude.

When we see a former comedian face the likelihood of death and call the world to account, we see a human being rising to meet the moment. We see someone transformed. As Adam Gopnik points out, it’s a sharp contrast to Vladimir Putin’s imperial posturing. Putin is surely someone who hates being laughed at. But he is trapped in his persona, a one-dimensional figure who may earn obedience but can’t surprise us enough to earn respect.

Comedy depends on surprise—a punchline is an idea that we didn’t see coming. And in the midst of a brutal war, “Oh, wow, he was once a comedian” may be the most inspiring punchline of all.

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Back then, in 2002, I did not know, exactly, what a mentalist was. But the performance changed my life.

The mentalist asked my wife at the time and another woman—someone we did not know—to get up from the audience, to stand about 8 feet apart in the performance area, and to close their eyes. He silently touched the woman with a feather, twice, on different parts of her arm. He then asked my wife, whom he never approached, if she felt anything.

“Yes,” she said. Something had touched her arm.

“Where?” the mentalist asked.

My wife pointed to two places—the same spots he had touched on the other woman’s arm.

“What did you feel touch you?” the mentalist then asked my wife.

Her answer: “A feather.”

The audience gasped audibly. This was inexplicable. Over the next hour or so, this guy performed impossible feats of thought-reading, precognition, telekinesis, and verbal persuasion. If I had seen him on TV, I would have sworn he was using stooges, confederates, camera tricks, or doing some sort of “cheating.” But I had no explanation for what I saw in that hotel suite that night. I know there were no confederates. My wife volunteered in a couple more demonstrations, and I knew she wasn’t in league with the mentalist. (Or, perhaps she was, which would explain our eventual divorce.)

Right then and there, I became hooked. Mentalism provided me with a new passion, an obsession. What drew me in was the mystery of it all—the power to read and control thoughts, the ability to predict actions, and the opportunity to perform a wondrous, other-worldly show.  Having someone merely think of a drawing, then taking a pad and duplicating their vision perfectly?  Or handing someone in your audience (not a stooge) a sealed envelope at the beginning of the show, and opening it at the finale to reveal every single choice made by spectators throughout the night?

Mentalism forces people to consider that things they previously thought to be impossible are, in fact, possible. My father was a philosophy professor at New York University for more than 50 years. Mentalism, like philosophy, involves the quest to figure out the unknown; there’s a strong metaphysical aspect to it. And, like stand-up comedy, mentalism asks its practitioners to observe the human condition, find the things we have in common, and make a connection with the audience. Both are all about understanding patterns.

After that demonstration at the Waldorf, I wanted to understand how it worked, and to learn how to read thoughts myself. I probably acquired close to a thousand books on mentalism, and several hundred videos. I found a couple mentors, too. I started practicing whenever I could, doing simple demonstrations everywhere I went. I worked up one demonstration where someone drew a picture and I duplicated it without ever seeing it, standing in a far-off location. I perfected another where I asked a person to think of a loved one, and then I guessed their loved one’s name. After blowing people away, everywhere from dinners out to the checkout line, I started doing my mind-reading act at parties, and eventually I took a shot at going pro. Over the past 10 years I’ve traveled around the world several times, performing in hotels, comedy clubs, cruise ships, and theaters.

The longer I do this work, the less I believe in the supernatural and the more I believe in intuition. So much of what I do is based on psychology, observing human behavior, and recognizing patterns of thought and body language. It’s also about knowing how to control someone’s choices through linguistics or “verbal judo,” as mentalist Andy Nyman calls it. I can get a volunteer to make the choices I want them to make without them, or the audience, ever getting a sense of my process.

One of the greatest mentalists of all time, the late Bob Cassidy, once said, “If you want to be real, don’t claim too many talents.” Mentalism includes thought reading, thought sending, clairvoyance, remote viewing (seeing something from a far-off location), and psychokinesis (which consists of effects like metal bending). Can I bend cutlery and coins? Sure, but I heed Cassidy’s advice, and I don’t. If I step onstage and bend a fork with my brain, it makes everything too unbelievable. “You can pick up on thoughts and you can bend spoons?” an audience member might say, the seeds of suspicion creeping in.

My favorite mentalism exercises rely on verbal persuasion techniques—using spoken language, and body language. There are no props. It’s not sleight of hand, like traditional magic. It’s sleight of mind, and it draws on neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, statistics, behavioral patterns and other science-based methods. And while sometimes I’ll fail, that ultimately is to my benefit: getting something wrong offers credibility, because what mind reader would make an intentional mistake?

So, yes, what I do is real, and I present it as such, as do many of my colleagues. But I believe it is not ok, nor ethical, to say we can talk to spectators’ dead relatives, or to prey or profit on people’s grief. Some mentalists offer a disclaimer before their act, informing the audience that there’s nothing supernatural involved. I respect the impulse, but from a performance standpoint, I think this is counter-productive.  As Cassidy used to say, “Why would anyone pay to see a fake mind-reader?”

I never say what I am doing is real, or that it is a trick of the mind. I leave that to the audience to decide for themselves.

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What possessed writer-director Aaron Sorkin—a man who’s openly stated that I Love Lucy is “not a show … we’d think was funny” today—to make a film that dramatizes a week of the sitcom’s production is a mystery. Sitting through the biopic, though, I thought back to the “Scary Lucy” situation with new sympathy. Suddenly I understood the frustration of feeling Lucy’s image was being shaped by the wrong hands.

It also got me thinking about why—amid a spate of new Lucy content, including the Amy Poehler-directed documentary Lucy and Desi and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, which inserts “Lucille Doolittle,” a Ball composite character, into its 1970s San Fernando Valley coming-of-age story—we’re still having a hard time getting the “real” Lucy right today.

Ball, born Lucille Désirée Ball on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, lived multiple lives as a model, showgirl, and “queen of B-movies” before the success of her CBS Radio comedy My Favorite Husband led the network to invite her to develop the show for television. Ball famously agreed—so long as she could play opposite her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz.

The result, ultimately, was I Love Lucy, one of the most watched and influential television shows of all time.

While Lucy Ricardo is beloved for her hijinks and heart, it’s easy to forget that Ball’s character was also emblematic of the changing role of the American housewife in the postwar era. In 1951, when the sitcom debuted, women who’d entered the nation’s workforce during World War II were being pushed out of it and into the suburbs.

“She’s a transitional figure—she’s on the cutting edge,” said Leslie Feldman, a professor of political science at Hofstra University and author of The Political Theory of I Love Lucy.

Ricky constantly dashes Lucy’s dreams of becoming an actress, beginning in the pilot episode where he tells her, “I want my wife to be a wife, I want you to bring my slippers when I go back home, prepare my dinner, and raise my children.” But throughout the show’s six-season run—where it never left the top three in weekly ratings—Lucy pushed back, enacting various harebrained antics, with the help of neighbors Ethel and Fred Mertz, to become a star.

She’s often successful: When the Ricardos go to Hollywood, MGM offers Lucy a contract; when they go to England, the Queen herself requests to “meet the lady that did the comical dancing.” But each time Lucy gets a taste of fame, she’s put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between her career and her family.

This struggle “represents the conflict of women in the second half of the 20th century,” said Feldman. “Are they going to stay home and be wives and mothers? Are they going to go to work? Or are they going to do both? And what if they really do better and earn more money than their husbands? What about that? That’s an element of Lucy, too.”

The real Lucille Ball faced these same questions. Ball was 40 years old when she started filming I Love Lucy, and she’d devoted herself to her career. “She was very serious-minded, and an incredibly hard worker,” said biographer Kathleen Brady, adding that Ball was the “first to say she was a workaholic.” On the other hand, family was extremely important to her, and growing up in the Great Depression, she had a traditional view of how that dynamic worked. “Certainly, her idea was that women cater to the men, wives cater to the husbands,” said Brady.

What Lucy Ricardo achieved on the show—a happy home and family life—is what Lucille Ball wanted off screen. But her great success as an actress, a comedian, and later, a businesswoman came at a personal toll.

A tribute paid to Ball by actor and comedian Taylor Negron, who’d enrolled in a comedy class she taught in the late 1970s, speaks to this. “Lucy paid a heavy price for fame; she knew its depthless, lonely suspension,” he wrote in “The Pink Gorilla (Tuesdays with Lucy),” a moving reflection on the eight-weeks he spent learning from her at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental Film School. But it was this insight into the human condition, he argued, that gave her comedy so much depth. “Lucy was a realist who made the world a happier place to be in because she mocked the sadness in her life,” he wrote.

“Scary Lucy” statue in Celoron, New York. Courtesy of Adam Moss/ CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The public did not see much of that sadness. Throughout her life, Ball worked hard to shape her image, something instilled in her by the Hollywood studio system she rose up in.

“She wanted to present her best self, and she felt this was an obligation,” said Brady, the biographer. While as Lucy Ricardo she was fine wearing a fright wig and blackening her teeth, as Lucille Ball, she spent hours in makeup and hair. She also went to personal expense to respond to every fan request that came her way. “She took the love of the public seriously,” said Brady. “I think she always knew it could go away in a minute.”

Because of this, Brady believes that in this recent slate of Lucille Ball biographical work, the star would likely approve of the Poehler documentary, Lucy and Desi, the most, calling it a “valentine” to Ball and Arnaz’s relationship.

It replays the tale “we want to know—that Lucy and Desi always loved each other, and that this was a great love story,” Brady said. But, of course, that’s only part of the truth: “There were years,” she said, “where they genuinely and truly hated each other.”

Both Lucy and Desi and Being the Ricardos chose to write about Ball through her relationship with Arnaz. But the story of their partnership isn’t the only narrative around Ball to tell. Lucy and Desi, in fact, offered a tantalizing glimpse into another account of the star that one day I hope gets its own feature treatment. That’s her relationship with I Love Lucy co-star Viviane Vance, specifically during the era they starred together in The Lucy Show.

The sitcom debuted in 1962, the year that a recently divorced Ball reluctantly bought Arnaz’s interest in their production company Desilu. In The Lucy Show, she and Vance reunite on screen as two single women making a go of it together. The show is the first to feature a divorced woman (Vance’s character) on primetime television, just as off camera, Ball navigated life after two decades of marriage to Arnaz and adjusted to being the first woman to head a Hollywood studio.

Putting the focus on Ball and Vance would make space for a truer, and more complicated look at Lucy to surface. It also would offer a reminder that I Love Lucy was not just about the love story between Ricky and Lucy.

After all, while it is Arnaz’s Ricky who famously sings “I love Lucy,” the line could have easily been said by Vance’s Ethel. Their friendship served as its own emotional heart of the show. Because, as Feldman, the political scientist, pointed out during our conversation, “Ethel loved Lucy, too.”

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