I have an embarrassing confession to make. On weekday nights at 11 I turn on MeTV and watch the bits and pieces of The Carol Burnett Show that the channel broadcasts before it turns to the serious business of Perry Mason. Watching these old shows is informative and educational in a whole bunch of different directions. Mason’s more or less in-house detective, Paul Drake, smokes and smokes and smokes again, with nary a trigger warning to the equally smoky audience of the early 1960s. The cars that the people on the show drive are the boats that we Boomers grew up with. Mileage? Maybe ten miles a gallon? I honestly can’t imagine navigating the streets of Reading, PA, in those automobiles.
But on a recent evening, the Burnett Show handed me a real winner. The skit took place in a take-off on Beni Hana restaurants, here called Beni Haha. As the skit began, we saw a Japanese chef doing the kinds of culinary sleights of hand for which Beni Hana is famous—the flashing knives, the sudden flames, the portions masterfully landed on the customers’ dishes.
The careful modern observers may have done a double take when they noted that although the chef himself was East Asian, the restaurant manager gleefully watching the performance was . . . Harvey Korman. Korman was a very funny man, a great actor, whose Hedley Lamarr on Blazing Saddles raises him to the heights of the cinema firmament.
But Harvey Korman was not Asian.
And then the shtick of the piece fell into place. The other chef, it turns out, was too sick to work, so Korman-as-manager had to scramble around to get someone to replace him. Enter the substitute, then, Tim Conway. Janitor for the restaurant, Conway convinces Korman that he has all the skills necessary to be a Beni Haha chef.
Conway was playing his usual bumbling, cack-handed self, so the idea that he was competent to twirl knives, etc. was part of the humor of the scene. The contrast to the Asian cook we had just seen was obviously going to be hilarious.
But again from the perspective of the careful modern observer there were other problems for the scenario. First, Conway is as Asian as Korman. To be sure, he did put on a slit-eyed guise intended to suggest an East Asian background. That was obviously intended as part of the humor of the scene. Second, Korman and Conway communicated in something that I guess was meant to pass as Japanese. The conversation was also part of the humor of the scene since the “language” that the two deployed was of course very very badly faked Japanese—gobbledygook, in other words. Third, as Conway began his failing efforts to imitate a Beni Hana chef, he and Korman yelled back and forth at each other, Korman evidently questioning Conway’s abilities while Conway evidently reassuring Korman that despite the disaster taking place at the table, he could manage the task.
I say “evidently” about the conversation between Conway and Korman because they were still speaking gobbledygook. And I say about the whole shtick that the various moments were part of the humor because, without exception, the audience—a real live audience, as was the standard for The Carol Burnett Show—the audience roared with laughter, first at Korman’s passing as Asian, then at Conway’s slit-eyed bumbling, then at the very badly faked Japanese conversation and then at the mutual harangue between Conway and Korman.
Like Paul Drake’s smoking and the boat-sized automobiles of Perry Mason, the skit was a revelation—for those of us old enough to have seen the shows when they first aired, a recollection—of just how different the past was from the present. I cannot imagine any show in 2022 presenting two European Americans as Asians without commentary in the twitterverse that would have excoriated the actors. I cannot imagine any show in 2022 giving us a dialogue, over the course of the ten or so minutes of the skit, in which the speakers exchanged fake Japanese with each other in order to provoke gales of laughter from the audience. Again, the twitterverse would have exploded in condemnation. The result, no doubt, would have been shutting down the whole of The Carol Burnett Show and the exclusion of Korman, Conway, and Burnett herself from any further employment in the world of acting—to my mind, an unfortunate result because silencing should not be the goal of free speech
Dearleader’s minions would call such a response “cancel culture,” and demand that the censorship stop. I would call the excoriation and explosion in the twitterverse something else: good manners. Good manners dictate that you do your best not to offend other people. Good manners might lead some to attempt to silence the actors, but in and of themselves good manners are not cancel culture. I associate good manners with what in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson calls “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” It is not censorship to ask that bad manners be considered offensive. Rather it is simply the case that free speech provokes free speech in response—or, in a more contentious kind of way, that free speech has and absolutely should have consequences. Removing the offenders from public life, “cancelling” them as happens all the time nowadays, is a step too far, as I see it: but strenuously arguing against what is by its very nature a breach of good manners is absolutely essential.
Why not simply silence offensive speech? John Milton says in “Areopagitica” that the goal of free speech is truth. The progress towards that goal, he says, amounts to “the wars of Truth.” In an ideal form, the point and counterpoint of debate in free speech moves humanity along towards truth: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Silencing the other side precludes such “wars.”
As is so often the case, the modifying initial clause of Milton’s sentence bears a great deal of attention. Silencing, for instance, does not reflect a desire to learn. But then neither does the erasure of the present in order to return to a past that no longer exists. Dearleader’s minions want the present moment to be a carbon copy of the past, so that jokes at the expense of Asian people, for instance, are fine and dandy because they provoke laughter in the majority—the majority in the Euro-American universe, at any rate, since in point of fact Asians constitute the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants. But regardless of the wishes of dearleader and his minions, the present is not the past. It’s simply not possible to make America great “again” by returning to the status quo of the 1960s and before. America is just not the same nation as it was back then.
Just think about what restaurants were available back then as opposed to now. I graduated from high school in 1970, and there was indeed a Beni Hana restaurant in Harrisburg, where a few of us went to dine before the senior prom. There was one. There were a couple of Chinese and Italian restaurants—I’m not counting pizza parlors—but no Mexican or Korean or Jamaican or Thai or Ethiopian or Vietnamese or Indian or . . . . To say the least, it was a very very limited smorgasbord of cuisines that we ate from. That kind of limitation may not seem important, but it really is. It points to the equally limited variety in the human population of the city. And as was Harrisburg, so was the nation in the 1960s and before. Indeed it was quite possible then to speak about “minorities” because the majority was an obvious, clearly marked set of people.
There were exceptions to that rule, to be sure. New York City, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago were as multifaceted then as now. But the nation as a whole did not consider such variety as in any way shape or form normative. The evidence? Consider the way in which the large African American community was treated back then, restricted to specific neighborhoods and excluded from the mainline world of getting and spending, from board rooms to green rooms, that constitutes the heart of our social existences. The same kind of limitations existed for other groups, where such groups were numerous enough to constitute a noticeable percentage of the populations. Harrisburg did not have a China town—but Los Angeles did, as did New York and Chicago. Miami had its Cuban ghetto. Houston had its Mexican neighborhoods.
Boston strikes me as the outstanding instance of such limitations, across the board—North Boston for the Italians, South Boston for the Irish, Roxbury for the African Americans, the Back Bay for the WASPS and passing Catholics. No wonder there was a bussing crisis in Boston!
To make America great “again” would mean returning to that status quo. We would have to reject and obscure the ethnic and racial diversity that has become standard in almost all of the country, even in rural America, return to the domination of social and economic life by a “majority” that has or will soon be an actual “minority” of the population, and impoverish our dining experiences.
That last item is not there for fun. The variety of restaurants that are now available to us is a serious index of just how multifarious America has become. It would not be simply that our appetites for baba ganoush would go unfulfilled, but that the life and blood of a Middle Eastern world would at best be relegated to obscurity. America would be “great” at the cost of losing what makes it America.
And what would we gain? Well, we could securely laugh at Beni Haha skits. What a tradeoff.
