Steal this newsletter
Or, how Abbie Hoffman made outrage contagious
The difference between wit and humour is critical but hard to explain. Humour is round; wit is pointed. Humour makes you laugh; wit is a smile in the mind. This week’s explanation: Abbie Hoffman was a tremendous wit who bombed as a comedian.
Hoffman is perfectly portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen in The Trial of The Chicago 7, Netflix’s scaldingly hot slice of Sorkinese Americana. There’s plenty to be said about the mismatch of Mr. West Wing and the radical left, and you’ll find that here. And there’s more to be said about the similarities between Hoffman and Cohen, especially with Borat Margaret Sagdiyev’s return to screens. But other people can and have said all that, so here are some words about Abbie Hoffman’s wit as a political weapon.
Near the end of his life, Hoffman tried comedy. He failed. As a perceptive obituary noted:
No one who was funnier was ever more estranged from the orthodoxies of American democracy; no one who was radical was ever more comical in his perceptions. Nevertheless, for a comedian, Hoffman was not funny — and failed at that demanding profession, at the age of 51, doing a stand-up act in New York in 1988 that led one local critic to complain: ‘Comedy without laughs is just too obscure a concept for us.’
But wit without laughs is great — and for political purposes, preferable. By naming his books Steal This Book and Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture, Abbie Hoffman ensured his words caused as much upheaval as the ideas they conveyed. When his Yippie movement showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills and attempted to levitate the Pentagon, he packaged an anarchic movement for the television age. Though as he later reflected, “The idea of manipulating the media was ridiculous. The people who own the media manipulate it. We just had some tricks up our sleeves.”
He also displayed a Wildean skill with the epigram, as seen in the 180-degree turn of phrase:
Free speech means the right to shout ‘theatre’ in a crowded fire.
And the metaphor extension that is:
Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
Ultimately, Abbie Hoffman wanted revolution. Or as he titled his first book, Revolution for the Hell of It. One classic theory of laughter is that it exists to release tension. But revolutionaries don’t want laughs; they want the tension to build up until the system is overthrown. And so comedy without laughs — a decent definition of wit — is exactly the point.
Quick quips; lightning
“You’re sure you want to do this? You know who I am? You know who my uncle is? You’ll be pounding the beat in Staten Island.”
— Hoffman’s tip for not getting arrested, as outlined in this enjoyable interview. As he explained, “Every police force has a place where cops get punished without getting kicked off the force. So you know that, you know cop talk. And they know you know their cop talk, and the only way you'd know that they don't want to pound the beat in Staten Island is if you have some pull. They think you know the inner ways of the power structure, so they back off. They get nervous about that. It's something that they haven't seen with your standard, run-of-the-mill suspect.”
“A $330 Bulova sport timer accurate to 1/10 of a second will be lent free to judges and referees to time any amateur sporting event. Call your local authorized Bulova dealer and get one lent to you under a phony name. Tell them you want to time an orgy.”
— Hoffman’s tip for getting a free luxury watch, as outlined in Steal This Book. Your mileage may vary.
“I grew up with the idea that democracy is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls apart.”
— Hoffman at his most Sorkinesque, and vice versa.
Logrolling in Our Time
The Current Affairs article on The Real Abbie Hoffman mentioned above came via Siri Agrell’s Loss Leader newsletter, an invariably interesting weekly read on leadership. Subscribe to it! From this week’s issue:
With so much earnest parsing of inexplicable horrors these days, I could use someone throwing a verbal Molotov Cocktail or two.
That was issue No. 69 of Get Wit Quick, a variably interesting newsletter for the hell of it. You can steal Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting if you promise to make it into a major motion picture. Or at least one that’s on Netflix. Free love by tapping the ♥️ below.