The repertoire of chopping down our history has surpassed just the matter of taking down statues, changing street signs, and renaming military bases.

Now, we can add historical buildings - especially ones that continue to promote laughter.

For more than one hundred years, the Friars Club was the Boys Town of comedy and home to America’s funniest men and women.

Its roasts were the best duets of insulter and insultee, giving its audience a door wide open to the foibles and sometimes frailties of a performer otherwise only known as the strong, famous type.

Now the red awning-ed dark wooden door of the Friars Club is closed.

City signage marks the door and front windows - a toe tag for commercial real estate. The owners were unable to make payments on their $13 million mortgage.

Is it one door closing? There is no such thing. The action of one door closing produces a reaction of loss, followed by further losses. Then, loss produces attempts for replacement.

The loss of the Friars seems unintentional and happens to be co-occurring with a loss of classic comedians who brought self-deprecation to hysterical heights interwoven with other-deprecation and gifted us with the indulgence of laughing at ourselves and our loved ones.

The perfectly served lines, including, Jack Benny’s, “I’m thinking it over,” Henny Youngman’s, “Take my wife,” Rodney Dangerfield’s “The last time I saw a face like that it had a hook in it,” may be a style that has died with its creators.  

Comedy routines are still the best theatrical monologues, such as the late but always relevant, Joan Rivers, recommending that the bikini wax replace waterboarding for gaining intel,(circa 2010) and the very much alive and funny, Jackie Marling’s telling of a hitchhiker and a driver sharing a tunafish sandwich, a joint and an impromptu reflection on Jesus. But, even so, there is a creative destruction of comedy taking place – not necessarily on every stage, but certainly in our day-to-day life. Despite all the so-called human rights activists from the Sixties, every single one a declared fighter of freedom of speech, we are now not so free to laugh at you and me.

The worst thing a humorless joke can do is refuse to die, and the emboldened humorlessness joke of our present day culture surpasses the stench of the most chemically induced skunkweed permeating city streets in both mass formation and lingering survival. Humorlessness stinks up society as it spits on everything once deemed a basic component of universal goodness – love of God, marriage, family, American pride. It was the shared baseline values that once provided the foundation for humor. The risk of tearing down ourselves and each other in jest, especially the kind of jest that revealed truth, had a safety net because we all yielded to a shared understanding that our ideals were to be taken seriously first and our egos only second and not so serious at that.

Creative Destruction is a term used in economics that describes the discarding, discontinuation – destruction of something once valuable. The horse and buggy industry being shooed away in place of the car is one classic example. In economics, destruction is creative and necessary for betterment. 

But in comedy, creative destruction amounts to the cancelling of college shows due to people feeling offended. Feeling offended was once the point. We could take a look at ourselves and laugh. Now, the new replacement comedy is a series of vicious bites aimed at people and beliefs deemed bad – by the very people who see themselves as crusaders for freedom.

Creative destruction is in industries outside of comedy. It is easy to picture the industries of education, psychology, medicine, law enforcement and the legal profession all as sheep – compliant and absent of free critical thinking. Baa Baa, the text books must change – not due to facts, but so nobody feels uncomfortable. Baa Baa, the statues must be torn down, streets renamed, all students pass every class – no matter what. Baa Baa, the therapeutic skill of minimal confrontation, where a therapist points out a client’s inconsistency, such as, “you’re saying you want to end the dependency of your brother, but you are continuing to pay his salary indefinitely regardless of his hours or work” often cannot be spoken.

Creative destruction is also at an all time high within the family unit – and since the family unit is dependent upon the development of each person as an individual – there is a creative destruction within what the criteria is for being human.

It seems the Friars Club closing is a foreshadowing of the closing down of other clubs, laughter, and life.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, via Picryl // public domain