The World of Don Imus is Gone, Because the Woke Left Can’t Bear to be Teased

By Peter Wolfgang Published on December 28, 2019

Don Imus poked fun at the powers-that-be in the wide open. And it wasn’t just Imus, who died yesterday at the age of 79. It was his whole cast: Chuck McCord, Bernie McGurk and Rob Bartlett.

It was Kinky Friedman singing “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” It was Bartlett as Jesse Jackson, when news broke about Jackson’s illicit affair, doing a riff on “Keep Hope Alive” that I can’t even repeat. It was a mock Ted Kennedy voice, reacting with horror to a crackdown on sexual harassment, promising to do all he can to reverse that trend.

It Was …

It was a mock Rush Limbaugh voice pronouncing words like “Hillary” and “talent on loan from God” to greater comic affect than even Rush could muster.

It was the look on the face of Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, when Bernie asked her if she got so excited over the Monica Lewinsky story that she ran to the White House and offered to be an intern.

It was that thick Long Island accent cutting a fake commercial for the 1992 presidential race. “’Ey! This is Joey Buttafouco for family values. Y’know, time was, when you told your girlfriend you didn’t want to see her no more, she didn’t come around bothering your wife. Dat’s da problem with kids dese days. Dey got no family values.”

It was the time Imus was Connecticut’s Governor for a Day. It was how he helped launch Laura Ingraham’s radio career.

It was that wonderfully horrible speech he gave in front of President Clinton and the Washington press corps. The obits this morning say he offended the Clintons. His real crime was that he offended the press.

From a 1996 Weekly Standard article on it: “Imus told jokes that were funny and mean, and true: unforgivable. He recommended that Peter Jennings, a notorious ladies’ man, have a V-chip in his shorts. He joked about the old charges of plagiarism that hover around Nina Totenberg, and Dan Rather’s obviously tenuous mental health, and ABC News’s devotion to the Clinton White House, and Ed Bradley’s ludicrous earring (‘Ed, you’re a newsman, not a pirate’).”

Across Societal Divides

It was, to this Gen Xer, growing up with my Dad playing Imus on the car radio. Tuning in to his 4th of July broadcast from our camper at Wolf’s Den. Experiencing a wickedly funny genre of comedy that has since been erased from our bland, “woke” world.

And enjoyed not just by white people. A friend of mine, an African-American from New Haven whose parents were among the original civil rights “freedom riders” taking buses to the Deep South in the 1960s to challenge segregation. He was camping with us when my Dad put on Imus’ 4th of July broadcast in the early 1980s. He lit up. “You listen to Imus? My Dad and I love Imus.”

That was a thing back then. In a less fragmented culture, it was a thing we shared across societal divides that had been more acute before my boyhood and would become acute again in my adult life.

Which brings us to the thing about the basketball team. He called an African-American women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hoes.” It was stupid. “Our agenda is to be funny and sometimes we go too far,” he admitted. “And this time we went way too far.” He shouldn’t have said it. But almost everything Imus said was stupid and something he shouldn’t have said. That was the whole point of his career.

“Ah, but Howard Stern…,” you say. To me, Don Imus was the thinking man’s Howard Stern. Imus himself addressed the difference once in an interview. “We would be willing to have a stripper on the show too,” Imus once said, “if she wrote a book. We just wouldn’t spank her.”

At the Pompous

He would tear up every Martin Luther King Day and repeatedly play clips from the slain leader’s speeches. That was the real Imus. His audience understood that.

The point of Imus’ humor was to poke fun at the pompous. His targets were both liberal and conservative. But, given who was in charge back then, they were more often on the right.

Imus did sometimes punch down. The remark about the basketball team occurred around the time of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” when the FCC was cracking down, and Imus’s mouth finally caught up with him.

And so the world of Imus is gone, at least so far as mainstream culture is concerned. You still get the occasional Dave Chappelle. And my son and I enjoy Stephen Crowder.

But listening to Crowder with your boy in 2019 is not like listening to Imus with your Dad in 1979. Crowder has to self-fund. It’s like you are living in some Soviet-era Eastern bloc nation, sneaking a subversive look at samizdat literature.

Slobs vs. Snobs

Imus was a product of the “slobs vs. snobs” genre of comedy, when the snobs — that is, our ruling class — were on the right. But they were not the authoritarians the Left claimed. Comic personalities like Imus could make fun of them in relative freedom.

It is today’s ruling class, the “woke” left, that can’t bear to be mocked. That is why Crowder, the Imus of our day, has a harder time breaking through.

But as Imus knew, humor is our best response to the self-important. Faith and politics are deeply important to our culture. But so is comedy.

 

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on The Stream are solely his own.

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