The Great
Comedian
When
Bob Hope died last year, the British
columnist Frank Johnson remarked that
actually, Ronald Reagan was a much funnier man. Hope was a mere wiseacre; Reagan could
make you laugh from your depths. I heard him speak in person several
times, and there was always magic in the room. The laughter he provoked
was truly jovial as startling as thunder.
He had odd points of resemblance
to Lincoln, who also got his start as an entertainer. As a young man
working at a general store, Lincoln would attract people from miles
around with his flow of jokes and mimicry. He was so popular that friends
urged him to go into politics, where his humor always proved an asset.
Like Lincoln, Reagan also bore
the shame of a drunken father whose failure he was determined to avoid.
And Reagan too had a rare charm with large audiences, yet was hard to
know intimately. At the same time, both men avoided making personal
enemies. Petty spite wasnt in them.
In personality, the president
Reagan may least resemble is George W. Bush. Reagan could make
conservatives laugh at liberals, which was no great feat; but with his
gently barbed wit he did something harder: He made even liberals laugh at
liberals. Bush only makes them laugh at Bush.
In his unassuming way, Reagan
was an electrifying speaker. Id heard him speak in a documentary
film well before he went into politics, hawking the free-market system
and decrying the fallacies of socialism. It seemed obvious, but no less
cogent and satisfying for that.
![[Breaker quote: The one and only]](2004breakers/040608.gif) And
he had that wonderful voice so reassuringly American, the perfect instrument
for uttering home truths. He wasnt a great actor on the screen
too much of a known quantity, too genial and untroubled to be very
interesting. C major was his only key. But that was the perfect key
for his political career. And it was politics, not cinema, that revealed his
comic gifts, including a nice touch of Irish black humor. Yet that same
humor, with its impish cynicism about politics, only underlined his
convictions.
During his presidency, several of
Reagans speechwriters were friends of mine. They were always
happy, like composers writing concertos for a masterful violinist. They
knew Reagan would make their words sing. Bushs speechwriters
have to avoid using words he cant pronounce.
There is a world of difference
between Reagans relaxed and genial conservatism and Bushs
tense, brittle, humorless version. Though he hated Communism, Reagan
would never have gotten this country into a mess like the Iraq war. He was
a lucky man who usually knew when not to press his luck. Or, as a friend of
mine puts it, when a man is as lucky as Reagan, its not just luck.
For eight years, liberals
tiresomely accused Reagan of making war on the poor. He
replied to such charges with a naughty irreverence for the dying gods of
liberalism, like a choirboy winking at the girls during a long sermon. He
reminded you of Muhammad Ali dancing around the ring, landing quick jabs
at will on a flat-footed opponent who flails heavily at the air.
The eulogies to Reagans
greatness are forgivably overblown; they reflect the great affection he
inspired rather than historical perspective. There was no Reagan
Revolution: The Federal Government kept growing steadily
throughout those eight years. Both his partisans and his enemies
promoted, for opposite reasons, the myth that he was slashing government
with his conservative cutlass.
Did he bring about the fall of
Soviet Communism? No, though he may have hastened it a bit, with a little
help from Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa. He was, however, wise
enough to realize that Communism would eventually destroy itself
without outside efforts to destroy it, and he was willing to risk
alienating his anti-Communist base by reducing Cold War tensions. In this
his easy-going style served him well. CIA experts and hopeful liberals
warned that the Soviet Union was both economically and militarily
invincible, but Reagans instincts told him it was moribund.
Reagans real originality,
rather strangely for such an old-fashioned man, was stylistic. He was
never so absorbed in politics that he failed to see its comedy. And he
played it for all it was worth, sharing his essential skepticism through
the infallible medium of the belly laugh. Like all rare personalities, he
leaves no successors.
Joseph Sobran
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