A Horse in a Hospital!

The power of pointing out the absurdity of shamelessness

I’m grateful to my friend Steven Bingler and my new friend Sharon Joy Kleitsch of The
Connection Partners for the opportunity last week to talk to with their Florida Network group via Zoom about something I’ve been studying for 50 years: improvisation.

“I've been asked to explain improvisation’s value in helping The Florida Network address climate change. I find that daunting. I don't know yet what approaches you’ve considered to overcome climate deniers. How can I begin to speak to that?

When the legendary baseball hitter Wee Willie Keeler was asked how he managed to hit in 44 straight games, he answered, the secret is to hit them where they ain’t.

I find the key to persuading anyone or moving anyone off their dime is just the opposite: to hit them where they are. You've got to know where your audience is to take them by the hand and move them where you want them to go.

So, in my role as lead-off hitter today, let me begin my making clear where I am. One fresh idea I bring to the table is the view that improv is not only powerful but perilous, and all the more perilous because of its power. Improv has a dark side. And the dark side is the exact flip side of the improv that we know and love. All the characteristics of improv, point by point, are also true of Trump’s malignant improvisations.

So, thinking that maybe the dark side was the place to start, I asked myself, what does dark improv have in common with climate deniers? One answer, and perhaps we’ll come up with more in discussion, is that Trump and climate deniers are all shameless.

Make no mistake, the other, benign side of the improv coin is shameless too, but shameless in a different way that I hope to clarify. We know all shame by the rules it breaks. We live in a world where there is a right way to do things. Before Romanticism, for example, artists agreed to follow the rules of decorum, to abide by what is fitting. Apollo, the sun god, the god of reason was also the leader of the muses. You might associate the muses with inspiration and so with improv. But the first thing you go to the muses for is the rules of each human discourse. Want to know how to write lyric poetry, invoke Erato. History, Clio. Astronomy, Urania. Improvisers consult the muses only to know what rules to break. Breaking rules is a kind of shamelessness. But sometimes rule breaking makes great art or ushers in a new cultural paradigm.

The central trope of improv, Yes, and… — creating in the moment of performance — breaks the rules of decorum from the get go. Faced with coming up with a quick response, there’s little time to rush to Mount Helicon to consult the muses.

It’s not just a matter of the arts. Legal or historical arguments must be evidence- and logic-based. That’s the rule. Or used to be....

The rules of decorum change over time, but slowly. Improvisers are in a hurry. They want quick change. Trickster the disruptor archetype is the constant voice of improv. Hermes, the Greek trickster, wears winged helmet and sandals. His Roman name is Mercury, quicksilver. Created in the moment of composition, improv embraces not logic and reason as a guide but intuition, and instinct, and embodied emotion. What neuroscientists call Hot Cognition. What Daniel Kahneman calls Fast Thinking or system 1.

Ignoring the muses’ Apollonian rules then is a kind of shamelessness. But improv is shameless with the goal of bringing about a new richer culture. For Einstein, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Improv seeks to remember the sacred gift. Let’s call the intuition that charges improv benevolent shamelessness.

Trumpian shamelessness is malignant or toxic, meant only to feed his ego and rain down chaos.

Let me tell you a story. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (c. 600 BCE), Hermes creates the method of sacrifices that renews Hellenic culture by connecting the gods and humankind. He does so by shamelessly slaughtering the immortal cattle of his brother Apollo.

That’s a longer story than the one I want to tell. But in that poem, he is called the Slayer of Argos and that’s where I’m going.

Now, Zeus has an affair with Io, an Argive princess, mother of Perseus and other heroes. You may recognize the name as one of the Galileo’s moons.

When Hera finds out, Zeus turns Io into a very lovely — I suppose — cow. Hera, whose name means the hours or the seasons, cares about what’s seasonal, what’s right, what’s seemly. Goddess of marriage, women, and family, she cares about decorum. So getting wind of Zeus’s affair with a cow, she sets Argos to guard entrance to the cow’s pasture where Zeus spent time mooning over this lovely cow..

Now Argos is a giant with 100 eyes, so many that he can let two eyes sleep while keeping the others on guard. The ultimate watch dog. All those eyes, a metaphor for shame in a shame culture. Using Argos as guarddog, Hera is shaming Zeus.

So, Zeus sends Hermes to slay Argos, not an easy task.

Hermes wanders by, disguised as a goatherd, wanders by. He plays his Pan pipes and Argos is charmed but doesn’t sleep. Finally, Hermes adds a story to his song, telling Argus how the pipes were invented, how Pan had chased a young woman who, desperate to escape, changed herself into the reeds from which Pan fashioned his pipes. As Hermes weaves this tale, he sees that Argus’ eyelids close. Without delay, as the watchdog sat nodding, Hermes kills him with his caduceus.

I am continually amazed at the deep understanding of human experience embedded in the details of myth. While we mostly remember the myths in broad strokes, the gods (or the devil, as a different version goes), are in the details. When we attend to the details, archetypal myths explain things in a deep way, etiologically, back to their origins. Want to know how civilization began? Listen to the myths told time immemorial around the campfire. As Neil Gaiman, one of today’s finest mythographers, writes, “You know myths and legends still have power; they get buried and forgotten, but they’re like land mines.”

Here Pan is the land mine. Pan is the god of the wild, of shepherds and flocks, rustic music and impromptus (improvisations). He hangs out with the nymphs. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr, all of them known for their randyness. Like Hermes his homeland is rustic Arcadia, where pastoral poems are set and shepherds woo shepherdesses all the long summer’s day. Pan is sex, fertility and the season of spring. Pan means everywhere. What’s more natural, more universal than sex? I’m beginning to sound like a shepherd in one of those pastoral poems:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

In other words, Pan represents a world where sexual urges are the norm. He represents a world where shame has no force. He’s shameless.

With his narrative Hermes has changed the conversation’s register. He’s determined where Hera and Argos stand, where they are fielding this affair — that is, in terms of shame. He hits them where they ain't, in a world where shame doesn’t matter.

This is natural for Hermes because he, too, is shameless. Killing the immortal cattle of the sun to create the rituals of sacrifice is a shameless, indecorous act. After all, they were immortal till he came along. Through this act of indecorum, he creates Hellenic civilization.

There’s little need here to list Trump’s many acts of toxic shamelessness which aim not to enrich our lives, but only to bring down American democracy.

What I want to point to before I open this up to further discussion, are some examples of the Resistance’s efforts to change the register. The obvious example is the many efforts to drag Trump and DOGE’s shameless acts of illegality before the bar. That seems to be working but I fear they will just be met with new acts of shamelessness, that ratchet the register up to more extreme shamelessness. That was the pattern of Trump 1.0.

Instead, I’d like to point to a couple examples of the uses of comedy to change the conversation’s footing.

Here’s the first: One of Musk’s DOGE guys was on a Zoom call to GSA to explain this “fork in the road” that would put them in the street. Suddenly spoon emojis began to rain down on the screen. “Fork in the road,” Rachel Maddow added with a smile, “how ’bout ‘fork you.’”

Here’s another: Andrea Lucas, the new EEOC head, whom you may recall has a kind of bovine look, emailed everyone in the department demanding they resign en masse. During the Zoom call that followed, an EEOC administrative judge responded, “the tactics you are employing and the actions you have taken are illegal and unconstitutional. If upon reflection you feel like now would be a good time to take a vacation and resign from your position, hit ‘reply all’ and put in the subject line, ‘I’d like to occupy Mars.’”

Comedy has the virtue of undermining one of the superpowers of improvisers, their charisma or bravado. In Trump's case, let's call it braggadocio. Comedy changes the register, pulls the rug right from under their you-can’t-touch-me charisma. In this case the admin judge challenged Miss Lucas’s braggadocio along with Elon Musk’s, who longs to occupy Mars as much as he longs to unseat the deep state.

So here’s what I’m saying: Denying the science of climate change is not only bad science and irrational, it is also shameless. Shamelessness explains what climate denial’s irrationality doesn’t, that it’s shamelessly all about quick money, about greed.

And while the law courts are a good place to start, pointing instead to the absurdity of their shamelessness also has great power.

So, no comedian myself, my advice to the Florida Network on Climate Change is to hire stand-up comic John Mulaney to write a horse-in-a-hospital joke about climate science. You’ll see what I mean in this 4-minute video:”

Liked this post? I’d be grateful if you’d give the ❤️ button a tap! It helps keep me going to know that you’ve read this far and you appreciate my writing.