Will Rogers Mocked Congress for Thirty Years and Never Lost the Room

Here is a job description that ought to scare you. Make fun of the United States Congress, in print and on the air, six days a week, for years on end. Do it to both parties. Do it so well that senators clip your columns and presidents invite you to dinner. And when you die, make sure the whole country mourns, including the very officials you needled.

That is not a thought experiment. It is the career of William Penn Adair Rogers, and he did it from the late 1910s until the summer of 1935. The question worth asking is not how he got away with it. The question is why nobody has managed it since, and what the answer says about how we talk about politics now.

A cowboy from Indian Territory

Will Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, near Oologah in what was then the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, in land that later became Oklahoma. His father, Clement Vann Rogers, was a Cherokee Nation judge and senator, the family lived on a ranch, and Will grew up proud of his Cherokee heritage and of being a working cowhand. He was a restless student, quicker with a rope than with a textbook, and he left formal schooling behind.

In the early 1900s he went abroad, working as a cowboy and performer in Argentina and South Africa, and he came back to America to join Wild West shows and vaudeville as a rope artist. The act was a trick-roping show, and the patter was an afterthought, a few remarks while the lasso spun. The audience, however, liked the remarks. The story goes that he began to work in gags about the day's news because he had to fill the time while his rope made its loops, and he found that the crowd laughed harder at the headline than at the trick. The detail comes from the standard tellings of his life, and I give it as the tradition it is. What is solid is that the rope turned into a stage, and the stage turned into a platform.

From the Follies to the newspapers

In 1916 Rogers joined the Ziegfeld Follies in New York, the most glamorous revue on Broadway. The Follies had beautiful women, elaborate sets and famous names, and in the middle of it all stood a plain-spoken man in a cowboy outfit who twirled a rope and told the audience what he thought of the news. His routine, based on the morning papers, changed every night. The newspapers gave him material, and he gave them back an audience.

From there he moved into every medium of the age. He wrote a weekly newspaper piece beginning in the early 1920s, and in 1926 he started a short daily column that was syndicated in newspapers across the country. These were brief, sometimes only a paragraph or two, and they were written in a deliberately plain, misspelled-looking voice. He appeared in the movies, first the silents and then the talkies in the 1930s, where he played the amiable country philosopher in pictures that did well with audiences. And he took to the radio, where he spoke to enormous audiences in the early 1930s about the news of the week in a voice that sounded like a neighbour leaning on a fence.

He was also, in his own time, a sort of unofficial mayor of the United States. In 1926 he was named honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, a joke that he enjoyed. In 1928 he ran a mock presidential campaign in a humour magazine as the "bunkless candidate" of an invented Anti-Bunk Party, and he took the satirical candidacy seriously enough to keep the gag going and not so seriously that anyone mistook him for a rival. It was a send-up of the whole business of running for office, and it worked because everybody could see that he did not want the job.

The style: gentle ridicule of institutions

Study his method, because it is the lesson of this post. Rogers made his living mocking Congress, and the other parts of the government, and the parties, and the conventions, and the committees. His line, as nearly as it can be paraphrased, was that Congress was a gold mine for a humorist because it provided new material every time it met. He said much the same about conventions and campaigns, and about the long speeches that were the staple of politics in his day.

But what he did not do is almost as important. He did not call his targets crooks. He did not accuse them of treason. He did not attack their families or their looks or their religions. He joked about what they did: the speeches, the votes, the budgets, the rituals of the Capitol. He aimed at the institution, and when he mentioned a person, he mentioned a public act, and he did it in a way that left the man free to laugh along. Presidents and senators who had been the target of one of his remarks often reported that they enjoyed it, and some wrote to him to say so.

Here are the rules of his style, as I read them.

1. Aim at the thing, not the person. The Congress, the committee, the platform, the tariff. The joke should survive if you swap the name.
2. Do it to both sides. He called himself a member of no organized political party, joking that he was a Democrat, and he teased Democrats and Republicans alike. The audience believed him because he did not carry water for anyone.
3. Let the target off the hook. A joke that ends with a smile invites the target to share it. A joke that ends with a sneer closes the door.
4. Be plain. He talked like the people in the audience and not like a lecturer. When the subject was complicated, he used a small example.
5. Be useful. He raised money for relief during the hard years of the Depression and the drought, travelling on behalf of the Red Cross, and he gave his time without making a spectacle of it. People remembered that he was kind.

I do not say these rules make a man a saint. I say they make a commentator who can get away with saying hard things to a country that is divided.

Why he never lost the room

This is the interesting question, and I think the answer has three parts.

First, he was fair, and everybody knew it. Because he lampooned Republicans in the Coolidge and Hoover years and Democrats in the Roosevelt years, nobody could file him under a party. When he said something critical, the listener had to consider whether the criticism might be right, and could not dismiss it as partisanship.

Second, he was warm. His jokes came from a man who plainly loved the country he was joking about. This is the secret of good political humour. The audience forgives a sharp tongue if the heart behind it is evidently generous, and it never forgives a sharp tongue attached to contempt. People laughed at his jokes about Congress because they felt that he wanted Congress to do better, not that he wanted it to fail.

Third, he was independent. He had no party to protect and no office to win, and so his only loyalty was to the audience. A commentator who is working for a team has to cover for the team's mistakes. A commentator who works for the listener has to tell the truth.

What the Founders would have recognised

There is something in Rogers that the Founding generation would have found familiar. They understood public office as a trust, and they expected the public to hold officials to account in print, in speech and with ridicule. Benjamin Franklin made an art of it. The republic was built by people who thought the proper response to a ridiculous idea was to laugh at it in public, and a country that loses that habit loses something that its constitutional design assumes. The First Amendment protects "the freedom of speech, or of the press," and a humorist like Rogers is exactly the sort of person that clause had in mind: a private citizen with no official power who used a column and a microphone to tell his countrymen what he thought of the government.

I wrote about the long history of this tradition in Satire From Aristophanes to Swift Has Always Been the Weapon of the Underdog, and Rogers is the best American example of it in the first half of the twentieth century. He deserves a place alongside Twain in the hall of fame for plain-spoken mockery of Congress.

The objection: wasn't the target easier then?

A fair critic would say that Rogers had it easy. The country was less polarised, the media was smaller, and nobody had a smartphone with which to clip a joke and send it to a million people. A commentator today has to worry about a mob in a way that Rogers did not.

There is something to that. The incentives of modern media do reward outrage, and a joke can travel farther and faster now than it could in 1930. But I think the objection has the causation backwards. The reason a Rogers-style approach is rare today is not that the audience would not reward it. It is that it is hard, and the easy route is to pick a team and flatter it. The easy route pays, in clicks and followers, in the short run. The hard route pays in trust, in the long run, and in a legacy that lasts for decades.

There is also a more practical answer: Rogers was operating in a country that had just gone through a world war, a deadly flu epidemic, a boom and a catastrophic bust. It was not a calm time. People turned to him because he gave them a way to laugh at their leaders without hating them, and that is more valuable in a hard time than in an easy one.

Compare him to what later became the house style of a good deal of television comedy. I argued in Late Night Comedy Stopped Punching at Power and Started Lecturing that a host who always lands on the same side stops being a humorist and becomes a pundit with a laugh track. Rogers is the other model, and a better one. Nor is he the only comic figure with a claim on conservative affection. A country that took its humour seriously also took its news seriously, and the habit of reading closely, which I describe in Seven Words Reporters Use to Tilt a Story Without Telling a Single Lie, goes hand in hand with the habit of laughing at what you read. A reader who can spot the loaded word is a reader who can enjoy the joke that exposes it.

One more thing about the room he never lost. A crowd that has been taught to expect honesty will put up with a surprising amount of bluntness. Rogers could say something hard about a bill, or a budget, or a President of whichever party, because the people listening had a long record of his fairness to draw on. Trust, once earned, works like a bank balance, and a humorist who spends it carelessly goes broke quickly. He never overdrew the account, which is the whole secret.

The end

On August 15, 1935, Rogers died in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, along with the pilot Wiley Post, who had been one of the best-known aviators of the day. He was fifty-five. The country mourned him as it had mourned few private citizens, and the tributes came from every political direction, including from the officials he had spent a career mocking. That is the best evidence that his gentle ridicule had done its work. He had taught the public how to laugh at its government without despising it, and he had taught the government that a joke is the price of democracy.

What modern commentary can learn

I write this as a commentator, so let me say it to my own profession and to the people who read us.

• Check the aim. Before you publish the joke, ask whether it hits a policy, an institution or a public act. If it hits a person's family, looks or health, throw it away.
• Be willing to hit your own side. The jokes that cost something are the ones that earn trust. A conservative who never needles a conservative is a courtier.
• Keep the heart visible. Make it clear that you criticise because you love the country, and you will be believed.
• Do not confuse contempt with courage. Sneering is easy. Making a hostile audience smile is hard.
• Remember that the audience is the boss. Rogers served his listeners, and that is why they kept coming back.

That is the formula for a conservative commentary that persuades rather than merely preaches to the choir. We have a movement that believes in limited government, and a limited government is a government that can be laughed at. Rogers would have been at home with that idea. He might have said, in his own plain way, that the best protection against a bad government is a good sense of humour among the governed. I think he would have been right. If you want a cautionary example of the opposite approach, a country that cannot laugh at its comedians, see When Comedians Avoid Campus Crowds, the Whole Culture Gets Less Funny.

The case in brief

1. Will Rogers, born in 1879 in Indian Territory, rose from roping acts to the Ziegfeld Follies, newspaper columns, movies and radio, and mocked Congress and both parties until his death in 1935.
2. His method was gentle ridicule aimed at institutions and public acts, never at families, looks or private lives.
3. He kept the room because he was fair to both parties, warm toward the country and independent of any team.
4. The Founders' idea of free speech assumes exactly this kind of citizen commentary on those in power.
5. Modern commentators, on the right as much as anywhere, can learn that trust and good humour outlast outrage.

What you can do: the next time you share a joke about a politician, check whether it targets a policy or a person, and share only the ones that would still be funny if you swapped the party.