September 1, 2006
The Drowsy Chaperone Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST Most people who live in New York City rarely if ever do some the things normally associated with the city, other than in the company of people from out of town. I have only been to the top of the Empire State Building, or seen the Statue of Liberty, in the course of entertaining European guests. This week, possibly for the first time in my life, I saw a Broadway show in the strictest sense, i.e., a musical comedy playing in a theater physically located on Broadway—in the course of entertaining two English guests. Maybe the exception proves the rule: The Drowsy Chaperone is a very clever and deeply affectionate send-up of late 1920 musical comedy, so it is, I suppose, more of a meta-musical than the real thing. Most “Broadway” theaters are in fact located on side streets (I was cheating on that one), and The Drowsy Chaperone was written not in Tin Pan Alley, by Runyonesque characters, but by Canadians, presumably while living in Canada. In any event, while The Drowsy Chaperone has a lot of virtues, this post is prompted by a single joke, although one that made me, in the words of one of my guests, laugh like a drain. One of the play’s characters, in the course of working out a scheme to shatter an engagement by finding a would-be Lothario to seduce the bride-to-be, remarks that “We need one of those people who are corrupt but gullible—whaddaya call ’em—you know, a European.” I am not sure quite why I found that so funny, but here are some guesses: First, corrupt but gullible is a witty and engagingly optimistic paradox. We may carelessly assume that integrity and credulity are paired traits, and that the same is true of their reverses, but the joke reminds us that immorality is not the same thing as skeptical intelligence. What about associating corruption and gullibility with Europeans? Americans have a long tradition of defining themselves in opposition to Europeans. In that stereotype we are new, full of hopeful optimism, and not terribly sophisticated. So we of the New World are proverbially brash and moralistic but also idealistic. They of the Old World are proverbially wicked but impressively sophisticated. When imagining national character in this way, Americans and Europeans are normally conceived to possess real but contrary strengths and weaknesses, although that sense of trade-offs is not invariably present. Donald Rumsfeld evoked a harsher and more simple contrast with that gibe about “Old Europe,” juxtaposing Eastern European support for overthrowing a tyranny in Iraq with Western European hostility to that project. But how do Europeans come to be imagined as both corrupt and gullible, rather than simply as corrupt? Don’t we all agree that Americans are the gullible ones? As for corruption, in the 1920s it might have meant sexual corruption—morganatic marriages and the mistress as institution, versus priggish and chaste New World Protestantism. It might also have meant political corruption, where Americans were in fact imagined to be somewhere in the middle: We were, and probably remain, more corrupt (politicians on the take, etc.) than is likely to be the case in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, but less corrupt than in Latin Europe or Ireland. There are words in Latin languages to denote specific mechanisms of political corruption—Transformismo, Caciquismo, etc.—which have migrated into the technical language of political analysis. They have a word for it, you can imagine the American dowager sniffing, and we do not, although of course we do have words for it—boss rule, machine politics, etc. Still, there are differences between political cultures, and they matter. In what sense, though, have we ever imagined wicked old Europeans to be gullible? Aren’t we, in our virtuous trumpeting of our innocence, the gullible ones? Yes and no. The Yankee trader, who can sing the silver out of your pocket and leave you puzzling over a wooden nutmeg, is an old type in our folk comedy, and it is an American who can proverbially sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge. Mulling over the problem of an American stereotype of gullible Europeans, however, I remained stuck for a couple of minutes. I’m still uncertain, but this is what I think may make that joke work, at least for me: The Drowsy Chaperone is set in the late 1920s, when a lot of Europeans had already swallowed the preposterous Mussolini, a fair number of them had swallowed Hitler’s hysterical ranting, and a lot were also taken by Lenin’s dicta. Americans are proud of hardheaded common sense, in politics and in other things. It is now the fashion to scorn us for our susceptibility to cretinous idealism about international politics, a trait sometimes dubbed Wilsonianism. But as far as susceptibility to deadly idealisms—a special sort of gullibility—I am not sure we compare too badly with the last century’s Europeans. Of course, the writers of The Drowsy Chaperone are Canadians, and the joke may have been intended to mock American conceit and chauvinism. If so, the joke, rather intriguingly, works both ways.
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