Humor can bridge machine Democrats and patrician Republican legislators

Evidence

Surprisingly, his friends included Republicans as well as Democrats. No one would have seemed less likely to get along with the aristocratic upstate Republicans, born into families that controlled the great utilities and banks of the state and educated among the Ivy, than Al Smith, but his jokes had them roaring, too. The rising star of a band of reforming Republicans who were trying to unseat the Black Horse Cavalry was young Jimmy Wadsworth, a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Rochester and a former Yale baseball star. Wadsworth soon began to make a regular supper trio with Smith and a slow-talking, forceful, young German-born state senator who had become particularly close to Smith, Robert F. Wagner, Sr. Elected Speaker, Wadsworth handed Smith some choice committee assignments. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 529

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that a Yale Republican baseball star befriended the Tammany saloon singer is a nice anecdote for someone interested in cross-party machine politics.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-establishment protest can be expressed through absurdist comedy and electoral jokes — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 180; Cynical joking paradoxically frees political complaint more than earnest volunteer talk does — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 131; Humor functions as social currency for navigating school hierarchies — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 485 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-establishment protest can be expressed through absurdist comedy and electoral jokes #expands (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 180
• Cynical joking paradoxically frees political complaint more than earnest volunteer talk does #corroborates (0.80) — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 131
• Laughter disarms ideology because it dissolves fear and enables thought #expands (0.78) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 413
• Humor functions as social currency for navigating school hierarchies #qualifies (0.75) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 485
• Free speech defenses of satire can ramp up rather than defuse religious tensions #qualifies (0.75)
• Republican non-domination language can articulate left and right causes alike #expands (0.72) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1251
• Industrialized laughter represses fear by capitulating to power instead of escaping it #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110
• Republicans made deliberate weirdness their defining political aesthetic in 2024 #exemplifies (0.70) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 830