THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.

April, 1976: Monty Python came to appear Live at City Center, in New York.
May, 1976: Everybody bought the rush-released album. I did, at age 12. Or Chris did. Kenny maybe saw the show –? Anyway one of the big laughs on Broadway that season was Michael Palin snidely referring to “the Abraham Beame School of Advanced Finance.” Everybody in the crowd, even the suburban kids, thought we got the joke – Beame was New York’s mayor, and New York was bankrupt, bust. The Big Apple had been told to Drop Dead; so, we laughed. But that corruption bred corruption, which we missed.

May, 1991: Angels In America, and Tony Kushner told us all about Roy Cohn, and we thought we felt the pain — Cohn, the McCarthyite witch-burner, had AIDS and yet denied it. Tragic. But that corruption bred corruption, which we missed.

Below, Frank Rich writes of how all that corruption was hatched out; and it sums up why playwrights have fulminated against tyrants: they are irresistibly corrupt, right the way down, to the ghastly little lessons learned at the knee. But they get rich, thus, the crowd applauds:

The crowd is not the chorus. Laughing and crying is beneath the chorus. In hindsight: maybe we need to be the chorus: to foresee, to lament, to gasp, to protest, and if needs be gnash our teeth.