Keefe Smiling!Author(s): Ross BakerSource: PS, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer, 1979), pp. 338-339Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/418650 .

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Keefe Smiling! *

Among the legendary thin volumes such as Ethics for Used-Car Dealers or Love Sonnets for Bureaucrats, one would invariably find a copy of The Wit and Humor of Political Science. There is an irony here and it is this: the very subject matter which is studied by political scientists-government and politics-has pro- duced an enormous amount of humor, but those who study it rarely allow themselves the luxury of approaching the topic with levity or a sense of the absurd. How can it be that what is humorous in practice is so serious in theory? There are jokes about sports, jokes about ethnic groups, jokes about sex, and even jokes about religion but can anyone recall the last time he was elbowed in the ribs and had someone snicker to him, "Say, did you hear the latest joke about content analysis?" What would a joke about political scientists sound like? Would it go something like this? Question: How many political scientists does it take to exper- ience love-making? The answer is three-two to ask each other how it felt and the third to determine the degree of inter-coder reliability. Pretty slim pickings on the whole until the book that is the subject of this piece of arrant puffery. It is sad that we have had to wait until now for a first-rate collection of political science humor because in a very real sense, American humor has traditionally been political. The great hu- morists of the nineteenth century used political themes more extensively than any other. Petrol- eum V. Naseby, Lincoln's favorite humorist, turned out book after book full of the political witticisms of the legendary Postmaster of Con- fedrit X-Roads (which wuz in the state uv Kentucky). Artemus Ward, a contemporary of Naseby's, cast his comic spell over the excesses of Reconstruction, the political chicanery of the post-Civil War era, and the vulgarity of life in the age of roccoco. Bill Nye, in a similar vein, needled rustic politicians, robber barons, and bosses. Finlay Peter Dunne, better known as Mr. Dooley, had the Edwardians laughing about immigration, progressivism, and the Boer War. "Uncle Hank," a cantankerous old New Hamp- shireman made literary pilgrimages to Washing- ton to deflate the egos of Chauncey Depew and Henry Cabot Lodge the elder. While all of this was going on, political science was in the process of making itself more scientific so it could live up to the title which it had conferred upon itself. Scholarly disciplines do not invite much levity; scholarly disciplines striving for rigor and scientific respectability laugh at themselves even less. There were a few bon mots uttered by or about political scien- tists at this time such as the politician's admonition to E. E. Schattschneider that he would be well-advised to change his name if he

Ross Baker Rutgers University

ever hoped to win elective office, or the story of the renowned political scientist of German extraction who attended a party given by a younger colleague and when offered a joint was reported to have responded, "I vould prefer a small glass of sherry."

It may be that our counterparts in the pnysicai and biological sciences go into gales of laughter over polymerization or metal fatigue, but I have not personally witnessed any mirth over a particularly droll Chi-square and clowning about T-tests or scatter-plots is probably un- thinkable. The fact is that humor is essentially idiosyncratic and political science is a discipline that shuns the idiosyncratic in favor of the quest for generalization and regularity. Political scientists now affect a gravity of purpose and an earnestness that does not permit much self-ridicule or jollity. But even when this solemn trend is taken into account, it is unfair to hang the blame solely on those who observe and analyze politics and government. Politics, as virtually any practicing politician will tell you, is not much fun anymore. In the process of "cleaning up its act" under the gimlet-eyed gaze of professional reformers, elec- tive politics has become a serious enterprise. Politicians have become busier, more special- ized, and more apt to stress such qualities in themselves as sincerity and diligence. Bureauc- ratization at all levels of government is the enemy of the idiosyncratic. Interest-group poli- tics is waged with a grim no quarter asked-no quarter given determination, and election cam- paigns which Ostrogorski once saw as a surro- gate for popular entertainment is little more than a panoply of polling, targeting, mass- mailings, and media events. Politicians of today steadfastly refuse to wear Indian war-bonnets or coon-skin caps. Grey pin-striped suits are the accountrements of grey pin-striped politics. There is little that academic students of politics can do to arrest this trend. There is certainly little enough to laugh about in the universities and colleges these days. Jokes about cutbacks in programs, affirmative action goals, or tenure disputes are more likely to elicit sour grimaces than they are to prompt gales of laughter. We are more serious about ourselves, what we study, and where we work and the prospects for the future are unrelievedly grim. This status report on political science's slough

*Impurely Academic, edited by Alan Rosenthal, Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Bruns- wick, New Jersey 08903; $3.95. Royalties from the book are being donated to the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program.

338 PS Summer 1979

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of despond should, however, end on an upbeat note (if for no other reason than as a hedge against the possible outbreak of future mirth). Our salvation comes from one of the few genuinely funny men in political science, Bill Keefe of the University of Pittsburgh. While dignity and sobriety have cloaked virtually every scholarly contribution of Bill Keefe's, there lurks behind his unchallengeable academic repute, one of our discipline's most irrepressible (and occasionally insufferable) wags. He has received encouragement recently from an APSA board member who should have better sense than to incite Bill Keefe in his antics. But my colleague and friend, Alan Rosenthal, who is the Director of the Eagleton Institute of Poli- tics at Rutgers has put together a collection of Keefe's most outrageous correspondence under the title of Impurely Academic (Transaction Books). Rosenthal's choice of publishers was not accidental, since Irv Horowitz, one of the most irrepressible jokesters in the social sciences presides over the publishing empire. This collection of Bill Keefe's correspondence reveals much about his complex (some would say contradictory) qualities. As his 1975 letter to the APSA's Tom Mann demonstrates, he is an empiricist with a heart. Concerned over press reports that Patty Hearst had been forbidden by her abductors to go to the bathroom for the first ten days of her confinement, Keefe re- solved to replicate Ms. Hearst's prodigious feat and reported to Mann in the course of his eighth day of abstention that, "The first few days . .. are by all odds the most difficult. It then gets easier around the 5th or 6th day. I think the main generalization to be derived from my study, however, is that from the 5th day on it is simply impossible to cough with confidence." This entry, I hasten to add, was deleted at the suggestion of one of the review- ers because it offended the standards of com- munal decency in his town in Ohio. The quintessential Keefean philanthropy comes through in a departmental memo to his col- leagues written when he was chairman at Pitt

which urged department members to contribute to either the United Way or the University's program of giving. Displaying a canny knowl- edge of conservative economics and enlightened self-interest, Keefe urged his fellow faculty members to be generous because, "Money given to these campaigns is very likely to trickle down or trickle back to you. For example, if you give to the University, the money will, in all probability, trickte down to you in the form of salary; if you give to the United Way it will trickle back to you if you are evicted from your home or if you are, among many other things, an unwed mother or an alcoholic." Appealing, finally, to the self-esteem of his colleagues, Keefe warned, "Although our department doubtlessly out-published tne Yale, Berkeley, and Michigan departments last year, we did not out-give them. It is fair to say that the whole profession is watching us. Emulation theory, of course, tells you why." While flawed by occa- sional lapses of good taste, Impurely Academic is refreshingly free of any theoretical signifi- cance and the only evidence of rigor is the fact that the pages are numbered consecutively. Alan Rosenthal, who on occasion moonlights as a clown at the Ringling Brothers Circus (really) went to great pains to assemble a Keefe festschrift with an emphasis on the fest. The selections range from a Keefe letter to Pitt's Chancellor Wes Posvar to correspondence with an assortment of political scientists. There are puckish communications with permissions edi- tors and droll memos to his departmental colleagues. Impurely Academic deals a death- blow to the notion that the roles of scholar and humorist are incompatible and Rosenthal, who thinks that roll-call analysis is a stitch, provides connecting essays which, while adding nothing to our comprehension of academic humor, provide a feeble counterpoint to the superior stuff that Bill Keefe has turned out over the years. It is all in the grand tradition of the enraged academic who, upon hearing from his publisher that his manuscript had been turned down cabled: "Drop dead! Strong letter to follow."

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