One more note about this week's Mad Men

Did it strike anyone else that the premiere of this season was funnier than usual? The show has always banked on humor, often reserved for the audience’s delicious chuckle at the period (think of the pilot episode, with Joan unveiling Peggy’s typewriter and assuring her it’s been designed so women can use it). In the past seasons, though, that humor has always been accompanied by either a cringing realization of the underlying injustice, or a subtle shiver at the deeper darkness. When has Mad Men’s funny bleakness been more disturbing then last season’s completely bizarre Utz potato chips commercials? In comparison with that incredibly grim sense of humor, this episode was downright slapstick.

Railing against the establishment in stocking feet

There’s Bert Cooper’s sexy woman-on-octopus office art, the fired accounts director flipping out wearing only socks, and of course, Pete Campbell’s amazing dorky touchdown dance. There’s Don and Sal’s sly G-men act at the restaurant, and the hilarious crosstalk between Pete and Ken Cosgrove in the elevator. And from the start, “Out of Town” begins with a Don Draper origin story flashback and gives us an explanation for his birth name that’s awful, but also two steps away from a cocktail party one-liner. Dick jokes permeate the episode, from Dick Whitman’s naming to Sal’s exploding pen (hee hee), to Don and Sal’s discovery of an explicit visual joke in a magazine ad. Oh sure, the sad harsh reality is never far behind, but male anatomy humor is timeless.

Without pushing this too far, because I have no idea what will happen this season and maybe a careful re-watching of the previous seasons will remind me of their equally silly undercurrents, but just as of right now, here’s what I’m wondering. In the first season, and to a lesser degree in the second season, the polarity between the Donna Reed, Leave It to Beaver, Camelot veneer and the seedy reality of people’s lives was much starker. Flipping back and forth from family man to lecherous adulterer was transgressive, and when the two worlds collided, there was a meltdown. But now, in 1963, we’ve been watching the show long enough, and maybe (in slight contradiction to my previous post) the idyllic myth of 1960 has been tarnished enough, that humor has room to creep back into picture.

Sal's exploding pen; my that's a big bottle you have there, sir

I’d like to avoid getting too grad studenty on you here, but one classic theory of the novel is that first there’s a form, and then there’s a satire of that form, which creates a new serious form, which is then satirized, and so on. It’s reductive and it doesn’t explain a lot of literary history, but it’s an interesting model for thinking about this new shift for Mad Men. I wonder if after all the darkness we were taught to find in the sunshiny commercialized lives sold to us by Don Draper, we’ve finally earned the right to see absurdity in both the cheerful advertisements and the depressing flashbacks.

I hope so, because Mad Men is going to need as much humor as it can get to tackle the pall history will inevitably cast. But if that’s the case, I do have one wish that I doubt will be granted – it would be nice if the women could share in the fun. This new turn toward the funny is almost exclusively masculine, and for a show with such interesting female characters, it would be a shame for humor to be gender-specific.