Are we not men?
There's nothing fun or funny about the fake times we live in.
If you are of a certain age, you might remember the album “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!” which came out in 1978. The band Devo1 was an art school band. Their music and stage costumes were like performance art and devolution was an arty thing to say at the time.
Today, you have to wonder if the human species is not, in fact, devolving. Everything and everybody are losing quality and seem fake.
A couple of Substack pieces this past week brought the ersatz nature of life in 2025 into the spotlight.
This one, in the Metropolitan Review, observes the fundamental lack of character of people in public life: everybody in the news seems to be pretending: playacting their roles and even their personalities:
And this one, by Freya India, observes the lack of character of basically everybody else: where once we were individuals with interesting and sometimes perplexing or difficult personalities, everybody is nothing but a bundle of diagnosed and “treatable” disabilities now:
As you might imagine, art is in a bit of a state. The big existential statements were all made 50+ years ago, and the culture has since become so contrived, artificial, and affected that it is virtually impossible to represent it, critically, satirically or otherwise. Not that some won’t try.
Retro Man
The slogan “Make America Great Again” is a lament for a reality that now lives only in memory. Some people will cling to the past, though, as if the grounded, wholesomeness of the past might be recovered. Oddly, the very people calling for such revival are the fakiest of the fake.
Is it even possible to go back?
Jake Vadeland is a Canadian country musician committed to living his life as if it were still the 1940s or 50s. Vadeland talks in a sincere, old-timey way; he dresses the part; and he writes and performs traditional country music. (Extremely well I might add.)
Vadeland is aware of his striking, odd persona. This song is all about his retro “act.” Except it’s not an act. According to everything I’ve read, this is just who he is. There’s no “real” Jake Vadeland behind a mask.
It’s not like we haven’t had these sort of immersive characters in culture before. Salvadore Dali adopted a highly contrived, surreal if you will, character, not without reason it turns out.2 The awkward, robotic, affected speech of David Byrne of Talking Heads, another art school band like Devo, comes to mind. (He has since been therapy-ized: diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.) Sad, derelict, gravelly voiced Tom Waits is another.
Nothing fun or funny about fake
Somehow this unfunny charade reminds me of clowns and in particular a very frightening, and frightfully old silent movie, He Who Gets Slapped,3 the twisted, tragic plot of which is magnified by the truly terrifying spectres of people laughing without sound and clowns marching in fascistic lock step.
These are dark times, or so they say. And in dark times, dark humour is what we get culturally, at best.4
Arbitrary authority is said to be bending liberalism to the limit. According to “the media,” all is catastrophe, victims and helplessness. Yet look around you and prosperity is everywhere, the pace of technology is exponential, we are longer lived and more people live at a higher standard globally than ever before in history.
But if the tone of “progress” today is saccharin and antiseptic, devoid of character and depth as we know them, is it really progress? Or are we regressing to a less developed human state. If the feeling is “Yes, we are devolving,” we’re just waiting on the science now.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol GYC (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (/ˈdɑːli, dɑːˈliː/ DAH-lee, dah-LEE; Catalan: [səlβəˈðo ðəˈli]; Spanish: [salβaˈðoɾ ðaˈli]), was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dali
“Nine months before Dalí was born, his older brother Salvador passed away from a stomach infection. His parents named Dalí after him and due to his eerily similar appearance, his parents told him when he was five years old standing over the grave of his brother that he was his reincarnation.” - 10 unique Dalí facts you didn't know | The Paris Pass®
That’s certainly one way to go back.
See my discussion of Marcel Danesi’s book Comedic Nightmare.
Funny Business: part 4 of a series On Conservative Aesthetics
Donald Trump disarms the media, including the comedy establishment, with his buffoonery. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the media, comedians and late-night talk show hosts doubled down on their mockery to try to keep him out of office and failed miserably.