A Cultural History of "Zany"

Since the end of the silly 1970s, "zany" has nearly disappeared from our collective vocabulary. Too bad – in the age of government bailouts and the Tea Party, we could all use a dose of zaniness.

We all have favourite words. One of mine is "zany."

You probably haven't read or heard it in a while, since people don't use zany much these days. Looking back, it seems the word had a definite heyday – the 1970s, the first full decade I lived through.

In the '70s, zany was everywhere. It was used to describe things that were frivolous, fun, slightly foolish. As a kid, I often heard it applied to the television shows I watched. Programs like The Muppet Show, Match Game and The Gong Show were all considered zany – these were not serious efforts, but instead reveled in being fun for the sake of being fun. They were fluff.

But zaniness wasn't limited to TV. The stand-up comedy of Steve Martin was zany. Celebrities such as Charo specialized in zany antics. Many a fad – the pet rock springs to mind – was zany.

Zany was a way of looking at life, an attitude. It represented the full flowering of the campiness of the 1960s – zaniness is what happened when a generation that had grown up watching Adam West's Batman and Laugh-In came of age.

Zaniness was also a reaction to the prevailing mood. Nixon poisoned the well with the Watergate scandal, which is how cynicism became cool. So many entertainers instead embraced the opposite position: outright silliness.

Those who embodied zaniness were not afraid to look foolish. Zany humour had a certain heedless aspect to it – just look at old episodes of The Muppet Show, in which Jim Henson's team built on the vaudeville tradition by adding absurdist one-liners. You'll see zany in action.

Even though it didn't land in theatres until 1980, the spoof Airplane! is a perfect example of zany comedy. Mad magazine's fictional mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, was zany. The way Sonny and Cher dressed was zany.

Heck, if you look at old photos of your own family, the clothes they wore and their hair, you'll see everyone was a little zany.

We needed zany. It was a way of fighting a bleak reality: inflation, gas rationing, the hostage crisis in Iran, punk music, Quebec separatism. Zany was part of the spirit of the age, which leads to the inevitable question: Where did it go?

By the end of the Reagan decade, zany had been replaced by a gritty, grim aesthetic – as exemplified by the work of Frank Miller for Marvel Comics and DC. Cynicism had triumphed. The rise of grunge was the final nail in the coffin.

I miss it.

In the age of government bailouts and the Tea Party, we could all use a dose of zany. But I guess we're too mature for that now. Perhaps, in our corporate era, zaniness is no longer possible. It required a certain innocence.

Then again, every time I see a video from the Flaming Lips I think there just might be hope.

This article was originally published in the London Free Press.