The Meaning of America : Forget the Niceties. Everyone Else Has. With Insult and Injury Permeating Pop Culture, It’s Cool to Be Cruel

OK guys, you ready?” All 5 feet, 10 inches of Marki Costello bounces up and down the aisles of a studio audience. With every cheerleader jump, another chunk of dark hair slides out of a barrette and down the back of Costello’s black vintage dress. “Now,” she yells, “what do you say when the contestants say something about sex?” “Oooo!” her audience roars back. “And what do you say when the husband says something chauvinistic?” A round of staccato “yo-yo-yo’s” from the men pours forth, easily drowning out the higher-pitched female “boos.”

This spirited crowd is here today to watch the taping of “That’s Amore,” a new nationally syndicated game show that airs weeknights in Los Angeles at 2 a.m. on Channel 9 and features bedroom brawls between married couples. It’s the job of the audience to egg on the contestants as they fight, to provoke more heated arguments with their “boos” and “woos” and, ultimately, to pick the winner. “You will decide who has the most convincing arguments,” booms the breathless male voice-over. “Will it be Norma, who has brought Ray’s ex-wife, Belinda, to support her? Or will it be Ray, who has his best friend, Tibor, to back him up?” By now the cameras are rolling, and this audience is as hot for action as Romans in the Coliseum.

Ray, a British man in his 40s who sports a shag haircut, leads off with a complaint that Norma, his American wife, and Belinda, his former wife, compare notes about his sexuality. Norma doesn’t disagree, but launches into her own tirade about her husband’s torn jeans, his penchant for wearing no underwear and his large sexual appetite, all of which are linked in her mind. The audience goes wild. When host Luca Barbareschi calls for a midway poll and a station break, they reward Norma with 68% of their votes.

By the time Round 2 opens, Norma’s ready for blood. Blue eyes blazing, she spews at her husband: “You’re a liar, and you have a big mouth.” And this: “You are so sickening, you make me want to throw up.” And this: “You don’t know how to do anything right. You’re a walking accident waiting to happen.” (“Ooo-ooo!” the audience cheers.)

Ray counterattacks with--what else?--a story about his wife’s girth. “My wife, I’m so proud of her. She’s lost 80 pounds. But she walks into the supermarket since we started eating normal again, and she takes hot dogs off the shelf and stuffs them in her mouth.” (“Ugh!” from the audience.) “When we finally get to the check stand,” he continues, “there’s no food to pay for, just packages with tags.” (“Boooo!”) “I’ve seen it,” concurs Ray’s friend Tibor. “It’s so embarrassing.”

Barbareschi calls time and polls the audience. Ray wins, at 77%. Norma and Ray wrap their arms around each other and beam: For their performance, they earn a second “honeymoon” in Mexico.

If you think this is sick stuff, you’re woefully behind the pop-culture curve. In the 1990s, “dissin’ ” is fast becoming a national pastime. Cutting insults, crude put-downs and vulgar and vicious personal lampoons are dominating mainstream entertainment--even while political leaders urge us to put people first. More than ever, comedy draws the most laughs when it’s at the expense of someone else. “Humor has devolved to allow more extreme forms of brutality and insults that are normally perceived of as abhorrent,” says Jennings Bryant, director of the University of Alabama’s Institute for Communication Research. “It is pushing the bounds of propriety.”

Today’s personal attacks often are aimed close to home--at family members, girlfriends, co-workers, teachers. In an age of political correctness, these are safe targets, not likely to generate a rash of protest from hypersensitive organized interests. So are celebrities, who are fast slipping from their privileged positions with fawning fans and press. Fat jokes are popular; fat people aren’t a protected lobby. Sexual put-downs are in; who other than religious zealots would challenge them in the post-sexual-revolution age?

Barbed humor is the staple of relationship game shows. If the couples connect on the popular dating games “Love Connection” or “Studs,” sexual innuendoes bubble forth. But if they don’t, the insults fly: She was fat, he was cheap, she was cold, he was a bore. “Kiss him? I’d rather make out with a sidewalk,” quips one “Studs” contestant. The producers of these shows shrewdly count on the put-downs to escalate as each contestant’s defenses go up.

“That’s Amore” producer Walt Case and host-creator Barbareschi claim to put only happily married couples on the air. After the show, Norma and Ray, both born-again Christians, explain that they love each other and were simply drawing on hostile feelings from the early years of their marriage that they have since worked out. “It was all in fun,” Norma insists. Imagine a game show that featured problem marriages. Apparently, some Hollywood producers already have: One major game-show company is developing a program that would air the grievances of divorcing couples before a live audience.

Fictional characters on contemporary TV shows have a staff of writers to script them, so their insults are wittier, but equally vicious. On Fox’s popular “Married. . .With Children,” a running gag of intrafamily ridicule, Al Bundy wonders why his wife Peg didn’t marry a man more like her father: “Or weren’t there any chronically unemployed social parasites the month you were in your prime?” The satirical variety show “In Living Color” is more reckless, taking aim at black women, gays and even, in an off-color skit about a spastic handyman, the handicapped.

Over on ABC, “Roseanne” chuckles that she’s done her job when her kids say they hate her, or she fantasizes about trading her brood in for a new dishwasher. Meanwhile, Roseanne Arnold’s real-life husband, Tom Arnold, stars in the new “Jackie Thomas Show” as an obnoxious TV star who describes colleagues in terms like: “That candy-ass, publicity-sucking little pimple farmer!” (And of the TV critics who castigated her husband’s new show, Roseanne offers these choice descriptions: “creeps” and “faggots.”) Last fall’s Emmy telecast turned especially unpleasant: In the midst of Hollywood’s counterattack on the Republicans’ own mean-spirited family-values campaign, Diane English--creator of “Murphy Brown,” one of TV’s saltier put-down artists--burst out: “I couldn’t possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs.”

In children’s entertainment, the superhero has evolved into a superbrat. Cartoons feature 6-year-old child-animals who slam doors in the faces of innocent characters and maniacally kick villains in the shins. The star of the hit movie “Home Alone 2” is a 10-year-old snot who delights in setting up vicious pranks for the villains, any one of which would, in real life, maim or kill a person. (When was the last time anyone survived a brick to the head from three stories up?)The fantasy alter ego of a sweet young woman in “Drop Dead Fred,” a video cult favorite with the 8-year-old set, greets her mother with such salutations as, “It’s megabitch! Get me the ax! No, get me a chain saw!”

Radio shock-jock Howard Stern’s obscenities are what draw the ire of the Federal Communications Commission and the press, but biting cruelty is also his stock in trade. When Dick Cavett, who recently disclosed his shock-therapy treatment for depression, called Stern’s show to lend support in his battles against the FCC, Stern offered this in return: “So how many volts did you take to the head?” One of his ugliest comments was made while his partner read the celebrity news one morning last fall: “Big, fat Kirstie Alley. It’s a good thing she had a miscarriage. If she got pregnant, her breasts would be sagging to the floor.”

Stern’s popularity is skyrocketing: He now airs in 10 cities, including Los Angeles, where he has the top-rated morning show, and he has launched a TV talk show. Radio-industry officials note that other radio talk-show hosts around the country now are borrowing Stern’s style.

Even while some commentators complain that PC-ism is choking free expression, American popular culture is rich with examples of misogyny, racism and homophobia. In rap and heavy metal music, especially, women are routinely referred to as bitches and “ho’s” (short for whores); gays are faggots. Need some anti-Semitism? The syndicated TV series “Uptown Comedy Club” recently featured a skit about the law firm of “Judacy,” where Hasidic lawyers sing, “I really want to sue you. I really want to overcharge you.” Rush Limbaugh has sunk to disturbing lows on his radio show, such as this tirade against AIDS and abortion activists: “Get out of our schools. Get out of our churches. Take your deadly, sickly behavior and keep it to yourselves.”

There’s something equally mean about the increasingly violent voyeurism that permeates American TV news and entertainment today--from the airing of domestic squabbles on talk shows like “Geraldo” to last month’s shooting of a woman by her estranged husband at a Florida cemetery, captured by a Spanish-language news crew and disseminated nationwide.

Whatever form this invective takes, media researchers call it “psychological violence,” and they are concerned that just as hundreds of studies link TV to a more violent society, the decline in civility in popular culture will alter our behavior toward each other. “It’s worrisome,” says Alvin Poussaint, associate dean at the Harvard Medical School and former consultant to the now-defunct “Cosby Show.” “I don’t think this is just reflecting reality. It’s also part of encouraging reality. For a lot of vulnerable people, especially children, this is putting suggestions in their heads, or at least lowering their defenses against impulses they might have.” Poussaint also worries that trends in popular culture contribute to an increased difficulty among many young people in discerning right from wrong.

What is the reality that America’s tastemakers are helping to shape? More confrontational social relationships, for one. John Murray, head of the Human Development and Family Studies Department at Kansas State University, doesn’t permit his children, age 7 and 11, to watch “Roseanne” or “The Simpsons.” The many fans of these shows point out that both TV families, despite their heavy reliance on irreverence and insult humor, demonstrate strong bonds of love. But for Murray, who studies the impact of media on children, love hidden beneath a crusty exterior isn’t a satisfying rationale: “No matter what else, a steady diet of these shows conveys the sense that it’s all right to be mean-spirited to each other. But if you act like that in real life, all you do is anger people. Every office, every department, every class has one person like that, and--fortunately, I guess--they’re always the outsider.”

At its most destructive, American culture’s mean streak holds out the potential to promote even more violence in a society where cutting off someone in the fast lane can mean a bullet to the head. Social graces are not just the stuff of snobbery, notes Judith Martin, author of the syndicated “Miss Manners” column. Holding our tongues, setting internal limits on the views we express to each other, smooths the bumps in a conflict-ridden society. In our zeal to promote “open communication” at any cost--or for any laughs--we’ve forgotten that, Martin contends. “The total expression of every thought is not desirable,” she says. “People are killing each other in the streets over insults and dissin’.”

The most chilling side of this mean streak is coming straight from the mouths of soldiers and college students and children. Left to their own devices, without the benefit of network scripts or the restrictions of government censors, they create ballads rife with cruelty and brutality. Sailors at the U.S. Naval Academy march to sadomasochistic tunes that feature sex with corpses and “bitches” cut in half by chain saws. This is one current favorite: “My girl ain’t got no eyes / Just two sockets full o’ flies / Sometimes I even play a joke / Pull the plugs and watch her choke.”

In October, a UCLA fraternity made headlines with songs celebrating the mutilation of women with such props as cheese graters and hot oil. The frat members apparently didn’t believe they had anything to hide: They published the lyrics inside an otherwise informational orientation manual.

And on the schoolyards of Los Angeles, third-graders can be heard singing ditties like this (to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land”): “This land is my land, it isn’t your land / I’ve got a shotgun, and you don’t got one / I’ll blow your head off, if you don’t get off / This land is private pro-per-ty.”

HOSTILITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN ENGINE OF HUMOR. AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, Sigmund Freud wrote that hostile jokes, like obscene humor, give humans an outlet for a natural emotion that civilized society otherwise forces them to repress. As Americans, we laughed when Moe pulled Larry’s hair and told him to “sha-a-a-t up!” or when Abbott smacked Costello upside the head for issuing a dumb wisecrack.

Hollywood’s toughest acts were packaged as working-class humor (as if, somehow, the upper classes were too refined to get angry). In Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners,” Ralph looks ready to slam his fist into his wife’s jaw when he slugs his hand and boils, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days. . .pow!” Archie Bunker unleashed his ridicule not only on his wife, his daughter and his “meathead” son-in-law but also on “coloreds,” Jews and anyone else who wasn’t a white working-class Protestant like himself.

Ralph Kramden’s anger bubbled out of the frustrations of his daily life as a bus driver bored with his life and struggling to make ends meet. Gleason, who created the series, made it clear that he intended the Kramdens’ bickering to take place within the context of love, and it did: “Baby, you’re the greatest!” he’d say with a bearhug. Audiences saw how the extremes of Ralph’s personality got him into trouble, and they laughed at him, not his targets. Similarly, Archie’s insults and racism sprang from working-class frustrations, but, by surrounding him with more tolerant family members, “All in the Family’s” writers turned his views--not his victims--into objects of derision.

Most of today’s humor and song doesn’t reveal any ironic truths about the perpetrator (just as violence in film long ago ceased to comment on the nature of violence). “It’s nastier and more personal. And there’s very little wit in a lot of this, it’s just dumbed-out and gross,” complains Michael Medved, author of the 1992 book “Hollywood vs. America.”

The University of Alabama’s Bryant first noticed a turning point in American humor in the mid-1970s, when, as a young faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, he saw the “Mr. Bill” skit on “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Bill was a clay doll whose sole purpose was to be abused--his face pounded, his limbs torn--while audiences roared. “I thought, ‘What in the world have we unleashed here?’ ” recalls Bryant. “There was no cognitive complexity. All you saw was cruelty.” Fifteen years later, American audiences have become so inured to cruelty, physical or verbal, that we laugh when the Joker electrocutes his victims in “Batman,” and we actually buy the line that the “Terminator” is being compassionate when he shoots his victims in the knees instead of killing them.

When Don Rickles burst onto the national comedy scene in the ‘60s, lampooning Frank Sinatra and other revered celebrities, his act was new--and shocking. Two decades later, when New York’s satiric Spy magazine first appeared, calling Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian,” it, too, was new and shocking, an arrival of much-needed irreverence toward the rich and powerful. But insult humor has a short shelf life; the shock wears off and audiences grow numb-- habituated is the word researchers use. The purveyors of the satire can respond by adding more dimension to the humor, as Spy has recently done, or they can scream louder, pushing the boundaries of propriety even further, as most of Rickles’ comedic heirs have.

It’s not hard to figure out what will push buttons in contemporary audiences. Marki Costello isn’t a sociologist or marketing executive, but she probably knows this country as well as any of them: One of the game-show world’s most prized talent scouts, she interviews potential contestants, thousands of them a year, for “That’s Amore” and, before that, for dating-game shows such as “Love Connection.” At 26, Costello knows people. She learned the business at the knee of her late mother, who did the same job for game shows in a previous era, and she’s the granddaughter of comedian Lou Costello. Costello’s conclusion about contemporary culture: “I am convinced that America is dying to love to hate. We thrive off other people’s gossip and misery. Humor today makes people laugh because it’s shocking. When my grandpa did it, it was clever, it was thought out.”

“Married. . .With Children” co-creator Michael Moye tackles the question from a different angle. He sees his shows as an antidote to the overweening and unreal “niceness” of sitcoms like “The Cosby Show.” “Personally,” Moye says of “Cosby,” “I never lived like that or saw people who could work so hard and look so good. We thought, ‘There has to be something out there for the rest of us.’ So we did the dark side of the American family.”

Irony and irreverence are particularly appealing to an under-40 audience weaned on “Saturday Night Live” and Mad magazine, as Newsweek media writer Jonathan Alter notes. The motto hanging in the office of one producer sums up a feeling that is widespread among younger TV writers: “No messages, no hugs.”

People draw their own lines between funny and offensive. Moye, for example, calls Howard Stern’s radio show “the oinking of a pig” but gives his own show longer rope because the put-downs are directed at fictional characters. Others, such as “That’s Amore’s” Barbareschi, forgive brutal candor when it is done humorously--as it is on his show--rather than being offered up as some kind of serious social commentary on voyeuristic talk shows. That’s actually a line that most of us draw without knowing it: Bryant’s studies have found that audiences will even laugh at images of sexual violence when they are presented as comedy.

THAT INSULTS AND CRUELTY ARE THRIVING in popular culture today isn’t surprising. Conditions have converged to produce a climate in which this virus multiplies: There are more channels of communication today, and all the information coming through those channels is “more frank, more explicit” than ever before, says Daniel Linz, associate professor of communications at UC Santa Barbara.

And popular culture is tapping a wellspring in modern society that many social observers say is brimming with rage. “During the election, reporters would write about ‘voter anger’ as if that was somehow separate from culture,” says Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of the book “Boxed In.” “But the rage is global. Everywhere you look, there is a very striking separatism going on. People are receding into their ethnic or sexual peer groups. There is an anti-cosmopolitan, antisocial movement.” In Europe, neo-Nazis are on the rise, and ethnic strife is tearing the Balkans apart.

Much closer to home, in Los Angeles County, hate crimes have tripled in the last four years. Gays, especially, are being targeted for violence throughout the country. Anti-gay ballot initiatives in three states last year unleashed a torrent of gay-bashing, from threatening calls and hate mail to the firebomb killing of a gay man and lesbian in Salem, Ore., in September.

That hatefulness seeped into the presidential campaign last summer, when GOP candidate Pat Buchanan called on his audience to “take back our country” from gays and blacks and “radical feminists” like Hillary Rodham Clinton. Commentators called Buchanan’s tirade the meanest prime-time political speech in American history.

More and more, the perpetrators of violent crimes show a chilling lack of remorse. The public was stunned when one of the suspects in the 1989 brutal gang assault on a woman jogging in New York’s Central Park explained to police that “it was fun.” But just last November, a San Jose teen and two of his friends allegedly hacked to death his best friend’s 8-year-old brother, then told police they had planned to rob the house and kill whomever was inside. They had expected the mother to be home, but when they couldn’t locate her, they figured the young boy--home sick from school--would do.

Pick your reasons for that collective wrath underlying these frightening events. In the United States, researchers point to sexual repression caused by AIDS, a sagging economy, the breakdown of family and community, and other pressures of modern life. “People are feeling less nurtured, more like there’s no one to take care of them,” says Carole Lieberman, a clinical psychologist and chair of the National Coalition on Television Violence. “We’re the walking wounded. People are feeling more hurt, more needy, more powerless. We’re putting on a bravado (front) by being stoic and angry.”

Much of the anger in pop culture is directed at women, and many researchers link the trend to the movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. Carol Burke, an associate dean at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in military folklore, notes that brutality and violence have always been a part of the soldier’s marching chants. “It was a way of dealing with the fears of wartime and dehumanizing the enemy,” she says. With the jungle warfare of Vietnam, though, the concept of “enemy” broadened, and the chants became more gruesome: “Napalm sticks to kids. . .napalm sticks to ribs.”

Likewise, soldiers and sailors have always directed raunchy humor at women. But since the 1970s, Burke has detected a sharp rise in the level of hostility. Sadomasochism and sex with mutilated female corpses are favorite subjects; so is slugging a girlfriend in the face if she gets out of line. “You didn’t see things like that before women entered the military,” Burke says, “so I can’t attribute it to anything but anxiety over women in the ranks.” It is within this kind of environment, she notes, that naval officers in 1991 allegedly assaulted 26 women, including fellow officers, in what’s become known as the Tailhook scandal.

Burke also detects subtle female-bashing in children’s play songs. Children’s verse has always been gruesome (“Ring Around the Rosey” satirizes the bubonic plague) and mean ( an infant falls out of the tree in “Rock-a-Bye Baby”). But in playground songs today, children celebrate the shooting and maiming of others, particularly teachers. Burke notes that the gender of the teacher in the following rhyme is no accident. I shot my poor teacher with a .44 gun I didn’t even miss her, her class was no fun I went to her funeral, I went to her grave Everyone threw flowers, I threw a grenade. I looked in her coffin, she wasn’t quite dead I took a bazooka and blew off her head I looked in the newspaper, I looked on TV I saw her going up to heaven So I shot her with a BB.

TO LOOK AT THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN society’s emotional state and the way pop culture reflects it is to walk into a hall of mirrors. Even while acknowledging that pop culture reflects society, researchers also accuse image crafters and tastemakers of intensifying those raw feelings. As Miller puts it, “We are so embedded in the media spectacle that we can no longer say the media simply reflect something. They reflect a reality that they have altered.” Contemporary TV and movie plots, Miller and others argue, often encourage audiences to relate to the meanness and violence rather than be frightened or repelled by it. A commonly cited example is “Silence of the Lambs”: During the film’s ending--not a part of the book--audiences root for serial murderer Hannibal Lecter when he turns his lethal sights on a particularly obnoxious functionary. Last year’s crop of movies--”The Player,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Unforgiven” and “Reservoir Dogs,” among them-- writes Newsday film critic Jack Mathews, was especially rife with “loathsome male protagonists.”

Increasingly, Miller argues, even advertisers--historically known for excessive sentimentality--are sneaking in appeals to rudeness and selfishness, using characters such as children who don’t have to share their candy bars or women who see their beauty and thinness as life’s best revenge.

Most well-documented are the links between what children see on television and what they do. It is widely accepted among those who study children and psychology that exposure to TV violence can promote aggressive behavior in young people, particularly if a child’s family or neighborhood doesn’t sufficiently counteract the influence. That conclusion is based on hundreds of studies, including a 1972 surgeon general’s report. One study from the 1970s, for example, compared the playground behavior of children who had watched a steady barrage of “Batman” and “Superman” cartoons with those who watched shows such as “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The former group was more aggressive and more likely to get into confrontations, while the latter group was more likely to play cooperatively and help their teachers and peers. Later studies also showed a link between adult violence and the TV programs they watched as children or adolescents. One survey found that as many as one-third of violent young felons said they had imitated crime techniques seen on TV.

Experts suspect, then, that it will make some difference that in 1988, children watched a whopping 28 violent acts per hour on their cartoons. And now they can participate in the on-screen violence: In the Supernintendo video game “Final Fight,” players use every means at their disposal to kill the video opponents on the screen. If a punch doesn’t work, stab him with a knife. In a “Simpsons” video-arcade game, the player gets to watch the opponent crumble to the ground and die.

All of this raises a question that researchers have yet to fully answer: Is it easier to pull the trigger or throw a fist at someone who has already been demonized, or at least dehumanized, in song or humor? Are children more likely to pick on each other or ignore their parents or tell their teachers to shove it if they see that kind of behavior on TV? Researchers can only speculate. Says Leonard Eron, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois: “The kind of humor that continually denigrates certain parts of the population can’t help but build an attitude that it’s OK.”

IT’S A COLD NOVEMBER morning, and the parking lot of the Hollywood Palace looks like the site of a Harley-Davidson convention. A sea of black leather and beard stubble spills out onto Vine Street toward Hollywood Boulevard. The crowd of 5,000--mostly men in their 20s and 30s--chants “Howard! Howard!” and leers at the near-naked women (including Jessica Hahn) on a makeshift stage in the parking lot. Much of the conversation between the men goes something like this: “Hey, I wanna see that chick come out again and take her top off. . . .”

This is Howard Stern’s target audience, the men whom high-risk auto insurers fall all over themselves to woo. These are the listeners who admit their addiction to Stern’s show; there are plenty of others who do not--female Ph.D.’s and lawyers and editors and secretaries. A running joke about Stern’s show is the number of people who insist they never listen but can recite every skit.

The crowd gathered in Hollywood took off from work and school to watch Stern stage a mock “funeral” for his chief rivals in the L.A. market--the KLOS morning team, Mark and Brian. It’s a publicity gimmick Stern has used before in other markets as he climbs to the top of the talk-show radio heap. The New York-bred Stern got his first big break at a Washington, D.C., station, then moved on to New York’s WNBC, where he was fired by a management that liked his high ratings but not how he got them. His new employer, Infinity Broadcasting, couldn’t be happier: Stern has made the company’s New York station No. 1. His show is now sold to stations nationwide, including L.A.’s KLSX-FM.

Inside his studio at the Palace, Stern conducts a rare “press conference” in which he tells one reporter, “You’re so stupid. You’re really very stupid. You’re too dumb for words.” He asks a woman TV producer, “How did you get your job? Have you ever dated anyone in your organization?”

At about 8, Stern, costumed as a king (“of all media” is the gag), is carried to the outside stage in a palanquin by a corps of scantily clad women. Once onstage, Stern guillotines a pair of dummies--fake blood spurts out--while his cohorts lampoon the KLOS disc jockeys with songs like “So Crappy Together.”

Aside from his nasty run-ins with the reporters, this affair is mostly harmless juvenile prattle, a kind of frat party for guys who never made it to a university club. The event is tame compared to what Stern pulled in Philadelphia, when he viciously ridiculed competitor John DeBella, culminating last summer in a “Divorce Party” to celebrate DeBella’s broken marriage. Stern encouraged listeners to write songs memorializing the breakup; then his producers began wooing DeBella’s ex-wife. Annette DeBella finally agreed to appear on Stern’s show so he could continue to ridicule his rival. Apparently, though, the woman was more troubled than she let on during that broadcast: In October, she was found dead in her garage with the car engine running. Philadelphia’s coroner ruled the death a suicide.

Stern rarely talks at length to the press--he wouldn’t talk for this story--so it’s difficult to explore the motivation behind these pranks. Joe Logan, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who closely followed the DeBella affair and has interviewed Stern, believes the highly paid radio personality knows, but doesn’t want to acknowledge, the potentially damaging side of his act. “Stern has built up a blind spot,” Logan says of Stern, who portrays himself on air as a faithful husband and caring father. “He does not want to face the reality of what he’s doing, that he’s making it OK to say and do these things.”

If that’s the case, then he is no different from any of us who laugh at the malevolence of Stern and other entertainers. When it comes to cruel humor, we have a collective blind spot. It makes us passive listeners, sheepishly amused at these appeals to our dark sides, often until they hit too close to home. There was, for example, the woman who called Stern’s show to complain about his “disgusting and very mean” remarks about the inability of children to love adoptive parents as fully as natural parents. She was a regular listener; she was also an adoptive parent.

We don’t want to know how invective can influence our behavior. We want to believe that our socialization is somehow isolated from the media that bombard our daily lives. “There is so much cruelty in this world, whether Howard is here or not,” says Steve Jasso, a service technician who lost $22 an hour while attending Stern’s event in Hollywood. Then he pauses and adds, “But some people do take it to heart.” Jasso has a good point: Humans are, by nature, aggressive creatures, regardless of tasteless jokes and vicious playground rhymes. And if Freud was right, and hostile humor is a release of natural emotions, isn’t it better for Americans to indulge in verbal abuse rather than the real thing? That’s one argument posed by UC Berkeley anthropologist Alan Dundes, who wonders what all the fuss is about as he ticks off dozens of examples of cruelty in literary history. “Underlying the veneer of civilization and sophistication, you still have people with very basic desires and drives,” Dundes says.

But studies on the influence of popular culture suggest that cruel humor serves as more than a release in modern society. The ubiquitous media pick up on our baser nature, exaggerate it to entertain, and, by spitting it back at us, encourage us to push the boundaries even further. As a result, says Johns Hopkins’ Miller, “We’re gradually eroding the kinds of social forms and inhibitions that kept (aggressive) compulsions contained.”

Before the cycle escalates further, we might do well to consider the advice of Roman statesman and orator Cicero, who wrote at the peak of the Roman empire: “If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.”