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Agent 86 (Don Adams) holds his shoe telephone next to Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) in the television spy comedy ‘Get Smart.’
Photo:
Bettmann Archive
Joe Biden’s
“Soul of America” speech is said to have been inspired by the popular historian Jon Meacham, who used that phrase as the title of a 2018 book. But I think the president owes a debt to
Mel Brooks
and
Buck Henry.
His speech reminded me of nothing so much as “Mr. Big,” their 1965 pilot episode of the spy satire sitcom “Get Smart!”
Mr. Big, an agent of the evil spy organization KAOS, threatens to destroy the U.S. city by city using a device called the “inthermo ray,” capable of “converting heat waves into immense destructive power.” KAOS has stolen the inthermo and kidnapped its inventor, Prof. Hugo Dante. (Dante’s inthermo—get it?) Maxwell Smart, agent 86 of the top-secret counterespionage organization CONTROL, is assigned to the case. “Mr. Big must be stopped before he goes any further,” Max’s boss, known only as “The Chief,” tells him urgently.
You can see the parallel:
Donald Trump
is Mr. Big, “MAGA Republicans” are KAOS, and Mr. Biden is in CONTROL. The Chief warns: “Max, this is a big one. The fate of our entire nation may depend on it.” Mr. Biden: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
Mr. Big plans to start by destroying the Statue of Liberty. As Max puts it: “So that’s their target. Miss Liberty herself!” “We, the people,” Mr. Biden intoned, “have burning inside of each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall. . . . That sacred flame still burns.”
Great satire uses exaggeration not only for comic effect, but to illustrate the absurdity of the issue at hand. Hence
Alexander Pope’s
mock-epic poem “The Rape of the Lock” centers on the theft of a strand of a woman’s hair, likening the purloining to the abduction of Helen of Troy. The disproportion between deed and reaction results in both comedy and the revelation of truth. “What mighty contests rise from trivial things,” Pope’s narrative begins. Mr. Brooks made a glorious career out of this genre, ridiculing everything from westerns (“Blazing Saddles”) and
Alfred Hitchcock
thrillers (“High Anxiety”) to Hitler and Nazism (“The Producers”).
Mr. Biden’s speech, despite its flimsy attempt at admonitory statesmanship, was a translucid partisan bid for votes in the midterm elections, its exaggerations at once obvious and ridiculous.
At the end of the “Mr. Big” episode, Maxwell Smart congratulates himself: “Mission accomplished. KAOS destroyed. That’s the end of Mr. Big. If only he could have turned his evil genius into—niceness.” In accepting the 2020 presidential nomination, Mr. Biden said: “It’s a moment that calls for hope and light and love.” If only he would follow the advice his predecessor often tweeted: “Get Smart!”
Mr. Opelka is a musical-theater composer-lyricist.
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