Heather Havrilesky

Time was when you could call your kid a lazy shit or a stupid jerk and get away with it. Remember those days? You know, back before the immensely powerful toddler lobby took over Washington and people became enlightened and informed and started treating their filthy little rug rats like foreign dignitaries. “Rude, thoughtless little pig” was mild talk in my family, the kind of thing you might hear when you forgot to take out the trash. For a few years when my older brother was in high school and looked just like Funky Winkerbean, my dad couldn’t address him without using the word “weirdo,” as in “Stop being such a weirdo and play a sport or something.” The summer I turned 13 and started sporting fake Ray-Bans and listening to Blondie’s “Parallel Lines” on a continuous loop in my Walkman, my dad referred to me as a “shallow dummy” at least as often as he said my name. If there were an army of spies with camera phones back then, we would’ve been ripped straight from the arms of our hotheaded parents and dropped into the nearest foster home before we were even potty trained.

I had a boyfriend whose father basically never called him anything but “little fucker” for most of his childhood, so I know I’m not the only one who was called names on a regular basis. Did it erode our self-esteem? Clearly not, since here I am, overconfident enough to be bloviating in these pages.

In the old days, when you used mean words instead of your fists, it was considered a triumph. The big debate among my mom’s friends focused on whether or not it was really fair to hit someone else’s kid on the ass with a wooden spoon or a belt when he did something bad. Spanking wasn’t shameful back then, it was an important job that you needed tools to perform.

These days, you’re not even allowed to use adjectives that might insinuate that a child is anything less than perfect in every way. A friend’s kid came home from drama class one day complaining that the teacher had called him an idiot. My friend didn’t like that. “What was he doing?” I asked. Turns out that, during an improv exercise, he was loudly insulting the actors’ choices. An understandable reaction to bad improv, to be sure, but one that, if indulged, would basically render the whole class mute with self-consciousness. The instructor thought it better to hurl a well-timed insult, saving the other students from shame by shaming the idiot.

That seems like an important lesson for any kid, to me: If you don’t want to be called an idiot, sometimes you have to stop acting like one. But today, everyone agrees that merely uttering these words is pure evil, that kids will always take their hotheaded parents’ remarks personally, every single time, and their sweet little natures will be eaten away and they’ll turn hard and mean and full of spite. You know, like me.

But if everyone is right about this new no-name-calling trend, you’d assume that our playgrounds would be filled with patient, amicable darlings. Instead, all I see are the same rude, thoughtless little pigs who were always there, still reenacting scenes from “Lord of the Flies.” Only these days, the savages smack their own parents in the face, and all their moms and dads do is whisper diplomatic tomes on the pros and cons of maybe, possibly considering putting down that sharpened stick and thinking about possibly, maybe trying to resist the very natural and normal urge to impale that poor kid over there with it.

What happened to the furious mom who would appear out of nowhere and wrench her little punk’s arm ruthlessly, yanking him out of his strike position and back to the sidelines for some stinging words and a few solid swats? The sharpened stick would be left in the dust by the swing set, and Piggy and Ralph would be free to roam the playground without fearing for their lives henceforth.

I don’t mind that spanking is no longer considered a good time, but honestly, would it really kill anyone to hear “Stop it, stupid!” once or twice? How about “Quit it, you big jerk!”? OK, “Quit acting like a big jerk!” right? Because that way the kid isn’t necessarily a jerk, he’s just acting like one?

I don’t know. Where’s the fun in mincing words? Calling people mean names is like smoking — first you can’t do it at work, then you can’t do it in public spaces. Now you’re not even allowed to do it in e-mails or at sushi restaurants or even in the privacy of your own home, even though everyone there knows you well enough to know that you’re just a temperamental dick. You’d think that if you grew up the way most of our parents did, raised by the so-called Greatest Generation who regularly got drunk and threw plates at their kids’ heads, you’d have earned the right to utter a few choice, nasty words every now and then.

Sure, we all cringe when we overhear bad parents berating their children in ways that it’s pretty clear will erode their self-esteem, and maybe even impede their ability to get out of bed in the morning for the rest of their lives. I’m not talking about those freaks, I’m talking about reasonably happy, witty, intelligent, mean-spirited hotheads. Remember when all parents fit that description, and they all went around chain-smoking and swilling coffee and eating cherry pie and complaining about their spouses and stopping for half a second to say something sort of biting and harsh to their kids? I miss them, damn it! When I hear Alec Baldwin’s voice mail, I don’t feel disturbed, I feel nostalgic for the good old days, when everyone was free to be a huge asshole from time to time without fearing expensive and lengthy litigation.

And anyway, if name-calling is so awful, how did my generation turn out to be so charming and self-confident and wise and omniscient? Oh, you don’t think I’m charming? You don’t think I’m omniscient? Fine, I’ll prove it right now by reading your mind…

You’re thinking, “I can’t wait to read the letters for this one.”

To all of Salon’s readers: You’re some of the most engaged and outspoken readers on the Web, and my writing has benefited from both your criticism and your encouragement. I genuinely appreciate your support over the years. Please feel free to drop me a line via Twitter, keep up with my latest work through my website, the rabbit blog, and look for my memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” on Dec. 30 from Riverhead Books.

Few writers ever get the chance to enjoy a job that’s as creatively fulfilling as this one, or to write for an audience as smart and as insightful as Salon’s. Although it’s time for me to move on to new challenges, I will look back fondly on my years at Salon and feel grateful for them.

While the old familiar faces of late night don’t do much more than make us chuckle ourselves to sleep at night, one man has been calmly and quietly upping his game: Jimmy Kimmel. Despite his distance from the action, it was Kimmel who took some of the most direct shots at Leno during the late night wars. In addition to imitating Leno on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and then appearing on Leno’s show and insulting him to his face, Kimmel has been more outspoken than Conan himself about Leno’s sneaky strategy to take back “The Tonight Show” (although Bill Carter’s new book, “The War for Late Night,” seems to suggest that Leno wasn’t quite so calculating as Kimmel and others seem to assume). When asked in an interview with GQ this month what he learned from the late night dust-up, Kimmel replied: “The lesson is, it pays to be sneaky. I think that’s the main thing I learned. That, and don’t trust Jay Leno.”

It’s this frank talk that sets Jimmy Kimmel apart from his peers. Throw in the sharpest and funniest opening monologue on late night, an incredible knack for improv, and liberal use of off-kilter gimmicks and skits, and it’s no wonder that Kimmel has risen to the rank of late night king. Whether he’s launching a multitiered attack on Facebook idiocy with his National Unfriend Day, finding creative new ways to insult Matt Damon, or shooting an entire episode during a power outage using only his webcam, Kimmel has always had that combination of swagger and imagination that separates the good talk show hosts from the great ones. Like Johnny Carson and Letterman in his heyday, Kimmel has the bluster and the quick wit to make every moment watching him on the air feel dynamic and exciting.

That’s no small feat, of course, but it’s what real late night heroism demands. Kimmel tackles pop culture with more sharp wit and weirdo flair than any of the other late night hosts, whether he’s addressing the new Spider-Man musical (“I’ve been working on a superhero show myself, it’s called ‘Aquaman on Ice.’ Aquaman on skates, trying desperately to speak to his friends who are trapped under the layer of ice. That’s a musical!”), rumors that Snoop Dogg will play at Prince William’s bachelor party (“I’m excited for His Highness, and by His Highness, I mean both of them”), airline security pat-downs (“We freak out if a TSA agent touches us on the outside of our pants, but Black Friday, we will hump each other’s heads to get at Walmart to save 8 bucks on a PSP”), or even the plans to have Lindsay Lohan appear on “Dancing With the Stars” (“I would love to see her vomit on Len Goodman”).

When he’s interviewing guests, Kimmel is arguably better on his feet and more ready with unexpected quips than any other host. On a recent episode when Ben Affleck waxed sympathetic about hard economic times in America, Kimmel soon hinted that no one wants to hear a megastar fake emotion for the little people.

Affleck: I don’t think there’s anybody in the United States that hasn’t been affected (by the recession) in some way or another.

Kimmel: Oprah hasn’t been affected at all.

On another recent episode, Kimmel took an otherwise bland interview with Kate Bosworth and livened it up. (And let’s face it, the real test of good late-night hosting lies in finding some way to spice up interviews with dull, self-involved young actors and actresses. In addition to Kimmel, only Letterman and Craig Ferguson manage it with any regularity.)

Bosworth: (on her Korean co-star) He literally is the Brad Pitt of Korea. It’s pretty wild.

Kimmel: Really? ‘Cause I was told I was the Brad Pitt of Korea. That’s disappointing. I feel like I was lied to. (pause) He’s the Brad Pitt of Korea. And so does that mean he adopts a whole bunch of white kids, or how does that work?

He even managed to save an interview with Paris Hilton from the bowels of hell:

Hilton: (on her current boyfriend) Right now, I’m just so happy. He’s my best friend.

Kimmel: Wait a minute, now. I saw a television show in which you picked a best friend and he wasn’t it. Are you telling me that was not your real BFF?

Later, when Hilton called her new perfume “my tenth fragrance,” Kimmel countered, “That seems like too many fragrances to me.”

This is where the fans of Jimmy Fallon, who have been rallying lately to crown their contagiously giddy leader the supreme ruler of late night, really must admit defeat. While Fallon’s antics try our patience in all the right ways (Zach Galifianakis’ recent appearance, followed by a skit the very finest flavor of stupid, marked a recent high point), Fallon is a pretty bland interviewer, sometimes resembling Chris Farley’s guffawing yes-man talk show host of “SNL” legend. Nonetheless, Fallon is undoubtedly in the groove lately, with such sure-footed oddball gimmicks and quirky enthusiasm that it makes you wonder if “The Chris Farley Show” itself wouldn’t have morphed into something deliciously strange, if given enough time. And let’s face it, anyone who makes Helen Mirren play beer pong deserves at least an honorable mention, if not an Emmy.

While he might be the best Neil Young impersonator on late night (or anywhere else), Fallon has none of the subtle snideness that made Carson, Letterman and now Kimmel masters of the craft. Sure, the kind folks down at the local elementary school’s bake sale might find such a tone distasteful, but the rest of us, who’ve been marinating in a toxic mix of “The Love Boat,” People magazine and celebreality shows for years now, need a healthy dollop of scorn to make the celebrity promotional appearance go down a little more smoothly.

Fans of Craig Ferguson will point out that he shares the requisite doubting tone in his interviews, and also scores very high for sheer courage of conviction. And it’s true that to watch half a second of Ferguson’s show is to love him, from his googly-eyed knowing looks to his perverse but genius rambling asides. His self-effacing charms make his perhaps the most unpredictable and unruly of the late night shows. However enchantingly strange Ferguson’s monologues and interviews may be, they just don’t stack up to Kimmel’s.

And like Letterman, Kimmel carries the torch of bemoaning his network overlords, lamenting the dumb stuff ABC makes him promote. The imbedded advertising — Bud Light signs on the stage, Old Navy promotions at the start of the show, constant appearances by “Dancing With the Stars” contestants — isn’t all that easy to ignore, but Kimmel makes the best of it. He’s taken to calling himself “the three-headed dog the stars must pass on their way to no-dancing hell,” and after that show’s big finale, he told his audience, “I tell you something, I had a good morning. I woke up this morning, and for about three minutes, couldn’t remember who won “Dancing With the Stars” this year. It felt great, it really did.”

But Kimmel should wake up feeling great every morning. After all, who would’ve thought that this guy would be the big winner of the late night debacle of 2010? When you flip from Conan to Leno to Letterman, or stay up for Carson Daly or Fallon or Ferguson, even though you might appreciate Ferguson’s bizarro self-deprecating digressions or Fallon’s raw enthusiasm, Kimmel is the only host who will make you laugh out loud more than a few times per episode. He’s got the sharpest monologue, the most interesting digressions and skits, and the best interviewing skills. Now that the dust has cleared, “The Tonight Show” doesn’t look like a prize worth squabbling over, because, with or without the Cheesecake Factory backdrop, Jimmy Kimmel is the new Johnny Carson.

“OK, have a great weekend!” I replied.

Old people are a little checked out, it’s true. But we’re amiably comatose. This friendly state of autopilot is the only way we’ve found to manage our dashed dreams, our growing contempt for the culture, our creeping disappointments, our fibromyalgia. We grind our teeth at night and have vivid dreams about screwing cheerleaders. We resent the unflattering shape of matchstick jeans and daydream about gigantic claw-foot bathtubs we can’t afford. Our elbows hurt and our hair always looks bad and we secretly think all electropop sounds like Kraftwerk.

Recognizing the defeat in each other’s eyes, we smile warmly and say things like, “Of course! We’d love to,” and “Fantastic! I can’t wait!” because we recognize that everyone is flawed and just barely able to accept their own mediocrity or tolerate the frustrations of advancing age. The least we can do is be nice about it.

Youngish (under 35) skeptics will tell you that the men of “Men of a Certain Age” (premieres Dec. 6 on TNT) don’t talk like men at all, they talk like post-menopausal book club members. This show isn’t made for those youngish people, though. It’s made for the oldish (over 35) among us, who recognize the self-doubting, second-guessing, pot-bellied guys on their TV screen as a painfully palpable embodiments of the humiliations and tiny little ego victories of middle age.

The charms of “Men of a Certain Age,” like the charms of growing old, are lost on the common whippersnapper. While youngish people tend to reevaluate and reappraise their oldest friendships constantly, questioning whether this or that old friend is up to speed with just how advanced and mature and evolved the new “me” is, old people recognize that they haven’t actually advanced or matured or evolved much over the years. Thus do they humbly turn to each other, all rumpled feathers and matted fur, and sigh deeply. Less important than how far you’ve come, to old friends, is how far you haven’t come — and also, where you were before you got old. The fundamental importance of old friendships, plus that peculiar flavor of shared, comfy nastiness that bounces around between old friends — these make up the soft center of “Men of a Certain Age.” We grow old, we fail, we reproach the gods and grimace in pain, and then we meet to eat pie and complain at the same diner each week.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, don’t give up on your dream, Terry!’” Terry (Scott Bakula) tells lifelong friends Joe (Ray Romano) and Owen (Andre Braugher) of his acting career. “What would’ve been so bad if I had, huh? We’re at this place in our lives, we’ve come all this way, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You’ve got something — families, careers …”

“Families suck,” Joe replies. This harshness, which of course we don’t expect and don’t believe entirely (even from a divorced guy with an anxious teen son and a moody teen daughter), is what balances out the vulnerability of “Men of a Certain Age.” As hand-holdy as the talk can get, these guys are still just guys.

And if you think their confessional, supportive tone with each other comes out of left field, tell that to the wood fence contractor who volunteered to me last week that he’d been “journaling a lot” about his dad’s death, or the plumber who, apropos of nothing, discussed the struggles of raising teenagers. Middle-aged strangers tell each other emotional stuff out of the blue, and middle-aged friends tell each other everything. (The only exception may be certain varieties of hipster intellectual, who could literally chat about Sufjan Stevens’ latest album on their deathbeds instead of confessing the hopes, fears and regrets of their final hours.)

But the utter lack of hipness of “Men of a Certain Age,” the total lack of concern for what’s deemed cool and what isn’t, the complete disregard for matching the breakneck pace, the action, the swooning romances, the spitty outbursts, the shiny thrills of other TV shows, is exactly what makes this drama so lovable. Where other dramas would pack in more zaniness and intrigue in every available second of airtime, “Men of a Certain Age” rolls out the familiar, the ordinary, and locates poetic folds and sweet pockets of emotion therein: Joe’s employees are two pure-intentioned teenagers who are genuinely confused by his old-guy ways, and one slow-moving old Spanish-speaking guy, Carlos, who sleeps on the job but Joe still can’t stand to fire him (he lays him off then hires him back at the end of the first season). Owen works at a car dealership owned by his dad, a thoroughly mundane job that Owen dislikes most of the time, but also occasionally excels at. When he breaks away to work for another dealership at the start of the second season, his father is angry, but his respect and investment in his son finally start to emerge out of the fog of his constant hectoring. Even Terry, with his acting career, has encounters with the film industry that will strike anyone who’s actually worked production as hauntingly authentic, less focused as they are on stars and perks and glamour than on a steady flow of deeply humiliating interactions with the most unsavory sorts of egomaniacs imaginable. The big promises and untrustworthy allegiances Terry forms with one director (who refers to him, tellingly, as “T-bag”), only to have the rug pulled out from under him on a whim, echo some essential Hollywood experience that’s rarely portrayed with quite as much clarity and empathy.

But the big impact of this drama comes in its quietest moments: Joe and his son, Albert (Braedon Lemasters), are driving home from the movie theater after Albert has had an anxiety attack and insists that they leave. Suddenly, Albert wants to know if Joe is embarrassed by him. “Embarrassed? No, man. Never,” Joe says, his eyes starting to well up a little. “You’re my hero. I mean that. You’re doing great, man. I’m proud of you.” It’s simple dialogue, nothing fancy, nothing too clever or provocative, but that’s what gets you in the throat sometimes.

Like the oldish and crumpled and vaguely resentful among us, “Men of a Certain Age” casts aside sophistication and witty banter for the comfort of what’s real — even when what’s real is disappointments, missed connections and inadequate attempts to reassure. In accepting our frailty, we locate our souls.

You’re doing great, “Men of a Certain Age.” We’re proud of you.

Oh, and have a great weekend! 

The answer to that question, of course, is zero. Or as Lebowitz herself puts it when speaking to a roomful of young people, “There are too many books, the books are terrible, and it’s because you have been taught to have self-esteem.” This is Lebowitz’s distinct talent: making elitist contempt sound charming.

Toni Morrison, a friend of Lebowitz’s, puts it a little differently. “You seem to me almost always right,” she tells Lebowitz. “But never fair.”

“That’s why,” Lebowitz responds. “I’m always right because I’m never fair.”

Most of us secretly wish that we could be as right and as unfair as she is. But the world has changed a lot since “Metropolitan Life” was first published in 1974. Being unfair isn’t nearly as acceptable as it used to be. Today, people demand prose that is polite, respectful, nonjudgmental, and that never employs terms, phrases, suggestions or hints that could offend any segment of the population. People demand prose that isn’t prose, in other words.

Contrast that with almost any assertion made by Lebowitz in “Metropolitan Life” or “Social Studies”: Jews make good stand-up comedians. Sports are “dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.” Communism is unpleasant because “I do not work well with others and I do not wish to learn to do so.” Children “tend to be sticky” and “respond inadequately to sardonic humor and veiled threats.”

“Public Speaking” (premieres 10 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22, on HBO) is also packed with Lebowitz’s clever observations, the most gratifying of which may be her reflections on the ways our culture has changed since her books were first published. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. That audience died in five minutes,” she says, referring to the AIDS epidemic. These days, Lebowitz says, “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.” The problem? “Too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society.”

Lebowitz’s real strength, though, lies in explaining the different social classes to each other, either in her books or in Scorsese’s film. In “Social Studies” she includes a “Glossary of Words Used By Poorer People” including meatloaf (“A gloriously rough kind of pate”) and overworked (“an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, exhaustion, weariness. Similar to jet lag”), and outlines the trivializing effects of the international jet-setter (“What, after all, is London to a man who thinks of the whole Middle East as just another bad neighborhood and the coast of South Africa as simply the beach?”).

In “Public Speaking,” it’s clear that, although Lebowitz might mingle with elites, her underlying affections lie with the common man — as unsuitable as she might find his pants or his penchant for installing wall-to-wall carpeting in bathrooms. When the topic of how New York City has changed over the past two decades arises, Lebowitz says, “When a place is too expensive, only people with lots of money can live there. That’s the problem. You can like people with money, hate people with money. But you cannot say that an entire city with people with lots of money is fascinating. It isn’t.”

Even if her writers block continues for another three decades, Lebowitz herself remains undeniably fascinating. Scorsese’s documentary offers us a long overdue taste of her unique, queasily accurate perspectives on our culture — always right, never fair and never disappointing.