Social climbing is a comic pursuit. It can seem a little pathetic, a little cringe. And maybe it’s driven by vices like selfishness and greed. But at the end of the day, it’s predominantly a comedy.
I’m reading J.P. Donleavy again, so this has been on my mind a lot lately. Donleavy is a comic genius and literary stylist best known for his 1955 novel The Ginger Man. He’s the type of author who could write about virtually anything and it would always be entertaining. Despite this, he wrote stories almost exclusively about the pursuit of money, women, and a consequence-free good time. All that matters in life, he seems to believe, is social climbing.
Because life is a comedy and nothing is quite so comedic as this singular pursuit.
Donleavy was a weirdo. An artist in the romantic sense. He lived in an old, secluded mansion in Ireland with no source of income besides his writing. It seems easy to pass off his obsession with social climbing as the degenerate fantasy of a rascally literary figurehead.
Then again, he might have been onto something. According to Robert Wright’s book The Moral Animal: “During evolution social status correlated with reproductive success, so genes conducive to social climbing did better than genes that counseled indifference.”
In the New York Times article “Let Us Now Praise Social Climbing,” Richard Stengel explains: “Successful social climbers do feel superior. After all, that's why they climb. Neurobiologists have shown that those who ascend to dominant groups have more serotonin in their nervous systems than the rest of us. Serotonin makes us happy.”
To the comedic point, which Donleavy was intent to emphasize, examples of social-climbing-as-comedy abound. For example, this week on the Tim Dillon Show, Tim rehashed his popular episode “How to Be Popular.” He gives two humorous pieces of advice to help kids in school become popular:
1) “Find the weak link in the popular group and become their best friend, ultimately replacing them. You don’t go for the star quarterback, you don’t go for the head cheerleader, you go for the guy that’s just on the periphery. Befriend him or her and replace them. Then you work your way up.”
2) “Choose a personality. Because this is essential. One of them is the person whose parent died. This is a personality that is available to you. Someone whose father died and then it never ends with that. It’s the beginning, middle, and end of who you are. Every Instagram post is, “Dad! Love you, Dad! At the grave again with Dad!” And that is a fine personality for a person to have. And literally people introduce you like, “This is Alicia, her father is dead. And that’s what she brings to the table.”
People do get absolutely serious about social climbing, of course. Just look into Jared Kushner’s utterly dead but still somehow ravenously hungry-for-attention eyes. Or consider the guy, in the recent Victoria’s Secret documentary, who said that billionaire Les Wexner was a nobody as far as New York society was concerned because Wexner was based in the Midwest. And you have to make it in New York to make it at all. Or consider the villain in Blade Runner 2045, the guy who controlled Earth and nine planets but was mortified that he didn’t control more.
There is something sinister in these examples, but it’s not the element of social climbing. It’s the pursuit of power. When Jared Kushner seeks to achieve real political power, that’s sinister and a little terrifying. When he tries to rise in the ranks of New York high society by not entirely abandoning his liberal credentials, that’s comedic.
Now, for all the up-and-coming Jared Kushners out there, here’s a tip from the master, Donleavy, in the art of social climbing. This is a selection from his social climbing manual, The Unexpurgated Code:
Be easily amused. This is a socially superior characteristic, only improved upon by being highly amused. But for your own safety it is as well to temper this latter quality by never explosively convulsing with laughter except in the presence of established intimates. If however you are temporarily not easily amused and someone who may be of social advantage has put much effort into the telling of a joke, make every effort possible to remark. “Hey that’s really rich.”