Robert Browning wrote, “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made.”

All youth, reading the poem (“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” 1864), scoffed. But those of the old fortunate enough to nod in agreement are fortunate, indeed.

Many of our contemporaries live in remorse about their squandered, or sorrow for their lost, youth. One can clothe the nature (but not the substance) of these corrosive emotions beneath disgust at the Current State of the World, or anger at the swine who, in their wickedness, have brought it about.

Both, focusing on the self, give one a feeling akin to that brought about by self-control: One can confect a false sense of control by reducing one’s world to one’s own being.

Those of my fellow aged who do so have elected themselves rulers of a very small kingdom; and, like any bad and incompetent boss, they “rule” through complaint. It is not only the state of the Outside World that they decry — it is burning up, the seas are rising, our country is a Slave State — but that their own bodies are failing.

The aged may always blame their dissatisfaction on the State of the World, and name their failing strength, should they choose to do so, as betrayal by the universe (birth name: God).

In my youth the Farmer’s Daughter Jokes were a staple of the American schoolyard. They’d filtered down to us, as a heritage of the age of the traveling salesman. He covered his route from one small town to the next, by horse and buggy, and later by automobile. But both of these contraptions were liable to failure. And, often, he found himself stranded.

He walked on, till he came to a farmhouse and enquired of the farmer if he might spend the night. The farmer said, Of course, but with one proviso: You must not sleep with my daughter. And so on.

For many of us, in the mid-century schoolyard, this was our first exposure to the Dirty Joke. And it was particularly attractive to the pre-adolescent as it contained the suggestion of universal female acquiescence: For we embraced the salesman’s fantasy that every farmhouse contained a nubile and amorous woman.

(None of the daughters in the jokes were unwilling; they were, it seemed, put on earth to comfort the salesman after the failure of his distributor head.)

The traveling salesman was expected to be the life of the party around the old potbellied stove at the country store. He greased his entry into the sales pitch by sharing risqué jokes — it was expected of him.

See also life on a movie set. The hair-and-makeup trailer was always the locus of gossip, and its proprietors were expected to be our beloved court jesters. Just as the soundmen were all supposed to be deaf. Life on the good set runs on humor. It’s the expression of joy, if I may, at being a part of a true community. As was the camaraderie of the potbellied stove.

The Farmer’s Daughter Jokes grew out of life on the road. Their harnessmate, the Bellhop Joke, concerned the salesman’s life in the towns and cities. The salesman spent this in railroad hotels built near the stations and catering, largely, to commercial travelers. Here, the joke’s onstage action (farmer, daughter, salesman) was moved offstage, and the protagonist, coequal with the major actors, became the Chorus (see Ancient Greece): the Bellhop.

The Bellhop Joke was a modern repurposing of the Garden of Eden as the hotel’s bridal suite, with the dramatic interpolation of the Bellhop, the deus ex machina, as Chorus.

The deus ex machina, god from the machine, we will remember, was that angel, messenger, or divinity who was lowered onto the stage from heaven, at the ultimate moment of dramatic chaos, to put everything aright. (In Some Like It Hot, for example, it is Joe E. Brown, the millionaire, who rescues our lads from the Capone mob.)

Here’s a Bellhop Joke:

Honeymoon couple enters the bridal suite unpacking their bags. The man remembers that he left the iron on, in his apartment, back home. They begin throwing their clothes back into the suitcase. The suitcase won’t close. The man says, “Get on top and push.” It’s insufficient. The woman says, “You get on top.” Still insufficient. The man says, “Let’s both get on top.” The door bursts open and the bellhop says, “This I gotta see . . .”

Here’s another:

Couple in the bridal suite. Bellhop listening outside. He hears: She: “Jim. I just can’t believe it. (PAUSE) I can’t believe we’re married. (PAUSE) I just can’t believe we’re married. I can’t believe it . . .” He: “You’re gonna believe it when I get my shoelace untied.”

Another adaptive mechanism of the disaffected old is incredulity. (I can’t believe, for example, that “x, y, and z are all, now, so corrupt, decadent, inconvenient, wicked, and absurd. Are the young blind?”) This incredulity, like anger or hypochondria, is an analgesic (who does not enjoy bitching?). But that’s all it is. It masks, and, more importantly, impedes confrontation of the actual situation, which is age.

The traveling salesman is gone, the railroad hotels are gone, a phone call is no longer a nickel, and the adaptive mechanisms of one’s middle age do not suffice in this new and strange land.

But wait:

There is wisdom in jokes, they are all about revelation, which is to say exposure of the forbidden (dirty jokes) and, so, our sinfulness; or of the repressed (our knowledge of our own mental insufficiency: Why do firemen wear red suspenders? To hold their pants up).

And there is wisdom in literature. The attacks on free speech, like the eradication of national humor, are an attempt to terrify away from contemplation of our actual condition.

Will Smith lost his mind on international television and assaulted Chris Rock. Chris responded, “You saw it, the most memorable moment in the history of television.” And, the next day, “I’m just glad I didn’t insult Alec Baldwin’s wife.”

Here Mr. Rock took two otherwise indigestible events and conjoined them to give us a laugh, which is to say, release: which is best achieved in humor, by revealing the unavowable. By the way, God bless him.

Mr. Smith saw red. I’ve done so, and perhaps you have, too. And I, and perhaps you, have, after the event, thanked God that we somehow did not act upon that impulse, the rectitude of whose expression seemed to us, at that time, the most imperative of obligations.

Mr. Smith punched Mr. Rock out. In previous days, this was not an unheard-of phenomenon. Today, in a culture obsessed with discovering aggression everywhere, a friendly right cross is classed as an outrage equal with school shootings. But not here.

Well, Mr. Smith is beloved, famous, and real rich. No one believed that he would suffer for an assault that would have landed you or me in the jug, and our families on the way to the courthouse to change their names. Neither did anyone assume that the Blessed Panoply of the Oscars would cease, or that Mr. Smith would be escorted from the room in irons, or leave of his own accord, in remorse, umbrage, decency, or shame.

And none of us assumed that he would be debarred from his trophy. Nor that, should he receive it, he would fail to make some soppy speech.

So far so good. But who could have foreseen that the audience, having witnessed the assault upon Mr. Rock, and undergone the assault upon their good taste by Mr. Smith’s sanctimony, would then stand and burst into applause?

What in the world were they applauding?

The same thing that the Oscars always celebrate: moneymakers. N.B.: The NFL will not expel wife-beaters from their ranks. These may pretend to attend anger-management classes, for they are only linemen. But the quarterback, Will Smith, may explain that he punched Mr. Rock because his wife’s hair fell out, and the members of the Academy stand and applaud him as the Victim.

“Who could believe it?” is a rhetorical question, which is to say, a “statement,” which means, finally, “I am reluctant to correctly assess and honestly name the phenomenon.”

The phenomenon at the Oscars was momentary rage, on the part of Smith, and mob thuggery, on the part of the audience, which, pressed to assimilate criminal assault by their moneymaker, elected to praise it.

This is the most perfect demonstration of the power of the mob. For imagine those in the audience who were nonplussed, disgusted, or appalled, not by the punch, but by the speech. For there were, certainly, some of those.

But when folks started standing to applaud the sententiousness, did these retain their seats? Or did they make the cost-and-benefit analysis, and stand rather than risk the notice, and, so, displeasure, of the standees? That’s what we saw on historical television; and, being human, we chose to focus on the more acceptable outlier, the punch, rather than the greater disgrace of the standing ovation.

Were the audience insane? Probably no more than you or I; but they were assembled into a group, which as a group could not acknowledge the (minor, and interesting, to all but the victim) outrage, and so elected to celebrate it, and, so, to enjoy it.

Just as we, the aged, may enjoy incredulity as a perquisite of age.

I name the great Bob Hoover, combat ace pilot, test pilot, airshow hero, recently deceased, among whose precepts we find: Fly it as far as you can into the crash.

We, the aged, in this bizarre, unfamiliar new world (of the young), may throw up our hands in incredulity at what are, after all, natural processes: age, human nature, the inevitable transformations of all society. But the pilot who throws up his hands in an emergency is, at that moment, dead (the airplane will not fly itself); he has another option, as Mr. Hoover taught. Will the end be the same? He can fly on and see.

As can the aged, and, so, in action or contemplation, accept the position of Elder. Even if it does not seem to be on offer.

I adore Tolstoy’s novels. They are page-turners, and jam-packed with wisdom (helpful hints) regarding both our immutable human nature and observations on the same of a 19th-century Russian.

Most of his aperçus are put in the mouths of peasants. Here’s one that changed my thinking: The most dangerous age, for a man, is the years between 65 and 75. If he can live to 75, he can live to a hundred.

Well, I am on the brink (should it amuse God to spare me) of my 75th birthday. And, after the years of bitching and moaning, and incredulity at social collapse, I came to ponder his wisdom. For this decade is the last vestige of my youth. And the unwary will continue, in spite of its absence, to expend those remaining energies required for longevity — they will, then, suffer mental and physical fatigue and be host to all sorts of opportunistic infections.

Just as will a civilization.

Having reached maturity — our apogee, per choice, the magnificence of the moon landing or the horror of the Vietnam War — we may squander our energies in complaint about a vanished (and, indeed, misremembered) past, a pitfall of the conservatives; or insistence on an impossible future (our esteemed colleagues across the aisle). Or, like the wiser individual who’s been graced with a long life, thank God for the continued gift of life, and study to use our remaining energies honorably, leaving the young with the certainty that they will find age-appropriate uses and misuses for their time; and the hope that, as Mr. Hoover said, their knowledge will increase quicker than their reservoir of luck diminishes.

Is it possible that a country, our beloved country, can emerge intact from our various national hysterias? The embittered old would say, Of course not. Things have progressed beyond hope of reversal. But they are beyond hope only if we surrender hope; and the insidious beginning of surrender is incredulity.