There's a moment in the new Sam Richardson comedy where his character, a mild-mannered man who has just been handed a refund he didn't ask for, stares at the receipt like it's a ransom note.
But watching it in a theater last week, what struck me wasn't the joke.
We have become a country that treats ordinary kindness as a plot twist.
Richardson has spent a decade playing the guy who is decent when the script says he shouldn't be.
In "Veep" he was the loyal aide surrounded by vipers.
In "Detroiters" he was the friend who showed up.
In "Ted Lasso" he was the executive who tried to do right by people who couldn't be bothered to do right by him.
He is, in other words, the last honest man in a room full of people checking their phones.
And yet here we are, in a culture that has turned basic decency into a brand.
We put "be kind" on yard signs and then scream at the guy who took our parking spot.
We stream shows about good people and then treat the actual good people in our lives like they're running a con.
Richardson's entire filmography is a mirror, and the reflection is uncomfortable.
Most of it is cruelty with a laugh track.
We watch people get humiliated on reality TV and call it entertainment.
We scroll past strangers' worst moments and call it content.
It just stands there, slightly baffled, wondering why everyone is so angry all the time.
Trust in neighbors has been falling for decades.
Church attendance, club membership, bowling leagues — the whole civic fabric — has been unraveling since before Richardson was born.
We didn't just stop trusting institutions.
And when you stop trusting each other, you start seeing a decent guy on TV as a fantasy.
He's playing ordinary people who do the small, unglamorous right thing.
We've lowered the bar so far that basic integrity reads as saintliness.
They don't wave flags or post manifestos.
They just keep being decent in a world that has decided decency is for suckers.
We're laughing at the absurdity of a society that made him the exception.
I don't know if Richardson set out to become the patron saint of American niceness.
But the fact that his mild-mannered decency feels like a novelty act says everything about where we are.
We didn't lose our manners in a single election or a single pandemic.
We lost them one shrugged shoulder at a time.
Final Thoughts
The closing scene of his new special has him sitting alone in a diner, eating pie, saying nothing.