‘West of Hollywood’: Humor as Reparation in the Life and Work of Walter Becker

Innovative musician, producer, and songwriter Walter Becker (1950–2017) wielded humor to distance himself from a traumatic childhood and to bind himself to a peer group that shared his skewed, wry worldview. Following years of struggle at the fringes of the music business, Becker achieved worldwide success as co-founder of the platinum-selling band Steely Dan. By the end of the 1970s, however, the Dan was defunct, and Becker felt compelled to retreat to the Polynesian-American subculture of Maui, Hawaii, where he continued to write and record songs that tackled the orientalist theme of “East meets West” in his inimitable droll style. This chapter takes up Eysenck’s psychology of humor as well as various social theorists’ assessments of Romantic irony as lenses through which to view Walter Becker’s lifelong struggle to bend his potentially ego-diminishing sardonicism into positive relations with self and others. Positive Psychology 2.0 (PP2) will be called upon to frame the chapter’s discussion section, in which it is concluded that Becker was able to mitigate the self-other corrosion that emanated from his hipster-satirist persona by integrating into his art the more earnest, sincere sentiments that sprang from life on his Maui estate, where life amongst family, friends, and artistic collaborators reflected his embrace of a slow-paced, pastoral culture that the Manhattan-born bohemian had earlier dismissed as shallow and vacuous.