Is it goodbye to the happy birthday?
Last Sunday was my birthday and I’m glad it’s over. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the cards and good wishes, but it was the automated messages that broke the camel’s back. Like the one from the doctor: “Happy Birthday to Our Awesome Patient! We hope today is an extra special day for you, filled with lots of love, laughter, and of course, cake!” You bet.
And then came the dentist, the bank, a five-star hotel in Bali I’d forgotten I’d stayed in, and the mortgage broker with the gift of a never-to-be-won lottery ticket.
On one day, my special day, I was given summary reminders of everything that can crush a person in this life: ill health, failing teeth, mortgage repayments, the unwinnable lotto, and the fun that other people are having, dining al fresco on a beach in Seminyak, while at home fall is coming and we’re in full pumpkin mode. All in the guise of “have a nice day.”
Remember Morrissey singing “I’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday”? That’s how it feels when marketing shows up unsolicited at the party. Like you’ve just stepped into “a comedy of menace,” morphing into Stan, the miserable protagonist of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen it, it’s a psychodrama with an unhappy ending.
I’m not the only one targeted with birthday e-cards, either. Even Honey, the cavapoo, gets her share of happy birthdays from the vet and an online pet food provider who slips in a bonus $10 shopping voucher along with the inevitable, bad-pun declarative, “Have a pawsome birthday!”
Anniversaries have long been promoted by officialdom as a means of cultivating loyalty. It was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed George Washington’s birthday a day of remembrance; and Presidents’ Day has been a US federal holiday since 1879. In Britain, George II began the tradition of holding celebratory parades to honor the monarch’s birthday in 1748. He was born in November, which was deemed too cold for public festivities, so he chose June instead.
But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the birthday took off as a family fixture. Consumerism, in this new age of mass production, was there from the beginning, driving the festivities. An 1870 article in Harper’s Weekly describes an elaborate birthday party at a home on Fifth Avenue in New York City, the pièce de resistance being a cake cut into seventeen slices (the age of the birthday girl), each “ornamented by a little taper, of the Christmas-tree variety.” The “birthday-cake” at the center of this “pretty little ceremony” was obviously still a novelty, since the writer wonders whether it is “of American origin, or old English, or Knickerbocker, or German.”
The following year, 1871, Lewis Carroll could joke about birthday presents in his novel Alice Through the Looking-Glass, when Humpty Dumpty shows off a cravat he’s been gifted by the White King and Queen for his “un-birthday,” the name for “a present given when it isn’t your birthday.” Birthday cards were by then being sent, and in 1893 the tune for “Happy Birthday to You” came into existence, with the words following a few decades later. The modern birthday had arrived.
If I were to choose the high point of this birthday history, it would probably be Marilyn Monroe performing “Happy Birthday to You” with the jazz pianist Hank Jones in May 1962 at a Madison Square Garden star-studded fundraising bash, which was also a celebration of JFK’s forty-fifth birthday. Monroe was wearing a sheer, backless evening gown shimmering with rhinestones (the one which Kim Kardashian borrowed controversially for the 2022 Met Gala). A giant birthday cake was wheeled on stage as the President declared, “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” In retrospect, there’s a pathos to this party, given Monroe would be dead from a barbiturate overdose a few months later, and the President wouldn’t survive his presidency.
And the Birthday low point? That would be when “Happy Birthday to You” was reinvented as a handwashing song during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Americans told to sing it twice (20 seconds) as they soaped their hands, to make sure they were properly cleansed.
Is it just me, or has there been a general malaise creeping into the party for some time; an unhappiness which didn’t used to be there? And if so, when did it begin?
I’d argue that the tipping point came with the greed-is-good credo of the 1980s. In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfires of the Vanity we learn about the new rich who have “carnival rides trucked in and installed on the great green lawns for their children’s birthday parties, complete with teams of carnival workers to operate them. (A thriving little industry.).”
But by then the backlash had already begun. Think of the dark vibes of Junkyard, the album released by Nick Cave’s post-punk band The Birthday Party with songs like ‘Dead Joe’:
Welcome to the car smash a-a-a-a-a-smash Dead Joe
And who better to track the birthday’s devolution than Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, which came out in the same year as Wolfe’s book and captured the spirit of the times: “Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
By 1993, in Joel Schumacher’s movie Falling Down, birthdays were becoming torture. There, Douglas plays the character of William Foster, a divorced and deeply frustrated out-of-work engineer who crosses Los Angeles to make it to his daughter’s birthday. He’ll do anything to be there, even if it kills him, or others if he must.
Four years later, Douglas was back in David Fincher’s thriller The Game, this time as a wealthy San Francisco banker, Nicholas Van Orton, who is given a special present by his brother Conrad (played by Sean Penn) on his forty-eighth birthday—it’s a voucher for a “game” devised by a company called Consumer Recreation Services, or CRS. As Conrad says, “What do you get for the man who has…everything?” Answer: a mental breakdown induced by immersion in a $700K virtual reality adventure. Now, that’s a gift.
Birthdays were getting mental, and they got darker post 9/11. Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto is set at a birthday party in some unidentified country in South America at the home of the country’s vice president. The party in question has been thrown for Katsumi Hosokawa, the opera-loving chairman of a large Japanese corporation. But it all goes wrong when terrorists break into the house, planning to take the president of the country hostage, only to discover he isn’t there. So, instead, they take the party hostage.
You know there’s something seriously messed up when terrorists take over a birthday party. But the writing, as they say, was on the wall. Desperate measures, manipulative games, terror attacks, marketing bombardments: one thing’s for sure, birthdays will never be the same.