by Mardy Grothe
One of the vexing problems facing American leaders after the Japanese surrender in 1945 was what to do with Emperor Hirohito and his family. After lengthy—and apparently heated—discussions at the White House, it was decided that the emperor would not be tried for war crimes. But what exactly should be done with him and the rest of the Imperial Household? The details were left in the hands of General Douglas MacArthur, who was given free rein to make such decisions. MacArthur believed that a key to Japan’s future was the proper education of the emperor’s twelve-year-old son, Crown Prince Akihito.
MacArthur did something that would never happen today—he arranged for a virtually unknown American teacher to take the young prince under her wing. The tutor was Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Philadelphia widow with no children and no obvious credentials for the job. The forty-three-year-old Quaker woman had never visited Japan, spoke no Japanese, and came only with a strong recommendation from the American Friends Service Committee.
The tutor quickly won the trust of her young charge—even playing Monopoly with him during study breaks—and went on to play a pivotal role in his life. When she left Japan four years later, her pupil had flourished. He was fluent in English, was proficient in French and German, and showed a keen interest in Western ideas about individual freedom. In 1959, when Akihito became the first crown prince in Japanese history to marry a commoner, the only Westerner to attend the wedding was his beloved Mrs. Vining. On every birthday until she died in 1999—at age ninety-seven—she received a bouquet of flowers from her former pupil, delivered by limousine from the Japanese Embassy. When Emperor Hirohito died in 1989, Akihito ascended to the throne, a position he occupies to this day.
What does all this have to do with the chapter you’re reading? Well, as it turns out, the Japanese emperor and I have something in common—we both learned something special from Mrs. Vining. In her 1960 book Return to Japan, she wrote:
The word humor, according to the Oxford Dictionary, originally meant moisture or juice and only fairly recently, that is to say from the 17th century, came to mean that quality of action, speech, or writing which excites amusement, or the faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing. As anyone who has experienced the lubricating effect of even a small joke…humor still has an element of juice. It keeps life from drying up, gives it freshness and flavor.
In the first part of this passage, Vining correctly points out that the English word humor derives from a Latin word that means “fluid, moisture.” That root word is umor, which somewhere along the line added the letter h and gave us words like humor and humidity. The word originally conveyed the sense of “bodily fluids,” as in the ancient concept of bodily humors. In ancient Greece, physicians believed that the precise composition of four bodily fluids—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—determined a person’s temperament.
In the second part of the passage, Vining gracefully moves from the literal to the metaphorical realm by suggesting that the juice of humor can help to make life fresh and flavorful. When I first came upon her observation, I recalled something that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., recommended in his 1891 book Over the Teacups:
Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons,
and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
If music baths can be cleansing, it can also be argued that periodic humor baths are a good way to wash away some of the grime of life. Over the years, this beneficial aspect of humor has been well recognized, and many have expressed the view metaphorically:
Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.
STEVE ALLEN
Humor is just another defense against the universe.
MEL BROOKS
Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.
ARNOLD H. GLASGOW
Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.
PEGGY NOONAN
What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.
YIDDISH PROVERB
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
MARK TWAIN
Many people have come to believe that humor—especially if it provokes hearty laughter—isn’t simply a life enhancer but is also a life preserver, and maybe even a life prolonger. The most famous exponent of this view is undoubtedly Norman Cousins, the long-time Saturday Review editor and legendary peace activist. In the 1970s, Cousins was diagnosed with a painful and life-threatening illness. In his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, he described how he stumbled upon a letter that a consulting physician had written to his doctor. After reading the words “I’m afraid we’re going to lose Norman,” Cousins figured he had nothing to lose and began to take more control over his own treatment. He began viewing Marx Brothers’ movies and Candid Camera videos, discovering that “ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect that would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”
While continuing to work closely with his physicians, Cousins checked himself out of the hospital and into a nearby hotel, saying it was a place where he could “laugh twice as hard at half the price.” He slowly began to improve—greatly surprising his doctors—and he began to view laughter as sedentary aerobic exercise. All of this was occurring at the height of a worldwide running craze, and Cousins described the medical benefits of humor in a timely metaphor:
Laughter is internal jogging.
Anatomy of an Illness became an extremely influential book, stimulating intense interest in the mind–body connection and extensive research on the role of humor in medical treatment. Cousins, with no formal medical training, even went on to become an adjunct professor at UCLA’s school of medicine. In 1990, he died at age seventy-five, twenty-one years after the publication of his classic book.
In addition to the medical benefits, wit and humor are also believed to be great philosophical aides in our journey through life. Mark Van Doren wrote:
Wit is the only wall
Between us and the dark.
According to comic genius Victor Borge, there are also important interpersonal benefits:
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
And J. B. Priestley even extended the benefits to the larger society:
Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself—with a smile.
On the basis of everything said so far, one might easily conclude that humor is a good thing. And while that is true, it is also true that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. In history’s best argument for moderation in the arena of wit, William Hazlitt wrote:
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
This is a lovely reminder that wit should be dished out in the correct portions. Too little seasoning, and the food is insipid; too much, and it becomes inedible. Noël Coward also employed a culinary metaphor to make the same point:
Wit is like caviar—it should be served in small portions,
and not spread about like marmalade.
Recalling Mark Twain’s earlier remark, it is well accepted that wit can be a weapon, and a dangerous one as well. But when a weapon backfires, it leaves the intended victim unharmed, and it damages—sometimes seriously—the one wielding the weapon. The English writer and historian Geoffrey Bocca described the phenomenon this way:
Wit is a treacherous dart.
It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible
to stab oneself in one’s own back.
History is filled with examples of people whose failed attempts at wit have come back to haunt them. The most dramatic example in recent years was the “nappy-headed hoes” remark that shock jock Don Imus made about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team in the spring of 2007. Despite his numerous apologies and his excuse that he was “a good man who had done a bad thing,” Imus was fired by both CBS and MSNBC within a week.
Like Norman Cousins, who preferred the Marx
Brothers and Candid Camera videos, I also have my favorites when a humor bath is required. I’m especially fond of stand-up comedians, who often build entire portions of their routines around a metaphor and then milk the routine until the laughs stop. A perfect example is this riff from Jerry Seinfeld:
Why is commitment such a big problem for a man?
I think that for some reason when a man is driving down
that freeway of love, the woman he’s with is like an exit.
But he doesn’t want to get off there. He wants to keep driving.
And the woman is like, “Look, gas, food, lodging, that’s our exit,
that’s everything we need to be happy. Get off here, now!”
But the man is focusing on the sign underneath that says,
“Next exit 27 miles,” and he thinks, “I can make it.”
Sometimes he can, sometimes he can’t.
Sometimes, the car ends up on the side of the road,
hood up and smoke pouring out of the engine.
He’s sitting on the curb all alone,
“I guess I didn’t realize how many miles I was racking up.”
One of the great pleasures of life is the unexpected appearance of something genuinely funny or particularly witty. A while back, I got one of those forwarded e-mails that have become so popular in recent years. I generally delete them almost automatically, but this one was titled “Men are like computers,” so I figured I’d take a look. I’m glad I did, as it went on to read:
Computers are like Men…
…In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
…They’re supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
…They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
…As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer you could have had a better model.
…They hear what you say, but not what you mean.
Computers are like Women…
…No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
…The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
…Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
…As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
…You do the same thing for years, and suddenly it’s wrong.
In the rest of the chapter, you’ll find a wide variety of additional quotations on a wide variety of subjects. As you peruse these many examples of wit and humor, keep in mind the words of Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller: “Laughter is the Vaseline that makes the ideas penetrate better.”
I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
A bikini is like a barbed-wire fence.
It protects the property without disturbing the view.
JOEY ADAMS
Aaron Levenstein, longtime professor at Baruch College, is also well known for a bikini metaphor: “Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
I don’t like nature. It’s big plants eating little plants,
small fish being eaten by big fish, big animals eating each other.
It’s like an enormous restaurant.
WOODY ALLEN
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title—
expensive to support, hard to understand,
and therefore a supreme social challenge.
CLEVELAND AMORY
My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
W. H. AUDEN
Auden had a heavily wrinkled face that he accepted with good humor. But it was the subject of many fascinating observations by others. Lord David Cecil said of Auden’s face, “Were a fly to attempt to walk across it, it would break its leg.” And after the artist David Hockney did a drawing of Auden, he said, “I kept thinking, if his face was that wrinkled, what did his balls look like?”
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
RUSSELL BAKER
Personification, a type of metaphorical thinking, attributes human qualities—like hatred or revenge—to animals, plants, ideas and concepts, and even inanimate objects. It’s an integral part of humor, as Baker demonstrates in this quip about man versus machine.
Dogs need to sniff the ground;
It’s how they keep abreast of current events.
The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds
of late-breaking news items, which, if they are especially urgent,
are often continued in the next yard.
DAVE BARRY
A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.
JAMES BEARD
MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken.
LEWIS BLACK
Reading someone else’s newspaper
is like sleeping with someone else’s wife.
MALCOLM BRADBURY
He added: “Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.”
An after-dinner speech should be like a lady’s dress—
long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.
R. A. “RAB” BUTLER
Like a camel, I can go without a drink for seven days—
and have on several horrible occasions.
HERB CAEN
What Billie Holiday is to jazz,
what Mae West is to tits…
what Seconal is to sleeping pills,
what King Kong is to penises,
Truman Capote is to the great god Thespis!
TRUMAN CAPOTE, on himself as an actor
Capote’s efforts at self-promotion were legendary, and often hilarious. Thespis, a Greek poet in the sixth century B.C., is considered the world’s first actor. At a time when all stage productions were choral affairs, he was the first person to deliver spoken lines. He lives on in the word thespian, an eponym for an actor.
I want to get married but I look at husbands the same way I look at tattoos.
I want one, but I can’t decide what I want,
and I don’t want to be stuck with something
I’d grow to hate and have surgically removed.
MARGARET CHO
Smoking cigars is like falling in love:
first you are attracted to its shape;
you stay with it for its flavor;
and you must always remember never, never let the flame go out.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
A dead bird does not leave its nest.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
This was the elderly Churchill’s reply when he was once told that his fly was open. For most of his life, the Grand Old Man of English politics was on the lookout for witty replies. Many of his best, like this one, were self-deprecating.
Cleaning your house
While your kids are still growing
Is like shoveling the walk
Before it stops snowing.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.
NORA EPHRON
This was Ephron’s way of pointing out that working journalists get close to the action without actually participating in it.
A plumber’s idea of Cleopatra.
W. C. FIELDS, on Mae West
Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.
ARNOLD H. GLASGOW
Mothers, food, love, and career: the four major guilt groups.
CATHY GUISEWITE
Girls are like pianos.
When they’re not upright, they’re grand.
BENNY HILL
Humor is a rubber sword—
it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.
MARY HIRSCH
I’ve been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air,
an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt.
MOLLY IVINS
This remark is impressive at two levels. First, being gummed by any toothless animal—much less a newt—isn’t very dangerous. And second, it was a clever way for Ivins to take a back-handed jab at another foe: Newt Gingrich.
Don’t sit in a restaurant by the tank
where they keep the lobsters—it’s very depressing.
Lobsters always have that look of, “Any word from the governor?”
RICHARD JENI
If you haven’t struck oil in the first three minutes, stop boring!
GEORGE JESSEL
In the mid-1900s, Jessel was America’s most popular after-dinner speaker. By relating speech-making to oil drilling—and playfully punning on both meanings of the word boring—he provides great advice to anyone who is asked to “say a few words.” John Updike made a similar point when he likened boring adults to boring insects: “A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”
In any world menu,
Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations—
it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.
J. STUART KEATE
I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets.
It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.
JEAN KERR
People…have often been likened to snowflakes.
This analogy is meant to suggest that each is unique—no two alike.
This is quite patently not the case.
People…are quite simply a dime a dozen.
And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes
resides in their invariable and lamentable tendency to turn,
after a few warm days, to slush.