"And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likeable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.
"Shall I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee to you yet again?
"No need.
"To return to mere storytelling, which never harmed anyone: It is the premise which shapes each story, yes, but the author must furnish the language and the mood.
"It seems clear to me, as an American writing one hundred years after this house was built, that we would not be known as a nation with a supple, amusing, and often beautiful language of our own, if it were not for the genius of Mark Twain. Only a genius could have misrepresented our speech and our wittiness and our common sense and our common decency so handsomely to ourselves and the outside world.
"He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the young riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him, begin to imagine that he has some of the idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain.
"This is a miracle. There is a name for such miracles, which is myths.
"Imagine, if you will, the opinion we would now he ourselves and the opinions others would hold of us, if it were not for the myths about us created by Mark Twain. You can then begin to calculate our debt to this one man.
"One man. Just one man.
"I named my firstborn son after him.
"I thank you for your attention."
FUNNIER ON PAPER THAN MOST PEOPLE
I am better than most people in my trade at making jokes on paper.
For what it may be worth, I gave this graduation speech at Fredonia College, Fredonia, New York, on May 20, 1978, which contains, among other things, some of my theories about how jokes work, why jokes work:
"Your class spokesperson has just said that she is sick and tired of hearing people say, I'm glad I'm not a young person these days.' All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not a young person these days.'
"President Beal wished to exclude all negative thinking from his own farewell to you, and so has asked me to make this announcement: 'All persons who still owe parking fees are to pay up before leaving the property, or there will be unpleasant monkey business with their transcripts.'
"When I was a boy in Indianapolis, there was a humorist there named Kin Hubbard. He wrote a few lines for The Indianapolis News every day. Indianapolis needs all the humorists it can get. He was often as witty as Oscar Wilde. He said, for instance, that Prohibition was better than no liquor at all. He said that whoever named near-beer was a poor judge of distance. He said that it was no disgrace to be poor, but that it might as well be. He went to a graduation ceremony one time, and he said afterward that he thought it would be better if all the really important stuff was spread out over four years instead of being saved up for the very end. "Well—I assume that the really important stuff has been spread out over the years here at Fredonia, and that you have no need of anything much from me. This is lucky for me. I have only this to say, basically: This is the end—this is childhood's end for certain. 'Sorry about that,' as they used to say in the Vietnam War.
"Perhaps you have read the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the few masterpieces in the field of science fiction. All of the others were written by me. In Clark's novel, mankind suddenly undergoes a spectacular evolutionary change. The children become very different from the parents, less physical, more spiritual—and one day they form up into a sort of column of light which spirals out into the universe, its mission unknown. The book ends there. You seniors, however, look a great deal like your parents, and I doubt that you will go radiantly into space as soon as you have your diplomas in hand. It is far more likely that you will go to Buffalo or Rochester or East Quogue—or Cohoes.
"And I suppose you will all want money and true love, among other things. I will tell you how to make money: Work very hard. I will tell you how to win love: Wear nice clothing and smile all the time. Learn the words to all the latest songs.
"What other advice can I give you? Eat lots of bran to provide necessary bulk in your diet. The only advice my father ever gave me was this: 'Never stick anything in your ear.' The tiniest bones in your body are inside your ears, you know—and your sense of balance, too. If you mess around with your ears, you could not only become deaf, but you could also start falling down all the time. So just leave your ears completely alone. They're fine, just the way they are.
"Don't murder anybody—even though New York State does not put people in the electric chair anymore.
"That's about it.
"One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn't feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. That is when nature shuts everything down. November and December aren't winter. They're Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not spring. 'Unlocking' comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They are Unlocking.
"One more optional piece of advice: If you ever have to give a speech, start with a joke, if you know one. For years I have been looking for the best joke in the world. I think I know what it is. I will tell it to you, but you have to help me. You have to say, 'No,' when I hold up my hand like this. All right? Don't let me down.
"Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?"
[AUDIENCE: "No."]
"It is because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles. "That is the best joke I know. One time when I worked for the General Electric Company over in Schenectady, I had to write speeches for company officers. I put that joke about the cows and the little bottles in a speech for a vice-president. He was reading along, and he had never heard the joke before. He couldn't stop laughing, and he had to be led away from the podium with a nosebleed. I was fired the next day. "How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. We are such earnest animals. When I asked you about cream, you could not help yourselves. You really tried to think of a sensible answer. Why does a chicken cross the road? Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill? "The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn't demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.
"I have in fact designed this entire speech so as to allow you to be as stupid as you like, without strain, and without penalties of any kind. I have even written a ridiculous song for the occasion. It lacks music, but we are up to our necks in composers here. One is sure to come along. The words go like this:
Oh, farewell, farewell to Fredonia,
Adios to teachers and pneumonia.
If I find out where the party is,
I'll telephone ya.
I love you so much, Sonya,
That I am going to buy you a begonia.
You love me, too, doan ya, Sonya?
"See—you were trying to guess what the next rhyme was going to be. Nobody cares how smart you are. So laugh with relief.
"I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as
this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loose again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian aborigines. We are all so close together in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. I have several children—six, to be exact—too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say: 'Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am— Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You're wrong.'
"We are all experiencing more or less the same lifetime now.
"What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.
"What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgment and without further ado that they are, without question, women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgment. "Therefore, I take it upon myself to pronounce those about to graduate women and men. No one must ever treat them like children again. Neither must they ever act like children—ever again.
"This is what is known as a puberty ceremony. "I realize that it is coming a little late, but better late than never. Every primitive society ever studied has had a puberty ceremony, at which former children became unchallengeably women and men. Some Jewish communities still honor this old practice, of course, and benefit from it, in my opinion. But, by and large, ultramodern, massively industrialized societies like ours have decided to do without puberty ceremonies—unless you want to count the issuance of driver's licenses at the age of sixteen. If you want to count that as a puberty ceremony, then it has a highly unusual feature: a judge can take your puberty away again, even if you're fifty-six, like me.
"Another event in the lives of American and European males which might be considered a puberty ceremony is war. If a male comes home from a war, especially with serious wounds, everybody agrees: Here indeed is a man. When I came home to Indianapolis from the Second World War in Germany, an uncle of mine said to me, 'By golly—you look like a man now.' I wanted to strangle him. If I had, he would have been the first German I'd killed. I was a man before I went to war, but he was damned if he would say so.
"I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconsciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be. There are just wars, too, of course. The war I was eager to go to happened to be a just one.
"And when does a female stop being a little girl and become a woman, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto? We all know the answer in our bones: when she has a baby in wedlock, of course. If she has that first baby out of wedlock, she is still a child. What could be simpler or more natural and more obvious than that—or, in these days and in this society, at least, more unjust, irrelevant, and just plain stupid?
"I think we had better, for our own safety, reinstate puberty ceremonies.
"I not only declare those about to graduate women and men. With all the powers vested in me, I pronounce them clarks, as well. Most of you know, I'm sure, that all white people named Clark are descended from inhabitants of the British Isles who were remarkable for being able to read and write. A black person named Clark, of course, would be descended, most likely, from someone who was forced to work without pay or rights of any kind by a white person named Clark. An interesting family—the Clarks.
"I realize that you graduaters are all specialized in some way. But you have spent most of the past sixteen or more years learning to read and write. People who can read and write expertly, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect that we may be civilized after all. It is terribly hard to learn to read and write. It takes forever. When we scold our schoolteachers about the low reading scores of their students, we pretend that it is the easiest thing in the world: to teach a person to read and write. Try it sometime, and you will discover that it is nearly impossible. "What good is being a dark, now that we have computers and movies and television? Clarking, a wholly human enterprise, is sacred. Machinery is not. Clarking is the most profound and effective form of meditation practiced on this planet, and far surpasses any dream experienced by a Hindu on a mountaintop. Why? Because clarks, by reading well, can think the thoughts of the wisest and most interesting human minds throughout all history. When clarks meditate, even if they themselves have only mediocre intellects, they do it with the thoughts of angels. What could be more sacred than that? "So much for puberty and clarking. Only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boredom. No matter how old we are, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives.
"We are so lonely because we don't have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more. In Nigeria it's common for Ibos to have a thousand relatives who know them quite well. When a baby is born, it is taken on a long trip, so it can meet all its relatives. This sort of thing is still quite common in Europe today, although the number one-thousand is far too high for there. When we or our ancestors came to America, though, we were agreeing, among other things, to do without such families. It is a painful, unhuman agreement to make. Emotionally, it is hideously expensive.
"Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.
"So I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
"As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: 'Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.' We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.
"I come to a close now by noting that the news magazines, whose business is to know and understand everything, have found this year's graduates to be apathetic. This year's graduates have tired blood. They need Geritol. Well, as a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: hatred. All my life I've had people to hate— from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall, as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected Germany, a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation, with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.
"So it seems quite likely to me that the class of 1978 in the United States of America is not in fact apathetic, but only looks that way to people who are used to getting their ecstasies from hatred. The members of the class of 1978 are not sleepy, are not listless, are not apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin in their diet, and they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. "This is a very exciting thing they are doing, and I wish them well."
ONE reason I feel the need to be funnier on paper than most of my colleagues is that I have a German name, which can be counted on to remind almost any sort of American for at least a microsecond of German enemies in two world wars. I myself, a prisoner of war of the Germans, am so reminded for at least that microsecon
d when I hear a German name. I was on our side, remember?
So it is a good idea for me to tell a joke as soon as possible.
I have spoken to, and actually liked, several German veterans of the Second World War who live in America now. They, too, become screamingly funny as soon as possible.
And it may be that Mark Twain drew some of his comic energy from a similar uneasiness. He had served the Confederacy briefly, after all, in the bloodiest war in American history, and later faced paying audiences of, among others, Union veterans and their wives.
AN advantage of a writer's having a joke-making capability is that he or she can be really funny in case something really is funny. Most contemporary American novelists, especially those credited with greatness because their books are so huge, cannot be funny even when it is time to be funny. So they have to pretend to be dealing at all times with matters so serious, good and evil, for example, that there could not possibly be anything funny about them. Thus are their works as consistently lugubrious as bloodhounds appear to be.
The books of jokesters are short, which is a social disadvantage in an era when literary importance is measured by the pound. The problem is that jokes deal so efficiently with ideas that there is little more to be said after the punch line has been spoken. It is time to come up with a new idea—and another good joke.
I once asked my friend Joe Heller what he was up to. He said that he had an idea for a new book. I said that one idea wasn't nearly enough for a whole book. I said this because he is a funny writer.
If he had been a serious writer, I would have said one idea was more than enough for a trilogy.
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