Zizek's Jokes

by Slavoj Zizek

  AFTER ORPHEUS TURNS AROUND to cast a glance at Euridice and thus loses her, the Divinity consoles him—true, he has lost her as a flesh-and-blood person, but from now on, he will be able to discern her beautiful features everywhere, in the stars in the sky, in the glistening of the morning dew. Orpheus is quick to accept the narcissistic profit of this reversal: he becomes enraptured with the poetic glorification of Euridice that lies ahead of him; to put it succinctly, he no longer loves HER, what he loves is the vision of HIMSELF displaying his love for her.

  This, of course, throws a new comic light on the eternal question of why Orpheus looked back and thus screwed things up. What we encounter here is simply the link between the death-drive and creative sublimation: Orpheus’s backward gaze is a perverse act stricto sensu; he loses Euridice intentionally in order to regain her as the object of sublime poetic inspiration. (This idea was developed by Klaus Theweleit.) But should one not go even a step further? What if Euridice herself, aware of the impasse of her beloved Orpheus, intentionally provoked his turning around? What if her reasoning was something like: “I know he loves me; but he is potentially a great poet, this is his fate, and he cannot fulfill that promise by being happily married to me—so the only ethical thing for me to do is to sacrifice myself, to provoke him into turning around and losing me, so that he will be able to become the great poet he deserves to be”—and then she starts gently coughing or something similar to attract his attention.

  TWO JEWISH FRIENDS pass a Catholic church on which a large poster addresses non-Catholics: “Come to us, accept Catholicism, and you instantly get $30,000 in cash!” While walking away, the two friends become engaged in a debate about whether the offer is meant seriously. A week later, the two friends meet again in front of the same church, and one of them confides to the other: “I still wonder if that offer is serious.” The other replies condescendingly: “Ah you Jews, all you think about is money!”

  WHEN THE TURKISH COMMUNIST WRITER Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies evoked the proverb “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” to which Istrati tersely replied: “All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?”

  We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, “OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelet you are promising us?”

  IN ONE OF THE ANTI-SOVIET JOKES popular after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a fairy queen approaches a Czech and tells him that she is ready to grant him three wishes; the Czech immediately puts forward the first wish: “The Chinese army should occupy my country for a month and then withdraw!” After the fairy queen asks him for the other two wishes, he says: “The same once more! The Chinese should occupy us again and again!” When the bewildered queen asks him why he chose this weird wish, the Czech answers with a malicious grin: “Because each time the Chinese would occupy us, they would have to pass through the Soviet Union on their way here and back!”

  The same often holds for “feminine masochism,” and especially for du Maurier stories with their heroines enjoying their painful passions: they follow the logic of displacement; that is, to interpret them properly, one should focus the attention on the third (male) subject who is targeted when a woman is repeatedly “occupied by the Chinese army.”

  THERE ARE GOOD REASONS to accept that the Christian topic of immaculate conception is grounded in the mistranslation of the Hebrew alma (which simply means “young woman”) as “virgin”: “It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew” (Harris, The End of Faith). There are also good reasons to accept that the seventy “virgins” awaiting martyrs in the Muslim paradise resulted from a mistranslation: in using the word hur, transliterated as “houris,” the Koran relied here on the early Christian texts that used the Aramaic hur, meaning “white raisins,” a delicacy. Let us take a young martyr on a suicide mission because he took literally his leader’s promise: “The gates of Paradise have opened for you. There are beautiful black-eyed virgins waiting for you on the banks of rivers of honey.” Imagine the look on his face “when, finding himself in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as a fistful of raisins.”

  In a classic Bosnian joke, a guy visits his best friend and finds him playing tennis in a backyard court—Agassi, Sampras, and other world-class players are there waiting for a game with him. Surprised, the guy asks his friend: “But you were never much of a tennis player! How did you manage to improve your game so fast?” The friend answers: “You see that pond behind my house? There is a magic golden fish in it; if you tell her a wish, she immediately realizes it!” The friend goes to the pond, sees the fish, tells her that he wants his closet full of money, and runs home to check on it. When he approaches his closet, he sees honey dripping out from it everywhere. Furious, he runs back to his friend and tells him: “But I wanted money, not honey!” The friend calmly replies: “Oh, I forgot to tell you—the fish has impaired hearing and sometimes misunderstands the wish. Can’t you see how bored I am running around and playing this stupid game? Do you think that I really asked for an outstanding tennis game?” Is there not a Kafkaesque twist to this story, exactly homologous to that of the poor Muslim warrior being offered a fistful of raisins?

  THERE IS A NICELY VULGAR contemporary Bosnian joke about Beethoven’s popular piano piece “Für Elise” (“For Elisa”), making fun of the “enlightened” West European teachers sent to civilize “primitive” Bosnians. In a high school class on music history, a female teacher says that they will not deal with Beethoven in a traditional way, learning the facts, but more creatively: every pupil will mention an idea or image and then name a Beethoven piece that fits it. First, a shy girl says: “A beautiful green meadow in front of a forest, with a deer drinking water from a stream … Pastoral Symphony!” A boy follows her: “Revolutionary war, heroism, freedom … Eroica!” Finally, a Bosnian boy says: “A big, thick, strong, erect cock.” “What is this for?,” asks the annoyed teacher. “For Elisa!”

  The boy’s remark obeys the logic of the phallic signifier “suturing” the series, not because it explicitly mentions the organ, but because it concludes the series by way of shift from metaphor to metonymy: while the first two pupils were providing metaphoric meaning (the Pastoral Symphony signifies/evokes a meadow with a stream, etc.), the erect cock mentioned by the Bosnian boy doesn’t mean or evoke Elisa, it is to be used by her to satisfy her sexually. (The additional obscene implication, of course, is that the teacher herself is sexually starved, in need of a good lay that will stop her bothering her pupils with such stupid tasks.)

  A TOUCH OF COMIC REVERSAL pertains to Café Photo in São Paolo: publicized as “entertainment with a special touch,” it is—so I was told—a meeting place for high-class prostitutes with their prospective clients. Although this fact is very well known by the public, the information is not officially published on their website—the official statement is that “it is a place to meet the best company for your evening.” Things really proceed there with a special touch: prostitutes themselves—mostly students of humanities—choose their customers. Men (prospective clients) enter, take a seat at a table, buy a drink, and wait, while being observed by women. If a woman finds one of them acceptable, she seats herself at his table, lets him buy her a drink, and starts a conversation on some intellectual topic, usually a theme on cultural life, sometimes even art theory. If she finds the man bright and attractive enough, she asks him if he would like to go to bed with her and tells him her price. This is prostitution with a feminist twist, if there ever was one—however, as is often the case, the feminist twist is paid for by a class limitation: both prostitutes and clients come from the upper or at least upp
er-middle class.

  A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, Slovene feminists reacted with a great outcry to the publicity poster of a large cosmetics factory that made suntan lotion, depicting a series of well-tanned women’s behinds in tight bathing suits, accompanied with the logo “Each has her own factor.” Of course, this publicity is based on a rather vulgar double-entendre: the logo ostensibly refers to the suntan lotion, which is offered to customers with different sun-protection factors for different skin types; however, its entire effect is based on its obvious male-chauvinist reading: “Each woman can be had, if only the man knows her factor, her specific catalyst, what arouses her!” The Freudian point regarding fundamental fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses such a “factor” that regulates her or his desire: “a woman, viewed from behind, on her hands and knees” was the Wolfman’s factor; a statue—like a woman without pubic hair—was Ruskin’s factor; etc., etc. There is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this “factor”: this awareness can never be subjectivized; it is uncanny, even horrifying, since it somehow “depossesses” the subject, reducing her or him to a puppet-like level “beyond dignity and freedom.”

  THE DEBATE ABOUT WHETHER or not waterboarding is torture should be dropped as obvious nonsense: how, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? As to the replacement of the word “torture” with “enhanced interrogation technique,” one should note that we are dealing here with an extension of Politically Correct logic: in exactly the same way that “disabled” becomes “physically challenged,” “torture” becomes “enhanced interrogation technique” (and, why not, “rape” could become “enhanced seduction technique”). The crucial point is that torture—brutal violence practiced by the state—was made publicly acceptable at the very moment when public language was rendered Politically Correct in order to protect victims from symbolic violence. These two phenomena are the two sides of the same coin.

  THERE IS A UNIQUE COMICAL MOMENT in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety where he describes in a mockingly anti-Hegelian way how Simon Tornacensis (the thirteenth-century Parisian scholastic theologian) “thought that God must be obliged to him for having furnished a proof of the Trinity. … This story has numerous analogies, and in our time speculation has assumed such authority that it has practically tried to make God feel uncertain of himself, like a monarch who is anxiously waiting to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a limited monarch.”

  Kierkegaard of course dismisses the attempts to logically demonstrate the existence of God as absurd and pointless logical exercises (his model of such professorial blindness for the authentic religious experience was Hegel’s dialectical machinery); however, his sense of humor cannot withstand the wonderful image of God in anxiety, dreading for his own status as if it depends on the logical exercises of a philosopher, as if the philosopher’s reasoning has consequences in the real, so that, if the proof fails, God’s existence itself is threatened. And one can go even further in this line of Kierkegaardian reasoning: what undoubtedly attracted him to the remark of Tornacensis was the blasphemous idea of a God himself in anxiety. The political parallel here is crucial, since Kierkegaard himself resorts to the comparison of God and king: God exposed to the philosopher’s whimsy is like a king exposed to the whimsy of a popular assembly. But what is his point here? Is it simply that, in both cases, we should reject liberal decadence and opt for absolute monarchy? What complicates this simple and apparently obvious solution is that, for Kierkegaard, the (properly comical) point of the Incarnation is that that God-king becomes a beggar, a low ordinary human. Would it thus not be more correct to conceive Christianity as the paradox of God’s abdication—God steps down to be replaced by the assembly of believers called the Holy Spirit?

  THERE ARE MANY OBJECTS or gadgets that promise to deliver excessive pleasure but that effectively reproduce only its absence. The latest fashion is the Stamina Training Unit, a counterpart to the vibrator: a masturbatory device that resembles a battery-powered light (so we’re not embarrassed when carrying it around). You put your erect penis into the opening at the top, push the button, and the object vibrates until satisfaction. The product is available in different colors, sizes, and forms (hairy or hairless, etc.) that imitate all three main openings for sexual penetration (mouth, vagina, anus). What one buys here is the partial object (erogenous zone) alone, deprived of the embarrassing additional burden of the entire person. How are we to cope with this brave new world that undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy. So maybe, if our hands meet while pouring tea, we may end up in bed as part of a real romance, enjoying it outside any superego pressure to enjoy.

  IN AN OLD YUGOSLAV JOKE mocking police corruption, a policeman returns home unexpectedly and finds his wife naked in their marital bed, obviously hot and excited. Suspecting that he surprised her with a lover, he starts to look around the room for a hidden man. The wife goes pale when he leans down to look under the bed; but after some brief whispering, the husband rises with a satisfied, smug smile and says “Sorry, my love, false alarm. There is no one under the bed!,” while his hand is holding tightly a couple of high denomination banknotes.

  WHEN THE UNCONDITIONAL CHRISTIAN fundamentalist supporters of Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argumentation is best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse: it shows two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” THESE are today’s allies of the state of Israel.1

  YEARS AGO, ON THE CAMPUS OF SANTA CRUZ, one of the capitals of Political Correctness, I was told that that they developed jokes that are funny without hurting, humiliating, or even making fun of anyone, like “what happens when a triangle meets a circle?” As one might expect, I immediately exploded back: I don’t care what happens when a triangle meets a circle; the whole enjoyment of a joke is that there must be someone who is hurt, humiliated ... But what if was I wrong, what if I missed the purely formal aspect that is what makes a joke funny much more than its direct content, in the same way that sexuality is not a matter of direct content, but of the way this content is formally treated? The question is, of course, can this form do its work alone, or does it need “a little piece of reality” in the sense of some contingent positive content related to “dirty” topics (sex, violence)?2

  IN A WONDERFULLY STUPID (and apolitical!) Russian joke from the time of the Soviet Union, two strangers sit in the same train compartment. After a long silence, one suddenly addresses the other: “Have you ever fucked a dog?” Surprised, the other replies: “No—have you?” “Of course not. That’s disgusting. I just asked it to start a conversation!”3

  IN CHINA, THE LOCAL PARTY BOSSES are popular targets of obscene jokes that mock their vulgar tastes and sexual obsessions. (Far from emanating from ordinary people, these jokes mostly express the attitude of the higher nomenklatura toward the lower cadres.) In one of them, a small provincial party boss has just returned from the big city where he bought himself expensive shiny new black shoes. When his young secretary brings him tea, he wants to impress her with the quality of his shoes; so when she leans over his table and his foot is under her, he tells her that he can see (reflected in his shoe) that her underpants are blue; the next day the flirting goes on, and he tells her that today her underpants are green. On the third day, the secretary decides to come without underpants; looking at his shoes for the reflection, the party boss desperately exclaims: “I’ve just bought these shoes,
and already there’s a large crack on their surface!”

  In the final displacement, precisely when the boss is able to see the reflected “thing itself” (the vaginal crack, no longer just the underpants covering it), he withdraws from recognizing it and reads it as the feature of the mirror reflecting it (the crack of his polished shoes). One can even detect here, beneath the surface of the boss’s vulgar boastfulness, a sign of hidden politeness: in a gentle misrecognition, he prefers to appear as an idiot rather than to declare rudely what he can see. The procedure here is different from that of fetishist displacement: the subject’s perception doesn’t stop at the last thing he sees before the direct view of the vaginal opening (as in the fetishist fixation); that is, his shoe is not his fetish, the last thing he sees before seeing the vaginal crack; when, unexpectedly and inadvertently, he does get a view of the vaginal crack, he assumes the crack as his own, as his own deficiency.4

  A JOKE THAT RENDERS THE HEGELIAN TRIAD inclusive of the final “reconciliation” is a particularly cruel variation of the first-bad-news-then-good-news medical jokes, encompassing the entire triad of good-bad-good news. After his wife had undergone a long and risky operation, the husband approaches the doctor and inquires about the outcome. The doctor begins: “Your wife survived; she will probably live longer than you. But there are some complications: she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles, so shit will drift continuously out of her anus. There will also be a continuous flow of a bad smelling yellow jelly from her vagina, so any sex is out. Plus her mouth will malfunction and food will be falling out of it.” Noting the growing expression of panic on the husband’s face, the doctor taps him friendly on the shoulder and smiles: “Don’t worry, I was just joking! Everything is OK—she died during the operation.”5