OFFICIAL INVITATION
POSTMASTER: Please deliver as soon as possible.
It’s from America’s venerable secular abbey, the Smithsonian Institution. You’ve been invited to a party!
FLORENCE KING
You are one of a small group of
Purkins Corner Residents
invited to become National Associates
of the Smithsonian Institution.
They don’t know that the only status symbol in Purkins Corner is buying whiskey by the fifth instead of by the pint. The accompanying letter says that membership includes generous discounts on “reproductions”—doubtless that graven image of the pre-Columbian Incan caught in an eternal squat—and on something never before offered in junk mail: a dulcimer. The Renaissance comes to KMart. Ben Jonson hits I-95. Just leave a kiss within the Slurpee glass and I’ll not ask for a peel-away sweepstakes coaster.
Loneliness is good for business, so junk mailers have devised ways to trick us into thinking that a solicitation is really a personal letter. Their favorite ploy is the envelope addressed by hand. The staffer chosen for this sadistic ruse has a loopy, immature penmanship designed to trigger memories of long-lost daughters or old friends from P.S. 31.
Ms. magazine uses a combination of loneliness and celebrity worship. On one of their subscription pitches they leave off the name of the magazine in the return address and substitute a stamp of Gloria Steinem’s signature like a congressional frank gone awry to make recipients think they have received a personal communication from one of America’s leading egalitarian Junkers.
The manager of Shell Oil’s merchandising department writes whole letters by hand, using a simulacrum of lined notebook paper to suggest an intimacy so mellowed by time that standing on the slightest ceremony would be an insult. “Just a quick note to tell you that I discovered some really super items for you in my recent travels around the country,” he begins, and gushes on for two printed pages.
The American Spectator simply lies to the lonely, typing the word Personal on the envelope and highlighting it with a yellow Magic Marker. Inside is one of the most incredible pitch letters ever penned, a four-page threnody about mounting costs from editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who turns into a Jewish mother in the opening paragraph: “It is 9:15 P.M. and I am alone here in an almost totally dark office.”
Leftwingers do it, too. American Civil Liberties Union Director Ira Glasser begins his pitch: “It is late at night. I’m tired and my burning eyes are telling me it’s time to quit.” It is, Ira, it is. Thanks to you and your gremlins, the U.S. Constitution has turned into Mr. Nice Guy’s hankie.
The flip side of sadism is masochism, so if you wish to play the dominant role in junk mail rape, simply neglect to renew a subscription to a national magazine. Some six weeks before your subscription is due to expire, you receive an expiration notice, a businesslike and unemotional statement of fact that gives no hint of the psychodrama to come.
Ignore the expiration notice and a few weeks later you will get an envelope marked “THERE’S STILL TIME.”
Do nothing.
Next comes the fake mailgram with the first hint of desperation manfully concealed under a fake compliment: “KNOWING HOW BUSY YOU ARE WE HAVE MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO EXTEND YOUR SUBSCRIPTION RENEWAL PERIOD FOR TWO MORE WEEKS BECAUSE WE ARE CONFIDENT YOU STILL WISH TO RECEIVE OUR PUBLICATION.”
Do nothing.
Next comes the fake telegram—thin, crinkly, Western Union yellow. It says: “WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU!”
Do nothing.
Once you ignore the fake telegram, the fun really starts. The magazine sends you pathetic gifts: an envelope containing a free stamp, and a peculiar ridge that turns out to be a tiny pencil for marking the yes block. Now you’ve got them on “tender hooks,” as Alfalfa Bill Murray used to say. Here it is, the chance you’ve been waiting for. Your chance to frown in Smile Buttonland, your chance to slug a kid, your chance to park with the gimps, your chance to make Mario Cuomo’s father’s feet bleed some more.
Let bank tellers be warm and cuddly, let car salesmen give me free balloons, let official greeters hug me, let Ronald Reagan pull a one-eyed Navajo-Gypsy female West Point cadet out of his pocket and read her aloud. It doesn’t matter, because I’m now the biggest little sonofabitch in Purkins Corner and it feels great.
Donning my green eyeshade, I sat under a twenty-five watt bulb with all my junk mail spread out before me. All those coupons, RSVPs, check-a-blocks, and pledge cards, waiting to be mailed … to somebody or other. What to do?
I cackled, then said:
“I am not shaped for sportive tricks.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle printers of these days.
Plots have I laid, signatures dangerous,
By drunken mismailings, confusion and snafus
To set Amnesty International and Ira Glasser
In deadly hate the one against the other.
And if the American Spectator be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Ms. be mewed up
About a questionnaire that says that F.K.
Of Time’s heirs the subscriber shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul—
Here Newsweek comes.”
14
THE STATE OF THE FUNNY BONE
Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic, good-natured laughter and is favored by the “healing power” gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it’s the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.
It’s no accident that wit is practically an archaic word in American English. Wit has never played well in America, for reasons not hard to discern.
The first is democracy. Wit is not a democratic form; the two adjectives most often used to modify it are those weapons of Renaissance aristocrats, rapier and stiletto. Most Americans don’t stop and think what these words represent, but they know instinctively that wit is elitist.
History bears them out. The last civilizations to welcome wit were those last outposts of aristocracy, eighteenth-century France and England, homes to the famous conversational salons. Aristocrats are comfortable with wit because they’re socially secure. Knowing they could get away with anything simply because they were who they were, Versailles courtiers and Whig peeresses traded bons mots and double entendres without restraint.
Then the guillotine started crashing, the Industrial Revolution started clanking, and wit was drowned out in the clamor of democracy and the rise of the middle class. Both found their natural home in America, where no-holds-barred wit fell victim to the desire for respectability and the restraint demanded by social mobility. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is an excellent way to choke; living in dread of saying the wrong thing, American climbers rejected wit and embraced that favorite of the self-made man, the tall tale.
The next blow was struck by our great diversity. A heterogeneous population might be good for the body politic but it’s bad for the funny bone. Wit and its handmaidens, satire and parody, require a common ground, an audience of conspirators who are privy to your intentions, and a strong point of view—all of which conflict with that miasmic national squish we call “consensus.”
Our unmelted pot has truncated American wit by depriving us of a national comic figure or tic that everyone can identify with. The French have the miser, the Irish have the biddy, the Italians have the jealous husband, the English have Colonel Blimp, but what does America have? Paul Bunyan, Dagwood Bumstead, Babbitt, the cracker-barrel philosopher, the traveling salesman, the Southern senator, the Jewish mother, the Boston brahmin, the Main Line Philadelphian, and the good ole boy—to name just a few.
At first glance it seems like a rich comedic heritage with something fo
r everybody—and it is, which is just the trouble. What is funny to millions of Americans leaves millions of others bemused. We may catch cross-cultural jokes but we don’t “feel” them; we know the words but not the tune.
A country in which one man’s aberration is another man’s ethos obscures wit’s most tempting target. If you can’t tell who the eccentrics are, you can’t tell who the conventional people are, and if you don’t know who the conventional people are, it’s impossible to be witty at their expense.
Our great diversity also kills the spontaneity that wit needs. In his 1921 book American Civilization, historian Harold Stearns called America “a polyglot boardinghouse.” We have learned to watch our boardinghouse reach when seated at the national dinner table. We are so afraid of giving offense to this or that group that we have turned into oral basket cases.
Our worst nightmare is that backbone of wit, the generalization. Samuel Johnson could say “If you give a Scot something he’ll either break it or drink it,” but that sort of remark would cause mass cardiac arrest in the land of the free and the home of Jimmy the Greek. Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Daniel Inouye, Gloria Steinem, and Ira Glasser would all go on “Nightline” and say: “Some Scots are clumsy drunks, but the vast majority of Scottish-Americans are well-educated and responsible citizens.”
There goes your sprightly discourse. It’s impossible to talk coherently when compassionate humanitarians keep popping up and saying “some.”
If you want to see the Some Factor in action, watch Phil Donahue. The show that sticks in my mind featured a white Lesbian, a black Lesbian, and the black Lesbian’s child, who had been fathered by the white Lesbian’s brother via artificial insemination. The show was already a perfect gift for the feminist who has everything, but Donahue had to add even more democratic balance. When the white Lesbian, who was from Louisiana, said that her mother had “all the prejudices about color that Southerners have,” Philippe Egalité leaped in with “Some Southerners.”
Not daring to trust each other to filter sweeping statements, we clutter up our speech and writing with awkward adverbial easements like “generally speaking” and “by and large,” dragging in carefully documented exceptions on the grappling hooks of equivocation until we get so tangled up in what we’re trying not to say that we produce oxymoronic gems—as when we try to be fair to every ethnic group and come out with “Americans of all nationalities.” Hardly what Alexander Pope had in mind when he defined wit as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
Wit is rooted in the personality traits of the intelligent loner. The witty person characteristically takes a dim view of human nature and may even be a misanthrope like Jonathan Swift, who inadvertently gave us a chummy figure of speech when he said “I hate and despise the animal called Man, though I like the occasional Tom, Dick or Harry.” That sort of sentiment, like Dorothy Parker’s definition of wit—“the humor of the indifferent”—does not go over big in a land where headline writers see nothing wrong with “HEARTS GO OUT TO BRAINLESS BABY.”
Our desperate commitment to love ‘n’ compassion makes us reject corrosive rejoiners in favor of the bland, hale-fellow-well-met heartiness and tense jocularity of the toastmaster’s gentle dig. Even on the rare occasions when some American does get savagely indignant, he instinctively reins himself in and tries to blunt his remarks. Asked what should be done about Jerry Falwell, Barry Goldwater flashed a friendly grin and said, “Somebody ought to kick him in the ass.” It was supposed to be funny, but as Somerset Maugham observed, “There’s not much kick in the milk of human kindness.”
Goldwater’s retort makes one recall Cyrano’s line, “Oh, sir, what you could have said,” in his speech about the art of insult. Many years ago in a similar exchange, an American produced a witticism that would have won plaudits from both Cyrano and Maugham. Asked what he thought of William Jennings Bryan, the frosty Charles Francis Adams replied, “He is in one sense scripturally formidable, for he is unquestionably armed with the jawbone of an ass.” Today such a statement would be a candidate for damage control.
Nice Guyism and melting pot nervousness have made a mortal sin of “putting people down,” but the practice has its uses. Certain kinds of unflattering jokes have always helped keep society functioning in a reasonably civilized way.
In the one about the old goat and the spring chicken, pitiless references to the “foolish age” used to discourage many older men from acting out their fantasies lest they end up in a punchline. Now smarmy compassion has joined forces with pseudo-science to produce solemn pronouncements like “self-realization” and “mid-life crisis” that give such men a perfect guiltless excuse to jump the fence.
Bemoaners of sexual harassment might like to recall that the traveling salesman joke protected unescorted women from unwelcome attentions. Known unflatteringly as a “drummer” or a “masher,” the anecdotal traveling salesman became such a nationally famous symbol of crudeness that a woman could get rid of an importunate man merely by calling him by the generic name. She may have been less than respectable herself but it didn’t matter; a traveling salesman was worse. Theodore Dreiser was able to make the complaisant heroine of Sister Carrie a sympathetic character because she was seduced by traveling salesman Charles Drouet. After that, nothing was her fault.
The iceman joke saved bored housewives from themselves. The punchline scene of the husband coming home unexpectedly and finding a block of melting ice on the kitchen floor was so firmly embedded in the national psyche that people dreaded getting involved in a clumsy afternoon amour; the human spirit recoils from the idea of turning into a cliché. Today, however, such a comedy of errors is given the humorless name of “encounter” and credited with saving marriages.
No less a humanitarian than George Orwell defended putting people down when he wrote: “Jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law … do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalties taken for granted.”
Our quest for bigger ‘n’ better is at odds with wit. Well-aimed thrusts depend upon subtlety, understatement, and a poker face, as in Noel Coward’s definition of a gentleman: “A man who can play the bagpipes, but doesn’t.” But the American mind associates subtlety with sneakiness, understated with underhanded, and poker faces with hostile Indians.
American pragmatism is another of wit’s enemies. We want everything to be practical and useful, but the pinnacle of wit is the “Jeu d’esprit”—wit for its own sake, with no purpose but sheer joy in words. The jeu d’esprit ought to be popular in a country obsessed with every other kind of game, but it collides with our preference for the quick ‘n’ easy. It takes a lot of reading and reflection to come up with puns, maxims, epigrams, and ripostes, but Americans can’t be bothered. Our wish to be clever without going to the trouble of being learned is reflected throughout our culture. One example is Cosmopolitan’s notorious italics, designed to substitute for archness. Another is the pillow talk scene in mass market movies and novels.
Max Ehrlich’s Reincarnation in Venice encourages people who don’t have anything witty to say to say it anyway. Herewith the lovers as they wake up in bed together and have a go at sexual repartee:
“My dear Mr. Drew.”
“Yes, Miss Knox?”
“This is to inform you that it has been quite an adventure to have you in my bed. You will do. Speaking as a primitive, as a vital and lusty female, you will most definitely do, sir. You are what we call a very macho man. Very.”
“There happens to be a reason for that.”
“Yes?”
“You are a very female female.”
She laughed and kissed him for that. “You know, we could stay in bed all day.”
“We could.”
“Except that would be just too decadent. I mean, even us sybarites have to take time out to eat. Why don’t we make a supreme effort? I mean, get out of bed while I make us some breakfast. After that … .”
That’s the most rollicking bedroom jeu d’esprit since Atlas Shrugged.
Wit cannot survive a Noah’s Ark atmosphere dominated by self-conscious pairing. Speaking on America’s worship of marriage, our leading expatriate Henry James said, “An amiable bachelor here and there doesn’t strike me as at all amiss, and I think he too may forward the cause of civilization.” Wit flourished in the conversational salons of eighteenth-century Europe largely because these gatherings were not attended by “couples.” By contrast, American husbands and wives go everywhere together and spend the evening signaling each other about what not to say with daggerish stares, elbows in the ribs, kicks under the table, and hisses of “Shut up!” lest a clever riposte arouse fear and loathing in the other married couples who go everywhere together.
These are the same people who reply “a good sense of humor” in surveys about the qualities they look for in a mate. They say it because they know they’re supposed to say it; they know they’re supposed to say it because they read “Laughter: The Best Medicine” in Reader’s Digest. What they mean is something quite different. The man who claims to want a wife with a good sense of humor is looking for that quality of benumbed resignation found in women of the type known as “good sports”; the woman who claims to want a husband with a good sense of humor is actually looking for someone who won’t be mean to the children.
The most important reason why wit fails in America is sexual insecurity. Wit is aggressive and therefore masculine; at the same time, it’s waspish and therefore feminine. Therefore, witty people are queer.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
As with stilettos and rapiers, the name of the game is adjectives. A woman who is sharp, incisive, and surgical is displeasing to men. Fear of being called a castrating female makes the majority of women rein themselves in and blunt their remarks lest they say to a man, as Dorothy Parker did, “With the crown of thorns I wear, why should I worry about a little prick like you?”
Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 13