First son: Ah me; what can I do? Whither fly to escape my mother’s blows?
Second son: I know not, sweet brother mine; we are lost.
“Sweet brother mine” started my giggling, but I lost control entirely when the second son cried out in terror, “Even now the toils of the sword are closing round us.” The boys’ languid and archaic discussion of their imminent murder triggered my laughter. The ungraspable idea of an infanticidal mother kept it going.
From my involuntary laughter and the teacher’s shrewd interpretation of it, I glimpsed how life and art can be horrifying and comic at the same time. The two are bound together in art, as they are in life. Most of us don’t live in a literary genre, but in a world that swerves between tragedy and comedy, as it famously does at weddings, where we often find ourselves weeping when we expect to be laughing, and laughing at funerals, where we expect to cry.
The teacher’s kindness when I cracked up during Medea opened a deeper and stranger world of laughter than I had known before. When I discovered the almost maniacal, intoxicating laughter of the desperate, I dove into it as if it were a drug. And that’s what it was, an intoxicant. It altered my consciousness; it made my world larger, richer, weirder, more frightening, and truer than what I saw.
• • •
While my mother was still laughing at the joke about the boy running in circles, I asked, “What do you do with a dead dog?” “Take it out for a drag.” She doubled up. The pile of blue socks, the needle, and the black thread dangling from it, slipped off her lap and onto the carpet. She was convulsed, completely lost inside the silliness of the joke, the grotesque and oddly naïve—even innocent, if deranged—image it evoked. For the next couple of days, she looked at me from time to time, said, “Take it out for a drag,” and giggled.
It was risky to tell these jokes to a woman who had lost a child, something I fretted about before I told them, but my craziness to laugh and share the laughter overwhelmed my always weak sense of discretion. This time I was right. I didn’t, though, ask my usual lead-in to the dead-dog joke: “What do you buy a dead baby?” “A dead puppy.” And I certainly didn’t ask her, “What’s red and sits in a high chair?” “A baby eating razor blades.” I knew these jokes were too graphic for her, but it wasn’t totally a matter of sensitivity: I also know those jokes aren’t that funny.
At school being insensitive was the point. Most girls winced and left the room when we boys asked one another, “What’s blue and squirms?” “A baby in a plastic bag.” Their gasps, their flutters of indignation, their flouncing away from us, muttering, “You’re sick,” confirmed our sense of being outré, of being boys, especially since the guys I hung out with weren’t athletes. We didn’t have the athlete’s socially acceptable way of proving our masculinity on the football field or basketball court.
Not long ago, I read a piece by a critic who said that the dead-baby and mutilation jokes arose just as abortion was first being debated openly in America. The jokes, he argued, were the country’s way of beginning to work through its ambivalence and unease about abortion. Perhaps. But not for me. Growing out of childhood, physically weak, uncertain of who I was, I wanted to be a tough thinker, if not a tough guy, and what better way to show you’re not soft-minded than to make fun of the most sentimentalized people who exist: babies and cripples? And Helen Keller.
I was enchanted with Helen Keller jokes from the first time someone asked, “How did Helen Keller burn her fingers?” “Trying to read a waffle iron.” The joke was absurd, with a cruel edge, and to this day I can’t find the slightest sparkle of wit in it. The pleasure mostly resided in mocking a woman who had been used as a bludgeon to shame and taunt us kids. If Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, could overcome all the terrible obstacles life had thrown in front of her, surely you, Andrew, with all the advantages you’ve had, could learn your multiplication tables. You could spell Mississippi, read Tolstoy, and earn at least a B+ in algebra. Even when Helen Keller’s moral superiority wasn’t stated—and it usually was—the point was implicit in every classroom performance of The Miracle Worker, every assigned reading of Keller’s autobiography, and every book report on yet another children’s book about her. Still, with all the praise that was heaped on her, all the saintliness attributed to her, I was never certain what Helen Keller had done other than be blind and deaf and learn how to read. What was I supposed to do? Poke my eyes out and jab a pencil in my ears so I could get credit for doing normal things? (Apparently blind kids had it even worse than the rest of us. Georgina Kleege in Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller gets down to business in her very first paragraph, telling Keller, “I hated you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity. . . . ‘Yes, you’re blind, but poor little Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and no one heard her complain.’ ”)
Mom laughed when I told her the waffle-iron joke. As a country girl from Georgia, she bore a chip on her shoulder against the celebrated and the intellectual. So I asked if she knew how Helen Keller’s parents punished her. They rearranged the furniture. How did Helen Keller burn her ear? Answering the iron. How did Helen Keller burn her other ear? The guy called back. Mom laughed less enthusiastically then. But I plowed ahead with the irritating tenacity we jokers are famous for. How did Helen Keller burn her face? Bobbing for french fries.
Mom pursed her lips and darted me a cautioning look. That joke had gone too far. Yes, that’s why I liked it. It was so grotesque that it became a parody of cruelty jokes. It established a boundary by crossing it and scuffed its feet on the line as it crossed it. It showed that even jokes that make a point of going too far can go too far. But that joke inside the joke was a pleasure I didn’t expect others to share.
More idiosyncratically, I laughed at the joke about Helen Keller’s burned face because I was fascinated by deep-fat fryers, which are dangerous and therefore potentially funny. In high school I worked at a hamburger joint, and one of my jobs was to man the deep-fat. On my first day on the job, when I casually plopped down on a metal bench next to the fryer, the shift foreman slipped a handful of ice into the hot fat. Everyone jumped back, and before I registered what was happening, scalding grease sprayed a nasty archipelago of red islands up my left arm, to the merriment of everyone, including, eventually, me.
As new workers came on the payroll, I obsessively repeated the joke. I was a jerk about it. Hell, I’d laughed at being hurt, so could they. But in lulls between rushes of customers, I sometimes stared into the hot grease, watching it roil and sizzle around a load of frozen potatoes. The terrible image of Helen Keller plunging her face into the fryer leapt to my mind, and with it came the empathetic vision of my own face submerged in the boiling oil—and I shuddered at what the imagination was capable of, and at the frailty of human flesh.
In “What to Do with Helen Keller Jokes,” Mary Klages says that telling Helen Keller jokes “makes us feel safe, adequate, and competent, as we realize that we can successfully perform tasks, like shopping and answering the phone, that left this noble American heroine completely bewildered.” It’s not a coincidence, I think, that jokes ridiculing the competence of a famous role model became popular just after baby boomers like me learned how to answer the phone, walk to the bathroom without a night-light, and make waffles, and right before we learned to hold jobs and make french fries. From time to time, throughout childhood and well into high school, I’d clench my eyes shut when no one was home and wander around the house—go to the bathroom, maybe try to make a bologna sandwich—testing out what it must be like to be blind, imagining I was Helen Keller. But I could never do it long. Going backward and relearning skills I’d already learned strained my sense of transparent mastery of everyday life; the exercise in infirmity was too unsettling.
The sick jokes—dead baby, Helen Keller, and mutilated-boy jokes—mock human frailty. They became popular when we boomers were, as adolescents, starting to grasp that our bodies weren�
��t invincible and our lives would have a terminus, even if we couldn’t yet see it over the horizon. Some of us, though, had to toughen our minds to that knowledge.
Those of us who grew up in evangelical churches were reminded almost every week, sometimes two and three times a week, that we were mortal and we would die. We were steeped in the apostle Paul’s fierce insistence on the weakness and evils of the flesh. As a practical matter, our preachers knew they could more easily persuade apprehensive teenagers to walk down the aisle and accept Jesus if the sermon hammered home what we were beginning to comprehend with new emotional force: life is fleeting, death eternal, and the body begins to decay while we’re still in it.
We may be proud of our strength, they preached, but strength could be taken from us in an instant by a car wreck or a fall from a bike, and we could be left dead or imprisoned in a bed or a wheelchair. Even in the normal course of life we’d weaken as we aged, until even breath itself was taken from us.
We may be proud of our intelligence. Yes, we might think we were so smart that our intelligence couldn’t be taken from us. But time and chance happeneth to all men. The nursing homes are full not just of broken bodies. Also there, and even sadder, are men and women with perfectly sound bodies, staring into space. They look just like you and me, but they do not possess the wit to feed or wash or wipe themselves. Everything can be taken from us in the blink of an eye.
Morbid? Sure. But true, too, and after one of these sermons I, like almost everyone I knew, staggered down the aisle, blubbering in terror, to be baptized and saved from the terrible fate of living in a body made of perishable flesh. I came almost immediately to doubt that anything was eternal, while still frantically hoping I was wrong, but I could see my body was a terribly flimsy abode for my soul, a house made of straw, not brick, and I was only renting, not owning.
Real life was every bit as morbid as my jokes. The year my family moved to Alabama, 1966, Charles Woods ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination against George Wallace. Woods appeared regularly on television, in rambling half-hour commercials that he bought with his own money. I watched, horrified and fascinated. Charles Woods looked like a half-melted blob of shiny, pitted pink plastic, splotched with red. I’m not sure how I extrapolated the colors. On our black-and-white TVs, Woods looked, as one of my friends said, like Mr. Potato Head without some of the plastic facial features, as he talked calmly, if stiffly, about how sound business practices would solve all of Alabama’s problems.
Later, I learned he was born in a shack in Toadvine, Alabama. After his father deserted the family when Charles was five, his mother placed her two sons in a state orphanage because she could not support them. At twenty, Woods joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and later transferred to the U.S. Army Air Corps. By the time he was twenty-three, he had already piloted hundreds of trips from India to China, “flying the hump” over the Himalayas, to supply the Chinese forces of Chiang Kai-shek. It was extraordinarily hazardous duty, and on December 23, 1944, loaded with twenty-eight thousand pounds of aviation fuel, Woods crashed on takeoff and over 70 percent of his body was burned. According to his surgeon, Joseph Murray, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work in organ transplants, “The fire erased his face, destroying his nose, eyelids and ears. . . . Over the next two years, we operated twenty-four times to build Woods a new face—a new nose, eyelids, and ears—but he still looked like no one you have ever seen.”
He does not say that Woods’s new ears were barely more than small ridges of flesh and the black patch over his right eye was held in place with a black strap that sometimes went around and sometimes over his head. His good left eye was so oddly prominent that, when I watched him, I always thought of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold.” Despite his terrible scars, Woods, a hero by any measure, went on to make a fortune from house construction and a television station in Dothan. He also fathered a large brood of children—seven or so—whom he once arrayed before the TV cameras, leading many of us callous souls to speculate how one particular appendage survived the fire.
Only fifteen years old and new to Alabama, I failed to grasp that he was running to unseat George Wallace, which would have been a service to America greater even than his military service. What I knew was that a man who looked like Death’s own horrifying self took over our TV from time to time. So I was not surprised when one of my friends at school asked, “Why can Charles Woods never be governor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody’ll let him kiss their baby.”
Another friend showed me a joke that I liked so much I took it over as my own. I drew an eye patch on my thumb with a jagged mouth under it. Holding my inked thumb before people, I said, “Hi, I’m Charles Woods. Friends, Alabamians, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Mom, shocked, chuckled at that.
Now I’m nearly appalled at my callousness. Any joker has to be worried about the truth behind Goethe’s chilling judgment that “Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.” But I’m only nearly appalled because I remember what I was thinking then. I could have been Helen Keller. I could still be Charles Woods. I could be the dead baby or the armless and legless boy whose parents tossed him on the porch and called him Matt, hung him on the wall and called him Art, threw him in the pool and called him Bob. Anything that happened to them could happen to me. By telling the jokes, I sneaked up on acknowledging that life was harsh, unfair, and temporary—and that my time in the world was unlikely to culminate on a positive note. By laughing at cruelty and fate, you could pretend to be superior to it, and yet what fueled the laughter was the absurdity of laughing: nothing tames death. So you might as well laugh, brother, and strengthen your mind against your own vanishing.
Three
Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear
There must be no foul or salacious talk or coarse jokes—all this is wrong for you; there should rather be thanksgiving.
Ephesians 5:4
My mother loved to tell me about the boy who wanted a puppy for Christmas, and I brooded on the anecdote as if it were the meditation of the day from Guideposts or The Upper Room, the monthly devotional magazines that my father left on the back of the toilet for me and my brothers to read.
If the little boy really wanted a puppy, his mother said, he should get down on his knees and ask God to give him one. Night after night, before going to bed, the boy besieged heaven, praying for a puppy, praying fervently and long, confident that God was hearing him.
But at Christmas there was no puppy under the tree. As the boy played contentedly with the toys he did get, his mother said, “I guess God didn’t answer your prayers.”
“He answered me,” the boy told her. “He just said no.”
“That’s a cute story, don’t you think?” my mother said, chuckling, then glancing at me to see if I got it.
I got it. It was a moral. It was an Aesop’s fable for little Christians. It was her way of telling me that I wasn’t going to get the puppy I’d been whining for and that I might as well stop walking around the house belting out, “How much is that doggie in the window, the one with the waggly tail?”
My mother loved the anecdote because it showed a model child bowing humbly to God’s better judgment. It also conflates parents and God, because it’s not God who drives to the pound and gets the mutt. It’s Mom and Dad. How stupid did she think I was?
I was indignant that the mother in the story was just pushing the blame for her decision off on the Almighty. Even when I was ten, the psychological vacuity of the weakly humorous anecdote and the emotional manipulation in it left me raw with contempt. That smarmy boy knew nothing of desire and disappointment, I thought, though I couldn’t find the words for it then. I knew what it was like to have balked passions—or at least, balked greed—and I knew that even on those rare times when I accepted disappointment with seeming grace, I did it only
after swallowing a bitter mouthful of resentment. The little plaster saint of Mom’s joke infuriated me, but he also admonished me irrefutably, and I bowed to the point: Prayers were not always granted. We are guaranteed only that God will listen, not that he will oblige. I hated the joke for making me see what no sermon, no matter how compelling, would ever make me acknowledge, much less understand.
At least the pious anecdote gave me something to chew over. Humor and religion were married, it seemed, but not altogether faithfully. Behind religion’s back, the really funny jokes went on savage benders every Saturday night with punch lines of easy virtue, and then on Sunday morning they slumped in the back row of church, nursing a hangover, and worrying if they had caught a dose. The jokes I heard in Sunday school, by contrast, were so insipid that I didn’t even groan when I heard them.
Where is baseball first mentioned in the Bible? In the big inning, Eve stole first, Adam stole second, and Cain struck out Abel.
Where is tennis first mentioned in the Bible? When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.
Who was the greatest comedian in the Bible? Samson. He brought the house down.
Where is cannibalism first mentioned? 2 Kings 8:1.
Who is the fastest man in the Bible? Adam. He was first in the human race.
Who was the first person to drive a sports car in the Bible? Joshua. His Triumph was heard throughout the land.
Where was Solomon’s temple located? On the side of his head.
What kind of car did Jesus drive? He drove the moneychangers out of his father’s house in his Fury.
(I have to admit, though, that I was fond of the imaginary Christian plush toy we joked about: “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”—a pun on the hymn “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear.”)
Still, the bad jokes in Sunday school topped the torpor of sitting in church, waiting for something interesting to happen. No matter what I did, I was bored, bored, bored. I read the bulletin till I was furious with tedium. Who cared when the Adult Bible Study group was meeting and who had donated the lovely floral displays at the front of the church? If I kicked the pew in front of me or jostled my brother, trying to claim more space, Mom pinched me, thumped me with her finger, popped my thigh, or jabbed me in the side with her elbow. “Sit still and pay attention,” she hissed. “Just wait till I get you home, young man!”
The Joker: A Memoir Page 7