Momentarily chastened, I studied the pictures in my Bible of Jesus blessing the children, Jesus feeding the hungry multitudes, Jesus bearing the cross to Golgotha, and then I quietly creased the bulletin into a minutely pleated accordion and silently tore it into one-eighth-inch strips. Sometimes I chewed the strips as I tore them off. Sometimes I took the damp paper out of my mouth and studied the impressions my teeth had clenched into the sodden wad of pulp. Maybe I am destined to be a dentist, I thought.
The preacher’s microscopically close analysis of Bible verses went on and on. The state of our souls—miserable—was too depressing to contemplate. And the terrors of judgment and the increasing likelihood of my burning eternally in perdition—“like a pork roast on a grill”—disturbed me so much that I concentrated on not hearing them. But early in the sermon, warming us up for the brimstone to follow, the preacher often paused and smiled self-deprecatingly, letting us know he was going to tell a story. I stopped fidgeting and listened. Sometimes he simply told a cute anecdote about something that had happened in the news that week, but often he told a joke. And then I knew I’d have something to think about for the rest of the sermon.
Many times I heard from Baptist pulpits the story—it was a great crowd pleaser—of the farmer caught in a flood. As the waters rose around his isolated farmhouse, the farmer moved to the second story of his house and then onto the roof, where he perched, prayed, and waited for God to save him.
His neighbors rowed over in their fishing skiff and asked if he wanted to get in with them, but he replied no, he had prayed to God for help and God was going to save him.
They left, and as the waters kept rising, the farmer prayed even more fervently. The sheriff’s department puttered up in a motorboat, rescuing stranded flood victims, and again the farmer sent them away. He had asked God to save him and he was waiting for God.
Swirling brown water now lapped onto the roof, and a National Guard helicopter circled overhead. Through a loudspeaker, the guardsmen offered to send down a ladder. But once more the pious old farmer, who had climbed onto the chimney, waved them off.
As the water sucked at his boots and then started creeping up the legs of his overalls, the farmer, giving way to doubt, called up to the sky, “God, I thought you were going to rescue me.”
The sky opened. A bright light shined out of the sky, and God said, “I’ve already sent two boats and a helicopter. . . .”
When I first heard the story of the stranded farmer, I laughed and thought what I was supposed to think: Yeah, why can’t the old guy just accept the way God has answered his prayer? God helps those who help themselves. But as the preacher moved on into his sermon, I kept pondering the story, worrying over it. I knew I was supposed to take the obvious lesson from it and move on. But I saw the farmer’s point of view. When God admonished the presumptuous farmer, he was also correcting our definition of grace. Was the story telling us that the days of direct, divine intervention in our lives were over and we could only count on each other? Did God now only work through people? Why wouldn’t the farmer, after a lifetime of belief and obedience to God, want the Almighty to reveal himself in his servant’s time of greatest need? I was only twelve, but I wanted to see God. I wanted that reassurance. If God only worked through people, maybe there was no God. Maybe those saviors in boats and helicopters weren’t God’s agents but just people doing their jobs. That was a hard and frightening idea for a boy brought up as a believer.
Hadn’t God sent this flood, as he had sent the flood in Genesis and then intervened to save the one good man, Noah, in his ark filled with animals? But instead of being Noah, as he had imagined, this poor proud farmer found himself to be Job, a man endangered so he would ask for help and be taught a lesson that would edify others. Under all my thinking lay the Calvinist understanding that everything is a test from God. And that led to an inescapable and terrifying corollary: God’s grace and God’s malice are often indistinguishable. If the farmer hadn’t asked, would God have let him drown? And what about all the other people who were flooded out of their houses—what did they learn?
Maybe I wouldn’t have worried over this joke so much, but these questions about who and what God is and how he works in the world were exactly the questions troubling me daily. I was surrounded by believers who never seemed anguished in their faith. The gap between the hard, obvious God of the Old Testament and the vague God of the modern world troubled me. The chasm between story and actuality, joke and the real world, was what I was struggling to plumb. Where did the one stop and the other begin? Where did they overlap and what did it mean when and that they did?
Nobody raised questions about the preacher’s jokes and anecdotes. Nobody else, so far as I could tell, even had these questions waft through their minds, like eye-floaters drifting through their field of vision, so I assumed my mind was aberrant. In fact, the apostle Paul told me that I was a sinner for thinking such thoughts, so I kept quiet. But I could not stop my mind from thinking, and I began to perceive its processes as both the essence of myself and somehow autonomous, beyond my control.
If you think I’m making too much of a simple joke, you are of course right—and wrong. The preachers analyzed the parables of Jesus much more closely, and that joke is nothing if not a parable. Biblical exegesis considers everything. As a boy, I heard—twice, from different preachers in different states—sermons that explicated the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time over a year. Week One: a thirty-minute sermon on the phrase “Our Father.” Week Two: “Who Art in Heaven.” Week Fifty-two: “Amen.” I have heard Christ’s parables analyzed from just about every angle imaginable, including the story of the prodigal son considered from the viewpoint of the pigs in their sty as the destitute drunk settles down next to them for the night. “Whoa,” said the pigs, “why is this Jew, a man who has abjured pork in all its forms, sleeping here in the mud with us? Is he trying to steal our slop? There must be something wrong with him.” I learned the same kind of close reading from a book suggested by my pastor, who had noticed my susceptibility to jokes: The Gospel According to Peanuts.
The congregation always laughed at the joke about the farmer in the flood, though, and I laughed with them. So did my father. In church, my father relaxed. At a joke from the pulpit, his round pink face lit up. Jokes told in the sanctuary would not be sexual or violent, and they always made a point, a point that was instructive, moral, and, at least on the surface, tame. The anarchy of pointless wordplay and bizarre imagery was left outside the vestibule. Church humor did not tear down; it built up.
When my father chuckled, I studied how his lips drew upward as the cheek muscles lifted toward his eyes and the flow of blood into his cheeks made his face glow rosy and soft, unlike the vibrant red flush when he got angry. The near silence of his amusement fascinated me. I laughed from my gut. I was an hysterical laugher. I laughed till I wept. But my father controlled his laughs as he controlled everything but his temper. In church, an amused chuckle wouldn’t diminish his dignity and authority in the eyes of his children. When he smiled in church, he relaxed his jaw enough that I could see the blue breach where one of his molars had been extracted.
The death of my sister sowed such hidden sorrow that I grew up in a house deeply deficient in what Arthur Koestler called the “luxury reflex” of laughter. But when my father’s brothers, Uncle Herschel and Uncle Bob, blew through town, mild anarchy was loosed upon our home. Though Herschel was a Methodist minister and Bob later became one, they always said it was my father who was the religious Hudgins, the one who everyone assumed would be a preacher, a possible life that bewildered me with its unsuitability. Dad had the faith and the intensity of a preacher, but he entirely lacked the glad-handing gifts of the salesman, the ease with other people, and the stage presence that good preachers relish. Around his brothers and their faith, though, he relaxed and laughed, knowing their humor, like church humor, was safe. In fact, their humor often was church humor.
Most preachers I’v
e known possess a finely articulated, if circumscribed, sense of humor. Humor is a staple of the pulpit, of course, but it’s also social grease for people in the public eye—genial humor that is, not too judgmental, more or less harmless. It’s wordplay for well-educated people who love words, stories, and public speaking, but know the bounds in which they work. Like his brothers, Dad was raised Methodist, but my mother’s family was Baptist. During a Baptist service in Southern California, I was convinced of the magnitude of my sins and staggered, blubbering, down the aisle to join the church. Dad took my salvation as a sign that he should become a Baptist. After that, my Uncle Herschel, the Methodist minister, delighted in telling his newly Baptist brother the joke about the Baptist who argued that anything less than a full dunking did not count as baptism in his eyes or in the eyes of God.
A Methodist replied that he thought a little sprinkle of water on the top of the head would do the job just fine.
The outraged Baptist responded that that was ridiculous. Jesus was fully immersed by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, and we had to take Jesus as our model.
“Wouldn’t it be okay to take someone in the water only up to his chest?” the Methodist asked.
“No!”
“How about to the neck?”
“No!”
“Well, how about if you held him in the water till he was almost completely immersed, with just his head barely sticking out?
“No!”
“See!” cries the Methodist, triumphantly. “I told you that the sprinkle on the top was what counted.”
You have to be pretty deeply involved in church doctrine to appreciate the wit. The joke toys good-naturedly with doctrinal issues that churches and denominations split over, but, because it pokes almost as much fun at the Methodist’s skewed logic as the Baptist’s doctrinal vehemence, the joke’s real point is that such minor issues aren’t worth fighting over. While seeming to tweak my father for becoming a Baptist while his brothers had remained Methodists, Herschel was actually saying it didn’t matter, and they all shared a companionable laugh.
• • •
My uncles looked like my father, but without his austere expression. Bald men with large noses, they had pink faces creased with pleasure. Would I grow up to look like them or like my father? A few years ago a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years mentioned that he had enjoyed watching my genial face age through the years in the author photos on my books. He was worried I’d be offended by his describing me as “aging,” but what caught my ear was “genial.” I’ve turned into a version of my uncles.
On the road between Herschel’s parsonage and his church, there was a factory with the company’s name painted on the side in huge white block letters: SMITH MANUFACTURING COMPANY. Every time we drove past—and I mean every single time—Herschel said, “So that’s why there are so many of them!” He said it with such compulsive consistency that I’d bet my next paycheck he said it even when he was in the car by himself. He chuckled at his own joke, which was in fact not his but something one of his parishioners had told him years before, as he freely admitted. But he had taken it over and it never failed to amuse him. When he was moved to another church in another town, he continued to share his parishioner’s witticism whenever joke-telling time came around.
When I was young I couldn’t fathom why he loved this joke. But the tidiness of the pun lodged it in my head, and I’ve come to see how it must have pleased Herschel to drive each day past the perfect setup to a good little joke, a witticism that a preacher could tell even the stiffest starched shirt in his congregation. With each retelling, he must have enjoyed recalling the first time he heard it: there he was, driving past the factory with his friend, relishing again that half-panicked moment when he looked around to see why his friend should say, out of the blue, “So that’s why there are so many of them!” Then seeing the sign, making the connection: Suddenly nonsense turned into sense. His laugh was part admiration at the understated elegance of the wordplay, part relief that his friend wasn’t a nut, and part satisfaction at solving the puzzle. Now he shared and relived that aesthetic convergence. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. That’s how my mind works.
For all my adolescent superiority to Herschel’s pun, not only have I remembered it for forty years, I’ve thought about it every time I see a Smith or a Jones or a Johnson or a Williams Manufacturing Company. There are more of them than you’d think.
Herschel told a different joke one day while I was sitting with my brothers, squeezed onto his and my Aunt Hazel’s small sofa, flipping through one of their magazines while sunlight flooded the small parsonage. A boy and girl are kissing in the back of a car, and when they break their clench, the boy says, “Honey, that was some powerful kiss! I ended up with your gum.”
“Dum? Dat’s dot dum. I dot a told.”
I cringed, twisted my lips, and laughed involuntarily while swatting my hands in front of my face, as if I were trying to keep a fly from landing on my nose. Herschel roared with delight at my boyish prissiness. The idea of another person’s snot in my mouth excited such a strong response that I twitched and shivered for the next fifteen minutes, and every time I did, Herschel laughed again. I’d never heard a gross-out joke from an adult before, much less from a minister—and a minister who acknowledged without judgment that a boy and girl would make out in the back of a car! This was heady talk! I was almost dizzy.
I sneaked a glance at my father. Was this joke going to mean trouble? Would he scold me later for laughing? He chuckled at my histrionic revulsion, but he looked uneasy, indecisive. Then he seemed to let his unease go, and I could almost see him think, “That’s just Herschel. He likes to push at the boundaries a bit, but he never goes too far. His heart is pure.” If I had told that joke to Herschel, I’d be in hot water. My heart was not pure, and we all knew it.
Throughout junior high and into college, though, I had great success telling the joke, if, as I do, you consider making your friends lose their appetite a success. My cousin Julie, Uncle Bob’s daughter and a Methodist minister now herself, was scandalized as a girl by Herschel’s joke about the cannibal who passed his brother in the woods, though now she laughs both at the joke and her old squeamishness. The joke seemed astonishingly racy then to both of us, the allusion to the natural function more shocking than the double taboo of fraternal cannibalism. Why? Because cannibalism was impossible to take seriously, we were free to imagine it, but talking about doing dooty was dirty and not to be discussed, though it was an act we performed every day, or at least on good days.
Another joke that Herschel got away with was telling us that when he, Bob, and Dad were kids they couldn’t afford to keep a Sears Roebuck catalog in the outhouse like the rich folks, much less toilet paper. They kept a bushel basket of corncobs. You wiped yourself, he explained, first with a red corncob and then a white corncob. Did I know why?
No.
To see if you needed to use another red corncob.
I liked the joke because I knew Herschel was making fun of the you-kids-have-it-so-easy-now banter that kept erupting when the families got together—while hammering it home. He was also reminding us that indoor plumbing was a late arrival in their lives, a luxury they did not enjoy until adulthood. My parents didn’t mind the joke because Herschel was telling us something they wanted us to know. The joke slightly puzzled me, though. I understood the need for more wiping would reveal itself more clearly on the white cob than the red, and that texture was at the essence of the joke. “Rough as a cob” was how everyone described a country boy with no manners. But was there another detail of country life that I was missing? Were red cobs coarser and better for scrubbing than white ones? My aunt always shuddered at the punch line.
• • •
I was even more finicky about sex, which was a mystery to me. It scared me, and like most kids I freaked out when I tried to comprehend my elders doing it. Once while I was visiting my Uncle Bob in Toledo—I must have been fifteen—my cousin
Jane handed me a thin, dusty box her father had hidden on the top of one of his bookshelves. Herschel had sent it to him—a gift from one minister to another.
“Look inside,” my cousin said. I lifted the lid, and pulled out a sheet of paper announcing the box contained a monokini, the male answer to the bikini, which was then new and getting a lot of press coverage. The gag gift from Florida was a skimpy polyester man’s bathing suit with an eight-inch tube sewn to the front, hanging down like an empty sausage casing.
My cousin laughed and looked at me, waiting for me to laugh. Because I didn’t want her to see I was creeped out, I squeezed loose a weak laugh before I hurriedly replaced the monokini in the box and shoved it back into her hands. Why was I repulsed by this silly gag gift? I’d been telling dead-baby jokes with utter delight for years.
I was shocked that a minister would indulge in sexual humor, but mostly my prissy adolescent modesty was ruffled. The vaguely transsexual merging of men’s and women’s clothing perturbed me, and so did the faux-silk slipperiness of the fabric, which cheapened sex with a tawdry lubricity that still troubles me. As soon as I looked at this thing that was clearly never meant to be worn, that existed only for the concept, the joke of it, I imagined my uncle pulling the panties up his legs, stuffing his penis into the polyester tube in the front of the thong, and walking around the room. And that led me to imagine myself doing it. To a boy who’d never come close to having sex, those images were so threatening, so disruptive of my sense of an ordered sexual world, that I couldn’t see the humor in the monokini, and the fact that two ministers could laugh at what I couldn’t disturbed me even more.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 8