My own body was frightening. Week after week, the preachers, citing the apostle Paul, railed from the pulpit about the “works of the flesh.” The flesh was a depraved substance our souls were trapped in, and I absorbed Paul’s contempt. The body was dirty. I could see that. Over and above the evacuations that I never once wiped away with a corncob, my body peed, spat, and blew boogers out its nose. Each night, while I slept, crust formed in my eyes. My mother scraped brown wax from my ears. Zits erupted on my face and squirted onto the mirror when I squeezed them. My body blistered and oozed. Even something as comically innocent as my belly button collected loose fibers from my shirt—and when I swabbed my finger around in the puckered hole, gray lint stuck to it and stank. And what about farts? Sometimes they were laughingly called “poots” and “toots,” and my brothers and I sang out, “He who first smelt it, dealt it!” Sometimes, a fart got us backhanded out of the chair at the dinner table. As a result, I grew up with a Puritan fascination with, and mistrust of, bodily functions that my mother derided as “nice-nasty.”
I was as thrilled by this impermanent substance my soul occupied as I was wary of it. I instinctively understood Paul’s Platonic contempt for transient flesh that distracts our souls from the eternal. And yet God had put me in it, and even before sex arrived and made both pleasure and shame more intense, I loved the flesh’s passing pleasures. I raced to open the blue can of Maxwell House because I was enraptured by the first blast of coffee fragrance when the can opener breached the vacuum seal with a brusque psst. I sat in the tub for hours, reading comic books, luxuriating in the warm water till all my digits were wrinkled and tender, as if they were melting, and my mother forced me to dry off and put my pajamas on.
It seems natural to me that a boy so attuned to the competing tugs of flesh and spirit would find that dirty jokes, with their emphasis on bodily pleasures and mortality, possess a power that edges into the theological. The gap between what we want to be true and what we find to be true, between the ideal and the real, between soul and flesh, is so huge that when we reduce it to concrete examples we laugh. The romantically deluded boy who’s kissed his girlfriend so passionately that he thinks he’s snorkled up her gum is informed brusquely that his romanticism has blinded him to what he actually has in his mouth. The body itself continually undercuts our inclination to romanticize our desires. Similarly, the farmer stranded on his roof has a concept of the divine that he is forced to redefine. In the world of perfect forms there are no floods. But if there were, God himself would rescue us from them. The deluded farmer is trying, by will and faith, to turn this world into the perfect world, and he is slapped down for it. But why should that happen? Christ himself ordered us, “Be perfect,” the most startling of all his commandments and the only one that always makes me laugh. As if.
God watched everything I did, judged it good or bad, and kept a running total. More attentive to the bad than the good, God, as I understood him, was not very good at communicating positive reinforcement. I grew tired of being watched, distraught at being judged, and resentful of being instructed. Why did every story have just one moral? And was the moral always the whole of what the story was telling? I was, I thought, like the six-year-old boy in Sunday school, when the preacher’s wife is instructing the class about planning for hard times ahead:
“I’m going to describe something, and I want you to raise your hands as soon as you know what it is. This thing lives in trees,” she says, and pauses, waiting to see if anyone is willing to guess yet.
“It eats nuts.” She pauses again. “And it’s gray.”
No one raises a hand.
“It has a long bushy gray tail. . . .”
The children look at one another nervously, but no one says anything or raises a hand. The teacher is getting exasperated.
“And it jumps from branch to branch . . . ? And stores acorns for the winter . . . ?”
Finally, one boy raises his hand and says, “Well, I know the answer has to be Jesus—but it sure as hell sounds like a squirrel to me!”
• • •
Montgomery, Alabama—where I attended high school and college—is one of many places in the South that proudly dub themselves “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Its religiosity is airless and pervasive. Disregarding the Supreme Court’s ruling against school prayer, Sidney Lanier High’s popularly elected student chaplain read weekly devotionals over the intercom. Some homeroom teachers, including mine in my senior year, passed the Bible around the class every day for students to read a verse to the class. Pep rallies and student-body meetings began with a prayer led by the chaplain or a minister invited in from the community. One invocation, led by a local Baptist preacher, turned into a full-fledged revival meeting complete with an altar call for those wishing to be saved, to the astonishment of some students and the muttered rage and amazement of the Catholics and Jews.
As an adolescent in revolt against the unreflective pieties of my time and place, I was astounded that our teachers, who hammered at us to be good citizens and obey the law, so blithely thumbed their noses at the separation of church and state. But Christianity began as an oppressed religion, and its holy writings are steeped in oppression and defiance of authority. Paranoia often persists among believers because reading scripture leads us to identify with the early Church. Yet even I, a boy who went to church at least once and often twice a week, saw that the people who were loudly proclaiming their oppression were in fact the oppressors, a disparity both amusing and infuriating. In the Montgomery of my youth, the Christians were the Romans.
“Why don’t Baptists screw standing up?” asked a kid in my gym class. “They’re afraid someone will think they’re dancing,” he sneered, an answer that delighted me; I was fascinated to see my faith judged with a jaundiced eye. The non-Baptists mocked us Baptists as hypocrites who sinned in private but didn’t want to be seen committing the lesser but more public lapse of dancing. The Baptists I grew up with, though, danced every time they could get a date to any of the Sidney Lanier socials: the Junior–Senior prom, the homecoming dance, or the ROTC Ball. I know because I saw them on the dance floor every time I worked up the courage to ask a girl out. In Sunday school, we talked openly about the girls we had invited and where we had bought their corsages. For suburban Baptist teenagers like us, the joke was about rural believers who still thought dancing was a sin, though our elders, with tetchy wit, called dancing “the horizontal expression of a vertical desire.”
If you want to jolt yourself with your own daring and unconventional sense of humor, religion is one of the few places to go after dead-baby, Helen Keller, and mutilation jokes. Only those alert to the sacred can truly appreciate, I suspect, the various uses of blasphemy, and only those who respect taboos can enjoy the bone-deep electric charge of toying with them. Because I was a serious boy raised in a serious faith, surrounded by rational adults with a rigid sense of the supernatural, I still feel a diminishing frisson of sinfulness when I pull a cork from a bottle of Sauvignon blanc, tell a dirty joke, dance, or say “goddamn.” I like to test my own sense of religious trepidation, poke it with a stick, thump it on the head as I walk by. The agitation keeps me alive to my old faith and—who knows?—maybe it to me.
The first time I heard a joke about Jesus, the thrill of blasphemy was intoxicating, and it didn’t involve, as I’d imagined, witches gathering in the darkest piney woods to summon Lucifer or a warlock drawing a pentagram in blood on the floor of a deserted shack. It was simply three boys huddled in the back row of a tenth-grade world-history class after the teacher had stepped out of the room. We were supposed to be doing our homework.
Carl Blegen, a military brat like me, with black plastic glasses and lank brown hair swept across his forehead, leaned into the aisle. Elbows propped on his thighs, he motioned with his head for me and Gary Sandig to lean toward him. He looked around, and when he was sure no one else could hear, he whispered, “Jesus is on the cross.”
He paused a second and s
tared at us, making sure we had absorbed that this sentence was the beginning of a joke. He held his hands out loosely from his shoulders to suggest Christ nailed to the cross, but not wide enough that a casual onlooker would recognize what he was doing. He looked like he was imitating a chicken spreading its flightless wings.
I was so puzzled, tense, and suddenly afraid I could barely listen. Just listening seemed dangerous.
“Jesus looks out over the crowd and says, ‘Peter, come to me.’
“Peter hears Jesus calling him, so he starts walking through the crowd toward the cross, but the Roman soldiers see him and drive him back with whips.
“Jesus calls out again, ‘Peter, come to me. I want you.’
“Again Peter starts toward the cross and again the Roman soldiers whip him and beat him and punch him until he gives up.
“For the third time, Jesus calls out, ‘Peter, come to me. I want you.’ ” As he spoke Jesus’s words, Carl used a dreamy, disconnected sing song voice, as if Jesus, lost in his own thoughts, had not seen what had happened to Peter.
On his third attempt, determined to make it to the foot of the cross, Peter launches himself into the crowd. The Romans lash him bloody with their whips. They club him to the ground and kick him. But Peter claws his way to the base of the cross and calls up, “I’m here, Lord.”
Still using that dreamy voice, but with lilting childish glee in it, Jesus says, “Peter, I can see your house from up here.”
I laughed so hard I clung to the side of my desk to keep from falling on the floor. I put my face on my desk and laughed until I slobbered on my notebook paper. Other students turned and stared.
“What’s so funny?” they asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and kept laughing. Carl, red in the face with pleasure at his own joke, shushed me. He was nervous I’d repeat the joke and other students, offended, would tell the teacher.
I held my side and racked for air till I finally calmed down. But as soon as I thought, I can see your house from up here, air again exploded from my lips in a wet snort, and I was off again. Carl kept saying, “Come on, man, stop.” He made a lowering gesture with his hands, palms facing the floor. “Stop it. Everybody’s looking at us.”
Like that was going to make me stop? Everybody looking?
“What’s so funny?” the students near me demanded, frustrated and a little angry. Again I just said, “Nothing,” and kept laughing. It must have taken me five minutes before I could shut up.
The joke had raised me to a height of nervous expectation, and just as I was expecting something violent, gross, or sexually vile, it swooped beneath what I was prepared for. The eerie innocence of Jesus’s answer exploded in my head. Tortured, dying on the cross, this Jesus spoke with the “Gee whiz” amazement of a boy who had climbed a tree for the first time. The joke takes the pivotal event in Christianity and turns it into a childish thrill. This Christ isn’t interested in redeeming sinful mankind with the sacrifice of his life. He’s just a dumb kid in a tree who wants to share knowledge that others already have. I could remember being that kid. At fifteen, I still remembered the first time I had climbed a tall tree and looked to find the roof of my house. I am embarrassed now by my excitement then, and I was embarrassed for the naïve Christ of the joke who was as innocently delighted as I had been.
The joke was dynamite. I knew I had to be very careful with it. I couldn’t tell it to any adults at all, ever. Only my friends who saw themselves as outsiders were possible audiences, and even then I’d have to think twice. But I knew I was going to tell it. There was never any doubt in my mind about that.
In homeroom the next day, as I told the joke to my friend Tom, a girl overheard me and turned around. From her hesitant manner and the determined set of her jaw, I could see she didn’t really want to say anything, but her faith compelled her. The mockers of the Lord must be both admonished for their sin and offered the chance to repent.
She curled a strand of blond hair nervously behind her right ear. “When I think of all that Jesus has meant to me and all he suffered for my sake . . .” she said, her voice trembling. Unable to finish the sentence, she turned back around and faced the front of the class, opened her algebra textbook, and stared at it, lips trembling.
Tom shrugged at me. I shrugged back. I felt small and mean, and yet aggrieved too. She had turned to hear the joke without being invited. What right did she have to complain? But she hadn’t complained. She had been hurt. She was a bystander who had edged between the knife thrower and the woman strapped to the spinning wheel. A wounded civilian. Collateral damage.
Every time I told the joke, someone, between laughs, said, “You’re going to get struck by lightning,” and I shrugged with false audacity. For my blasphemy, I did expect a bolt of cosmic electricity to blast me into a stinking circle of charred earth, and for this magical thinking I held myself in contempt. It was not the sort of sophisticated, post-Christian thought I wanted to be thinking. Even if I were to remain a Christian, I didn’t want to understand God so primitively. But deep in my brain, a terrified king ruling over a shrinking desert kingdom knew he deserved to have his fields destroyed by floods, drought, and locusts, and his starving people afflicted with plagues. The rest of my brain laughed at the superstitious minor king, so far from the intellectual agora of Greece and the great public baths of imperial Rome.
Had the Jesus jokes been around for a long time and I just started to hear them when, in high school, I was going through my crisis of faith? Or were they something new? Whatever the case, they were there when I needed them. Perhaps it’s natural that the thing that has been drilled into us all our lives as holy should, when it is finally questioned, provoke an extreme response. This was certainly true for me. Attempting to understand intellectually and psychologically what we find funny comforts us after we have stopped laughing and the stitch in our sides has loosened. But laughter is not intellectual, thank God; it’s visceral. And my favorite Jesus joke while I was in high school was wordless.
I’d throw my arms wide and stop long enough for my listener to grasp that I was Christ on the cross. Then, grimacing with feigned pain, I’d yank my right arm free of an imaginary nail. I’d do the same with my left hand. I hesitated for a moment, my eyes widened, and I windmilled them backward, as if to keep myself from falling. The audience would make the leap and imagine Christ collapsing forward, still pinned to the cross by the spike in his ankles. If the joke is funny at all, and I found it very funny, it’s because it’s so wrenchingly horrible to imagine the torture of crucifixion being taken to a new and surprising level, and that because Jesus, the perfect man, a man and a god, makes an elementary mistake of physics.
The joke always makes me flinch. I feel a slight psychosomatic twinge in my ankles whenever I tell it. Oddly, the joke reminds us of Jesus’s humanity and torment in the body at the same time it mocks the gravity of the moment. Like the cruelty jokes and Helen Keller jokes, it reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies and pushes fear into laughter. The person enacting the joke is Christ, but a stupid Christ, a mortal who is not going to return from the dead. Who, then, is the joke on?
Four
What Did the Devil Ever Do for You?
The more trouble I had sustaining the simple faith I yearned for, the harder I tried. That’s one reason I became a camp counselor for the Royal Ambassadors the summer before beginning college, at a camp affiliated with the Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center in the woods outside Talladega, Alabama. The Royal Ambassadors were the Southern Baptist approximation of the Boy Scouts.
It all started the previous March, when Mr. Baldwin, the camp director, addressed the Sunday night prayer meeting at my family’s church and urged parents to send their boys to camp. After the meeting, my father hurried forward, buttonholed him, and pushed him to interview me. Dad was practically chattering! And it worked. Later that week, Mr. Baldwin drove over to our house one evening to size me up.
“I really prefer college men,�
� Mr. B said, dubiously eyeing the scrawny, affectless eighteen-year-old sitting on the couch next to his father. Across from us, Mr. B perched on my mother’s red velvet Queen Anne chair. I’d never seen anyone actually sit on that chair before.
“Who are your counselors?” Dad asked.
“College students,” Mr. B said. “Some of them are on their way to seminary at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.” Not the relatively liberal Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, he meant for us to understand. “All of them are men with a strong sense of Christian vocation.”
“College men? That’s just a technicality,” Dad said. “He’ll be in college three months from now.”
For every objection Mr. B raised, my father, suddenly voluble, had an answer prepared.
“Have you been active in the Royal Ambassadors program?
“He’s been in Cub Scouts, Webelos, and Boy Scouts.”
“Is your family active in the church?”
“Two of his uncles, my brothers, are ministers. I’m a deacon. He’s at services two or three times a week, regular as clockwork, and he goes to all the revivals.”
I jerked my head. Revivals? I’d gone to a lot, but not to all of them; they sometimes fell on school nights.
My father talked eagerly about what a fine counselor I would make, what a wonderful leader of men I would be. Except when directly asked, I said nothing. Where was my father’s almost frantic passion to get me this job coming from? The one time I’d complained to Dad that all my friends’ fathers helped them find summer jobs, he’d told me to go put my shoes on. He’d get me a job.
Suspicious, I asked him where and he told me that he’d be happy to drive me to the recruiting office himself. I’d have a job by the end of the day.
“Thanks,” I’d said. “I can join the army by myself.”
The Joker: A Memoir Page 9