My tenth-grade homeroom was held in the gym, and the coach, who was right out of college, didn’t give a crap if the non-athletes dressed out for exercise as long as we didn’t bother him while he shot baskets with the junior-varsity team, which shared the class period with us. Still wearing our street clothes, my friends and I lounged on the bleachers, studied, rushed through late homework, or told jokes. I hadn’t been in school for more than a few months when a kid in the class asked me if I knew what mung was.
I’d heard sniggering about smegma and mung. I assumed the mystery words had something to do with sex and I was eager to learn.
Smegma, I found out from the unabridged dictionary in the school library, is the shed skin that forms under the foreskin of uncircumcised men—a mystery to us circumcised Baptists who had never seen a foreskin. As boys, we were more intrigued by the esoteric grotesquery of smegma—toe cheese of the penis—than I can now imagine.
Mung, I’ve since learned, has a long history. The Oxford English Dictionary defines munge as a verb meaning “to wipe (a person’s nose).” Closer to our time, mung was World War II slang for chipped beef on toast, the famed SOS—shit on a shingle—that servicemen groused about. My mother also called chipped beef SOS, and when, staring at the budget extender on the plate in front of us, we asked what SOS meant, she laughed and said, “Save Our Souls.” When pressed, she inched closer to the truth: “Stuff on a shingle.”
We boys used mung as a generic gross-out word for nasty liquids or bodily oozing. But now, a kid I barely knew was offering a real definition. Of course I wanted to hear it.
“No, I don’t know what it is. Tell me,” I said.
“Naw, you don’t really want to know,” he said.
“Yeah, I do. Come on, tell me.”
“Beg.”
“Please tell me what mung is. I really, really want to know.”
“If you’re sure you really want to know . . . ?”
He made me nod before he continued.
“Okay, this is what mung is. You take a pregnant nigger bitch. . . .”
He stopped, looked at me and a couple of other boys who’d gathered to listen, and then continued in a rote tone. I could tell he was repeating a spiel he’d heard from older boys or a young uncle.
“There ain’t no such thing as ‘nigger lady’ or ‘nigger woman,’ it’s ‘nigger bitch.’ You take a pregnant nigger bitch, and hang her upside down from a tree. Then you beat her big black belly with a baseball bat till something brown oozes out her nose—and the stuff that drips out her nose, that’s mung.”
Someone guffawed, maybe in shock. I said, “That’s disgusting,” and turned away, a fastidious rebuff that gratified the joke teller. Maybe the one of us who laughed could divorce fiction—pray to God it was fiction—from reality enough to enjoy the imaginative perversity of the revolting image. I couldn’t. Baseball bats were a preferred weapon of the Klan. The year before, during the march from Selma to Montgomery, James Reeb had been beaten by a mob armed with baseball bats. Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot. Sheriff Jim Clark unleashed attack dogs on the civil rights workers, and the picture of Amelia Boynton Robinson, beaten unconscious, sprawled on the Pettus Bridge in her dress and gloves, her head lolling back as if she were dead, had been printed in almost every national news publication. Twenty miles from where we were defining mung, Viola Liuzzo had been gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan on the day after the march, and the trial of one of her killers had gone to the jury in September, right after school started. Despite overwhelming evidence against him, Collie Wilkins was acquitted by a jury that fully understood he had participated in the murder but refused to convict a white man for killing a nigger-loving outside agitator. The federal government was now retrying him in Montgomery for violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s rights by shooting her in the head. The story was constantly on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser the first semester I was a Sidney Lanier Poet.
The boy who knew about mung had assured us that Viola Liuzzo was nobody to worry about. She was a just a Yankee whore who had left her five children behind to come down to Alabama and fuck niggers. He proclaimed it with such vehemence that it took me years to flush the lie out of my head, a lie he didn’t know was a lie. The ultimate source of the defamatory falsehood about Mrs. Liuzzo, who died singing “We Shall Overcome,” turned out to be local law enforcement agencies.
For several days, my classmate’s definition of mung came back to me powerfully, and I twitched with visceral empathy with the fictional lynched woman. My imagination kept forcing the ball bat in my hands, trying to test both sides of the horror—myself as murderer, as murdered—but I always stopped before I swung. I hated the joke for tempting my suggestible imagination toward this abomination. Awake at night, the image seared into my brain, I tried to imagine who’d think up such a thing, and why. If the joker’s goal was to disgust his listeners, he’d succeeded. But why did he think it was funny? It had no wit, no lightness of language, no depth of dreadful self-understanding, or even any clammy pleasure in trying to disguise hatred as humor. The joke was just sodden misogyny and bigotry exulting in its power to create a nauseating image.
Jokes like this make people hate jokes. Once the forces of unrestrained imagination and our ugly subconscious come together there’s no telling how wrong they will go. Propelled by fear, they can rocket out of the gravitational pull of decency, wit, and rough fun, and zoom into the deep-space darkness of airless viciousness. People are right to fear what this union might create. Mein Kampf is as much a product of the human imagination as Goethe’s Faust.
Despite my revulsion at the joke’s racism, I think I’d have reacted almost as strongly if he’d begun the joke, “You take a woman, hang her up by her feet. . . .” Our innate sense of the inviolability of pregnant women and the near sanctity of infants, combined with most people’s instinctive wince at the thought of being clobbered in the belly with a bat, is ghastly enough. But the joke brings in the historical horror of slavery, lynching, and the dehumanization of African-Americans for an extra dose of nastiness. At fifteen, I pondered over why I was so repulsed by this joke while loving the gross-out joke I talked about earlier: How do you unload a truckload of dead babies? With a pitchfork.
I found many reasons. Imagining an anonymous mass doesn’t engage the emotions the way imagining one person does. In the mung joke, I had to imagine being a torturer and a murderer. (“You,” he said to me, “you take a woman, you hang her, you beat her.”) The joke had no point except the racist and sexist pleasure of utterly dehumanizing a pregnant African-American. I was probably too young to see the dead-baby joke’s point is that corpses, despite our intrinsic reverence for them, are no longer persons, while this joke meant me to feel the ugliness of its murderous punch line. These reasons are all true, but now I think the fundamental difference between the two jokes is I didn’t believe the truckload of dead babies was anything but a conceit, a fictional construct built to be played with, one that let me toy with larger issues of death and bodily integrity without thinking about actual people. But in the mung joke, I believed the atrocity could happen—might have happened—and the fifteen-year-old boy telling the joke might have been happy if it did.
Like any story, anecdote, or tidbit of gossip, jokes can create stereotypes or reinforce existing ones. But by playing with stereotypes, they can also reveal them for the fictional constructs they are, as I had thought my mother’s jokes were doing. The taboos and ugly forces behind jokes can feed positive laughter as well as nasty laughter. They feed laughter the way an accelerant feeds a fire, a terrible thing if the fire is on the living room carpet, a good thing if you’re having trouble getting charcoal briquettes glowing in the grill. With nasty racist jokes, however, it’s impossible to keep the fire in the grill. The lack of any mental gymnastics, which a true joke requires, reveals what is truly driving the joke: The teller’s ugly relish confirms his sense of African-Americans’ inferiority.
Laughter is, as Thomas Hobbes wrot
e, “a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.” In this joke there is a conception of eminency all right but there is nothing sudden or glorious about it. And the eminency is very much in doubt. I have often, while laughing, protested, “That’s not funny!” Then I am left looking backward, sometimes in shame, to figure out why I laughed. When a friend asked me, in high school, “What’s long and hard on a black man?” and answered himself, “Third grade,” I burst out laughing, before I turned away, ashamed, and I made a concerted effort to expunge it from my mind.
Why did I laugh? Because the punch line surprised me. The question so fills the mind with sex that even though you know that the right answer can’t be “penis,” you can’t see around the stereotype to grasp the other meanings of long and hard until the joke reveals them. In that way, it works like the junior-high joke:
Q: What word starts with f, ends with k, and has a u and a c in the middle.
A: Firetruck, of course. What word were you thinking of?
The long-and-hard joke also shocks by dropping the racism to an expectedly lower level—from sexual superiority to intellectual inferiority. It leads you down one racist path and then jumps to another, much worse, one. Though many people find the racism too ugly for the joke to be funny, it possesses a bit of ugly wit and a touch of audacity. When I heard it again, several years ago, encountering it as if for the first time since I’d happily forgotten it, I trusted the decency of the teller, whose voice, as she introduced the joke, implied, “You gotta hear this racist joke. You and I won’t agree with what it says but we can appreciate the way it plays with racist ideas.” That time I laughed without guilt, savoring the ugliness of the joke, and the nasty psychological ingenuity of it.
The first time I went to the Gulf Coast with my six-year-old nephew, he ran along the sand, chasing the waves as they pulled back into the Gulf of Mexico, then running away as they rushed up the beach. Every now and then a wave raced up farther and faster than he’d expected and rushed over his feet, surprising him, and after a few such surprises he simply stood still in the foaming water and wailed plaintively, “Where’s the edge?” The answer of course is that the boundary changes, the answer he knew already but couldn’t accept, even as he ran on, skipping in and out of the shifting water.
I understand his confusion. Just this morning, looking at an Internet listing of racist jokes, I saw the joke again, in the middle of an interminable list of sour, witless, racist jokes, and my laughter turned to wormwood and ashes in my mouth. Whatever twisted wit, surprise, or inverted understanding of racism I’d once found in it vanished in the context of an excruciating compilation collected by someone who seemed to believe the jokes were, in some way, true.
If we sense that the person telling a racist joke puts an ounce of credence in it, the lightness goes leaden because the malice is real. Who could laugh then? Those who agree with the premise of the punch line. Instead of taking the racism as an idea to make fun of, some words to play with, a construct to deconstruct, or a taboo they simply can’t resist prodding, they approve of it as an accurate representation of their reality. At the moment it’s taken seriously, the joke moves out of the category of joke and becomes a belief, one of the ugliest of ugly beliefs.
Maybe I first laughed at the long-and-hard joke because the fear of sexual inferiority was one that I’d begun to work through in my second year of high school. In tenth grade, I held a wooden ruler to myself and came in about a quarter of an inch under the six-inch average. At five foot six, 120 pounds, with a twenty-eight-inch waist, I was pretty pleased by the judgment of the ruler. Because I spent as little time as possible in locker rooms, the jokes and jibes about penis magnitude seemed largely metaphorical. I never heard anyone, except as a joke, mention the size of another man’s penis until I was a senior in college, when a black basketball player was tossed off the Huntingdon Hawks for some indiscretion or other. To demonstrate what he thought about that, he stood across the street from the girls’ dorm, I was told, and twirled his pecker like a baton. My friend, who happened to pass by before the police arrived, assured me, laughing, that it was large enough to twirl. Bigger than his by a long stretch, he said. “No kidding?” I said. We laughed, and then we settled in to study for our history test.
Not until college did I hear a follow-up to the long-and-hard joke:
Q: What’s long and hard on a white man?
A: Nothing.
At first, I took the second joke as a flaccid reversal of the first, a weak attempt to show that the person telling the long-and-hard joke wasn’t a racist, but an equal opportunity joker. When I repeated it, I was metaphorically tugging my forelock, attempting to embrace the stereotype and say that white men (“Like me—look, I’m mocking myself too!”) can laugh at themselves too and at our purportedly paltry penises. I told it a number of times before I understood it’s really slyer and funnier than I’d thought. The joke does do exactly what I thought it did, but it also implies that the attainments for which black men work long and hard come easily to white men because they live lives of untroubled privilege. I would be offended if I believed it was a sincere assessment of my life. I mostly don’t, it mostly isn’t, and, despite what I thought at first, it’s funny, though—or is it because?—it has a bit of a sting to it.
• • •
Nine months after I graduated from college, I married, and my father-in-law, as he had during the four years I dated his daughter, brilliantly frustrated my ability to discern the motives of jokers. He turned my status as the wince-inducing joker on its head. He did the joke telling; my ex-wife and I did the wincing. So of course he told the same jokes over and over, delighting in discomfiting us, trying to provoke a response beyond my wife’s pained, “Oh, Daddy!” One of his favorites involved two black professors at Alabama State University, the historically black school less than a mile from his house. As they pass each other on campus, one professor asks the other, “Is ya did ya Greek?” The pretentious professors presume themselves to be Greek scholars while the ugly (and inept) parody of rural Black English that they speak reveals them as incapable of mastering proper English, much less Greek.
Over time I came to laugh at the joke, not because I thought it was funny but because I came to love my father-in-law and trust him as a man of basic good-heartedness who wanted to be seen as an iconoclast. Much of his racism—how much I was never sure—was pretense designed to irk me. Some of it grew from his insecurity about not having gone to college. Those insights aren’t the reasons I laughed, but they allowed me to enjoy the impishness with which he worked to make me laugh at something I didn’t want to laugh at. Chanting the punch line in an almost incomprehensible sequence of syllables—“Izya-didya-Greek?”—he waggled his thick eyebrows and gave me a grin that hovered between mischievous and wolfish.
His pleasure in his own joke was impossible to resist. Once I determined that he was much more interested in the silly rhythm of the line than the racial message, I relaxed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. But I saw he was mostly interested in making my wife laugh while she was trying to say, “Daddy, don’t tell that joke again.” He was teasing us, mocking what he saw as our overfastidious liberalism. The point of the joke was no longer in the joke itself, but how we reacted. And, of course, his delight in chanting “Izya-didya-Greek?”
My father-in-law was a smart man who’d gone straight from high school graduation to supporting his family after his father died. Even after he’d suffered four heart attacks and undergone a coronary artery bypass, his skin remained walnut brown from sweat-drenched hours working bare-chested in his garden, pipe clenched in his teeth, as he mowed, shoveled, transplanted, edged, trimmed, and weeded. He grew the most elegant stand of hollyhocks I have seen outside of photographs. In an old refrigerator from which he’d stripped the rubber gaskets, he smoked turkey, chicken, and pork chops. Smoky, rich, and thoroughly desiccated, they were the best smoked meats I’ve ever eaten, though they took a lot of chewing. O
nce, shaking his head and chuckling, he told me about a friend who had tried to copy his homemade smoker but got a crucial detail wrong. When the friend finally pried open the door, fused shut by melted rubber, he found a beautifully cooked turkey infused with the flavor of burnt rubber.
His flat black hair slanted over his forehead, emphasizing the slightly Asian cast to his face that you sometimes see in very thin older southern men who spend a lot of time in the sun. From constant pipe smoking his teeth were, under a gray cast, distinctly green. His teasing was pure, complex play to him, and I came to love him over and above his joking, which played a game so deep that often I wasn’t sure what the game was.
Though intimidated by people with college degrees, he was also contemptuous of them because he, a voracious reader, found they often didn’t know nearly as much as he thought they should. How could I tell him that the faux black English of his joke was nothing like real black English vernacular? And why would I tell him, since he knew that better than I did? Certainly I could’ve told him that teachers don’t do homework; students do. He told the joke because he had only been a student, not a teacher—and because it sounded funny. But why cause a family rift, especially when over time I came to know him as a man of little malice who delighted in wordplay? And the Greek joke was in tune with other, non-racist, jokes he enjoyed.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 16