In another way, by telling the joke, my friends and I acted out the role of the combative bull, as we assured ourselves and others we were straight. The joke implicitly demeans gays, and you could say we were picking on those weaker than we, but gays at Sidney Lanier were deeply closeted, and jokers like me were one of the reasons they stayed that way. We were bullies without knowing it, our jokes reaffirming what we already believed—that it was morally wrong, personally sick, and socially unthinkable for a man to have sex with other men. The jokes relied on our boyish, visceral revulsion at gay sex to drive the humor, which only strengthened the taboo. Example: Guy orders ten shots of whiskey. Slams all ten back. Shakes head. Orders another. Bartender cuts him off.
“Ah, man, come on. I just had my first blow job.”
“Oh, in that case, have one on the house before you go.”
“Just forget it. If ten won’t get the taste out of my mouth . . .”
I’m more ashamed of the homophobic jokes I laughed at and repeated than the racist ones. I seldom took jokes about race seriously because I never took racial superiority seriously, even when I should have listened more closely to what the jokers—and my laughter—were telling me about themselves, the world, and me. But because I dreaded other boys thinking I was gay and because I accepted the prejudices of my time, gay sex seemed absurd and therefore risible. Still, contrary to what preachers roared from the pulpit, an insistent voice inside my mind—or maybe it was simply an enlarging sense of what normal was—grew stronger and stronger, arguing that people’s loves were none of my damn business.
So even as I repeated them, I was growing uneasy with the lisped jokes about limp-wristed Bruce, including the one about his attending, for some reason, Sunday services at a rural Baptist church and putting a twenty into the offering plate. The impoverished congregation is astounded by his munificence, and, as thanks, the preacher asks Bruce if he’d care to choose the next three hymns. Bruce stands up, looks around, and says that he is, in his turn, astounded by their generosity and, pointing three times around the congregation, says, “I’d like to choose him, him, and him.”
Ba dum tish! A dismal Ba dum tish.
If there’s any comic pleasure here, I can’t find it in the tortured and suffering pun, God knows, or in the clash of cultural expectations between rural fundies so poor they are astounded to discover a double sawbuck in the collection plate and a citified gay so ill educated he’s never heard of hymns. What sparks the humor, if there is any, is the violence that implicitly ensues after the farm boys realize what they have been selected for. Does anyone think the pastor is likely to respond with a frosty, “Sir, that is not what I meant?” The city boy is likely to get his three hims and not in the way he hopes.
Even in my revulsion at my former homophobia, though, there’s room for a laugh. I still chuckle at a joke, dated now, that my mother and I heard Johnny Carson tell on The Tonight Show.
Clasping his hands in front of him, rocking back slightly on his heels, Carson asked, “Did you hear about the three gay men who assaulted a woman?”
Any mention of sex while I was in the room with my mother made me anxious. Adding gayness, a category she didn’t grasp, as I knew then, turned up the thermostat. Assault turned it up even higher. And of course there’s the built-in tension of a riddle. Can I answer the question? Will I understand the answer when it’s given? And this riddle is a poser. Why would gay men attack, presumably sexually, a woman?
When Carson began the answer, “Two held her down . . .,” the tension becomes almost excruciating. All I could think about, sitting six feet away from my mother, was gang rape.
“Two held her down.” Pause. “And the third fixed her hair.”
Mom and I laughed in relief, sure, but the joke is also clever in the way it sets rape so thoroughly and illogically in our head that we can’t see past it, and then suddenly resolves more or less harmlessly if you aren’t, as we weren’t then, offended by the stereotyping. For my mother, at least a little of the humor must have resided in the esoteric concept of sissy men fixing hair. Her hair had only ever been set by women, and when I was dragged along to the beauty salon with her as a boy, I was almost always the only male in the room. Even the men who were waiting for their wives or, if it were near five, the husbands picking up the hairdressers, usually waited in their cars.
The three gay men are so offended by the woman’s visible lack of beauty that, in a sort of aesthetic rape, they force beauty on her to satisfy their need for it. And the joke hints that real men’s different needs for a woman would lead to the gang rape the joke teases us with in the beginning.
• • •
Identity is at the heart of teenage agonizing, and so a lot of the jokes I loved then were about how we define ourselves or have ourselves defined. Though I heard it often, a joke I never laughed at is the one about the man who, on the psychiatrist’s couch, just happens to mention that he’s been having sex with his horse.
Taken aback by this casual admission, but trying to be calm, professional, and nonjudgmental, the doctor asks, “Is it a stallion or a mare?”
“It’s a female of course. What do you think I am—a queer?”
In the telling, it’s necessary to get the right tone of outrage, incredulity, and contempt into the punch line. Even when I heard it told well, I rolled my eyes, not because I was offended but because the punch line is so predictable. Once the psychiatrist asks about the sex of the horse, the joke has an obvious path, and it takes it. Still, the joke has some interesting wrinkles that my contempt for its punch line blinded me to. What is worse, homosexuality or bestiality? The patient is more indignant at being thought gay than being thought a horse fucker. The joke is funny, to those who find it funny, because the man accepts with equanimity the greater taboo—he doesn’t even acknowledge it is a taboo—but angrily rejects the lesser. The horse fucker clings to his dignity by insisting that there are straight horse fuckers and queer horse fuckers, and whatever else he is, he’s straight! What I missed in high school is that even as the joke winks at the patient’s delusions, it clearly signals that homosexuality is so outside acceptance that even horse fuckers look down on queers. The man’s voice saying, “What do you think I am—a queer?” is also the voice of the joke teller, donning his terror of gayness.
But there’s even more to the joke. It’s the homophobic inverse of Virgil Thomson’s famous quip while walking down the street with a friend. A gorgeous young woman walked by, and Thomson sighed, “Dear, when I see a beautiful woman like that I can’t help wishing I were a lesbian.” At first I had dismissed this witticism as an easy reversal of expectation. Only on hearing it the fourth or fifth time (and it’s unclear whether Thomson actually said it) and pondering my gay friends’ affection for the quip, did I begin to understand the depth of the wit. Thomson, reveling in how his gayness defined both his sense of himself and how he wanted to be seen, understands that if he physically desired a woman he’d have to be a lesbian. Thomson’s sexual desire does not lead, but follows, sexual identity.
• • •
In high school, jokes about gays, bestiality, and incest flowed together because they were all about the territories lust was forbidden to explore. Because bestiality seemed too ridiculous to take seriously, I laughed easily at the torrent of jokes about it, but I began to wonder if I shouldn’t take it more seriously.
The country boys, bussed to Sidney Lanier High from the country, regaled us air force brats with stories about stump-trained heifers, receptive sheep, and chickens so ubiquitous that nobody noticed when, from time to time, a hen went missing. Since I had never seen female genitalia, I occasionally glanced at the privates of a dog or cat, and involuntarily wondered if it would be possible. Even those few clandestine glances made me feel like an irredeemable degenerate. So I listened avidly to the country boys’ jokes. I wanted to know the things I wasn’t supposed to know. What happened in the showers that left my father speechless? What happened in the barn, b
ehind the barn, and out in the farthest pasture?
Like a lot of boys I was fascinated by the details, the know-how, of the forbidden. As Samuel Johnson once said, “There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not,” though it’s hard to envision the Great Cham listening raptly to pimply boys explain that a stump-trained heifer was one taught to stand still in front of a tree stump so they’d have easy access to her, and that if you wear hip boots you can jam a sheep’s rear legs in them so she can’t wander off during sex.
The country boys knew I wanted to know, so of course they refused to tell what they meant when they yelled, laughing, “Get up, wo-bak! Get up, wo-bak!” They sniggered it in gym class softly so the coach couldn’t hear. They called it to one another in the hall between classes, and mumbled it in front of teachers, sure that no one would understand. It was their joke and they weren’t sharing it with any of us outsiders, the air force brats who were new in town.
I was crazy to understand the farrago of incomprehensible syllables. Not until a decade ago, reading Gershon Legman’s The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, a bravura compendium of filth and screwball Freudian interpretation, did I discover the rest of the joke. Git-up-whoa-back! Git-up! Whoa! Back! It’s what the world’s laziest pervert says when he’s screwing a mule.
I thought bestiality was merely a joke, but in one of my classes, the boy who sat behind me claimed otherwise. He’d already bragged that he and his junior high buddies had, just the year before, hurled burning bags of their own feces at Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, but I was even more disturbed when he hissed into my ear, with moist intimacy, “Hudgins, you ever fuck a chicken, Hudgins?” When I, incredulous, croaked, “No,” he said, “Hudgins, this is what you gotta do first. You gotta snip off its legs off with wire cutters or it’ll claw your thighs up something terrible.
“Oh man!” he sang to the back of my stiff neck, his voice soft with remembered ecstasy, “you ought to feel that dyin’ quiver!”
When I jerked my head around and stared at him, trying to determine if he was telling the truth or just trying to get under my skin, he cackled. When I turned again to face the teacher, he slapped the back of my head, delighted in my shock. Some days—this is true—I actually calculated the chances that Satan had assumed human form and sat behind me in tenth-grade biology, whispering lascivious iniquities into my ear.
Now that boy reminds me of the horse fucker on the psychiatrist’s couch. I’m sure he would have beaten me to the ground if I had ever suggested that he had made love with another boy. It was a hen, not a rooster. What do you think I am, a queer?
• • •
In my first-period gym class, sitting on the bleachers, trading jokes and stories, the country boys repeated, with fervent conviction, the rural legend that humans could impregnate ewes. Months after the act, a violated ewe would drop a distorted creature in the pasture, half-human, half-lamb, a ghastly, doomed mutant being that would die shortly after it was born because . . . because . . . because things like that just can’t live, that’s why.
In “The Sheep Child,” the poet James Dickey takes the adolescent myth and points out its purpose:
Farm boys wild to couple
With anything . . .
will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
There’s this thing that’s only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol . . .
The myth of the sheep child keeps adolescent horndogs off the livestock. If during birthing season in early spring, your father finds a woolly mutant baby slipping from a ewe, your explanation that evening over the family dinner is going to be awkward.
The sheep child lived in the stories we told, laughed at, and flinched from on the gym bleachers at Sidney Lanier High. And he was very effective at his job of protecting the sheep. In Alabama, in Wyoming, in Mississippi, in Greece, in Some-Rural-Place-That-You-Don’t-Like, how do they separate the men from the goats? With crowbars. And this story is a crowbar with a lot of leverage.
In that tenth-grade gym class, though I could hardly bear to think about it, I always laughed at the farmer who hated bestiality, just hated it. Why? Because when he was having sex with his mule, it was exhausting to keep running around to the front to kiss her. The tenderness inside the depravity undid me. I loved the comically pornographic Keystone Kop picture of a naked man frantically running back and forth from one end of a mule to the other so he can share the romance with her while not losing interest in his own pleasure, but I writhed in embarrassment at the stupidity of the poor, uncomprehending boob who so confused lust with love. I identified with him. The creepy poignancy of the farmer’s misplaced decency inside his greater indecency upset me. It seemed the sort of idealistic mistake I’d make if I were to, um, find myself in his situation. He had lost his head over a piece of ass, and not just a figurative ass either. And not just a piece. All of her.
• • •
In high school, we learn some identities are transient, experimental, or playful. Others are ineradicable. Does anybody not know the classic joke that tells us that?
A young man sits down at a bar and falls into conversation with a grizzled old fellow. When the old guy finishes the whiskey in front of him, the young man buys him another one, clearly not the old guy’s second whiskey of the day. The drink makes the old guy loquacious, and in gratitude, he wants to share the wisdom his eight decades of life have taught him.
“Look out that window there, sonny. Those eighty acres of feed corn and the eighty acres of prime pasture next to them, I made them out of scrub and nothing—but do they call me John the Farmer around here? No, they don’t.”
Next drink.
“And the fence around all those one-hundred-sixty acres? I built that fence with my own two hands, felling the trees, cutting the boards, setting the posts. But do they call me John the Fence Maker? No, they don’t.”
Next drink.
“And remember that bridge you drove over coming into town? I built it myself, standing there in the mud of the river. But do they call me John the Bridge Builder? No, they damn well don’t.
“But you fuck one goat . . .”
Bestiality is a zero-tolerance offense. You do it once and you forever forfeit all your achievements and complexities and become merely, irrevocably, and comically John the Goat Fucker. It’s a steep price to pay for an ephemeral, if presumably pleasurable, depravity. It was easy to extrapolate the lesson behind the joke to other sins, iniquities, and indulgences, including homosexuality and incest. Suck one cock, you’re a cocksucker. Fuck one mother . . .
The closest of the intimate taboos was the one that made my friends and me flinch the most. One morning, before Analysis class began, my friend Tom observed that he had nothing against incest in the abstract. It was only when he considered his limited list of options . . . His voice trailed off and he waited for me to laugh, which I did.
Walking home that afternoon, as I cut through Sears for the blast of air-conditioning and then continued south on Court Street, tramping along the edge of people’s yards because there were no sidewalks, I passed the time ticking down my own circumscribed list of possibilities. A few female cousins, not so bad, but aunts? Oh, please. After that there were, jeez, my grandmothers. That was beyond nasty. My brothers? Mom, Dad? Then I had to stop. I’d meant to entertain myself by toying with my gag reflex, but now my lips cramped from being curled so long.
Jokes love to play with visceral responses, and incest offers one of the most reliable revulsions. In the tenth grade, just as study hall was beginning, a girl I barely knew popped into the room, stopped in front of my desk, and asked, “What’s the grossest thing in the world?”
Her hair was cut in a brunette pageboy, and she wore a burgundy crew neck sweater over a white blouse. Gold chain necklace. I seem to remember a green and red plaid skirt.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She leaned forward and looked at me intently. “It’s when your eighty-year-old grandmother kisses you good night—and she slips you the tongue.”
I scrunched my lips as a little bark of laughter burst through them. My mouth felt unclean. I wanted to spit. And I was also exquisitely aware that an attractive girl had just told me a joke about French kissing and laughed at my reaction. She said “slips you the tongue” as if she were nonchalantly familiar with an act I had only dreamed of.
Being a moron, I assumed that she had told me the joke only because she thought it was funny and was totally unaware that a boy might wonder if she were flirting with him. I guiltily dismissed the thought. It was unworthy of her. But the joke, I loved the joke! When she left, I whispered it to the boy on the other side of me, and kept telling it to anyone who’d listen for the next two days, until I’d exhausted my list of available listeners, gleefully telling it as a grandpa joke to girls, and to boys as a grandma joke.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 23