Enraged by this slur on the Israeli minister of defense, the Jew confronts the pet shop owner, who says that he’s embarrassed, but what can he do? He bought the parrot from the estate of an anti-Semite before he knew its quirks. Eyeing the Jew, the owner says, insinuatingly, “The parrot’s for sale, you know.”
After a moment’s thought, the Jew buys the parrot and, all the way home, the parrot, in his cage on the front seat of the car, screams, “Awwwk, Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off! Awwwk, Moshe Dayan is a jerk-off!”
Once they get inside the front door, the new owner grabs the bird out of his cage and yanks its tongue out. Then he returns to the pet shop, hands the cage to the owner, and smirks, “Here, see if you can sell a parrot that doesn’t talk.”
Pleased with himself, he drops by the pet store a week later to see what’s happened. As soon as the bird sees him, it flips one wing over his left eye, imitating Dayan’s eye patch. He drops the other wing to his crotch and makes an exaggerated wanking motion.
The joke’s only fairly amusing, and fewer and fewer of us can recall Moshe Dayan and his eye patch, but what’s irresistible to me was seeing, and now remembering, a good-looking, thirty-year-old curly-headed doctoral student throwing an imitation wing over her eye with one hand and jerking the other hand up and down in front of her crotch, imitating a speechless parrot imitating Moshe Dayan masturbating.
Julia was also the first person to tell me one of the great jokes of the last fifty years. Man buys a parrot. Parrot curses all day and all night without ceasing, flaunting the most inventive invective and curdled filth imaginable. After a while, the man becomes worn out from being subjected to the relentless barrage of profanity, and he’s embarrassed and lonely because the parrot has driven away all his friends and potential girlfriends. He tries to reason with the bird, asking it to temper its language, at least when people are around.
His request makes the bird even more profane. Cursing up a storm, it mocks the man for being a friendless, unloved pansy. Infuriated, not knowing what to do, the man picks the parrot up by its feet, slams it into the freezer, slams the door, and stalks off. After a couple of hours, he begins to worry about the parrot freezing to death. Bracing for yet more swearing and insults, he opens the freezer door.
To his surprise the parrot immediately says, “Sir, I want to apologize profoundly for my terrible behavior, and I want to assure you, sir, that from this moment on I will be the model of good behavior and civility. You will have, sir, no further complaints about my vocabulary or behavior.”
The man is dubious, but the parrot is as good as its word—polite, deferential, and even obsequious in its desire to please. After three weeks the parrot, though, clearly has something on its mind. “Sir,” it begs, “do please forgive me if I’m being too inquisitive, and of course you don’t have to answer. That’s entirely up to you. But if you don’t mind, would you please tell me what the chicken did?”
For me, the bird’s voice is forever Julia’s oleaginous creation of it, and the bird’s last question is a triumph of her storytelling. I wonder if she didn’t see me as a bit like the parrot. Over another cup of coffee a few years ago, she told me that, as a psychologist, she had long speculated that I might suffer from a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. I have a propensity for profanity and a delight in invective, like Caliban in The Tempest, who tells Prospero that he is grateful for the darker resources of the language: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.” And of course Jill had taken a professional interest in my twitchy legs and my susceptibility to muscular and vocal tics, some of them nearly involuntary.
Did my compulsive joke telling, especially of offensive and vulgar jokes, give me a marginally acceptable way to use profanity in public? she wondered. At times I think she was right, given my powerful impulse toward crude joking. At other times I think she is wrong. I get no pleasure, merely relief, from jerking my head to the side, as I used to do, or by popping air against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, as I now find myself doing, sometimes startling even myself with the sharp clicking noise. Occasionally the joking is compulsive, and I’m startled by what I hear coming out of my mouth. More often, though, I simply take immense, deliberate pleasure in laughing, making others laugh, and thinking about laughter.
• • •
There were other girlfriends, other jokes. I must also celebrate the girlfriend with the marvelous dark throaty chuckle who asked me a question that has haunted me for twenty years: Why do cheerleaders wear such short skirts? She wasn’t telling a joke. She’d heard only that much and assumed that I would know. Though I have searched high and mostly low for an answer, I’ve never found one. I’m afraid the punch line might be something as insipid as “so the losers will have something to cheer for.” Did she perhaps mishear the homophobic riddle that asks, “Why do cheerleaders in San Francisco not wear short skirts?” “So that when they sit down their balls won’t show?” Or is the mystery of the joke still a mystery, waiting to be appreciated? (Mystery solved: A copy editor of this book just told me the punch line is “To make the fans’ root harder.”) The classic joke on ladies’ garments is probably, “Why do widows wear black garters?” “In memory of those who have passed beyond.” It is a joke so close to benign I believe I first heard it from one of my godly minister uncles.
Because we lived thousands of miles apart and rarely saw each other, our relationship wasn’t destined for the long haul, but every week when I called her I fell in love again with her laugh. You are “so silly” she told me over and over again, laughing, because I’d say almost anything to provoke her great dark-chocolate chuckle. I reveled in it the way an otter revels in water.
Silly, my girlfriends called me, knowing I made myself silly for their delight, knowing too that sharing jokes with someone is a way of saying to them that you trust them enough not to think you are stupid but deliberately aping stupidity and that you trust them to trust your good intentions. Cill Lee, they said, playing with the pronunciation, pulling it out, making silly silly.
Sometimes jokes make it clear when a relationship is bound to founder short of love.
In the early days of getting to know each other, a girlfriend and I drove the tedious length of Illinois together. I liked her very much. I wanted to love her. I was taking her home to meet my father in Montgomery. As the cornfields of southern Illinois went on for mile after unvarying hot green mile, I ran through every bit of conversation I could think of and then started telling jokes. The one that caused the problem might have been one of the racist jokes I’ve written about earlier. Or it could have been a joke I’d heard just recently from Henri Coulette, who lived almost his entire life in Los Angeles.
“What are the first three words a Mexican baby hears?” Henri asked as I was driving him from his room in the student union at the University of Iowa to the Kmart so he could buy toiletries. My mind raced to the famous three words “I love you,” then tried to figure out what they would be in Spanish. Before I could go any further, Henri answered, “Attention, Kmart shoppers.” I laughed so hard I almost drove into a telephone pole, and Henri laughed too, enjoying his own joke and my response. I had to pull over to the side of the road while Henri and I composed ourselves.
“Why do you think that would be funny?” my girlfriend asked, wanting me to justify my apparent racism.
Though I bristled, I tried to explain my complex attraction to the joke. First, I laughed simply because the joke had taken a turn I hadn’t expected. It also amused me because I knew that Henri had only thought of the joke because we were driving to Kmart. And it opened a world I hadn’t thought about. The jokes I’d heard about Latinos were few, rote, and mostly served to support the familiar homegrown racism: Why do Mexicans refuse to let their kids marry blacks? They are afraid the kids will be too lazy to steal. But Henri’s joke went in an entirely new direction. It mocked Latinos for being poor and for shopping at the déclassé Kmart—the very store we were driving to and a
chain I had patronized without irony since high school, my mother and I chasing the blue light around the store to see what was on sale. The prejudice against Kmart startled me almost as much as the one against Mexican-Americans because it was also a joke on me.
“Are you sure there isn’t really another reason you are laughing at the joke?” she asked. Her eyes were bright and encouraging, the eyes of a parent trying to elicit a confession from a pigheaded adolescent.
“What would that be?” I asked. I’m sure I must have snarled.
“It’s a very unpleasant joke.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then why did you tell it?”
“I just explained that.”
“Do you think what you said really explains why you laughed?”
“It’s the best I can do. Look, it was just a joke,” I told her. “It failed. I’m sorry. Let’s let it go, okay?”
“Do you know people who’d think that joke was funny?”
“Yeah, rather a lot of them in fact.”
With each of us silently reassessing the other, the next hundred miles or so of green cornfields, silos, and the occasional red-winged blackbird plucking at something dead alongside the road were less agreeable than the identical hundred miles that had preceded them. Alert to the joke’s disparagement of Latinos as impoverished but inveterate shoppers, she was disturbed at being in the car and maybe in love with a possible hate-monger who apparently swapped jokes with many other hate-mongers. For my part, I was exasperated to be interrogated like a xenophobic bigot unaware of the offense inherent in the joke. I felt I had earned the benefit of the doubt for good intentions with wicked jokes. In something as short as a joke, context is so thin that sometimes it’s impossible to tell if there is a nasty intention in the heart of the teller. The joke was morally indefensible, but I thought it was funny anyway. I foresaw a future of justifying every laugh that passed my lips. Amazingly we didn’t break up before crossing the Kentucky state line, but stayed warily together for a few more months before drifting apart.
If there is a joke that encapsulates the joy and mistakes, anxiety and missteps I felt for these failed lovers, it’s this. A composer writes the most beautiful love song ever created, but despite having sent out tapes and CDs, he’s never been able to get the song published. Finally, in desperation, he sneaks into the largest music publishing company, forces his way into the president’s office, and begins to play the song on his violin. The song is so beautiful that secretaries and janitors, accountants and lawyers find themselves drawn into the president’s office to listen, rapt, as the music immerses them in memories of loves old and new, good love and sorrowful love, failed love and sustaining love. They are radiant with joy while weeping with sorrow. When the composer finishes, the president of the music company says, through tears, “That truly is the most beautiful love song. I can’t believe it hasn’t been published. What do you call it?”
“I Love You So Fucking Much I Could Shit.”
Thirteen
You Two Just Crack Each Other Up
I always felt like Jack, the Jack of giant-killer fame, who in a lesser-known tale, “Lazy Jack,” is forced out of the house by his mother to find work. The first day, Jack hires out to a cattle farmer, who pays him with a jar of milk. Jack puts the jar in his jacket pocket, and of course on the way home he spills it.
His mother shrieks, “You stupid boy. You should have carried it on your head.”
Jack says, “Next time I’ll do that.”
The following day, he works for a cheese maker. Wages: a block of cream cheese. As he promised his mother, he carries it home on his head, where it melts in the heat and becomes matted in his hair.
Mother once more pronounces Jack a stupid boy and tells him he should have carried it in his hands; he promises to do so. The next day: a baker. Wages: a cat. When Jack holds it in his hands, it scratches the daylights out of him and runs off.
“Stupid boy, you should have tied it on a string and dragged it home behind you.”
“Next time I’ll do that.”
The following day: butcher. Wages: a lovely shoulder of mutton. Jack ties a piece of string to the mutton and drags it home with results predictable to everyone but Jack. This time Jack’s mother calls him a “ninny-hammer” (a charming disparagement dating to at least 1592) and tells him he should have carried it on his shoulder.
“Next time I’ll do that,” promises our slow study.
The next day, Jack goes back to the cattle farmer and at the end of the workday he is given a donkey. It’s a job to hoist the donkey on his shoulders, but Jack does it and slowly staggers home, bent under the weight of his wages. Jack’s path home takes him by the house of a rich man with no wife and only one child, a beautiful daughter who is deaf and dumb. We will call her Erin. And while we’re at it, let’s change Jack’s name to Andrew.
Our folktale Erin had never laughed, and the doctors, being folktale doctors, had prognosticated that she would never speak until someone made her laugh. Now Erin just happened to be looking out her window when Andrew stumbled past, the donkey on his shoulders, the donkey’s legs sticking up in the air, kicking wildly. Erin burst out laughing at the silly man, and, laughter being the best medicine, she immediately regained her speech and hearing. Her overjoyed father married Erin to Andrew, who felt richly rewarded for his silliness all the rest of his life.
Moral: You’re just an idiot with an ass on your shoulders until someone laughs.
• • •
I first saw my future wife drinking a beer on the porch at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. A common friend had told me Erin would be there and she’d gently nudged us toward each other, though she’d warned me Erin was a California-style Catholic handwringer, one who anguished over the plight of the downtrodden. Sometimes she had a good sense of humor, the friend said, and sometimes she was earnest and touchy, so I should watch my mouth until I figured out whether my, uh, particular sense of humor meshed with hers. What I saw, looking at the woman I was to marry, was a tall, open-faced, attractive woman with a jolt of curly hair off her forehead. Unlike the folktale Erin, she looked eager to laugh. In fact, hers was the face of someone who gravitated to laughter the way other people gravitate toward good looks or the palpably powerful. I decided to go with my instinct, rather than our friend’s warnings, which I’ll admit were more catnip than red flag.
She had a name. Erin McGraw—a name so Irish it might as well be Ireland McIrish, and when she told me who she was, I immediately asked if she’d heard about the Irishman who drowned in the vat at the brewery.
“No,” she said.
“They knew he was Irish because, before he died, he crawled out twice to take a leak.”
I held my breath for half a second, fearing a pointed rebuff, but she laughed and didn’t feel a need to inform me that not all Irish were drunks, thank you very much. Good sign, I thought. I didn’t know how good. I soon found out her brother was in AA and her father had been addicted to prescription meds for years. But I dialed back anyway and asked a cutesy riddle: What’s Irish and stays out all night? Paddy O’Furniture. She groaned with a smile and said, Bah dum bump, Czh!, tapping out a rimshot on her thighs. Not much of one for puns, apparently, but happy to play.
After confirming that she, as her name suggested, was Roman Catholic (or cat lick, as my Uncle Buddy invariably, derisively pronounced it), I told her about the three Irishmen sitting in a pub opposite a whorehouse in Dublin. Looking out the window, they see the local rabbi walk down the street and, after a quick look around, slip into the whorehouse.
“Och, and it’s sad to observe the depravity of the Jews,” says Paddy to Seamus and Murphy, and all three shake their heads knowingly.
(I love this part of the joke because it lodges in the listener’s mind as an uneasy anticipation of anti-Semitism. It goes nowhere, but does raise the tension level.)
The three Irishmen order a second stout, and as they are drinking, the Presb
yterian minister walks quickly down the street and scuttles into the whorehouse.
“Well, and if that doesn’t demonstrate what we’ve always known about the morals of the Protestants,” says Murphy to Seamus and Paddy, who nod in sage agreement.
As they are all relaxing into their third stout, the parish priest, Father Quinn, strolls down the street, hesitates a moment, and steps over the threshold into the whorehouse. The three Irishmen say nothing for a moment until Paddy says, “It’s good of the Father to visit them, it is. One of the poor misguided girls must have fallen ill.”
“Sounds about right,” Erin said, laughing.
A lot of RCs would resent hearing these jokes from a southerner and a Protestant. Erin, though, has a fond but jeweler’s eye for the foibles and venalities of her Church and its priests, as well as a wariness of the self-exculpating sentimentality of the Irish—and this joke indulged both misgivings.
Thinking back, I am almost certain that, over the course of the evening and dinner, I told her the joke about Dewey the leprechaun, the joke that ruined my injudicious play for Condi Rice—and she got a kick out of it. Her sense of humor revealed her flexible-mindedness and intelligence, her instinctive desire to sympathize with both sides of an issue but still able to take a firm moral stand.
We were just getting to know each other as lovers and as people—I think we’d made love twice—when I invited her to listen to a comedy tape I’d just bought, by Sam Kinison. I had heard Kinison on TV, I told her, and he did a bit that always put me in stitches. Looking out at the audience, he yelled, “You can’t scare me.” Then he’d bend forward and bellow as loud as he could, “I’VE BEEN MARRIED!” The first syllable of married was a sustained low note, which then rose to the high piercing long e in the second syllable, which he held like a crazed soprano unwilling to end her aria, all the muscles in his neck taut as the wires stabilizing an electric transmission tower.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 29