Even in my tame imitation, Erin, who had also been married, liked the joke. “That’s funny,” she said, charmed. “That’s very good.”
As she settled into a chair on the other side of the room, I snapped the cassette into my screaming-yellow boom box and punched PLAY. Almost immediately Kinison began screaming at the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa, telling the starving masses that they live in a fucking desert and they are always going to be starving if they don’t move. “Move, you fucking morons! Move to where the food is!”
“See this?” he bellowed. “It’s sand. A hundred years from now, it’s still going to be sand! We have deserts in America—we just don’t live in them, assholes!” The sheer audacity of the line about sand jerked a choked snort out of me—choked off, because I was wondering nervously how I looked to Erin. Maybe this crude rant would conjure up the bleeding-heart California Catholic I’d been warned about and I’d have to hear for the rest of the night about how crass and cruel Kinison was and, by logical extension, how cruel I was to laugh, though I myself was hearing the tape for the first time, and so certainly couldn’t be advocating—could I?—the moral contents of it, which I didn’t in fact find terribly funny except for the one laugh he’d forced out of me, which really was, in its own awful way, funny, wasn’t it—a little bit, maybe?
“I’ve, uh, only heard him on TV,” I said. “I had no idea he was this, uh, vulgar.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I see what he’s doing.”
But what exactly was he doing? Kinison was a shock comedian, but Kinison was also an ex-evangelical preacher whose rage at the world’s shortcomings frequently broke into long frustrated screams. It was hard sometimes to hear past the anger to the perverse glee of a man who has shed the illusions of his faith and was now performing his balked idealism in front of an audience. Reading Brother Sam, Bill Kinison’s account of his younger brother’s life, I discovered my assumptions were mostly right. But there is another devastatingly simple reason why Kinison often seemed deranged. According to his brother, Sam had been “a mild little boy” until the age of three, when he ran into the street after a rubber ball and “a semitruck struck him flush on the side of his head.” The doctor diagnosed him as having suffered “thirty percent brain damage.”
Erin and I were relieved when Kinison finished the bit about Ethiopia, but we weren’t relieved for long. The next rant was about cunnilingus, which Kinison did not call cunnilingus. He bellowed at women in the abstract because of how freaking long they take to climax and how unbelievably tired his tongue got in the laborious process of gratifying them. With a muffled sort of speech impediment, he mimicked the act while yelling at his imagined recipient to please hurry the fuck up and come because he’s dying down here. His tongue is falling off, for Christ’s sake.
Then he described how he both satisfied his lover and relieved his boredom by spelling out the alphabet on her clitoris with his tongue. Again with the muffled speech impediment: Ah! Bah! Sah! Dah!
Though Kinison’s rant about oral sex deliberately overlooked the pleasure of giving pleasure, he said something that most men think but know not to say. With a new lover sitting on the other side of the room, one whom I hoped would continue as a lover, I felt no particular desire to say, “You know, he kinda has a point,” though now, after twenty years of marriage, I probably would say it, if for no other reason than to provoke a look of amused forbearance. We sat silently, listening to Kinision scream, unable to bring ourselves to look at each other. Was she offended or would I offend her more by turning off the tape and seeming like a chivalrous dolt, determined to protect fair maiden from foul taint? I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and swept quick glances in her direction, trying to gauge her mood. Her studiously neutral face was poised above her carefully open, but very still, posture.
“Well, that’s enough of that,” I said, and hit the EJECT button.
Immediately she was on her feet, ready to go. We smiled brief, forced, uneasy smiles at each other and then decided it’d be a good idea to walk into town for an ice cream cone. Walking, we talked about suffering and humor. The gap between our concern for the hungry, unhoused, and afflicted, and what we actually do to help them—our self-preserving hypocrisy—is the sort of cognitive dissonance that is the stuff of humor. And our acknowledgment of our hypocrisy while still doing nothing or little is the source for more and different laughter. As Kinison himself said in an interview, “You can’t just cry.”
• • •
A joker, but seldom a joke teller, Erin loves to laugh as much as anyone I’ve ever met. From the beginning I loved the way our voices joined in laughter, as singers delight in their voices uniting in song. Everyone knows music is sensual, but the free jazz of laughter—soloing and asking for a response, like a clarinet calling to a saxophone, the sax replying with its solo, and the two then combining in harmony—is sensual and even openly erotic. Erin rarely finds puns funny, which is a relief; while I enjoy puns myself, I don’t like being caught in a barrage of them. She doesn’t laugh at racist or violent jokes unless they really catch her off guard, and she laughs briefly before the ugliness catches up with her, but she’s interested in the forces behind them. She wants to understand the psychology of the racist joke and joke teller because they are alien to her.
I wooed her and her pealing musical laughter with the jokes Jill loved: “That dog bite you!” And as we got to know each other better: “We might as well leave now, Fanny.” And “Morning, ladies!”—which to my amazement she both knew and thought funny. Not until much later did I tell her about Willie going to the doctor because he looked good but felt bad, and when I did tell it, as a specimen of the racist jokes I heard in high school, she took a moment to work through revulsion to puzzlement at the intricate conflicting ugliness of the joke.
I felt a bit like an adulterer, delighting one lover with the pleasures learned from another. Between Jill and me, the jokes were an open intimacy, the hilarity sparked by our delight in each other and flaring to a frantic flame by the romantic disappointments that had brought us together. Each of us then became another one of those disappointments to the other. But the things that made us laugh still seemed to me so intimate that I felt, irrationally, as if I were sharing pillow talk or the details of our sex life if I repeated them. But jokes are not wholly owned by the context in which we first enjoy them or enjoy them the most; they have a life of their own. I got over my sentimental attachments and discovered that not every joke of Jill’s was a hit with Erin.
Sure, she loves and still urges me to ask people, “Where did George Washington keep his armies?” so she can laugh happily when I shoot my hands out of my cuffs and crow, “In his sleevies!” And she laughs though she knows that every single time I tell it, I think of Jill, who first told it to me.
She’s not so fond of another one of Jill’s, which I like simply because it’s silly, a pun so dumb it’s pure idiot music.
“Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?”
“To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump! To the dump, to the dump, dump, dump!”
“When’d you learn that one, third grade?”
“And what do you have against third grade, Miss Big Shot College Professor?”
But I had learned a few new ones. After making love one afternoon, I asked her what a man could do in bed to ensure that his woman enjoys a massive, life-affirming, even life-changing orgasm every single time they make love.
“Okay, what?”
“Who cares?”—delivered with a dismissive shrug. Oh, she howled at that one.
It’s a guy joke. And it’s an ugly joke if one takes the speaker seriously. But most guys telling the joke are, I think, acknowledging that while there are guys who think that way, the ones telling the joke are not like them, or else the orgasm wouldn’t be so lovingly described. Some men certainly have no interest in anyone’s pleasure but their own, but it’s also true that there are times when one partner is going to clim
ax and the other, for whatever reason, isn’t, and then one either tends to one’s own pleasure or is left unsatisfied. Would I have told this joke to my wife before we made love? Probably not. But afterward the implicit message is different: It says not only am I not one of those guys, I hope I’ve shown you I’m not. And as Erin and I age, that nasty punch line takes on a compassionate, even a deeply loving, note. If one of us doesn’t finish, who cares? The act of love is still love, dammit, if not as entirely satisfactory as sex.
Obligatory large penis joke: My wife has never had an orgasm. She passes out first from the pain.
Erin and I laugh at most of the same things for most of the same reasons, but with different slants. Her laugh seems to me more compassionate, imbued with a generous Catholic sense that people, by revealing their flawed nature, are somehow reaffirming an ordered universe with God at the top and humans below. To her, the self-serving gratification of the “Who cares?” is, in its own small-minded way, life-affirming because, as St. Augustine says, “To blame the fault of a creature is to praise its essential nature.” There is some of that acceptance in my laughter. I wish there were more. But the Calvinism of my childhood makes me expect the worst from people. I see and celebrate the occasionally necessary selfishness behind “Who cares?” but I also deplore it. Erin disapproves of it too, but finds the cheerful lack of hypocrisy charming, just as she laughs with pleasure when she sees a dog unabashedly being a dog, even if it’s protecting its food bowl from a passing shadow, trying to steal another dog’s toy, or running to the basement to hide from thunder.
In the first weeks that I knew her, I told Erin the joke that became her favorite—another joke I first heard from Jill—and it’s no surprise that it’s about sex and levels of sexual avidity. A man has been on a desert island for twenty years, utterly alone, and one day, as he is walking along the beach, scavenging, he finds a woman washed up on the shore. He goes to attend to her and sees that it’s Sharon Stone. She must have fallen off a passing yacht. (Which means she fared better than another famously beautiful actress who stars in another joke. “What kind of wood doesn’t float?” “Natalie.” Erin does not care for that one.)
The castaway carries Sharon Stone up to his hut, cleans her up, feeds her warmed-up coconut milk, and slowly, tenderly nurses her back to health. After three months, when she is completely well, he says, “Sharon, I’m nervous about bringing this up because I don’t want to offend you and this is a little embarrassing to say, but, you know, I’ve been here alone on this island for twenty years and I’ve never seen a ship. I’ve never been close to being rescued. The chances of our being saved are virtually nil, and I hope you won’t think I’m being forward if I suggest we might want to think about, you know, maybe having sex.”
Sharon isn’t so wild about having sex with a scroungy beachcomber, but the prospect of spending the rest of her life on an island with no sexual companionship is a pretty convincing argument; he has saved her life and taken care of her. With a little reluctance, she agrees. For the next two months they have almost nonstop, frantic, insane, passionate sex—the best sex either of them has ever had.
After three months, though, Sharon notices that her lover’s ardor has begun to decrease, and she thinks she ought to raise this issue with him.
“Yes, Sharon, you’re right,” he says. “I guess I haven’t been as fully engaged with you, as fully besotted with you, as I was in the beginning.”
“You know we’re likely to spend the rest of our lives here on this island,” she says. “Is there anything I can do, anything at all, that will get you excited again—that will make our love complete for you?”
“Well, yes, there is. Do you mind if I call you Bob?”
Sharon is taken aback. Nothing in the castaway’s demeanor had prepared her for this. But twenty years alone on an island . . . no real hope of rescue . . .
She shrugs, and says, “Yeah, sure, you can call me Bob.”
“Hey, that’s great. Thanks. Why don’t you come here and sit down beside me, Bob?” he says, and pats a spot on the log he’s sitting on in front of the fire.
With a sigh Sharon sits down, not sure what’s going on.
The castaway looks at her, smiles, and says, “Hey, Bob! Guess who I’ve been fucking?”
How lovely to tell this joke to a woman with whom you are in the wild, first stages of a love affair! We were both besotted with each other and yet wondering whether the passion would turn to enduring love or, as it were, peter out, and this joke let us acknowledge that fear and laugh about it while reveling in what we had at the moment. But being a joker—carrying a donkey on your back—exacts a toll on one’s dignity. When Erin and I decided we were serious, she called her mother and told her she was seeing a new man. “Oh,” her mother said. “What’s he like?”
“Uh, uh, well, he’s southern.” Erin knew her father, a lifelong Californian, had gone to medical school at Louisiana State University, where he’d joined a fraternity. To the last year of his life, he kept his initiation pledge to stand whenever he heard the song “Dixie,” even if he were alone in his house watching football on TV and the band struck up the tune. He’d love having a southerner in the family.
“Oh, southern!” said her mom. “Is he courtly?”
Long pause, interspersed with giggling.
“What’s so funny? Are you laughing at me?” Her mom was imagining Ashley Wilkes, not a man carrying a donkey on his shoulders.
• • •
After we married, the second marriage for both of us, Erin and I spent a lot of evenings and weekends watching music videos and stand-up comedy on TV—talking and joking as we watched. We were tuning our sensibilities, learning in greater detail which music the other loved and what we both laughed at. We were trying to understand and embrace the other’s pleasures.
We also watched home-decorating shows, trying to coordinate our tastes. We wanted to furnish our new house with something other than the graduate-student furniture we’d dragged around into middle age—bookshelves made of concrete blocks and two-by-sixes, sofas cast off by friends and family, and twenty-year-old, swaybacked mattresses. We were fond of a short-lived show called The Furniture Guys on PBS. Ed Feldman and Joe L’Erario stripped, refinished, and reupholstered furniture while keeping up a farrago of sub-Grouchoesque puns and insults. On one episode, they brought in a woman who specialized in stenciling, and while she earnestly stippled flowers around the edge of a refinished cabinet, Ed and Joe mocked her, laughing and egging each other on. The more they joked, the stiffer her neck grew, until finally, upper lip curled back on her incisors, she snarled, “You two just crack each other up, doncha?”
It was the first catchphrase of our marriage, one we still use, burnishing and cherishing it. When one of us amuses the other in a way too silly for others to bear, one of us sneers, “You two just crack each other up, doncha?” The joke is a warning about making our private jokes in public, a caution against being so into each other we’re rude. But it’s true that we have become dedicated to making each other laugh or smile. I will mention only the lifelike plastic lizard that appears regularly in coffee mugs, in the silverware drawer, pressed into the bottom of a bar of soap, or poised to fall off a cabinet door. Taking the time to polish a pun or fine-tune a practical joke is a way of saying, I’m thinking about you and I want to please you. It is the opposite of “Who cares?”
The catchphrase I’m most fond of is one I stumbled on at the biennial meeting of the Fellowship of Southern Writers a few months after we were married. In the hospitality suite of the hotel, I loved listening to the banter of luminaries like Louis Rubin, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, and Fred Chappell—writers whose works I have admired for decades. I’d never dreamed of meeting them, much less hanging out with them as they gossiped, played guitars, and sang.
Among the stars was Andrew Lytle, a novelist and one of the authors of the famous southern agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The So
uth and the Agrarian Tradition. A bit overawed by the folks in the hospitality suite, I’d been talking to John Jeremiah Sullivan, then an undergraduate at Sewanee: The University of the South. John, who lived in a downstairs apartment in Mr. Lytle’s house, was at the meeting to tend to the elderly writer. But I had failed to get John’s name, and when he left the group, I asked someone what his name was.
“Who?”
“The kid who was just here,” I said. “Mr. Lytle’s boy.”
From across the circle, a man who’d heard only the last part of the conversation looked up from his guitar and snapped at me, “He has a name! It’s John!”
I was abashed. Bourbon and sloppy camaraderie had led me to a patronizing characterization of a young man I’d just met. When I repeated the story to John a decade later, he laughed: “But I was Mr. Lytle’s boy!”
That night, though, when I called Erin, I was still embarrassed by my gaffe. Erin consoled me. The stranger, she said, perhaps feeling the bourbon himself, had seized a harmless blunder and chastised me in public to make himself look good in front of the famous writers—a true egalitarian who nobly rebuked the snob who did not trouble himself to learn the names of the little people. And so our most enduring catchphrase was born.
At breakfast last week, I asked Erin, “Do you want me to clean it?”
“What?”
“The thing there,” I said, nodding across the kitchen counter. I’d gone blank.
“It has a name!” she said. “It’s TOASTER!”
• • •
Being married also meant integrating myself into a new family, and telling jokes was how I worked out a relaxed relationship with my father-in-law, both in person and on the phone. Tom wasn’t much of a joke teller but he loved hearing jokes. Like his daughter, he loved to laugh. One of his favorite stories, one that still made him chuckle seventy years after it happened, was about being aboard the SS President Hayes as a marine in World War II. Tom bunked in the extreme forward area of the ship, two decks down in the narrow part where the prow comes to a point. Because of bad weather, the ship pitched up and down dramatically at both ends like a teeter-totter, and he was surrounded by the vomiting and moaning of the men inclined to seasickness. Once he stumbled to the crowded head and saw that the pipes had backed up and troops were slipping on the vomit.
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