I live within a block of two large retirement homes. The people who reside in them, most older than I, are part of my everyday mise en scène. Many are in good enough fettle: straight and kempt and cheerful, they have made the decision that living on their own has, for one reason or another, become too lonely or otherwise burdensome. Others have funny walks, or are bent with osteoporosis; a few have slightly vacant looks in their eyes. An occasional resident, in a wheelchair pushed by a Filipina minder, is deep into dementia, and is not so much out for a walk as for an airing. I have watched some of these people go from walking confidently to using a metal cane to requiring a walker to disappearing. Doubtless you have yourself already heard the ugly rumor that the mortality rate at present is at 100 percent.
For all that can be said on its behalf, Losing It, William Ian Miller’s book on the subject of old age, is not a gift one wants to present to a friend or relative on his or her eightieth birthday. Professor Miller is an historian of the medieval world, with a special interest in Icelandic sagas, who teaches in the law school at the University of Michigan. Years ago I read—and reviewed in the New Yorker—an earlier book of his called The Anatomy of Disgust. He has written other books on revenge, fraudulence, and humiliation, and obviously has a penchant for darkish subjects. Self-described as “halfway between an essayist and an historian,” he writes well, with a slightly macabre sense of humor, with irony added, shoring up his arguments with rich historical comparisons and analogies.
Writing a book called Losing It puts one in danger straightaway of giving evidence that one has oneself begun to lose it. Professor Miller’s premise is that he hasn’t quite lost it but is well on his way to doing so. “It” stands for one’s intelligence, wit, intellectual penetration, verbal agility, physical prowess, and strength, all the powers that one felt confident of when younger but feels slipping away with age. Miller’s bête noir in this book is the school of positive psychologists who claim that old age is the time of our lives, those serene golden years, all wisdom and tea (also tee) times. Miller’s own view is closer to that of a friend of mine who recently turned 90 and, to the question of what is the best thing about old age, answered: “It doesn’t last long.”
Professor Miller laces his book with autobiographical bits, touching on his own experience of growing old. He is Jewish, despite that suspicious middle name of Ian, born and brought up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Losing It contains several references to the Green Bay Packers.) He was 65 when he began writing this book, 66 at its completion, a tad too young perhaps to claim the complaining privileges of old age. As a university teacher, his being around students may aid in making him feel old; nothing adds years on a person more than being regularly around the young. Miller worries, in fact, that in his book he may have exaggerated his decrepitude. He is, after all, a man who continues to teach, works out on an exercise bike, has a mother still alive (at 90), drives a motorcycle—not, clearly, everyone’s idea of an alte kocher.
Intimations of mortality are what Miller has begun to feel, but, I should say, intimations merely. He speaks of memory lapses, of thinning hair, of no longer being quick in response, of his more attractive female students grasping that he is not really in sexual contention: “Oh, Professor Miller, he’s such a cute old man,” a colleague reported one such student saying of him. At the close of his book, he mentions a memory blackout he suffered—Transient Global Amnesia is its clinical name—before a Packers game. But where are his surgical scars? Where his white hair or baldness? He admits to taking Zoloft and Paxil, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs, but so far as I know, he doesn’t even have a plastic weekly calendar pill box, that badge of the older player.
Where Losing It is most valuable is in its author’s recounting of stories of growing old in warrior societies (such as the Vikings, Norsemen, and Icelanders) and religious communities. In warrior, or honor, societies, a good death was one in which one went down in battle, preferably with one’s enemies defeated, a ticket for Valhalla under your shield. In a religious, or at any rate a Christian community, martyrdom is the speediest way to heaven, there to dwell among the angels. In warrior societies, one dies with a sword in hand; in religious communities, with a Bible in one’s bed and a priest by one’s side. In secular societies, one is more likely to die with an IV on one’s wrist and a tube up one’s nose. The best death in a secular society is one in which one expires in one’s sleep—in other words, a death, next to birth the major element in one’s life, that one isn’t even around to witness.
Professor Miller relishes retailing the problems of old age. He describes the shrinkage that takes place in the human brain. Dubious about old age bringing wisdom, he holds that wisdom is rare at any age, and no more likely to be found among the old than any other group. He even cites studies that conclude the old are stupider than the young, in relying more on stereotypes and appearances to make judgments. He is quite properly skeptical about the official wise men and women of our day: “I still find the wise dead considerably wiser than those we hold to be modern-day wise men and women, who, the more famous they are, the more likely they are to be charlatans.” Sounds right to me.
No one gets Miller’s heart racing more quickly than those who find the prospects of old age cheerful. A book called Successful Aging he describes as advocating “staying spunky, thinking positively, and then dropping dead quickly when thinking positively finally succumbs to reality.” F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that the sensible state for the older man was mild depression. Miller wouldn’t disagree: “As a general rule,” he writes, “critical intelligence—mental acuity—wars with happiness.”
Miller takes after a Stanford professor named Laura Carstensen, whose optimism on the subject of being old drives him up and nearly over the nursing home wall. For Professor Cartensen, everything in old age presents an opportunity for contentment. For her, even “brain rot,” according to Miller, has its upbeat side. When Cartensen reports a sense of well-being among the elderly respondents to a study she has done, Miller asks, “Did she interview any old Jews? She couldn’t have, unless we have become more assimilated than I would ever have thought possible.” The work of Professor Cartensen and her followers, he characterizes as “suspect science” and selling “snake oil bearing the Stanford label.”
Miller’s own view of old age is that it is downhill all the way, a journey that leads ultimately back to a second infancy, replete with diapers, hairlessness, loss of locomotion—a ride from goo-goo to ga-ga. In old age Miller sees only diminishment, humiliation, the curtailment of pleasure. Old age, he writes, “made it hard for several of the deadly sins to operate,” though here La Rochefoucauld beat him to the punch by more than three centuries, writing: “Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.”
Live long enough, Miller warns, and even an exemplary career can be done in during one’s dotage. “You end up remembered,” he writes, “for your doddering vacancy . . . for your former self is now redefined in light of your drooling present.” Think of Bertrand Russell, a genius when young, a political fool in old age, hostage as he was at the end of his life to nutty left-wing movements.
When I began teaching at Northwestern University, the great figure there was Bergen Evans, the lexicographer who had earlier been the host of a television show on ABC called Of Many Things. His courses drew six or seven hundred students, his lexicographical works were best-sellers. A student in one of my classes who was taking Bergen Evans’s course in American usage told me that three times during the current quarter, Professor Evans took a letter out of his suit-jacket pocket, announced it arrived in the previous day’s mail, and read it to the class—and all three times it was the same letter. Oops!
Finding nothing good to say about old age, Miller does not ease up, either, on life after death. “Death does not lock in a reputation,” Miller writes.
What if ten years after you die it turn
s out that your son is a serial killer, your daughter a positive psychologist [I say, that’s a joke, son], your grandchildren drug addicts and in prison? You are not safe, your virtue, your life, will be reevaluated, and . . . there is no relaxing, no satisfaction in a life once thought well lived if you have spawned a line of losers.
Not a speaker much in demand at Ann Arbor Rotary Club meetings, Professor Miller, I should guess.
Do I need here to confess that I rather like my current age? I of course recognize, pace Yeats, that this is “no country for old men”; none, after all, is. Yet old age confers, if not wisdom—I would never claim that for myself, especially if I had it—then a certain amused perspective. From the parapet of 75 I can see the trajectory and final shape of the careers of my contemporaries, including the insignificance of my own. With the sense old age gives of time passing quickly, I find myself more patient now than in earlier years; old age has helped, if not entirely to defeat, then at least to quieten the traditional Jewish disease of schpilkosis.
My age has released me from the need to be au courant, or even moderately with it. I am no longer responsible for knowing much about Madonna, Lady Gaga, and the young women who will inevitably follow them. With the grave yawning, surely I cannot be expected to read the 600-page novel about the assistant professor of English who discovers his father is a transvestite? The imminence of death may or may not concentrate the mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson had it, but it does provide a few clues about how to expend what remains of one’s mental energy.
At 75, I feel I am playing with house money—the rest of my life, as people used to say before the worry about cholesterol set in, is gravy. Lovely it would be to stay in the game for another ten years or so, and I hope to be able to do so. But if before then some bright young oncologist or grave neurologist informs me that the time has come for me to cease flossing, I shall be mightily disappointed but scarcely shocked or even much surprised. On such an occasion I hope to retain the calm to count my blessings, which in my case have not been few. Among them will be that I have lived in freedom during a time of unprecedented prosperity, been allowed to do work of my own choosing that has been appreciated and decently rewarded, while never having been called upon to betray my friends or my ideals. Another blessing has been that thus far I have dodged the landmines, the flying darts, and the machine-gunner, and arrived at old age.
Day, day, enu, as the Hebrew chant has it, dayenu, dayenu.
What’s So Funny?
(2014)
The motives for humor are as manifold as those for murder. Among them are the raucous physical misfortunes of others (slapstick), grotesque incongruities (between reality and appearance), ethnic abuse (Polish, Irish, anti-Semitic, and other), subtlety elegantly deployed (through irony and understatement), release of inhibition (blue jokes), witnessing the mighty fallen (the revered made to look ridiculous). Laughter itself comes in multiple forms: smiles, sniggers, grins, giggles, belly laughs, falling-off-the-couch laughs, and what Mel Brooks once called heart-attack laughter. The realm of jokes encompasses the entire world in its subject matter and appears in such varying forms as puns, one-liners, epigrams, witty ripostes, practical jokes, comic commercials, and elaborate narratives requiring foreign, often Jewish-greenhorn, accents.
Various, often contradictory theories about humor have been devised—from the notion that humor is little more than a form of hidden aggression to those that hold humor is a cure for all sorts of illnesses. Given the range of motives for humor, its varying kinds and occasions and forms, can it be usefully studied and codified in the way of other phenomena?
Whether it can or not, it already is, in universities, in scholarly journals, at comedy clubs, at improv studios, and elsewhere. The University of Southern California provides students a “concentration” in humor. The University of Colorado has a Humor Research Laboratory. The international Society for Humor Studies publishes Humor: The International Journal of Humor.
Henri Bergson is perhaps the greatest name to write a full treatise on the subject, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, a work that brings to mind the comedian Chris Rock’s remark after seeing the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, “Not many laughs.” Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) contains a few decent jokes but it, too, fails to light up the subject, except perhaps for that minuscule portion of the population that continues to believe in the doctrines of the man Vladimir Nabokov never failed to call “the Viennese Quack.”
Three people, it has been said, are required for the successful consummation of a joke: one person to tell it, another to laugh at it, and a third not to get it. If you have to explain it, as everyone knows, it isn’t funny.
Without spontaneity—even well-rehearsed spontaneity—humor is sadly crippled. I once told a joke through a translator to the Soviet dissident hero Andrei Sinyavsky. The translator had come up to me at a party to say Mr. Sinyavsky had heard I knew lots of jokes. He, Sinyavsky, loved jokes, and would be pleased if I would tell him one. I proceeded to do so. The translator translated me line for line. At the punchline, Sinyavsky smiled faintly, and told the translator, in Russian, “Very nice.” But it wasn’t, really. All rhythm was lost, literally, in translation, and by the time I came to the joke’s end I myself was slightly bored by it.
“Analyzing humor,” E. B. White wrote, “is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.” This sentence appears toward the end of Peter McGraw and Joel Warner’s The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Interesting they would include it, since their book is about little else than the dissection of humor to learn how it works, when it is effective, and what are its uses. The authors propose to answer such questions, among others, as:
Do comics need to come from screwed-up childhoods? What’s the secret to winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny make you more attractive? Who’s got a bigger funny bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans?
They do answer them, but for the most part in the largely unsatisfactory manner of social science—with, that is, poll results, surveys, and focus-group findings.
McGraw, the director of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, supplied the theoretical expertise for the book. The notion of a Humor Research Lab is itself amusing. One imagines a large, well-lit room with mice and monkeys falling over with laughter while watching videos of Rodney Dangerfield.
Much legwork went into the making of The Humor Code. The authors interviewed the cartoon editor of the New Yorker and a founding editor of the Onion and many other experts. They investigated one or another aspect of humor in Sweden, Denmark, Africa, Japan, and Palestine; and talked with stand-up comics and humor theorists in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and elsewhere. Many studies are cited (some are called “compelling”) and the word science often comes into play when social science, a much less stringent activity, is meant. All of which leads into a poor joke of my own creation: How many social scientists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Difficult to say. They’ll first need a grant to do a study of the problem.
McGraw’s studies have led him to endorse something called the benign-violation theory, which holds that “humor only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening (i.e. a violation), but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable, or safe (i.e., benign.)” The form this takes in most jokes and comic situations is to begin with the threat of a violation of some sort and save the uneasiness this causes by its turning benign at its end.
The theory does work with a great many jokes. In 1962 I heard Lenny Bruce, a man not overly concerned with seeming benign, tell a joke whose premise was that Sophie Tucker, still alive at 75 and then thought one of the great ladies of show business, was a nymphomaniac requiring the services of an unending supply of Puerto Rican busboys working in the nightclubs in which she performed. Bruce then staged a dialogue between Mr. R
osenberg, the (naturally) Jewish owner of such a nightclub, attempting to persuade Manuel, one of his busboys, to attend to Miss Tucker in her room. In a heavy Hispanic accent, Manuel protests vigorously, citing Miss Tucker’s age, her looks, the outrageous impropriety of the whole business. Rosenberg offers him 50 dollars. Manuel claims it’s impossible, he cannot do it. Rosenberg assures him it will all be over in 10 minutes. This back and forth conversation continues until, finally, Manuel says, “I don’t care what you say, Mr. Rosenberg, I cannot, I cannot, I will not [brief pause here] schtup her.”
The joke turns out not to be about Sophie Tucker’s putative nymphomania but about Manuel’s use of the word schtup, which picks up on the point that the minority employees of Jewish bosses often acquire odd bits of Yiddish.
Another such joke has a man and woman necking passionately on their banquette in a French restaurant, when suddenly the woman slides under the table. (You should be a bit nervous at this point.) A moment or two later the waiter approaches the table and informs the man that his wife is missing, to which he replies: “No, she’s not. She just walked in the door.” Relief follows; it’s not a fellatio joke with a high yuck quotient.
In both jokes, benignity wins out over violation. But not always, however. Not even all that often, actually. The benign-violation theory has its limits.
For example: A woman comes to her physician to announce that her husband, a Christian Scientist, has been behaving strangely of late, but, owing to his religion, refuses to see a doctor. The physician suggests she give him a list of her husband’s symptoms. After she does so, he says that there are two distinct possibilities here: her husband has either AIDS or Alzheimer’s. When the woman asks what is she to do, the physician offers a simple solution. “Drive your husband thirty miles out of town and drop him off. If he returns home, don’t sleep with him.” (A more forceful word than “sleep,” unfit for a family magazine, was used when I first heard it.) No redemption in the benign here; quite the reverse.
The Ideal of Culture Page 10