Palm Sunday (20 page)

“I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do. I was raised this way—in the midst of what provincial easterners imagine to be a Bible Belt. I was confirmed in my skepticism by Mark Twain during my formative years, and by some other good people, too. I have since bequeathed this lack of faith and my love for the body of literature which supports it to my children.

“I am moved on this occasion to put into a few words the ideal my parents and Twain and the rest held before me, and which I have now passed on. The ideal, achieved by few, is this: ’Live so that you can say to God on Judgment Day, “I was a very good person, even though I did not believe in
you.” ’ The word ’God,’ incidentally, is capitalized throughout this speech, as are all pronouns referring to Him.

“We religious skeptics would like to swagger some in heaven, saying to others who spent a lot of time quaking in churches down here, ’I was never worried about pleasing or angering God—never took Him into my calculations at all.’

“Religious skeptics often become very bitter toward the end, as did Mark Twain. I do not propose to guess now as to why he became so bitter. I know why I will become bitter. I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see God, that there is no heaven or Judgment Day.

“I have used the word ’calculations.’ It is a relative of that elegant Missouri verb, ’to calculate.’ In Twain’s time, and on the frontier a person who calculated this or that was asking that his lies be respected, since they had been arrived at by means of arithmetic. He wanted you to acknowledge that the arithmetic, the logic of his lies, was sound.

“I know a rowdy joke which is not fit to tell in mixed company in a Victorian home like this one. I can reveal the final line of it, however, without giving offense. This is it: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’ Any writer beginning a story might well say that to himself: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’

“This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.

“The wildest adventure with storytelling, with Missouri calculation, of which I know is
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
. It was written in this sacredly absurd monument—as were
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp
Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi
, from which I have quoted, and the world masterpiece,
Huckleberry Finn
. Twain’s most productive years were spent here—from the time he was thirty-nine until he was my age, which is fifty-six. He was my age when he left here to live in Europe and Redding and New York, his greatest work behind him.

“That is how far down the river of life he was when he left here. He could not afford to live here anymore. He was very bad at business.

“About
A Connecticut Yankee:
Its premise, its first lie, seemed to promise a lark. What could be more comical than sending back into the Dark Ages a late-nineteenth-century optimist and technocrat? Such a premise was surely the key to a treasure chest of screamingly funny jokes and situations. Mark Twain would have been wise to say to himself as he picked up that glittering key: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’

“I will refresh your memories as to where he wound up, with or without his hat. The Yankee and his little band of electricians and mechanics and what-have-you are being attacked by thousands of English warriors armed with swords and spears and axes. The Yankee has fortified his position with a series, of electric fences and a moat. He also has several precursors to modern machine guns, which are Gatling guns.

“Comically enough, thousands of early attackers have already been electrocuted. Ten thousand of the greatest knights in England have been held in reserve. Now they come; I quote, and I invite you to chuckle along with me as I read:

“’The thirteen Gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, and then they broke, faced about, and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached
the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths reached it and plunged over—to death by drowning.

“’Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.’

“End quote.

“What a funny ending.

“Mark Twain died in 1910, at the age of seventy-five and four years before the start of World War One. I have heard it said that he predicted that war and all the wars after that in
A Connecticut Yankee
. It was not Twain who did that. It was his premise.

“How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end. Suddenly and horrifyingly, what had seemed so clear throughout the book was not clear at all—who was good, who was bad, who was wise, who was foolish. I ask you, Who was most crazed by superstition and bloodlust, the men with the swords or the men with the Gatling guns?

“And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of
A Connecticut Yankee
remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likeable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.

“Shall I read the ending of
A Connecticut Yankee
to you yet again?

“No need.

“To return to mere storytelling, which never harmed anyone: It is the premise which shapes each story, yes, but the author must furnish the language and the mood.

“It seems clear to me, as an American writing one hundred years after this house was built, that we would not be
known as a nation with a supple, amusing, and often beautiful language of our own, if it were not for the genius of Mark Twain. Only a genius could have misrepresented our speech and our wittiness and our common sense and our common decency so handsomely to ourselves and the outside world.

“He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the young riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him, begin to imagine that he has some of the idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain.

“This is a miracle. There is a name for such miracles, which is myths.

“Imagine, if you will, the opinion we would now hold of ourselves and the opinions others would hold of us, if it were not for the myths about us created by Mark Twain. You can then begin to calculate our debt to this one man.

“One man. Just one man.

“I named my firstborn son after him.

“I thank you for your attention.”

I
AM BETTER THAN MOST
people in my trade at making jokes on paper.

For what it may be worth, I gave this graduation speech at Fredonia College, Fredonia, New York, on May 20, 1978, which contains, among other things, some of my theories about how jokes work, why jokes work:

“Your class spokesperson has just said that she is sick and tired of hearing people say, I’m glad I’m not a young person these days.’ All I can say is, I’m glad I’m not a young person these days.’

“President Beal wished to exclude all negative thinking from his own farewell to you, and so has asked me to make this announcement: ’All persons who still owe parking fees are to pay up before leaving the property, or there will be unpleasant monkey business with their transcripts.’

“When I was a boy in Indianapolis, there was a humorist there named Kin Hubbard. He wrote a few lines for
The Indianapolis News
every day. Indianapolis needs all the humorists it can get. He was often as witty as Oscar Wilde. He said, for instance, that Prohibition was better than no liquor at all.
He said that whoever named near-beer was a poor judge of distance. He said that it was no disgrace to be poor, but that it might as well be. He went to a graduation ceremony one time, and he said afterward that he thought it would be better if all the really important stuff was spread out over four years instead of being saved up for the very end.

“Well—I assume that the really important stuff has been spread out over the years here at Fredonia, and that you have no need of anything much from me. This is lucky for me. I have only this to say, basically: This is the end—this is childhood’s end for certain. ’Sorry about that,’ as they used to say in the Vietnam War.

“Perhaps you have read the novel
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the few masterpieces in the field of science fiction. All of the others were written by me. In Clark’s novel, mankind suddenly undergoes a spectacular evolutionary change. The children become very different from the parents, less physical, more spiritual—and one day they form up into a sort of column of light which spirals out into the universe, its mission unknown. The book ends there. You seniors, however, look a great deal like your parents, and I doubt that you will go radiantly into space as soon as you have your diplomas in hand. It is far more likely that you will go to Buffalo or Rochester or East Quogue—or Cohoes.

“And I suppose you will all want money and true love, among other things. I will tell you how to make money: Work very hard. I will tell you how to win love: Wear nice clothing and smile all the time. Learn the words to all the latest songs.

“What other advice can I give you? Eat lots of bran to provide necessary bulk in your diet. The only advice my father ever gave me was this: ’Never stick anything in your ear.’ The tiniest bones in your body are inside your ears, you know—and your sense of balance, too. If you mess around with your ears, you could not only become deaf, but you
could also start falling down all the time. So just leave your ears completely alone. They’re fine, just the way they are.

“Don’t murder anybody—even though New York State does not put people in the electric chair anymore.

“That’s about it.

“One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. That is when nature shuts everything down. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not spring. ’Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They are Unlocking.

“One more optional piece of advice: If you ever have to give a speech, start with a joke, if you know one. For years I have been looking for the best joke in the world. I think I know what it is. I will tell it to you, but you have to help me. You have to say, ’No,’ when I hold up my hand like this. All right? Don’t let me down.

“Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?”

[
AUDIENCE:
“NO.”]

“It is because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.

“That is the best joke I know. One time when I worked for the General Electric Company over in Schenectady,
I had to write speeches for company officers. I put that joke about the cows and the little bottles in a speech for a vice-president. He was reading along, and he had never heard the joke before. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he had to be led away from the podium with a nosebleed. I was fired the next day.

“How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. We are such earnest animals. When I asked you about cream, you could not help yourselves. You really tried to think of a sensible answer. Why does a chicken cross the road? Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill?

“The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.

“I have in fact designed this entire speech so as to allow you to be as stupid as you like, without strain, and without penalties of any kind. I have even written a ridiculous song for the occasion. It lacks music, but we are up to our necks in composers here. One is sure to come along. The words go like this:

“See—you were trying to guess what the next rhyme was going to be. Nobody cares how smart you are. So laugh with relief.

“I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity
all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loose again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian aborigines. We are all so close together in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. I have several children—six, to be exact—too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say: ’Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am—Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You’re wrong.’