The Joker: A Memoir (2 page)

Just in case you think, as I do, that it might be amusing to imply that a king’s wife is promiscuous and his daughter a bastard, you should know that when his beloved jester Will Somers did just that, Henry VIII threatened to kill him with his bare hands. Somers, who amused Henry by eating and sleeping with the royal spaniels, was forgiven. Archibald Armstrong, jester to James VI and Charles I, was not. Archy disliked William Laud, the diminutive Archbishop of Canterbury, and at a royal supper, the jester offered grace before the meal with a pun: “Great praise be given to God and little laud to the devil.” His joke was good enough for him to keep his head and his job despite his audacious effrontery. But after Laud’s attempt to impose Anglican religious services on the Presbyterian Scots led to the Scottish rebellion of 1637, Archy, meeting Laud in the street, asked, “Who’s fool now?” After Laud complained, “it was ordered he
[Armstrong] should be carried to the porter’s lodge, his coat pulled over his ears, and kicked out of the court, never to enter within the gates.” Being stripped of the king’s scarlet livery seems fair punishment for a fool who, in anger and animosity, resorted to calling his victim the true fool, the oldest and bluntest arrow in any fool’s quiver.

•  •  •

Though I’m not particularly worried about being beheaded or burned at the stake, I do worry about losing my job or offending friends and acquaintances. On recent teaching evaluations, one student complained that I made far too many references to bodily fluids “even for a graduate class,” and another participant at a writers’ conference expressed concern that my delight in a particular joke was detrimental to the good reputation of the conference. Am I sorry about that? Of course. Am I going to stop telling the joke? Of course not. The next time you see me, just ask me for “The Barbie Joke,” and I’ll perform it for you. But still, I wake up in the middle of the night after parties, thinking,
My god, I can’t believe I made that joke about O. J. Simpson to Richard Wilbur.
Or I walk out of my classroom, stricken with nervous regret, praying nobody files a complaint because I told the joke about the Scotsman and the goat, which I will tell you in chapter 10.

I don’t want to end up like John “Santa John” Toomey, who for twenty years in a San Franciso Macy’s belted out rich baritone
hoho-hos
over Santaland. Children adored him and so did adults, for different reasons. When adults sat on his lap, Santa John asked if they’d been good that year. When they said yes, he replied, “Gee, that’s too bad.” Santa, he told them, was jolly because he “knows where all the naughty boys and girls live.” It was a bit of shtick he’d been doing for twenty years, and never, he insisted, when children could hear. But in 2010, a middle-aged couple unacquainted with humor asked to sit in his lap, and the sixty-eight-year-old Santa
soon found himself, like Archy Armstrong, stripped of his red coat. He died of a heart attack nine months later.

With all due respect to Bill Maher and Don Imus, both fired for jokes they told, the most famous joke-instigated firing in recent history was probably the 1976 canning of Earl Butz, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture. Butz was apparently an inveterate joker. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, he amused himself by pitching pennies at the secretary of the treasury, a stunt that walks the line between gratingly juvenile and almost charming. Who better to pitch pennies at?

After Ford was nominated, Butz flew out of Kansas City, accompanied by John Dean, who was covering the convention for
Rolling Stone
. In “Rituals of the Herd,” Dean recounts how he introduced Butz to Pat Boone, and then asked Butz about the tepid reaction to Bob Dole’s vice presidential acceptance speech. Butz, with what John Dean called a “mischievous smile,” said, “Oh, hell, John, everybody was worn out by then. You know, it’s like the dog who screwed the skunk for a while until it finally shouted, ‘I’ve had enough!’ ” Folksy and apt, it’s a wonderful metaphor for a political convention grinding to an exhausted end, and it demonstrates Butz’s humorous acuity at its most incisive.

But there was something else going on too. Butz was enjoying messing with Pat Boone’s head. Boone, the 1950s pretty-boy alternative to Elvis, was so excruciatingly proper he once refused to kiss his movie costar because she was married in real life. In the presence of such a famous Goody Two-shoes, the earthy Butz couldn’t resist telling a joke about a dog screwing a skunk to a standstill. Butz didn’t stop there:

Pat gulped, then grinned and I [Dean] laughed. To change the subject Pat posed a question: “John and I were just discussing the appeal of the Republican party. It seems to me that the party
of Abraham Lincoln could and should attract more black people. Why can’t that be done?” This was a fair question for the secretary, who is also a very capable politician.

“I’ll tell you why you can’t attract coloreds,” the secretary proclaimed as his mischievous smile returned. “Because coloreds only want three things. You know what they want?” he asked Pat.

Pat shook his head; so did I.

“I’ll tell you what coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit. That’s all!”

Pat gulped twice.

We can easily understand why Pat gulped, but it’s almost as easy to understand why Butz enjoyed messing with Pat Boone. Confronted by Boone’s historically naïve question about why blacks don’t vote for the Party of Lincoln—there was a long century between Ford’s Theatre and the resignation of Richard Nixon—Butz must have found it irresistible to tell a racist joke that also requires he say “pussy” and “shit.” Who wouldn’t want to rattle such an earnest interlocutor? The joke jabs a cruelly precise needle into Boone’s assumption that Republicans took the black vote seriously. It doesn’t just explain why blacks don’t vote Republican; it consciously demonstrates why. Blacks know that Republicans like Butz perceive them as little more than animals, and Butz knows they know. He is not only telling Boone all this, he’s also deliberately flaunting his personal contempt as well as enacting his political calculation of how little chance Republicans have of attracting black voters.

For all the subtexts buried in it, the joke is still a nasty piece of work, its racism supercharged by the rhythm of the punch line but unadulterated with wit. It relies almost entirely on the shock value of cramming as much racism, misogyny, and scatology into as few words as possible. Interestingly, Butz avoided the charged word
that’s obviously missing; he substitutes “coloreds” for “niggers,” slightly ameliorating the shock he’s depending on.

I’m not the only reader curious about where the humor might be hiding in this painfully crude joke. According to Gareth Morgan in “Butz Triads: Towards a Grammar of Folk Poetry” published in
Folklore
, Butz’s joke is actually a “fairly well-known” southwestern triad:

The three things that a nigger likes:

Tight pussy,

loose shoes,

and a warm place to shit.

It’s the same pattern as “What are little girls made of? / Sugar, / and spice / and all things nice, / that’s what little girls are made of” and “Pease porridge hot, / pease porridge cold, / pease porridge in the pot, nine days old”—with the third item in the list having twice as many beats as the first two. Morgan traces the pattern back to an epigrammatic masterpiece from ancient Sumer:
“Aba garra? Aba galla? Aba urma ganna aburu?”
(“Who is miserly? / Who is opulent? / For whom shall I reserve my vulva?”) The rhythm of Butz’s joke gives it some power, but these examples demonstrate just what’s missing: rhyme, wordplay, or wit. The only surprise is the loose shoes—a mildly amusing image leavened with assonance—but that’s hardly enough to make anyone laugh.

Or is the whole crudeness of the humor somehow the point? Does the joke simply hope to keep piling up ugliness till someone laughs in incredulity or agreement? Is it supposed to work like the joke I heard when Ricky Walker leaned over to me in tenth grade and asked, “Do you know what the American Dream is?”

“Yeah, it’s some ideal about, uh . . .”

“No. It’s all the niggers swimming back to Africa. With a Jew under each arm.”

“How could they swim like that?” I said, sneering at the contradiction in his joke, only to be told, witheringly, “That’s the point.” Then he laughed at my dawning consternation.

Was Ricky’s joke only a joke?

“It’s only a joke” was more or less Butz’s defense, and it’s one every joker resorts to when a humor bomb blows up in his face: “You know, I don’t know how many times I told that joke, and everywhere—political groups, church groups, nobody took offense, and nobody should. I like humor. I’m human.” Butz was almost certainly lying. It’s hard to imagine many pastors, even those few who didn’t flinch from the racism, chortling at “pussy” and “shit” while mounding their Styrofoam plate with scalloped potatoes and Sea Foam Salad. But like Butz, I too have weakly mustered “It’s only a joke,” when my love of a joke’s audacity enticed me into an amoral blindness to what’s being said. Every time I think of Earl Butz, I wince and think,
There but for the grace of God—and the fact that reporters don’t follow me around the country—go I.

Religious bigotry, racism, sexual discomfort, and death provide the tension in jokes, the friction to wordplay’s lubrication, and in this thematic memoir of my life as a joker, the story of my life shifts back and forth in time as I explore how I learned to think about religion, race, and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes. Even in their frequent ugliness I love jokes. They illuminate how we think and the often irresolvable contradictions our lives are built on. The laughter they draw from us both expresses our sorrow at our inconsistency and soothes it. I love the sound of laugher; my voice joining almost musically with yours in a fearful celebration of how the frailties of others are also our own.

I was slow to delight in disorder, in which words didn’t mean what I’d understood them to mean and in which phrases had secret histories I couldn’t know. I was an anxious child, one who sat at his desk and, sounding out words so he could spell them, felt them dissolve on his lips. Or I wrote them with such attention to each mark of the pencil that they disintegrated into their component lines and curves, hooks, and squiggles. Clutching a child’s fat pencil, I painstakingly etched words, upstroke and downstroke, onto the lined paper of my Blue Horse Pencil Tablet, paper so near to pulp you could see brown flecks of bark and heartwood in it. I concentrated on the letters until they started to look queer, alien, wrong. I looked back and forth from the book to my handwriting, trying to see what I had copied incorrectly. When I found no mistake, I distrusted my eyesight. I often erased the word and wrote it again, spelling it the same correct way as the first time but trying to make it
look
right
in my handwriting. I wrote and erased and wrote and erased till I rubbed holes through the paper.

The sounds of the words were even slipperier than their shapes. Certain small, obvious words were the most likely to crumble in my mouth. As I repeated them, the sounds shifted and the word warped. The word
word
was one of the worst. The
w
stretched out or shortened as I said it different ways. So did the
ur
sound following it. And the
duh
at the end could be the end of one syllable or break off and establish itself as a separate syllable if I over-enunciated, which I almost always did once I started to think about what I was saying. I was terrified by the porcelain delicacy of words. Language was so fragile I could break it just by trying to grasp it, and since it was the only tool I had to make sense of the world, if I destroyed it I also destroyed my own identity. Several times I was so terrified by a word’s crumbling in my mouth that I stretched out on the floor between my brother’s bed and my own—a place where no one could see me—and cried until I was panting.

Maybe I should have asked my mother for help, but I remembered working myself into a frenzy when, trying to write a sentence for a homework assignment, I had a word slip out of my mind—a basic word, one I should’ve known. I burst into the kitchen, gasping, “Wuz! Mama, wuz!” I was frantic, my face sticky with tears, but even in my agitation I saw excessive alarm spread across her face. I’d been born two and a half months premature and then placed for several weeks on a respirator that stunted some babies’ development by over-oxygenating their brains. Mom had watched for it, braced for it, probed for it, and at long last brain damage had raced into her kitchen, clutched her leg, clamped its damp face to her belly, hysterically begging, “Wuz!”

“What? What are you saying?” she demanded as I clung to her, wailing, “Wuz, Mama, wuz?” Her body was stiff with fear.

Finally she grasped what I couldn’t put into words. I could feel
her muscles relax. Smiling with more amusement than I thought my stupidity called for, she spelled out, “W-A-S.”

Wuz
was restored to its essential was-ness, and I immediately calmed down. But words remained skittery.
The
was a persistent vexation, shifting between a short
e
sound and or a long
e
that knocked it up against
thee
from the Bible. Not much later,
mama
changed. One day she snapped, “Don’t call me
Mama
, boy. I’m your
mom
.” She didn’t want to be a countrified mama, as her mother was to her and her sister back in Georgia was to her boys. The wife of an air force officer, she wanted to be that modern thing, a mom. My calling her
Mama
, especially in front of her friends, undermined how she wanted to see herself. It was hard for me to imagine words having the power to change who we are and still being able to fall apart when looked at too closely, but there was Mama’s—Mom’s—clear demonstration of it happening.

Words were, I thought, like eggs. Hold them loosely and they fall through your fingers and splatter on the linoleum; grasp them too tightly and they are crushed, messily, in your hands. Or maybe words were more like the photos in the newspaper. If I looked at them from across the room, they blurred into blotchy gray shadows, but if I hovered over the pictures, my nose grazing the page, all I could see were individual gray dots. The discomfort of trying to focus on the dots made me suspect that eyes weren’t supposed to be used this way. To make sense of the photos, I had to hold them somewhere between too far and too close, just as I had to hold the egg firmly enough to control it but not so firmly that it cracked. Words worked the same way. Words, and maybe the whole world, had to be held gently and understood from the proper distance if they were to mean something.