The Joker: A Memoir (21 page)

Like any story, anecdote, or tidbit of gossip, jokes can create stereotypes or reinforce existing ones. But by playing with stereotypes, they can also reveal them for the fictional constructs they are, as I had thought my mother’s jokes were doing. The taboos and ugly forces behind jokes can feed positive laughter as well as nasty laughter. They feed laughter the way an accelerant feeds a fire, a terrible thing if the fire is on the living room carpet, a good thing if you’re having trouble getting charcoal briquettes glowing in the grill. With nasty racist jokes, however, it’s impossible to keep the fire in the grill. The lack of any mental gymnastics, which a true joke requires, reveals what is truly driving the joke: The teller’s ugly relish confirms his sense of African-Americans’ inferiority.

Laughter is, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, “a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.” In this joke there is a conception of eminency all right but there is nothing sudden or glorious about it. And the eminency is very much in doubt. I have often, while laughing, protested, “That’s not funny!” Then I am left looking backward, sometimes in shame, to figure out why I laughed. When a friend asked me, in high school, “What’s long and hard on a black man?” and answered himself, “Third grade,” I burst out laughing, before I turned away, ashamed, and I made a concerted effort to expunge it from my mind.

Why did I laugh? Because the punch line surprised me. The question so fills the mind with sex that even though you know that the right answer can’t be “penis,” you can’t see around the stereotype to grasp the other meanings of
long
and
hard
until the joke reveals them. In that way, it works like the junior-high joke:

Q: What word starts with
f
, ends with
k
, and has a
u
and a
c
in the middle.

A:
Firetruck, of course. What word were
you
thinking of?

The long-and-hard joke also shocks by dropping the racism to an expectedly lower level—from sexual superiority to intellectual inferiority. It leads you down one racist path and then jumps to another, much worse, one. Though many people find the racism too ugly for the joke to be funny, it possesses a bit of ugly wit and a touch of audacity. When I heard it again, several years ago, encountering it as if for the first time since I’d happily forgotten it, I trusted the decency of the teller, whose voice, as she introduced the joke, implied, “You gotta hear this racist joke. You and I won’t agree with what it says but we can appreciate the way it plays with racist ideas.” That time I laughed without guilt, savoring the ugliness of the joke, and the nasty psychological ingenuity of it.

The first time I went to the Gulf Coast with my six-year-old nephew, he ran along the sand, chasing the waves as they pulled back into the Gulf of Mexico, then running away as they rushed up the beach. Every now and then a wave raced up farther and faster than he’d expected and rushed over his feet, surprising him, and after a few such surprises he simply stood still in the foaming water and wailed plaintively, “Where’s the
edge
?” The answer of course is that the boundary changes, the answer he knew already but couldn’t accept, even as he ran on, skipping in and out of the shifting water.

I understand his confusion. Just this morning, looking at an Internet listing of racist jokes, I saw the joke again, in the middle of an interminable list of sour, witless, racist jokes, and my laughter turned to wormwood and ashes in my mouth. Whatever twisted wit, surprise, or inverted understanding of racism I’d once found in it vanished in the context of an excruciating compilation collected by someone who seemed to believe the jokes were, in some way, true.

If we sense that the person telling a racist joke puts an ounce of credence in it, the lightness goes leaden because the malice is real. Who could laugh then? Those who agree with the premise of the punch line. Instead of taking the racism as an idea to make fun of, some words to play with, a construct to deconstruct, or a taboo they simply can’t resist prodding, they approve of it as an accurate representation of their reality. At the moment it’s taken seriously, the joke moves out of the category of joke and becomes a belief, one of the ugliest of ugly beliefs.

Maybe I first laughed at the long-and-hard joke because the fear of sexual inferiority was one that I’d begun to work through in my second year of high school. In tenth grade, I held a wooden ruler to myself and came in about a quarter of an inch under the six-inch average. At five foot six, 120 pounds, with a twenty-eight-inch waist, I was pretty pleased by the judgment of the ruler. Because I spent as little time as possible in locker rooms, the jokes and jibes about penis magnitude seemed largely metaphorical. I never heard anyone, except as a joke, mention the size of another man’s penis until I was a senior in college, when a black basketball player was tossed off the Huntingdon Hawks for some indiscretion or other. To demonstrate what he thought about that, he stood across the street from the girls’ dorm, I was told, and twirled his pecker like a baton. My friend, who happened to pass by before the police arrived, assured me, laughing, that it was large enough to twirl. Bigger than his by a long stretch, he said. “No kidding?” I said. We laughed, and then we settled in to study for our history test.

Not until college did I hear a follow-up to the long-and-hard joke:

Q: What’s long and hard on a white man?

A:
Nothing.

At first, I took the second joke as a flaccid reversal of the first, a weak attempt to show that the person telling the long-and-hard joke wasn’t a racist, but an equal opportunity joker. When I repeated it, I was metaphorically tugging my forelock, attempting to embrace the stereotype and say that white men (“Like me—look, I’m mocking myself too!”) can laugh at themselves too and at our purportedly paltry penises. I told it a number of times before I understood it’s really slyer and funnier than I’d thought. The joke does do exactly what I thought it did, but it also implies that the attainments for which black men work long and hard come easily to white men because they live lives of untroubled privilege. I would be offended if I believed it was a sincere assessment of my life. I mostly don’t, it mostly isn’t, and, despite what I thought at first, it’s funny, though—or is it
because
?—it has a bit of a sting to it.

•  •  •

Nine months after I graduated from college, I married, and my father-in-law, as he had during the four years I dated his daughter, brilliantly frustrated my ability to discern the motives of jokers. He turned my status as the wince-inducing joker on its head. He did the joke telling; my ex-wife and I did the wincing. So of course he told the same jokes over and over, delighting in discomfiting us, trying to provoke a response beyond my wife’s pained, “Oh, Daddy!” One of his favorites involved two black professors at Alabama State University, the historically black school less than a mile from his house. As they pass each other on campus, one professor asks the other, “Is ya did ya Greek?” The pretentious professors presume themselves to be Greek scholars while the ugly (and inept) parody of rural Black English that they speak reveals them as incapable of mastering proper English, much less Greek.

Over time I came to laugh at the joke, not because I thought it was funny but because I came to love my father-in-law and trust him as a man of basic good-heartedness who wanted to be seen as
an iconoclast. Much of his racism—how much I was never sure—was pretense designed to irk me. Some of it grew from his insecurity about not having gone to college. Those insights aren’t the reasons I laughed, but they allowed me to enjoy the impishness with which he worked to make me laugh at something I didn’t want to laugh at. Chanting the punch line in an almost incomprehensible sequence of syllables—“Izya-didya-Greek?”—he waggled his thick eyebrows and gave me a grin that hovered between mischievous and wolfish.

His pleasure in his own joke was impossible to resist. Once I determined that he was much more interested in the silly rhythm of the line than the racial message, I relaxed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. But I saw he was mostly interested in making my wife laugh while she was trying to say, “Daddy, don’t tell that joke again.” He was teasing us, mocking what he saw as our overfastidious liberalism. The point of the joke was no longer in the joke itself, but how we reacted. And, of course, his delight in chanting “Izya-didya-Greek?”

My father-in-law was a smart man who’d gone straight from high school graduation to supporting his family after his father died. Even after he’d suffered four heart attacks and undergone a coronary artery bypass, his skin remained walnut brown from sweat-drenched hours working bare-chested in his garden, pipe clenched in his teeth, as he mowed, shoveled, transplanted, edged, trimmed, and weeded. He grew the most elegant stand of hollyhocks I have seen outside of photographs. In an old refrigerator from which he’d stripped the rubber gaskets, he smoked turkey, chicken, and pork chops. Smoky, rich, and thoroughly desiccated, they were the best smoked meats I’ve ever eaten, though they took a lot of chewing. Once, shaking his head and chuckling, he told me about a friend who had tried to copy his homemade smoker but got a crucial detail wrong. When the friend finally pried open the door, fused shut by melted rubber, he found a beautifully cooked turkey infused with the flavor of burnt rubber.

His flat black hair slanted over his forehead, emphasizing the slightly Asian cast to his face that you sometimes see in very thin older southern men who spend a lot of time in the sun. From constant pipe smoking his teeth were, under a gray cast, distinctly green. His teasing was pure, complex play to him, and I came to love him over and above his joking, which played a game so deep that often I wasn’t sure what the game was.

Though intimidated by people with college degrees, he was also contemptuous of them because he, a voracious reader, found they often didn’t know nearly as much as he thought they should. How could I tell him that the faux black English of his joke was nothing like real black English vernacular? And why would I tell him, since he knew that better than I did? Certainly I could’ve told him that teachers don’t do homework; students do. He told the joke because he had only been a student, not a teacher—and because it sounded funny. But why cause a family rift, especially when over time I came to know him as a man of little malice who delighted in wordplay? And the Greek joke was in tune with other, non-racist, jokes he enjoyed.

In the middle of a conversation, he casually inquired of new acquaintances if they’d heard about the two gay judges who tried each other or if they’d known the plastic surgeon who hung himself. Had they met the two gay Irishmen William Fitzpatrick and Patrick FitzWilliam?

He delighted in one-liners that disrupted the flow of conversation, especially if he suspected he was being condescended to. If someone explained to him something he already knew, he invariably responded, “ ‘I see,’ said the blind man, who picked up the hammer and saw.”

The first time he used that line on me, I said, “Wha?” He looked at me as if I were a dimwit, until, blinking, I got it. After that, I watched in fascination as he lured new victims into confusion.
When the conversation veered into absurdity, the only way out was to acknowledge the absurdity, to relinquish control, to play. I couldn’t help loving the zest with which he decoyed chitchat out of its appointed rounds of business, small logic, and politesse—and into pleasure. A lot of people didn’t want to follow him there.

Some laughed, some groaned before laughing, and others simply groaned. Uptight listeners got huffy that he’d bollixed the flow of conversation for no good reason that they could see. He had shifted the focus from them, the explainers, to him, the one who was supposed to be listening. He delighted in small verbal anarchies and illogic, and I shared his pleasure. He made opportunities to laugh where they didn’t appear to exist, and he enjoyed one-upping people whose lecturing tacitly made him their pupil.

With the same bland irony, if it was irony, he occasionally commented to me, never in public, “A blue-gum nigger’ll cut your heart out.” Was he warning me that the blacker a black man was—so black his gums were blue—the more dangerous he was? Was this a bit of racist folklore he’d heard as a boy and enjoyed marveling over, mocking of outdated understanding and outré wisdom? Or did he merely like to say something outrageous for the sake of being outrageous? I suspect the latter, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it. He played, as I say, a deep game.

The overt racists were far blunter. Hidebound white southerners resisted, according African-Americans, the honorifics “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss,” and were often hostile when they insisted on it. Encroaching equality had to be squelched early and hard.

In my last year of high school, a boy in my math class told me what happened when the family maid’s son called and asked for “Mrs. Johnston.” My friend’s father snarled into the receiver at the child, “Ain’t no
Mrs. Johnston
here—just a nigger name of Bessie what works for us!” And he slammed down the receiver.

Seeing the astonishment on my face, my friend, who had
laughed at his own story and expected me to laugh too, explained. After slamming down the receiver, his father had then looked at him and said, “So far, with all her marriages, if they was marriages, she’s been a Smith, a McCoy, a Peebles, and a something else. Now she’s a Johnston. I can’t keep ’em all straight.”

This time, I barked a shocked, mean laugh. My friend was, I think, disturbed by his father’s meanness and yet proud of him for standing up for racial superiority, which they both believed in, the son probably not as strongly as the father. My laugh was fueled by the depraved audacity of the comment, the gap between my world and theirs, as well as the cold insufficiency of the father’s reasoning. I was repulsed by the adult’s cruelty to the black child, yes. The denigration of the mother to the son and of the son himself is obviously vicious, as is the example the father set for his own son. But in my southern soul I was also deeply troubled by the man’s searing and deliberate discourtesy. Not only did Mrs. Johnston likely hear her child rebuked for his good manners and then the ugly summary of her married life, the father had refused to convey the polite message the boy had wanted to tell his mother.