The Joker: A Memoir (38 page)

If there is a joke that encapsulates the joy and mistakes, anxiety and missteps I felt for these failed lovers, it’s this. A composer writes the most beautiful love song ever created, but despite having sent out tapes and CDs, he’s never been able to get the song published. Finally, in desperation, he sneaks into the largest music publishing company, forces his way into the president’s office, and begins to play the song on his violin. The song is so beautiful that secretaries and janitors, accountants and lawyers find themselves drawn into the president’s office to listen, rapt, as the music immerses them in memories of loves old and new, good love and sorrowful love, failed love and sustaining love. They are radiant with joy while weeping with sorrow. When the composer finishes, the president of the music company says, through tears, “That truly is the most beautiful love song. I can’t believe it hasn’t been published. What do you call it?”

“I Love You So Fucking Much I Could Shit.”

I always felt like Jack, the Jack of giant-killer fame, who in a lesser-known tale, “Lazy Jack,” is forced out of the house by his mother to find work. The first day, Jack hires out to a cattle farmer, who pays him with a jar of milk. Jack puts the jar in his jacket pocket, and of course on the way home he spills it.

His mother shrieks, “You stupid boy. You should have carried it on your head.”

Jack says, “Next time I’ll do that.”

The following day, he works for a cheese maker. Wages: a block of cream cheese. As he promised his mother, he carries it home on his head, where it melts in the heat and becomes matted in his hair.

Mother once more pronounces Jack a stupid boy and tells him he should have carried it in his hands; he promises to do so. The next day: a baker. Wages: a cat. When Jack holds it in his hands, it scratches the daylights out of him and runs off.

“Stupid boy, you should have tied it on a string and dragged it home behind you.”

“Next time I’ll do that.”

The following day: butcher. Wages: a lovely shoulder of mutton. Jack ties a piece of string to the mutton and drags it home with results predictable to everyone but Jack. This time Jack’s mother calls him a “ninny-hammer” (a charming disparagement dating to at least 1592) and tells him he should have carried it on his shoulder.

“Next time I’ll do that,” promises our slow study.

The next day, Jack goes back to the cattle farmer and at the end of the workday he is given a donkey. It’s a job to hoist the donkey on his shoulders, but Jack does it and slowly staggers home, bent under the weight of his wages. Jack’s path home takes him by the house of a rich man with no wife and only one child, a beautiful daughter who is deaf and dumb. We will call her Erin. And while we’re at it, let’s change Jack’s name to Andrew.

Our folktale Erin had never laughed, and the doctors, being folktale doctors, had prognosticated that she would never speak until someone made her laugh. Now Erin just happened to be looking out her window when Andrew stumbled past, the donkey on his shoulders, the donkey’s legs sticking up in the air, kicking wildly. Erin burst out laughing at the silly man, and, laughter being the best medicine, she immediately regained her speech and hearing. Her overjoyed father married Erin to Andrew, who felt richly rewarded for his silliness all the rest of his life.

Moral: You’re just an idiot with an ass on your shoulders until someone laughs.

•  •  •

I first saw my future wife drinking a beer on the porch at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. A common friend had told me Erin would be there and she’d gently nudged us toward each other, though she’d warned me Erin was a California-style Catholic
handwringer, one who anguished over the plight of the downtrodden. Sometimes she had a good sense of humor, the friend said, and sometimes she was earnest and touchy, so I should watch my mouth until I figured out whether my, uh, particular sense of humor meshed with hers. What I saw, looking at the woman I was to marry, was a tall, open-faced, attractive woman with a jolt of curly hair off her forehead. Unlike the folktale Erin, she looked eager to laugh. In fact, hers was the face of someone who gravitated to laughter the way other people gravitate toward good looks or the palpably powerful. I decided to go with my instinct, rather than our friend’s warnings, which I’ll admit were more catnip than red flag.

She had a name. Erin McGraw—a name so Irish it might as well be Ireland McIrish, and when she told me who she was, I immediately asked if she’d heard about the Irishman who drowned in the vat at the brewery.

“No,” she said.

“They knew he was Irish because, before he died, he crawled out twice to take a leak.”

I held my breath for half a second, fearing a pointed rebuff, but she laughed and didn’t feel a need to inform me that not all Irish were drunks, thank you very much.
Good sign
, I thought. I didn’t know how good. I soon found out her brother was in AA and her father had been addicted to prescription meds for years. But I dialed back anyway and asked a cutesy riddle: What’s Irish and stays out all night? Paddy O’Furniture. She groaned with a smile and said,
Bah dum bump, Czh!,
tapping out a rimshot on her thighs. Not much of one for puns, apparently, but happy to play.

After confirming that she, as her name suggested, was Roman Catholic (or
cat lick
, as my Uncle Buddy invariably, derisively pronounced it), I told her about the three Irishmen sitting in a pub opposite a whorehouse in Dublin. Looking out the window, they see
the local rabbi walk down the street and, after a quick look around, slip into the whorehouse.

“Och, and it’s sad to observe the depravity of the Jews,” says Paddy to Seamus and Murphy, and all three shake their heads knowingly.

(I love this part of the joke because it lodges in the listener’s mind as an uneasy anticipation of anti-Semitism. It goes nowhere, but does raise the tension level.)

The three Irishmen order a second stout, and as they are drinking, the Presbyterian minister walks quickly down the street and scuttles into the whorehouse.

“Well, and if that doesn’t demonstrate what we’ve always known about the morals of the Protestants,” says Murphy to Seamus and Paddy, who nod in sage agreement.

As they are all relaxing into their third stout, the parish priest, Father Quinn, strolls down the street, hesitates a moment, and steps over the threshold into the whorehouse. The three Irishmen say nothing for a moment until Paddy says, “It’s good of the Father to visit them, it is. One of the poor misguided girls must have fallen ill.”

“Sounds about right,” Erin said, laughing.

A lot of RCs would resent hearing these jokes from a southerner and a Protestant. Erin, though, has a fond but jeweler’s eye for the foibles and venalities of her Church and its priests, as well as a wariness of the self-exculpating sentimentality of the Irish—and this joke indulged both misgivings.

Thinking back, I am almost certain that, over the course of the evening and dinner, I told her the joke about Dewey the leprechaun, the joke that ruined my injudicious play for Condi Rice—and she got a kick out of it. Her sense of humor revealed her flexible-mindedness and intelligence, her instinctive desire to sympathize with both sides of an issue but still able to take a firm moral stand.

We were just getting to know each other as lovers and as
people—I think we’d made love twice—when I invited her to listen to a comedy tape I’d just bought, by Sam Kinison. I had heard Kinison on TV, I told her, and he did a bit that always put me in stitches. Looking out at the audience, he yelled, “You can’t scare me.” Then he’d bend forward and bellow as loud as he could, “I’VE BEEN MARRIED!” The first syllable of
married
was a sustained low note, which then rose to the high piercing long
e
in the second syllable, which he held like a crazed soprano unwilling to end her aria, all the muscles in his neck taut as the wires stabilizing an electric transmission tower.

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.