The Joker: A Memoir (8 page)

Toe jam was oddly sinister then, but also gross, comic, and mysterious. The joke about the poky Africans reduced human life to sloughed skin, and I feared that, in life, I was a slow native, one who’d be trampled by the ambitions and talents of other people. And of course I was afraid of death itself, the elephant that tramples and smashes us all to black stuff between its toes. My mind careened through these possibilities, never settling on any one for long, and the unsteady equation of myself with natives, toe jam, failure, and death, along with the image of a ridiculously outsized elephant who didn’t even notice people smushed between its toes, made me laugh. In the shifty joke, I glimpsed fears that I didn’t want to think about nakedly because they were too frightening without some clothes thrown over them. I was becoming a teenager, a time when taboos are as fascinating as they are frightening, and they’re a potent force in jokes.

Death, religion, race, and sex make jokes funny because fear, tripped as it stalks toward us, makes the reversal of expectation more powerful. It’s funny when a clown trips over his big shoes, funnier when a banker in a bowler slips on a banana peel, and funniest of all when a boogeyman jumps out of the bushes, skids on wet leaves, and falls on his face as he’s shouting “Boo.” Our relief at not being harmed makes us laugh even harder because we know we might not be laughing at all the next time the boogeyman jumps out at us.

Death is a fine taboo, but sex is finer. My joke about elephants and their dislike for black lace panties went over so well at the junior-high lunch table because it nudged up against the naughtiness of sex, though I was myself as sexually uninformed as it was possible to be. I affected a jaunty knowingness that in retrospect is funnier than the joke, which worked despite the fact that the boy telling it didn’t really understand it. But I knew enough to evoke the taboo subject of sex and twist it for a laugh. The joke, though small, lived larger than its medium.

Neither did I, as a teenager, entirely understand this joke: “What does an elephant use for a tampon?” Answer: A sheep. I told the joke a time or two, uneasily, and laughed at it; when I laughed, it was uncomfortably and self-consciously. Until I was married, menstruation was a mystery. I understood the physiology, but not what it meant in practical terms. So, though I seldom repeated the joke, I thought about it a lot. I was tickled by the image I concocted of an elephant grabbing a sheep with its trunk and jamming it up under its tail, and the white sheep turning red. But when the mysterious sexual opening was enlarged to the point that it took a sheep to cover it, I squirmed, nervous both about what the joke implied about the largeness and bestial nature of sex, and afraid that someone more honest than I would say, “I don’t get it” and ask me to explain. I could have babbled something like, “See, elephants and sheep don’t go together naturally, and so it’s funny that an elephant
would have to use a sheep for something an elephant doesn’t need, and take it and jam it into her private parts.” True enough, as far as it goes. But isn’t the point of the joke that human fastidiousness about sexual taboos, like the “uncleanness” of menstruation, is unknown to animals, and our ideas of civilization are mocked when we see an elephant try to find a natural equivalent to a tampon? That was a possible truth I was not ready to entertain or be entertained by.

Despite my queasiness with the sheep, most elephant jokes were becoming a bit tame for my changing taste. Before long, elephant jokes were on TV and in magazines. They were printed in the newspapers. What was the fun of knowing something that everybody else already knew? By then I’d moved on to the dead-baby jokes, mutilation jokes, and Helen Keller jokes that boys began telling when I was in junior high and high school. I laughed at them hysterically, in both senses of the word, with a sense of pleasurable fear that approached panic. I was thrilled as what could be said slid toward the unspeakable, the unthinkable, and the forbidden. These subversive jokes were thoroughly disapproved of by adults and squeamish kids, unlike the Little Moron, Polack, and elephant jokes—and having to keep them secret from adults sharpened the edge of laughter.

Dead-baby jokes, quadriplegic jokes, and Helen Keller jokes were over the line. They could get you yelled at, smacked, wept over, prayed for, and sent to bed hungry. At least in my house. I loved having the power, even if I knew better than to use it, to provoke such a passionate response. I loved being wicked without doing anything mean. The jokes were so far beyond common decency that they always startled me, no matter how often I told them, and the more graphic they were the better I liked them. My favorite was “How is a truckload of dead babies different from a truckload of bowling balls?” “You can’t unload the bowling balls
with a pitchfork.” Because I was familiar with both bowling balls and pitchforks, I reveled in the tactile uneasiness that shuddered along my nerve endings every time I told the joke. I imagined, without intending to, what the difference would be between the tines of a pitchfork clinking against a bowling ball and sliding into baby flesh. It was unthinkable, but I thought it. Nobody else, not even the hardened thirteen-year-old joke tellers I hung out with, thought the joke was as funny as I did. I suspected they had never held a pitchfork, much less tossed hay with one, and so the visceral disgust the joke evokes was lost on them. I was thinking of myself on both sides of the pitchfork, pushing the pitchfork into the body and being the body the pitchfork slid into. I was at the age when I was beginning to see in myself the power to harm awfully and the power to be harmed awfully.

For some of the same reasons, I adored the pun in “How do you make a dead baby float?” “Two scoops dead baby. Fill with root beer.” The gross—or is it sentimental?—image of a dead baby suddenly becomes grosser—cannibalism played for laughs. Sure, the idea was revolting. But by disgusting ourselves, we boys were assuring ourselves we’d never do something just because we could imagine it. Basic as it seems, the point was important to me because in church I sat through many sermons that, paraphrasing Jesus, assured me that to think something was the same as doing it. All that stood between thinking and doing was volition—as if volition was nothing! To be pure, I had to make myself an unblemished vessel, untainted in thought and deed. But my thoughts, I knew, moved in their own ways. Logic clumped along on its ordained path while imagination buzzed erratically from lilac to honeysuckle to rosebud, as well as violet, dandelion, red clover, morning glory, and all the other weeds I spent long afternoons prying out of the yard with a forked cultivator. I saw no harm in seeing where logic went—or imagination either, as long as I didn’t
do
anything dumb or immoral.

With these adolescent jokes I was separating myself from the world of adults, who would be appalled, and from little kids, who wouldn’t be mentally tough enough to take them. I also loved these jokes as things in and of themselves—not things of beauty exactly, though I can imagine a definition of beauty that includes their linguistic efficiency, their powerful imagery, their probing of social norms, and their provoking strong, often conflicting, emotions. Because I loved them and admired them as art and as craft, my emerging sense of discretion was balanced, and all too often outweighed, by my desire to share them. Who would laugh? How far could people be pushed? How far could I push myself? I knew not to tell them to my father, but did I dare tell them to my mother?

I sprawled across the vinyl recliner, legs flung over the arm, watching my mother, who sat in a child’s rocker by the sliding glass door, using the natural light to see the sock she was darning. She was petite, heavily freckled, with auburn hair that she called red. All her life—she died of leukemia before she turned fifty—she considered herself a tomboy. She loved the small, cane-bottom rocker because it was the perfect size for her small body and it was easy to pull around the living room, from the TV set to the glass door to the telephone. I was sixteen, hesitating on the edge of a joke, trying to decide if I should tell it to her. Mom liked to feign toughness since she was raising a houseful of boys, four of us that she called “rug rats,” “house apes,” “yard monkeys,” and “carpet munchers” when we were younger—she’d heard that last phrase and absorbed it into her vocabulary, thinking it meant something other than it does. But how tough was she with jokes?

“How do you stop a kid from running in circles?” I asked her. I paused a moment to let the question sink in.

“I don’t know. How?” she said, once she determined that I was not asking for advice.

“Nail his other foot to the floor,” I said.

The moment between the last words of the joke and the laugh, if there is a laugh, is a fraught and complicated expanse of time. The listener has to resolve the confusion of the joke’s anti-logical logic to “get” the joke and then assent to it, if she finds it funny or clever. But the teller depends totally on the listener’s willingness to go along with the joke, to play with absurdity instead of rejecting it, and then to laugh with you. It’s asking a lot. Even friends who know you well might suddenly, instinctively, decide a joke about abusing and mutilating a child is revolting—and that you are a pervert for telling it. I did not want my mother to think I was a perv, but damn, I wanted to tell my joke. I’d already told it to everyone I could find to tell it to and it was burning a hole in my brain.

Her blank look crumpled into laughter, which she tried to suppress. That joke shouldn’t be funny! But the natural impulse won out. She laughed, stopped to sputter, “That’s terrible!” and then laughed some more. The amoral logic of the joke surprised her. For a parent who’d nailed one of her child’s feet to the floor, it makes sense to solve the problem of his running in circles by nailing the other one down. For me, I couldn’t imagine a house in which it was acceptable to hammer nails into the floor. As a military family, we moved a lot and Mom was scrupulous in caring for the houses we rented. She wanted her entire security deposit back.

I suspect my mother also laughed because these jokes couldn’t be shared with my father. The anarchy of this kind of joke troubled his sense of a moral universe. A lot of serious people assume that anybody telling a cruel joke is in fact a perv, advocating cruelty instead of flinching from it. My mother, thank God, wasn’t one of those always oh-so-serious people. Actually, I’ve always thought jokes affirm established morality by imagining a world so amorally unaware of our deepest convictions that we can’t help laughing. Without knowing it, I was testing to see if my mother and I could share a laugh behind my father’s back. It was an illicit pleasure to
discover that we could laugh with each other almost like adults, just for the pure joy of laughing.

I already knew I wasn’t a perv, though. I’d learned that two years before when my ninth-grade world history teacher played a recording of
Medea
, and I failed at listening to it. When the scratchy LP of Euripides’s play spun around to the scene in which Medea kills her children, I began to giggle. I fought the giggles, but they burst from me in snorts and liquid sputters. Soon I was laughing desperately. Holding my sides, head down on my desk, drooling, I jerked with laughter and hated myself. Why was I helpless with amusement at a mother’s anguished determination to slaughter her sons and feed them to her unfaithful husband?

The teacher raised the needle from the black groove, and the whole class, already silent, stared, waiting for me to compose myself. I expected to be slapped and shipped off to a secure facility where I could not hurt myself or others. The only place I’d ever seen people laugh the way I was laughing was on movie screens, and those laughers were homicidal lunatics with spectacular and obviously flawed master plans for world domination.

The teacher, a tall woman with a pixyish face and short chic black hair, walked to my desk, paused, and gently touched my head with one finger. I was still snorting, trying to squelch my laughter. “When we hear an event too horrible for our minds to comprehend,” she said to the class, “we sometimes laugh. We refuse to accept it. We treat it like a joke.” Aspirating snot, still half slobbering, I sucked my humiliating cachinnations to a halt, and wiped the desktop with my shirtsleeve. She was doing me a great kindness while also teaching me something that would be useful for the rest of my life. If I could remember the name of that magnificent woman, that splendid teacher toiling at a junior high school in France for American military dependents—and I have tried for decades to call it up—I would send her a spray of white roses every
year on her birthday, and then randomly from time to time, just to surprise her.

I seized her explanation gratefully; it let me off the hook and made me look good too: I had responded so crassly to the play because I was really
more
sensitive than anyone else in the room. I suspected she was right, mostly right, but later I wondered if there weren’t more to it than that. I was also laughing at the stilted language of the two boys when they figure out Mom’s going to chop them into stew-sized bits. It didn’t sound like anything my brothers or I would scream if we saw our mother racing toward us with a sword in her hands and crazed determination in her eyes:

First
son:
Ah me; what can I do? Whither fly to escape my mother’s blows?

Second
son:
I know not, sweet brother mine; we are lost.

“Sweet brother mine” started my giggling, but I lost control entirely when the second son cried out in terror, “Even now the toils of the sword are closing round us.” The boys’ languid and archaic discussion of their imminent murder triggered my laughter. The ungraspable idea of an infanticidal mother kept it going.

From my involuntary laughter and the teacher’s shrewd interpretation of it, I glimpsed how life and art can be horrifying and comic at the same time. The two are bound together in art, as they are in life. Most of us don’t live in a literary genre, but in a world that swerves between tragedy and comedy, as it famously does at weddings, where we often find ourselves weeping when we expect to be laughing, and laughing at funerals, where we expect to cry.