The Joker: A Memoir Read online

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  Contents

  Introduction: Where the Naughty Boys and Girls Live

  One: Catch It and Paint It Green

  Two: Hide in the Grass and Make a Noise like a Peanut

  Three: Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear

  Four: What Did the Devil Ever Do for You?

  Five: Everybody Out of the Pool

  Six: A Quart Low

  Seven: Where’s the Edge?

  Eight: The Perilous Needs of the Joke Teller

  Nine: Never Lose Your Head Over a Piece of Tail

  Ten: I Just Want to Make Sure He Knows I’m a Bull

  Eleven: Morning, Ladies!

  Twelve: We Might as Well Leave Now, Fanny

  Thirteen: You Two Just Crack Each Other Up

  Postscript

  Andrew Hudgin’s Ten Favorite Jokes

  Acknowledgments

  About Andrew Hudgins

  This book is for my longtime joke-swapping buddies—Chase Twichell, Tom Doherty, Dan Thrapp, Jim Cummins, and Rick Anderson—and to the memory of my father-in-law, Tom McGraw, a wonderful laugher.

  Introduction

  Where the Naughty Boys and Girls Live

  Though I’ve been a serious poet, a student of poetry, and a teacher of poetry for forty years, I can’t recite from memory ten consecutive lines of William Butler Yeats, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or even Robert Frost, about whom I’m writing a book. But I can tell you the knock-knock jokes I heard when I was ten, all of them, and every week I still read Doodles, the children’s comic strip in the Sunday paper, just in case it runs a pun or knock-knock joke I don’t know. (“Q: What do you call a cow with two legs? A: Lean beef.”)

  Since junior high, I’ve been a joker, a punster, a laugher—someone who will say almost anything for a laugh. I don’t mean the chuckle that greets the mild obligatory jokes that ease the congregation into the sermon or punctuate an after-dinner speech—though I enjoy those too. What I love is raucous gut laughter—the kind that earns angry stares from the tables near you in a restaurant and makes strangers in the mall exchange knowing looks about the prevalence of drug use among nearsighted middle-aged bald men in polo shirts and chinos. Laughing until you are weak, gasping, holding your sides, barely able to stand is like a drug. I have laughed until I have fallen on the floor in public places. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to.

  I love how jokes either work or don’t. You are either a funny man or a fool, and to my anguish I am often a fool. I live uneasily with the fact that my joking sometimes makes others uneasy: uneasiness is the spring of the jack-in-the-box. Jokes delight us by making us nervous and then relieving the nervous tension. Pleasure needs friction as well as lubrication: the friction comes from fear and pain; wordplay releases the tension. Jokers make us anxious because they want something from us. Or to be more precise: I make you nervous because I want something from you—laughter—and to make you laugh I have to juggle subjects that make you laugh.

  Shortly before his death in 2009, Fritz Darges, a Waffen-SS officer, told a German newspaper that he still believed Hitler was a genius, “the greatest man who’d ever lived,” and he’d gladly serve him again. I don’t exactly take Darges as my hero, but there is one moment in his life I ponder with renewed delight as well as a frisson of incipient panic. Darges was awarded two Iron Crosses and a Knight’s Cross, but the bravest thing he ever did—also the stupidest—took place in a 1944 strategy meeting in Hitler’s famous Wolf’s Lair when he was serving as army adjutant to the Führer. As Hitler and his staff officers consulted a large map stretched out on a table, a fly buzzed around the confined bunker, landing first on the map, then Hitler’s shoulder, and then the map again. Annoyed, the Führer ordered Darges to kill it. Without a moment’s hesitation, Darges informed Hitler that the fly was an airborne pest and therefore the responsibility of Nicolaus von Below, the nearby Luftwaffe adjutant.

  I love the joke, but I love, fear, and identify with the impulse that drove Darges to tell it. By 1944, when he’d been Hitler’s adjutant for fifteen months, he must have had an inkling that the Führer wasn’t blessed with a wide and generous sense of humor. Didn’t matter. Darges had his joke, it was a good one, and he had to tell it—and the joke is funnier now because it was dangerous then. In fact, Hitler turned to Darges and screamed, “You’re for the Eastern Front!” Darges’s cleverness wouldn’t be a tenth as funny if he’d cracked wise to an indulgent and chuckling Uncle Adolf.

  Darges’s impulse is one I know well. I’m one of those compulsive jokers whose need to laugh can seem peculiar, immature, and even socially corrosive to those who do not share it. Our need to tell jokes trumps our sense of propriety and good sense. Here’s an example. After a section of this book was published in The Kenyon Review, I received an e-mail from the poet Chard deNiord, who reminded me of a joke I told at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Drinks in hand, Chard and I were talking to the poet Richard Wilbur. I was in awe, almost cripplingly so, that I was having a drink with Dick—he asked me to call him Dick—Wilbur, the man who had written some of the best poems of the last century, not to mention the libretto for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Because the joke had been burning a hole in my mind for a couple of days, I asked Dick if he’d heard the latest O. J. Simpson joke. Only a month before, Nicole Simpson had been murdered along with her friend Ron Goldman, who had dropped by her house to return a pair of glasses left at the restaurant where he waited tables, and I was fascinated by the jokes the murder had inspired.

  “No,” Wilbur replied warily. I doubt many people in his circles luxuriate in jokes about tabloid murders, but my social discomfort made me stupidly stubborn. I’d already committed myself to telling the joke, hadn’t I? Wasn’t it better to be a boor than a coward or a tease?

  “What’s the first thing Ron Goldman said to Nicole Simpson in heaven?” I asked.

  Even more warily than before, the poet who had translated Molière, Corneille, and Racine into English, asked, “What?”

  “Here’re your fucking glasses!”

  Chard tells me that he laughed. Wilbur, the most gracious genius I have ever met, chuckled politely. And I let out a belly laugh at my own joke. “I’ll never forget how unabashed you were and how much I admired you for that,” Chard wrote. I was startled by his admiration, because I was abashed. At the time, I thought I’d made a fool of myself, and in retrospect I’m sure of it. My insecurities and obsessions had turned me into a clown. But I’m pleased Chard laughed and holds the memory fondly in mind. That’s a pretty good payoff for telling a joke pinned to a crime rapidly passing into the vast chronicles of celebrity homicides. Still, a clown knows the cost of being a clown. For a laugh, I exploded any chance of becoming friends with Mr. Wilbur, a poet I admire immensely. But the clown also knows the joke was especially funny to Chard because he heard it against the background of Richard Wilbur’s wariness.

  Here’s another story. Again it takes place during the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, during my first summer teaching there. To my discomfort, I was a junior colleague to Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, poets whose poems and essays I’d read, admired, and studied for a quarter of a century. Hecht and Hollander’s mandarin erudition was intimidating, and the one time I finagled a seat at Tony Hecht’s lunch table, he offered only short, distracted answers to direct questions. I read his shyness as distaste for me and for my poems, which
I assumed (and still assume) he found crude—the unrefined product of an unrefined mind. And by God, when people think I’m a vulgarian, I’ll do my damnedest to prove them right. I can’t stop myself. Freud would call this impulse a minor manifestation of the death wish. Edgar Allan Poe more resonantly termed it “the imp of the perverse,” a phrase that captures the ornery humor of deliberately discharging a pistol into one’s metatarsals to astound people with my talent for insouciantly crippling myself, and then limping off on bloody feet as if I had accomplished something—the limp of the perverse.

  During their poetry readings both Hollander and Hecht paused to sip water. As they did, each remarked that the poet Randall Jarrell had once observed that sipping water during a poetry reading was the single most pretentious thing a poet can do. It did not occur to me that they, famous as they were, might feel self-conscious reading to a room full of writers. But I was. And in my insecurity I thought it might be funny to follow their lead and then go further. At the podium, I held up a glass of water, reminded the audience what Jarrell had said, and speculated that Jarrell might not have known there is a pretentious side of the glass and a non-pretentious side.

  I placed my finger on the lip of the glass closest to me and said, “This is the pretentious side.” Then, pointing to the far side of the glass, I pronounced, “And this is the unpretentious side. Do you know why?” Someone said no, and I tipped that side into my mouth. Water poured out the lower lip of the glass and down my shirt and pants. It’s a junior high joke I’d often heard of but never seen, so I was surprised at how thoroughly I drenched myself with a small cup of water. The audience sat still for half a breath, before someone laughed and the laughter took off. But only half the audience joined in. The non-laughers obviously thought my clowning was a breach of the decorum of poetry readings—precisely the thing the laughers enjoyed. From what I gathered later, Hollander and Hecht perceived my buffoonery as a barely concealed way of calling them pretentious. That was not my conscious intention, though now, to my regret, I see that interpretation is inevitable. After the reading, a small group laughed with me about the reading and my stunt, among them the wonderful playwright Horton Foote. His pink face shining with amusement, Horton took my hand between his and said he’d love to direct me in a play. He’d seen the teasing and playfulness I’d intended, and appreciated my playing with the audience instead of ignoring their presence. Maybe he shared my discomfort with the near-religious solemnity that often accompanies literary readings. His kindness saved me from even more self-loathing than I later felt. But as I put the glass to my mouth, when I was already committed to the act and couldn’t back down, I understood that I was as likely to annoy people as amuse them, though I only wanted to entertain, to jest.

  Being a jester is, historically, a high-risk profession. In medieval and Renaissance courts, jesters softened with humor truths forbidden those without official license to amuse the monarch. But a successful jester needed tact and a discerning alertness to the king’s mood. After assuring us that it was extremely rare for a jester to be punished, Beatrice Otto, in Fools Are Everywhere, goes on to recount enough beheadings, stranglings, disfigurements, banishments, and autos-da-fé to give even the most benign wit a reason to think twice before teasing a king.

  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 attrac
t 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: