The Joker: A Memoir Read online

  As I was struggling with my turmoil at this new understanding, I heard this joke:

  Jesus is in heaven, when suddenly he realizes that, though he sees his mother and God himself every day around the heavenly palace, he hadn’t seen his earthly father in almost two thousand years.

  So he goes to St. Peter, who’s standing at the pearly gates, and asks where his human father is.

  “Hmm,” St. Peter says. “That’s a tough one. What’s his name?”

  Jesus thinks for a moment. “Joseph,” he says, proud of himself for coming up with it.

  “There’re a lot of Josephs here,” says Peter. “What did he do for a living?”

  “He was a carpenter.”

  “Oh, in that case he’s probably been put out in the boondocks with all the other carpenters, so their sawdust won’t disturb everyone else. Let’s go see if we can find him.”

  Jesus and Peter walk and walk until they are way out in the backwoods of heaven. After checking out every carpenter and lathe operator they run across, they finally find an old man in a small shop, sitting alone at a workbench. He’s covered with sawdust and little curls of shaved wood, and Jesus thinks he looks familiar.

  He says to the old man, “Did you once have a child by miraculous circumstances?”

  “Yes, I did,” says the old man.

  “And did you then take that child and love him and raise him as your own?”

  “Yes, yes, I did,” says the old man, excitement rising in his voice.

  “And did he have holes in his hands?”

  “Yes, yes, he did!” says the old man, leaping from his workbench.

  Jesus throws his arms wide to embrace the old man, and says, “Father!”

  And the old man launches himself into Jesus’s arms, hugs him, and yells, “Pinocchio!”

  Oh, it is impossible to tell you how much I loved that joke. I don’t remember where I heard it or who told it, but I laughed until I had to sit down, tears leaking down my hot cheeks. I chuckled for the rest of the day, and when I woke up the next morning my jaws ached. I made a pest of myself, telling it to everyone I thought could stomach it. The joke plays on the search of a son for his lost father—a staple of myth, drama, and popular fiction—and ends here, comically, with him finding the wrong person.

  But it’s more than just the wrong person. Jesus confuses this particular woodworker with Joseph, but Geppetto confuses the son of God with a puppet. If bringing down the high and mighty is funny, no descent is more vertiginous than the fall from God Incarnate to a hand-carved block of wood in a children’s story. Suddenly we see in Jesus, the exemplary man, a character flaw we had not expected: vanity. He’d thought himself the only person with holes in his hands who had been brought to life by a miracle and raised by a woodworker.

  I was thrilled to hear this criticism, however mild, of Jesus. But what really fueled my laughter was seeing yet another way in which the story of Jesus, the story scholars call the myth of Christianity, was similar to other stories. The comic slamming together of the historical world of Jesus with the fictional world of the puppet is charmingly disorienting. Despite his having been indisputably a living person, was Jesus, as he was portrayed in the Bible, also fundamentally fictional?

  F. Scott Fizgerald famously observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Two opposed ideas are, with the right twist, often the source of humor, and I am grateful for the first-rate intelligence this joke embodied. It didn’t solve my spiritual dilemma, but it showed me how to laugh at the forces at loggerheads in my mind. If I acknowledged that each force—faith on the one hand, skepticism on the other—was legitimate and each had a right to be there, jammed up against the other, the pressure to make a decision eased. Over time, I’d sort them out.

  • • •

  In the meantime I could still laugh at the excesses of the faithful. At Huntingdon, a pre-seminary student and his girlfriend began seeing extravagant, brightly colored demons perched on the shoulders of everyone who did not share their fundamentalism. I don’t remember what color they told me my demon was, but I remember that it was polka-dotted.

  Some believers managed to keep their faith while acknowledging they followed a flawed and sometimes unreliable holy book; I, though, had been trained not to have a nuanced mind, one that could tolerate inconstancy, confusion, and imperfection. I knew now I would have to develop one. I kept eyeing faith: What form would it take if I could still have it? What would I believe in this new dispensation from absolutism, and how would I believe it?

  After my sophomore year at college, I returned to the Royal Ambassadors Camp as a counselor because I was between jobs and I wanted to get away from home again. Mr. B was gone, forced out of his job by political maneuvering inside the hierarchy of the Alabama Baptist Association. Mr. B’s assistant, who just that year had graduated from college, now ran the camp, and he was the same age as some of the counselors. Had the camp really changed or was I merely two years older and more aware of others’ failings? I got my first taste of the new regime arguing with a new counselor, a college student who insisted Baptist was spelled Babtist—the way we all pronounced it. I’ve seen that spelling on rural churches.

  During the second week of camp, leading my squad of boys on an afternoon hike, I heard a loud rhythmic voice echoing through the hickories and loblolly pines. I told my campers to hunker down on the trail, and I crept toward the voice to see who it was. Trespassers were an occasional problem. Peering through the leaves, I saw one of the new counselors preaching to a water oak. As a teenager, Billy Graham had taught himself to preach by standing on a stump in the pasture and expounding the gospel to his father’s cows. Maybe that’s what this guy is doing, I thought. He’s trying to be Billy Graham. Voice rising and falling with stiff, unpracticed fervor, he flailed his arms, slapped his Bible, and harangued the oak to abandon its worldly aspirations and accept Jesus Christ as its lord and savior. His face was upturned in what I assumed was a direct address to the Lord until I noticed his eight campers perched on the limbs of the tree, swinging their legs in the air, and listening to the sermon. Quietly, I led my own boys away.

  Unlike him, I did not enjoy public testifying. My first year I’d weaseled out of giving my personal testimony at local churches because of my youth. “We are ambassadors for Christ,” the apostle Paul wrote to the people of Corinth, and as an experienced, second-year Royal Ambassador counselor I could no long avoid ambassadoring. With three or four other counselors—some nervous, some raring to go—I stood before Sunday night prayer meetings in local churches throughout Talladega County and gave witness to my personal relationship with Jesus. Mumbling, hesitating, I rushed through a story cobbled together from other testimonies I’d heard, trying to make embarrassment and equivocation sound like diffident sincerity. I’d been born again in California, I said. In high school I’d fallen under the influence of bad companions but coming to work at the Royal Ambassadors Camp with good Christians had restored my faith and led me to rededicate my life to Christ. I hated standing in front of kind, earnest people, and lying about the thing that was most important to them. The first part of my story was mostly true, though I did not specify that my bad companions were Voltaire, Darwin, Clarence Darrow, and H. L. Mencken.

  During the final week of camp, takedown week, all the counselors moved into the main meeting hall, the building we held services in when it rained. We used the building as a makeshift barracks while we dismantled and folded tents, stacked tent platforms, and covered them with tarps. After work one day I noticed a Penthouse magazine tossed in the corner of the locker room. It remained there untouched and uncommented on for several days. The longer it lay there, everyone ignoring it, the more toxic it grew. Finally, its sheer silly forbiddenness overwhelmed me, and I picked it up and ostentatiously flipped through it. I was just being bold, trying to see if I could shock anyone, including mys
elf. Since I lived at home and my parents monitored me closely, I’d never held a girlie magazine in my hands before.

  One of my friends called, “Woooo! You’re going to go to hell. Straight to hell.” We laughed, nervousness edging into our voices.

  Thomas, a barrel-chested man who was already jackleg preaching at local churches, looked around the corner from his locker to see what we were laughing at.

  “I don’t think you should be doing that,” he said tentatively.

  “Sure we should, we’re guys,” I said.

  He grumbled and the only phrase I could make out was “abominations before the Lord.” Encouraged by his disapproval, I flipped open the centerfold, took a long leering look at it, and held it out for my friend to see.

  “Whoa, ho!” he said. “Good-looking!”

  Thomas jerked his head up in a small challenge, a we’ll-see-about-that gesture, before he slammed his locker door and stalked out.

  Defiant now and determined to get under his skin even more, I eased the centerfold off of its staples, took it upstairs, and stuck it on a nail jutting from the wall above my cot.

  Lying in bed, lost in a book, I’d already forgotten about the picture when Thomas, who’d come into the room, snorted loudly twice, like a bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and charged across the room toward me. He reached over my head, tore the picture from the wall, and held it crumpled in one fist. He stared at me, breathing in heavy gulps.

  I leapt off my cot and snatched the wad of paper out of his hand. “What do you think you’re doing? That’s private property! Keep your hands off it!”

  “This is blasphemy! You’re desecrating the Lord’s house.”

  “What? I’m what?”

  “We hold church in this room.” He snatched at the creased and torn centerfold, and I held it behind my back, out of reach.

  “I’m not desecrating nothing. That naked body was made by God and you may find God’s work disgusting, but I don’t.” I was tossing out clichés, egging him on, trying to goof with his head, enjoying myself. But I could feel myself slipping into real anger, unable to back down.

  I unwadded the picture, smoothed it as flat as I could, and jammed it back on the nail. Thomas lunged for it, grabbing over my shoulder. I slapped his hand away, and suddenly we were chest to chest, eyes locked, breathing into each other’s faces. He bumped me, and when I bounced backward a step, he grinned.

  “You Nazi!” I yelled, and I jammed my chest back up against his, shouting into his face. I was afraid. He was a thick, powerful man and the zealous light in his eyes glowed even brighter than usual, but I was sure he wouldn’t hit me if I didn’t swing first.

  The other guys rushed from their cots and stepped between us, and the camp director, who’d run upstairs from his office when he heard the yelling, ordered us to calm down. He took me aside, and when we were out of Thomas’s hearing, he laughed and told me I knew better than to hang up a nudie picture at a church camp. I needed to take it down. He was right, of course, but I appreciated his laughter. It made it easier for me to walk across the room with everybody watching, and pull the mangled centerfold off the wall.

  Then half-reluctantly, at the urging of the others, Thomas and I shook hands.

  • • •

  Back home that fall, I announced to my father that I didn’t want to go to church anymore. He sat in his olive-green lounge chair and kept staring at the TV set while I sat a few feet from him in the orange swivel rocker, pivoting it back and forth nervously. I’d had to work up my courage. I was afraid of him—physically afraid and afraid too that he’d stop helping me with my college expenses. Both my parents had told me often enough, “While you live in my house, you’ll play by my rules or you can leave.”

  Finally his silence wore me down, and I prodded him. “Did you hear me? I said I don’t want . . .”

  “I heard you. I’m thinking about it.”

  After a long silence, staring at the TV, never letting his eyes drift in my direction, he said, “No one is going to make you go to church if you don’t want to go.”

  “Okay,” I said softly, “I don’t want to go.”

  He stood up from the lounger, leaving it open, the footrest stretched out in front of it, and walked out of the room. I was halfway up the stairs to my bedroom when my mother raced across the den, where the TV was still blaring, and at the foot of the stairs she yelled, “Just who do you think you are? Just who do you think you are not to believe in God? As long as you live in this house, you’re going to get your butt up and go to church whether you want to or not. Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

  Her eyes were slightly unfocused and her jaw was clenched combatively. I’d expected Dad to go berserk, not her. She had always seemed to take church with a grain of salt, sometimes griping about having to go, occasionally implying that Dad made her go when she didn’t want to. As I stood on the stairs gaping at her, unable to speak, I realized that Dad, as a strong believer, must have struggled with faith and could accept, though unhappily, those struggles in his son, who was still poring over C. S. Lewis, The Lives of the Saints, Teilhard de Chardin, and everything in print by or about Thomas Merton. But Mom, because she accepted without challenge the faith she’d been born into, was enraged by my rejection of it. I was getting too big for my britches, showing off, trying to be a smarty-pants intellectual.

  Dad walked up beside her, put his arm around her shoulders, and pulled her around so she stood at an angle to the two of us.

  “Roberta, you don’t force somebody to go to church. That isn’t what it’s about.”

  But the next Sunday, when I didn’t come down for breakfast, he knocked on my door and said, “You’re going to be late for church,” just as if nothing had happened. And just as if nothing had happened, I got up and I went, confused and sullen. And the next Sunday, and the next.

  On the fourth Sunday, when he knocked, I called back through the door, “I don’t want to go.”

  “You’re not going to church?” He sounded surprised.

  “Only if you make me,” I said—one of several lines I’d practiced.

  “No, I’m not going to make you,” he said, and he left to dress for church.

  • • •

  In the hall of the church I no longer attended, I’d seen tacked on the bulletin board one of the most shocking pictures I’ve ever seen. It was the famous Ralph Kozak painting of Jesus, his head thrown back in manly, open-mouthed laughter, delight untouched by malice, his upper teeth in a straight pearly row, unlike any ever seen in a grown man’s face in Greco-Roman Palestine. I stared at it with amazement, amazement and longing. I so wanted the picture to be true that I felt a physical craving, a craving as pure as hunger, and I didn’t believe it for a second.

  As G. K. Chesterton and others have pointed out, the story of Christ is technically a comedy. If his life ended with his death, it would be a tragedy. But he returns from the dead, and, if you believe in what the faith teaches, he brings eternal life to all believers. That’s a lot to rejoice over. And the laughing Christ is right to see this. Yet it is impossible not to notice that in the gospels Jesus is the Man of Sorrows. He famously never laughs or jokes, and the only time he is confronted with a riddle, he doesn’t answer, though his life could depend on the answer. Francis Bacon retells the story this way: “What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting.” If he is who he says he is, Jesus must know, but he doesn’t say. Perhaps he disdains to answer. Some answers are only for those who can hear them.

  The Oxford don turned Episcopal priest M. A. Screech says in Laughter at the Foot of the Cross that the religious and the non-religious will always find each other amusing because they understand the world in fundamentally different ways. The spiritually inclined value things that, to the worldly, don’t exist, which makes their actions comic; and the world
ly, to the sad amusement of the otherworldly, cherish evanescent delights that will cost them eternal bliss. Paul says it in almost those words, in Corinthians: “Hath God not made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.”

  “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven,” wrote Mark Twain. Baudelaire, his contemporary, went further. Baudelaire declares that because there was no sadness in Eden, there was no laughter either. Harmony prevailed. Laughter didn’t exist till disharmony provoked it: “The comic is a damnable element born of diabolic parentage.” But I doubt there is much laughter in hell either. Laughter isn’t demonic, but the result of our human double vision. We see both the perfect world we desire and the flawed one we live in. Believers and unbelievers live in different flawed worlds and conceive different perfections.

  What we see around us is often disorderly and impossible to understand as meaningful. Christianity, like all religions, offers meaning. Jokes home in on the disordered places where meaning fails. They are drawn to chaos but they are terrified of it too because they cannot not see where meaning breaks down. Once they find those inconsistencies and breakdowns, they play with them, toss them in the air like a juggler keeping aloft a ball, two flaming torches, a cat, and a milking stool. Their attraction to chaos can be satanic delight or a godly attempt to heal by cauterizing a wound. They are both revolutionary and profoundly conservative. They are suspicious of systems of thought and enamored of the anomalies in them, but mostly they are content to mock, not destroy, those spindly systems.