The Joker: A Memoir Read online

  If she could tell mildly racist jokes, could I reciprocate with similar ones? I wanted to banter, maybe flirt, with the good-looking woman with a sense of humor, the one I’d already offended once. Would she see it as intruding on turf I had no right to walk on? What would my jokes sound like to her when told in my Alabama accent? I might easily step over whatever line she had drawn for herself. And what was it in her jokes that she found funny? That they were scornful of black men? Or were they jokes about class? Were they her way of saying, however obliquely, “I’m not like those people. I don’t act or think like them”? That was certainly one of the reasons my friends and I told redneck and hillbilly jokes. Were her jokes her way of showing she was at ease with herself? Was she showing us she was as tough in her way as we were in ours? Was her motivation some volatile combination of all these reasons, plus others I couldn’t see?

  Or, again, did she simply like jokes?

  I listened while someone else told a joke and then drifted back to the jug of wine and refilled my glass. I felt like poor Dewey. But instead of fucking a penguin, I’d simply screwed the pooch: I’d failed completely. I was seeing the future diplomat at work. She entered the room, deftly sized up the group of men she found herself in, and redirected the joking toward a place where she was completely in charge.

  • • •

  In the years since 1983, I’ve heard exactly three new-to-me racist jokes. Maybe I’d have heard more if I still lived in Alabama, though I haven’t heard any when visiting my father and brother there. I’ve worked for the last twenty-five years in universities, and academics, while they value wit, get squirmy around the atavistic psychology that drives most jokes. But I think racist jokes have mostly died out because the social stigma has become greater and more onerous in every stratum of America, and that intensifying of the taboo has been facilitated by the jokes’ migration to the Internet. I very seldom hear a joke anymore. Or tell one. I receive and forward them as e-mail, but they are not racist jokes, coming or going. Very few of us want to risk forwarding a scurrilous joke that might be traced back to us. Besides, writing out an ugly joke makes it even uglier. In person, we can judge how it’s being heard and change it as we tell it. We can signal with a shrug, a raised eyebrow, or a grimace how we feel about different aspects of what we are saying. If worse comes to worst, we can simply explain why we are telling it. The printed page and the pixilated screen permit none of these ameliorations.

  So, in the mid-eighties, when I was visiting my friend Sara in Tuscaloosa, I had a good idea of what was coming when she asked, “What’s the definition of renege?”

  “A shift change at McDonald’s,” she answered quickly, before I could work out where the riddle had to go. Her eyes were shining with pleasure, and I laughed a little, buoyed by her irresistible delight in puns and trespassed taboos. It wasn’t her telling the joke that troubled me, but the joke itself. It’s clearly racist; it links blacks with low-paying, crappy jobs, and the premise wildly at odds with reality: McDonald’s work crews are not all black. It’s hard not to guess someone saw the possible pun buried in renege and contrived a way to bring it forth, rather than observing a situation that sparked ugly wit. The very real racism embedded in the joke is used to make the joke; the joke is not formed to advance racism, even though it does.

  In other words, it’s a forced pun. The ins and outs of effective punning were brilliantly dissected by Charles Lamb, the great nineteenth-century essayist, who admits to loving a bit of wordplay found in the writings of Jonathan Swift. Lamb’s logic is too tight and too charming to condense:

  An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: “Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?”

  There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very common, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place—a public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,—which the fellow was beginning to understand; but then the wig again comes in, and he can make nothing of it: all put together constitute a picture: Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass.

  Lamb contrasts this spur-of-the-moment pun with others in which the pun is “too good to be natural”: “One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line.” Just so renege. With racist jokes that’s a good thing because it exposes the distortion of reality racism depends on. But it makes a bad joke.

  • • •

  I encountered the next of these three jokes in a joke book, an uncommon experience. I don’t remember what book or when it was published, only that one joke in it jolted an amoral laugh out of me.

  Q: What comes out of a cocoon?

  A: A n-n-n-n-nigger.

  I stared at the joke for a few seconds and, when the coin finally dropped, I barked out a laugh before, in embarrassment and shame, I caught myself. The joke effortlessly transported me back to an idealized childhood I never lived—What comes out of a cocoon, children, is a beautiful butterfly!—and then turned old, mean, and strange, shocking me into laughter. The strangeness is the stutter. Cocoon is revealed, presto-changeo, to be a stutterer’s attempt to say coon. The joke not only corrupts innocence, it puts the nigger and coon in the mouth of someone with an actual affliction who hates black people for their imagined racial inferiority, invoking and then undercutting our tendency to infantilize the disabled, imagining them more innocent than the rest of us. About wordplay, Charles Lamb says:

  A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders.

  This pun is more of a howitzer by the ear than a pistol.

  Because I was so troubled by having laughed at the joke, however briefly, I have told the joke at a couple of dinner parties, prefacing it with the question, “Is this joke racist?” Or “What’s racist about this joke?” For some hearers, the n-word blots out any subtleties about implied speakers. For them, the stuttering speaker is just an excuse for the joke teller to say nigger for a cheap startle response that sometimes jars loose an uneasy laugh. And that is the truest measure of the joke, I think.

  But the joke also possesses curiosities worth parsing. Even though it was a new joke to me, it sounds as if it’s at least forty years old, dating back to a time when coon, the antiquated slur, was common. It doesn’t sound contemporary. But at one level the joke is not deeply racist: The butt of the joke is the supposed racist stutterer who must not be very bright since he’s never heard of a cocoon. And the joke does not really advance any stereotype or criticism of African-Americans, though one may, by squinting, glimpse a bit of the old recalcitrant slam that niggers will always and only be niggers, and, even more tenuously, perhaps a distaste for African-American sexuality and reproduction. In the main, the racism is bound up in the history and connotations of one word, about which Randall Kennedy
patiently explains, “The word nigger, you see, sums up for those of us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America.” The joke exploits the electric jolt, the transgressive power, of “that fucking devastating word,” as Richard Pryor called it, to shock the hearer, the electricity sparking the volatile mix of pun-pleasure and guilt into complicated laughter.

  Something similar happens in the one other new racist joke I’ve heard. Actually I didn’t hear it. It may be the only racist joke I’ve ever received via e-mail.

  An old man from out in the country drives into town to a divorce attorney and announces, “I want one of them DEE-vorces.”

  The divorce attorney is surprised. Wondering if the old man might be addled, he starts questioning him.

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Eighty-six.”

  “Well, if you want a divorce, I need to know if you have grounds.”

  “Sure do. About a hundred acres.”

  “No, I mean, do you have a case?”

  “Don’t have no Case. Got me a John Deere, though.”

  “No, I mean do you have a grudge?”

  “Yes sir, that’s where I park the John Deere.”

  “No, no, no. Does your wife beat you up?”

  “Can’t say as she does. We both get up at four thirty.”

  “Is she a snorer?”

  “No.”

  “Is she a nagger?”

  “No, no—little bitty white woman.” Pause. “But my new son’s a nagger. That’s why I want a DEE-vorce.”

  Spins the head around, that joke, which is why I laugh.

  The power of the joke comes from the shock of the “fucking devastating word,” which is never explicitly used. The cuckold’s advanced age is simply misdirection, diverting our attention from the possibility he could father a child and leading us to assume his wife is as old as he is.

  Is the joke racist? In the main, it isn’t, I don’t think, except for its evocation of nigger. There may be some racism about black male sexuality buried in a black man’s fathering the child, but that’s a stretch. Race is evoked only to let us know that he figured out his wife was unfaithful when he saw his dark son.

  We can argue that the character himself is a racist, but it’s a peculiarly passive racism. He certainly responds to the lawyer’s use of what he assumes is the taboo word, taking it as giving him license to use it too. To his ears, the lawyer has indicated “Racism spoken here,” and that he is free to reveal his own. But interestingly, he brings no anger to the question “Is she a nagger?” If he were a dyed-in-the-wool racist, wouldn’t he be angered, offended, or at least miffed by the misheard suggestion that his wife was black? His stolid insistence on a divorce is driven by his wife’s infidelity, rather than unhappiness with whom she was unfaithful.

  If these three jokes are not new, the fact that they are the only new-to-me ones a joke-magnet like me has heard over the last twenty years tells us something. My friends’ experiences parallel mine. My fellow jokers very, very rarely hear—or see in their e-mail inboxes—racist jokes anymore, and when they do the jokes depend more on the taboo power of the word nigger than they do in perpetuating any particular invidious stereotypes. Actual racist jokes, the ones driven by animosity, are disappearing, though the taboo of the word is still being exploited. We are arguing to what degree and how the jokes are racist. No one I know is arguing that they are true.

  But still, by repeating the jokes I perpetuate the stereotypes even as I hope to mock them, and affirm the power of the taboo word as I attempt to vitiate it. I’ve told jokes to people who have been comforted by the joke’s racism, or more often, been offended. In the first instance, I’ve been an agent, though not by design, of perpetuating racism. And in the second case I’ve been perceived as a racist who has tried to lure the listener into racist agreement with me, a miserable position to be in. Can a case be made that laughing at stereotypes is a step on the way to transcending them? Yes, but there are a lot of missteps along the way.

  Racial humor, like most humor, tries to draw you into its world, but it has two worlds. One is the world of the absurd, the illogical, the disjunctive, the incongruous—the world of jokes. But the other is the world of racial superiority, and superiority, according to Aristotle, is the realm in which jokes thrive, the smart mocking the stupid, the strong the weak, the attractive the ugly, the white the black. Is it possible to be drawn into one and not the other? I think so, but it’s not always easy. A joke creates a bond between the joker and the audience that gets the joke, but what of the victim of the joke, the listener who just doesn’t get it, or the listener who gets it and thinks, sometimes correctly, the joker cherishes the stereotype and delights in taunting the victim? Jokes depend on (and reinforce) a structure of insiders and outsiders, one that’s particularly powerful and offensive with racist jokes because it’s a structure of values. Even when racist jokes don’t work—because of the failures of the joke, the joker, or the listener—the value being declared is still racism, even if the joker means to attack it.

  Rather than risk abetting racism or being perceived as a racist, why not stop telling these jokes entirely? I pretty much have, except for a few friends whom I can absolutely trust to understand the jokes as a sort of pure aestheticism, though jokes are never pure and rarely aesthetic. I tell fewer and fewer jokes to fewer and fewer people these days. Most people won’t even listen to a joke that looks like it’s going to veer into racial territory; only bad things can happen there. And though I am attracted to the boundaries, the outlawed, the verboten, I too back off when it comes to race, the last true taboo, or at least the strongest current one.

  Nietzsche says that a joke is “an epitaph on an emotion.” For racist jokes, I think we are seeing the death throes and we are hearing the epitaph being written.

  If you have a new racist joke, I’ll listen, but the odds are I won’t laugh.

  Nine

  Never Lose Your Head over a Piece of Tail

  This is what my parents told me about sex: nothing. Not one word. Ever.

  My brother Roger was so perturbed by my parents’ omission that one day when he was home from medical school he went into our youngest brother’s bedroom, closed the door, and explained to eleven-year-old Tim in dispassionate, clinical detail the physiology of human sexual reproduction.

  When he was done, he came back to the living room, resumed watching football on television, and mentioned to my brother Mike what he’d done. Mike, who is closer to Tim’s age, waited till Roger left and then he too went into Tim’s bedroom and closed the door behind him. He’d heard, Mike said, that Roger and Tim had had a little talk and he just thought he’d come in and see if Tim had any questions. Did he?

  “No,” Tim said.

  “You understood everything Roger told you?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Any time you have any questions, just come to me and I’ll do my best to answer them. You sure you don’t have any questions?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Any time, just let me know,” Mike said as he stood up and reached for the doorknob.

  “Uh, maybe I do have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s a vagina?”

  Good question, Tim! One I myself had long pondered. And I learned about sex in an even weirder way than you did.

  In seventh grade at Del Vallejo Junior High in San Bernardino, California, two boys and I regularly slipped away from P.E. We saw no reason to exhaust ourselves racing after a soccer ball that we seldom got close enough to kick. In red gym shorts, white T-shirts, and sockless Keds, we dawdled around the edges of the playing field, trying to stay out of the coach’s line of vision as we talked, argued about our favorite TV shows, and told jokes.

  One morning we edged along the outside of a fence along a concrete drainage culvert, curled our fingers into the fence’s chain links, our sole source of support as we leaned back, watching the exertions of our class
mates. While we hung there, the hard California sun rebounding off the dry field and the concrete, one of our trio, a chubby kid with a blond crew cut whose name I’ve forgotten, asked us if we’d heard about the dog that was walking along the railroad track when the train roared by and cut off his tail.

  The dog was very upset by this. What is a dog’s tail but his glory? Desperately searching for his tail, the dog sniffed and sniffed along the track, so engrossed he didn’t hear another train coming from the opposite direction. The train blasted over him, cut off his head, and killed him.

  “And what’s the moral of this story?” the crew-cut boy asked.

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

  The two of them laughed, hanging over the culvert by their fingers, while I pulled myself up to the fence, uncomprehending, stupid, left out. I chewed it over, but got nowhere. The dog had lost its head while worried about its tail. Was the point of the joke that we shouldn’t let small losses lead to greater ones? The cute moralism didn’t jibe with the hilarity of my friends.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  They explained to me that tail had a meaning other than the one I already knew. Then they explained their explanation.

  Jesus, did they think I was so stupid I’d believe something like that?

  The year before, my parents, after much whispered debate, had signed a consent form permitting me to watch a sex-education filmstrip with the rest of the boys in my sixth-grade class at Del Rosa Elementary. The decision had been a close one, and I was exultant that I didn’t have to scuttle out of the room and sit outside the door with the unfortunate dork whose parents had elevated him to iconic dorkdom. I spent the first several minutes of the filmstrip wondering whether, if I’d been out sitting on the green bench with him, we’d have talked to each other.