• • •
The funniest thing about the first joke I ever heard is that my father told it to me. I was sitting on the living room floor in front of
the couch, building a cage of Tinkertoys around a cabin made of Lincoln Logs. The long Tinkertoy spokes kept tapping the green roof slats of the log cabin out of place, which was infuriating to a seven-year-old. Frustrated, I was always on the verge of smashing the whole thing flat. I did not like the green slats. I was pretty sure, even then, that the roof of Lincoln’s childhood cabin wasn’t made of boards greener than lime Kool-Aid. The slats’ bright dye made me want to suck them, which I did compulsively, especially once I was forbidden to do so. They turned my lips a morbid gray-green.
Dad stood over me in his air force uniform. He was a captain. He had just returned home from work to the tract house on North Carolina’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Craning my neck, I looked up the long expanse from his summer khakis to his pink face, pale blue eyes, and prematurely bald head, and in the tensing of his thin lips, I saw him hesitate. He seemed to be pondering—pondering me. Did the color of my lips give me away?
“What’s black and white and red all over?” he asked.
What? Wait. Why was he asking? This question sounded a bit like the bullets he fired at me over supper: “What’s four plus seven?” “What’s our address?” “What’s the capital of South Dakota?” “Why can’t you just do what you’re told without pouting and whining?”
But this question sounded different. There was something worrying and peculiar in the way he almost chanted, as if he both did and didn’t expect me to answer. He seemed amused by my answer before I’d given it. And what a confusing question. If something was black and white, it couldn’t be red at the same time. That was just basic to knowing what words meant, wasn’t it? My father’s lips were now pressed into a tight line. I was taking too long to answer.
The only thing I could think to say always meant trouble.
“I don’t know.”
“A newspaper,” he said, grinning.
I closed my eyes, retreated into my mind to absorb the answer.
I couldn’t do it. I opened them, looked at my father, my head cocked to the side—apprehensive, stupid, trying to think and failing. Nothing connected. This was not unusual in my relations with the adult world. I must have looked like a beagle instructed to determine pi.
“I don’t understand.”
“A newspaper is read,” he said and nodded. He was encouraging me to keep working at it.
I conjured a picture of a newspaper painted red. I envisioned Dad painting the kitchen stool. He’d spread newspaper on the carport floor and then placed the unfinished wooden stool upside down in the middle of it. The paint often over-sprayed onto the
Goldsboro News-Argus
, covering much of the paper with a glossy coat of royal-blue enamel. In my mind I turned the blue paint to red. But that didn’t help. Where the newsprint was red, it was no longer black and white.
“A newspaper is read after you read it,” Dad said.
“But it’s not
red
. It’s still black and white.”
“Listen to me! It’s R-E-A-D, not R-E-D. The same word means different things.”
“That’s not fair! It’s cheating!”
“It’s not cheating. It’s a joke.”
“It doesn’t make sense!” I wailed.
“It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a
joke
, you stupid idiot!” he snapped, and marched out of the room.
After he was gone, I remember sitting on the carpet, tapping one Lincoln Log with another.
Read
sounds the same as
red
. Now that my father’s expectant eyes were no longer locked on me, I got it. The joke had faked me out by leading me to think the sound meant one thing when it really meant another. If that wasn’t cheating, I didn’t know what was. But the margins in a newspaper, I thought, weren’t “read,” so it wasn’t actually read
all
over, was it?
And what about the pictures? Did looking at them count as reading? I didn’t think so.
A few minutes later, Dad came back in the living room—to make amends, I now realize—and asked me why the chicken crossed the road.
“I don’t know,” I said. That seemed to be a safe answer to these joke things.
“To get to the other side.”
I nodded as if I understood, tried to smile, and he left the room again, appeased if not happy. In a way I did understand. The joke was a parable about simplicity. The chicken’s crossing the road was broken down to its simplest possible motivation, but one so fundamental as to be completely dull and unsatisfying. I’d come dangerously close to asking Dad what chicken we were talking about. The chickens in my grandmother’s grassless backyard waddled in circles, scratching the Georgia red clay for bugs and overlooked feed corn, and not a single hen had ever shown the least interest in crossing Vineyard Road. I had, though, seen plenty of others flopped dead by drainage ditches, their red and brown feathers erect in the backwash of air as our station wagon shot past, and I vividly remembered seeing a dead chicken humped at the base of a mailbox, a dog jabbing his muzzle into the carcass. Crossing the road was a skill in which many chickens were fatally deficient but maybe they possessed desires I was unaware of.
I was a single-minded little literalist and these jokes seemed like annoyances made of words, not life, the way math problems at school were annoyances made of numbers. If you had two apples and Mr. Smith gave you three, Mrs. Johnson gave you four, and Miss Ingle gave you three, how many apples would you have? I understood the mathematics behind the silly question, but I couldn’t imagine a world where grown-ups I didn’t know stopped me one after the other and gave me more than I could eat of a fruit I didn’t like.
Later, when I encountered more complex word problems in arithmetic, I believed them to be especially lame versions of jokes, dubious contraptions made of words that led to an answer that had nothing to do with life as I knew it. I couldn’t conceive of caring what time the train leaving Santa Fe at noon at forty miles an hour would pass the train leaving from Denver an hour later at fifty miles an hour. Maybe I’d care if I was on one train, my mother was on the other, and I could remember to look up at the exactly calculated minute and wave to her as we passed each other, but I doubted that would be possible. I’d get engrossed in reading a comic book, forget the time, forget to look for her, and then, later, I’d get fussed at for not paying attention.
• • •
At school, I met my father’s first joke again, and once more it flummoxed me. “What’s black and white and red all over?” asked the joke page of
My
Weekly Reader
.
Well, I know that one
, I thought with jaded triumph.
It’s a newspaper. Everybody knows that.
Wrong! said
My
Weekly Reader
. It’s a blushing zebra.
That’s just dumb
, I thought, enraged. Zebras don’t blush. What could make a zebra blush? And even if it did, it wouldn’t blush all over its body, just as people didn’t blush all over theirs.
My
Weekly Reader
helpfully printed a black-and-white picture of a zebra, its head radiating squiggly heat-lines of embarrassment as it looked back over its shoulder with an abashed grin. Its white stripes were shaded gray, to suggest it was blushing. But the picture made me crazier than the joke. Even in the picture, the black stripes of the zebra remained black, which was—
aha!
—a clear refutation of the joke’s logic.
What was this
joking
? It was challenging my grasp of reality. Was joking like what my mother often said as she flipped off the bedroom light after tucking me and my brother into bed? Hand hovering over the switch, she sang, “Where was Moses when the
light went out?”
Click
went the light, and framed in the doorway by the hall light behind her, my mother, chuckling, answered her own question, “In the dark!” Other times the question had a different answer, one that made her laugh out loud: “Down in the cellar with his shirttail out!”
“In the dark” was an obvious non-answer answer, like “to get to the other side,” and “down in the cellar with his shirttail out” was nonsense with a hint of naughtiness. Other than that, all I understood about these moments was Mom’s pleasure in the words. “Where was Moses when the light went out?” was, I discovered many years later, the refrain of a novelty song from her youth. In the song, Moses is courting Becky Cohen, and when the lights go out, old man Cohen is relieved to hear Becky keep playing the “pianer” in the dark while he leaves the room to find money to feed the gas meter. He is, he tells Becky, sure her Moses was courting her respectably—“loving in a Yiddisher manner,” but Cohen still wants reassurance: “Tell me, darling daughter, while I went to get the quarter / Where was Moses when the light went out?”
The refrain broke free of its source, became a catchphrase, and people simply invented answers for it, including one I never heard at home: “Down in the cellar eating sauerkraut.” We Southern Baptists weren’t notable consumers of fermented cabbage, and the only Moses I’d heard of was the one who led the children of Israel out of Egypt. In my mind, he was the Moses in the dark with his shirttail flapping free. I wondered why he was not wearing the long heavy robe he wore in my illustrated Bible. My lack of understanding did not, however, keep me from absorbing (if not entirely appreciating) how my mother, after she had turned out the lights on another day that ended with me safely in bed, allowed herself a moment of carefree nonsensical pleasure imported from a time before I was born.
• • •
I slowly eased my grip on my natural literalism, and began to enjoy the unrealities that language made possible. Chickens yearn to cross roads, zebras blush, and newspapers are red all over while remaining black and white. You could play with words, just as you played with marbles, yo-yos, kites, and Matchbox cars.
Jokes were toys made of words. They were like the jack-in-the-box whose handle I spent hour after hour cranking, listening to the rink-a-tink tune of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” and then crowing with laughter when the clown shot out of his box, flung his folded arms wide, and bobbed at the end of his spring, idiotic and yet sinister with his huge hooked nose, bright red cheeks, and derisive grin. Frightening as he was, Jack was mine to control. I determined when he lunged out of his box, and once he did, I folded his hands across his chest and shoved him back down into his dark enclosure. I could spin the crank rapidly, frantic notes pelting from the box till the clown popped out. More often I turned the handle with obsessive patience, feeling the bumps on the roller inside the music mechanism flick over the tines, making “Pop! Goes the Weasel” unwind as a tinny dirge, until Jack’s spring overpowered the loosening latch and the clown once more launched to the end of his hidden spring. I loved the absurdity of the clown with his arms flying apart wider than the box that held him and his long black gown that, stretched over his uncompressed spring, made him look much taller than the box from which he’d leapt.
The tune tinked out of the box, and I screeched along with it, reveling in the song as I conjured the unsurprising surprise of Jack’s appearance:
All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel;
The monkey thought ’twas all in fun,
Pop! goes the weasel.
A penny for a spool of thread
A penny for a needle—
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
Mix it up and make it nice,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Up and down the London road,
In and out of the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
I’ve no time to plead and pine,
I’ve no time to wheedle,
Kiss me quick and then I’m gone
Pop! goes the weasel.
To my ears the words were joyously cockeyed. I knew that weasels and monkeys didn’t belong together, and the two of them had no natural connection to mulberry bushes, which I had at least seen with my own eyes and not in picture books. The appearing and disappearing clown simply increased the mental anarchy that baffled, tickled, and intrigued me.
I loved the slight, giddy menace in how “needle,” “treacle,” “eagle,” and “weasel” inexactly rhymed. There was something eerie in the way the tune forced me to pronounce the last syllables of the words with unnatural weight: Wee-ZUL, knee-DUL, ee-GUL, whee-DUL.
The song changed a bit from songbook to songbook, class to
class, and even singer to singer. Did it begin “All around the mulberry bush” or “Around and around” or “Round and round”? Once, in a new class, I launched into the song, and when all the other kids, who had belted out “Round and round the cobbler’s bench,” turned to look at me, I felt stupid and flatfooted, betrayed by my full-throated devotion to the mulberry bush. Though I was perturbed by the unfixed lyrics and the unmoored world they implied, the exuberance of the song and the sheer pleasure it gave me made it easy to understand that all our versions were basically the same—and I learned that what I knew was not the only way something could be known. More crucially, I learned that pleasure can lead us to want to understand something and that understanding is not entirely necessary for pleasure.
I had no idea that “Pop! Goes the Weasel” was a drinking song, the Eagle a pub, and that the beer mugs were raised and drained at
pop!
—as a teacher once told the class. Or, depending on whom you read, the weasel is a weaver’s shuttle, a tailor’s iron, a coat, or a stolen bit of silver—all of which could be “popped” at the pawn shop to pay for drink and food or a tumble in the hay. No one knows for sure what the monkey was. Perhaps, one writer speculates not very confidently, a Frenchman. And I loved the cavalier shrug of “That’s the way the money goes.” Money was never talked about so dismissively in our house, or in any house I’d ever entered. A world where money was splashed out casually with a laugh and without a second thought—I enjoyed a frisson of illicit extravagance just mouthing the words.