After more than a quarter of a century, my heart tightens still just a bit when I remember Kathleen waking me in the morning,
singing “Wake up, snake. Peas in the pot and the hoe cake’s baking.” Her mother woke her the same way when she was a child. Neither of us knew it was a corrupted (or maybe an alternative) version of a nonsense song recorded by Lead Belly called “Green Corn, Come Along Charlie”: “Wake snake, day’s a-breaking / Peas in the pot and hoe cake’s a-baking.” This lost pleasure must sound like overripe corn to anyone hearing it now. It is. That’s the point.
After the marriage ended, I became enamored of a Polack joke that I changed to a Little Moron joke. The Little Moron comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. The other man jumps out the window and runs away, while the Little Moron, enraged, pulls a pistol out of the dresser drawer and points it at his own head.
His wife, in bed, the sheets pulled up to her breasts, starts to laugh, and her laughter infuriates the Little Moron.
Still holding the pistol to his head, he snarls at her, “What are you laughing at? You’re next!”
The joke captures how the self-loathing of rejection outweighs the anger of betrayal, though logically it should be the other way around. Changing the character from Polack to Little Moron eased the ethnic unpleasantness of the joke while tightening the connection between the joke and how stupid I felt.
During the year-long breakup, Kathleen, as I mentioned, said, “When we first met, you laughed at everything. Now you don’t laugh at anything.” True enough. But I can name the exact moment my sense of humor returned.
After the third and final time she moved out, Kathleen invited me for supper. We were going to try, she said, to be just friends.
Her apartment was in a house in an older, more fashionable, part of town than our neighborhood, where we had lived in a sixties tract house on West Vanderbilt Loop. The streets were named after elite private universities: Cornell Road, Northwestern Road, Colgate
Drive. Seeing our old furniture arranged into a comfortable and homey nest and my wife bustling out of the kitchen with the superficial gaiety of someone cooking a business dinner for a potential, but not very important, client threw me. Down the hall, I glimpsed the bedroom that was of course off-limits. We made awkward stabs at small talk. How are your parents? How is your dad? Work going all right?
I had entered her apartment with a sodden and hopeless resolve to be civil, even charming. I’d practiced good behavior in my head; I’d imagined, step by step, being gracious:
What a lovely home you’ve made! It was good of you to invite me. I’ve always loved your Chicken Marbella.
But once I was there, the disorienting strangeness of familiar furniture in an unfamiliar place and my wife’s breezy withdrawal of intimacy undid me. She was trying to force me to acquiesce genteelly to the role she had chosen for me, and I was frantic to fracture the façade of politesse.
I do not, and I am grateful for this, remember what snippy unpleasantness issued from my mouth, but Kathleen informed me that if I couldn’t be civil, I’d have to go home. She was right of course, but I couldn’t bear the stiffs we had become, unable to talk easily and intimately with each other. Not five minutes went by before I made another nasty crack, probably mocking her taut propriety.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” she said. I had become the boss who expected her to make coffee, the geology professor who had condescended to her, the law professor who expected her to participate in class.
I walked out her front door miserable, humiliated, and defeated, heading down the walkway to my blue Volkswagen parked at the curb, the one with the leaking shocks that she refused to ride in because the ride was rough and the engine deafening. It was also ugly. I’d hand-sanded the rust off the doors and brushed a can of DAP Derusto over the entire car. The Montgomery night was suffused
with the scent of spring flowers, freesia and honeysuckle, and halfway to my car, in the middle of her front lawn, I began to laugh. If she were standing at the door, I imagine she heard my laughter as nasty pride at my crummy behavior. It wasn’t. I was ashamed and laughing at my shame—but laughing even more at the soap opera portentousness of “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave” and the way my own robotic anger, which possessed the limited virtue of honesty, made me act like a jerk. We had become the puppets of our own pretensions. The me that was walking out that door to his battered blue Volkswagen Beetle felt infinitely superior to the me I had been just moments ago, and I was relieved to have left him behind.
Standing in the middle of her rented lawn, I laughed and laughed, gut-deep and wholeheartedly. I had done exactly what I had vowed not to do and confirmed all of my wife’s worst opinions of me. How could that not be funny? And I laughed at the loss of love, the loss of faith in that love, and the loss of my understanding of a life that had been shaped by that love. It was a laugh of freedom, and of terror at that unsought emancipation.
• • •
Denis Dutton in
The Art Instinct
, writing as a Darwinist, cites joke-telling as an extension of the use of language in the courting process:
As a form of cognitive foreplay in courtship, language can give us, in Geoffrey Miller’s words, “a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” If Darwin himself was right in his own speculation about the origins of language, foreplay of a sort is indeed where it began: as a means for first arresting the interest of members of the opposite sex and then demonstrating something to them. . . . Language originated in grabbing attention and expressing something compelling. Miller argues that this aspect of language, verbal courtship, spreads
through cultures and has come to be associated with many social skills and capacities: “Language puts minds on public display, where sexual choice could see them clearly for the first time in evolutionary history.”
But what began in the courtship context seeped into areas of human life far removed from sex. Art in the most general sense is also an extension of this capacity into imaginative realms of storytelling, picture-making, crafting artifacts, music, poetic language, joke-telling, dance, and ordinary banter.
Joke-telling, along with banter, music, and poetic language may have grown out of courtship, but in the process they have become integral to it. I can’t imagine not laughing with someone I love.
Before I fell in love with Jill—truth to tell, this happened in the last month of my first marriage—I loved the way she laughed. She was younger than I was by seven years, a recent graduate of the branch college where I taught as a temporary instructor. When she told a joke, she waited eagerly, expectantly, hopefully, for the listeners to laugh, and then, whether we did or not, she laughed at her own joke, with a peal of pleasure that tapered off into a long appreciative cackle, her face lit with intelligent, flirty mischief.
Her favorite joke was the one about two good ole boys who are walking down the street, when they see a bulldog squatting on the sidewalk. One of the dog’s rear legs is hiked up in the air and he is thoroughly and enthusiastically licking his balls.
“Oh, man—that looks
good!
” says one of the men. “I wish I could do that.”
“Ooooh weee,” the other says, “that dog
bite
you!”
I loved the way she threw herself into the joke, circling her head in an upward clockwise motion, mimicking the dog’s licking, and she emphasized the first boy’s lust and longing by elongating
good
into two lascivious syllables:
guh uhd!
She stretched out the second
boy’s astonished
ooooh wee
and
bite
. Her punch line intimated her pleasure in sex, words, and performance; it’s much more playful than the trenchant and skeptical punch line I had heard before: “Well, it’s your dog. . . .” And of course, I heard the earthy delight in mocking male sexual avidity.
“That dog
bite
you!” became our first and most treasured private joke, though it wasn’t very private. She told the joke to everyone we knew, and then I pedantically stepped in and offered the alternate punch line, milking the joke for a couple of extra chuckles.
The last eighteen months of a foundering marriage do not overflow with mirth. I needed to laugh, and so did Jill, rebounding from a couple of bad relationships, so we laughed with a hysterical need that made it all the sweeter. We suspected our love, by its very intensity and timing, was bound to fail, but maybe we could beat the odds. Maybe we’d be the happy exceptions to the rule.
From time to time, I pull out the memories of our happy times, like sharpened candy canes, to pierce my heart. Once we parked near the Capitol building in Montgomery, and on cardboard sheets, slid down the green slopes of Goat Hill (as it’s still called, from the time before the Capitol was built)—mostly just holding each other as we tumbled off the cardboard and down the dry lawn, laughing wildly in our dizziness.
The first of the two Christmases we were together I bought Jill a burgundy sweater. Twenty dollars from Lands’ End, a stretch since I’d returned to graduate school. She loved the sweater because I’d given it to her and I loved her loving it. She’d pull her hands up into the sleeves, ask, “Where did George Washington keep his armies?” then she’d pop her hands out, wave them in front of her, and sing out, “In his sleevies!” cackling with delight at the childishness of the pun and doubly at her own delight in childishness. She adored the joke because she’d heard it from her little brother, seventeen years younger than she, whom she was crazy about. She loved another
of his jokes too: Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash? To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump—sung to the theme music for
The Lone Ranger
.
She scoured the tacky mall store Spencer’s for gag gifts, and for months carried around a Popping Martian, a vaguely penis-shaped, rubbery tube with a face painted on it. She called it the Greenie Weenie, and when she squeezed it, its eyes, nose, and ears bulged; it looked like a sexually alert space alien.
As a man right out of a marriage, a man who had only ever had sex with his wife, I was thrilled to laugh with a woman who, often while wearing that burgundy sweater, clapped her hands over her breasts as if she were being grabbed from behind. “Move those hands!” she sharply ordered the imaginary masher. After a pause, she mock-caressed her own breasts, moving her hands but not removing them. Her laugh was lusty and long. I gleefully took to grabbing her from behind and responding the same way to the same command.
Oh, I felt like a different Little Moron now, a bit like the one in another of her favorite jokes. A policeman finds the Little Moron running along the road, naked, so he stops and asks him what he’s doing. The Moron says, “I was in the car with my girlfriend and she pulled off down a dirt road and drove off under some trees. Then she pulled off all her clothes and said, ‘Go to town,’ and that’s where I’m headed.”
The joke captured my sexual fear as I began life again as a single man. It amused me because, like the Little Moron, I have never been able to sense when a woman is interested in me. But I knew Jill was. “Go to town”—another private joke.
Here’s yet another: Three couples die and go to the pearly gates together. The first man goes forward, and St. Peter informs him, “You will not be permitted to enter heaven. You are a man given to gluttony. You have such a sweet tooth you even sought out and married a woman named Candy.”
When the second man goes forward, St. Peter peers down at him from his high desk and pronounces, “You too will not be permitted to enter heaven. You are a man given to greed. You are so greedy you even sought out and married a woman named Penny.”
The third man turns to his wife and says, “We might as well leave now, Fanny.”
We might as well leave now, Fanny. Private joke.
• • •
A couple of Jill’s favorites were misogynistic or racist jokes I’d known for a long time and never thought funny until she gave me new ways to understand them. Hearing them again, not from men, but from the lips of a woman I loved, someone who clearly enjoyed them without malice, I understood them differently, if not correctly.
“Morning, ladies!” as the blind man said as he passed the fish market was, as I’ve said, a joke that always embarrassed me, yet when Jill told it and hooted, unembarrassed by the idea that women might have a healthy sexual scent, I was at first disturbed and then exhilarated. If men told the joke with varying degrees of distaste, for Jill it was a joyous avowal of animal vitality. “Morning, ladies!” became another of our catchphrases, and one I take pleasure in still. When my wife comes back into the bedroom with our current dog, a Coonhound bitch, to wake me when I’ve slept late, I always say, “Morning, ladies,” as the dog sticks her sharp snout into my face and, as Erin has taught her to do, ardently licks the top of my bald head. It’s like being swabbed by an extremely affectionate slice of baloney, and I can’t bear it too long before I have to get up.
Jill’s other favorite joke, another I’d heard long before I met her, was a room clearer; at least twice, people stood up and walked away when she told it.
Willie gets up in the morning. The sun’s shining. He’s had a good eight hours of sleep. The first thing he says is “I feels goooood.”
He goes down to the breakfast his wife has fixed for him, and she says, “Willie, is you okay? You looks bad.”
Willie says, “I don’t know why I looks bad, but I feels good.”
I will spare you Willie’s identical conversations with the bus driver and his boss. But when the boss insists that he go to the doctor immediately because he looks so
baaaaad
, Willie goes, though he insists again that he doesn’t know why he looks bad because he feels goooood!
Willie is immediately issued into the doctor’s office and the doctor says, “Willie, you looks terrible.”
Willie replies, “That’s the problem. Everybody say I looks
baaaad
, but I feels so
goooood
.”