The Joker: A Memoir (12 page)

If you want to jolt yourself with your own daring and unconventional sense of humor, religion is one of the few places to go after dead-baby, Helen Keller, and mutilation jokes. Only those alert to the sacred can truly appreciate, I suspect, the various uses of blasphemy, and only those who respect taboos can enjoy the bone-deep electric charge of toying with them. Because I was a serious boy raised in a serious faith, surrounded by rational adults with a rigid sense of the supernatural, I still feel a diminishing frisson of sinfulness when I pull a cork from a bottle of Sauvignon blanc, tell a dirty joke, dance, or say “goddamn.” I like to test my own sense of religious trepidation, poke it with a stick, thump it on the head as I walk by. The agitation keeps me alive to my old faith and—who knows?—maybe it to me.

The first time I heard a joke about Jesus, the thrill of blasphemy was intoxicating, and it didn’t involve, as I’d imagined, witches gathering in the darkest piney woods to summon Lucifer or a warlock drawing a pentagram in blood on the floor of a deserted shack. It was simply three boys huddled in the back row of a tenth-grade world-history class after the teacher had stepped out of the room. We were supposed to be doing our homework.

Carl Blegen, a military brat like me, with black plastic glasses and lank brown hair swept across his forehead, leaned into the aisle. Elbows propped on his thighs, he motioned with his head for me and Gary Sandig to lean toward him. He looked around, and when he was sure no one else could hear, he whispered, “Jesus is on the cross.”

He paused a second and stared at us, making sure we had absorbed that this sentence was the beginning of a joke. He held his hands out loosely from his shoulders to suggest Christ nailed to the cross, but not wide enough that a casual onlooker would recognize
what he was doing. He looked like he was imitating a chicken spreading its flightless wings.

I was so puzzled, tense, and suddenly afraid I could barely listen. Just listening seemed dangerous.

“Jesus looks out over the crowd and says, ‘Peter, come to me.’

“Peter hears Jesus calling him, so he starts walking through the crowd toward the cross, but the Roman soldiers see him and drive him back with whips.

“Jesus calls out again, ‘Peter, come to me. I want you.’

“Again Peter starts toward the cross and again the Roman soldiers whip him and beat him and punch him until he gives up.

“For the third time, Jesus calls out, ‘Peter, come to me. I want you.’ ” As he spoke Jesus’s words, Carl used a dreamy, disconnected sing song voice, as if Jesus, lost in his own thoughts, had not seen what had happened to Peter.

On his third attempt, determined to make it to the foot of the cross, Peter launches himself into the crowd. The Romans lash him bloody with their whips. They club him to the ground and kick him. But Peter claws his way to the base of the cross and calls up, “I’m here, Lord.”

Still using that dreamy voice, but with lilting childish glee in it, Jesus says, “Peter, I can see your house from up here.”

I laughed so hard I clung to the side of my desk to keep from falling on the floor. I put my face on my desk and laughed until I slobbered on my notebook paper. Other students turned and stared.

“What’s so funny?” they asked.

“Nothing,” I said, and kept laughing. Carl, red in the face with pleasure at his own joke, shushed me. He was nervous I’d repeat the joke and other students, offended, would tell the teacher.

I held my side and racked for air till I finally calmed down. But as soon as I thought,
I can see your house from up here
, air again
exploded from my lips in a wet snort, and I was off again. Carl kept saying, “Come on, man, stop.” He made a lowering gesture with his hands, palms facing the floor. “Stop it. Everybody’s looking at us.”

Like that was going to make me stop? Everybody looking?

“What’s so funny?” the students near me demanded, frustrated and a little angry. Again I just said, “Nothing,” and kept laughing. It must have taken me five minutes before I could shut up.

The joke had raised me to a height of nervous expectation, and just as I was expecting something violent, gross, or sexually vile, it swooped beneath what I was prepared for. The eerie innocence of Jesus’s answer exploded in my head. Tortured, dying on the cross, this Jesus spoke with the “Gee whiz” amazement of a boy who had climbed a tree for the first time. The joke takes the pivotal event in Christianity and turns it into a childish thrill. This Christ isn’t interested in redeeming sinful mankind with the sacrifice of his life. He’s just a dumb kid in a tree who wants to share knowledge that others already have. I could remember being that kid. At fifteen, I still remembered the first time I had climbed a tall tree and looked to find the roof of my house. I am embarrassed now by my excitement then, and I was embarrassed for the naïve Christ of the joke who was as innocently delighted as I had been.

The joke was dynamite. I knew I had to be very careful with it. I couldn’t tell it to any adults at all, ever. Only my friends who saw themselves as outsiders were possible audiences, and even then I’d have to think twice. But I knew I was going to tell it. There was never any doubt in my mind about that.

In homeroom the next day, as I told the joke to my friend Tom, a girl overheard me and turned around. From her hesitant manner and the determined set of her jaw, I could see she didn’t really want to say anything, but her faith compelled her. The mockers of the Lord must be both admonished for their sin and offered the chance to repent.

She curled a strand of blond hair nervously behind her right ear. “When I think of all that Jesus has meant to me and all he suffered for my sake . . .” she said, her voice trembling. Unable to finish the sentence, she turned back around and faced the front of the class, opened her algebra textbook, and stared at it, lips trembling.

Tom shrugged at me. I shrugged back. I felt small and mean, and yet aggrieved too. She had turned to hear the joke without being invited. What right did she have to complain? But she hadn’t complained. She had been hurt. She was a bystander who had edged between the knife thrower and the woman strapped to the spinning wheel. A wounded civilian. Collateral damage.

Every time I told the joke, someone, between laughs, said, “You’re going to get struck by lightning,” and I shrugged with false audacity. For my blasphemy, I
did
expect a bolt of cosmic electricity to blast me into a stinking circle of charred earth, and for this magical thinking I held myself in contempt. It was not the sort of sophisticated, post-Christian thought I wanted to be thinking. Even if I were to remain a Christian, I didn’t want to understand God so primitively. But deep in my brain, a terrified king ruling over a shrinking desert kingdom knew he deserved to have his fields destroyed by floods, drought, and locusts, and his starving people afflicted with plagues. The rest of my brain laughed at the superstitious minor king, so far from the intellectual agora of Greece and the great public baths of imperial Rome.

Had the Jesus jokes been around for a long time and I just started to hear them when, in high school, I was going through my crisis of faith? Or were they something new? Whatever the case, they were there when I needed them. Perhaps it’s natural that the thing that has been drilled into us all our lives as holy should, when it is finally questioned, provoke an extreme response. This was certainly true for me. Attempting to understand intellectually and psychologically what we find funny comforts us after we have stopped
laughing and the stitch in our sides has loosened. But laughter is not intellectual, thank God; it’s visceral. And my favorite Jesus joke while I was in high school was wordless.

I’d throw my arms wide and stop long enough for my listener to grasp that I was Christ on the cross. Then, grimacing with feigned pain, I’d yank my right arm free of an imaginary nail. I’d do the same with my left hand. I hesitated for a moment, my eyes widened, and I windmilled them backward, as if to keep myself from falling. The audience would make the leap and imagine Christ collapsing forward, still pinned to the cross by the spike in his ankles. If the joke is funny at all, and I found it very funny, it’s because it’s so wrenchingly horrible to imagine the torture of crucifixion being taken to a new and surprising level, and that because Jesus, the perfect man, a man and a god, makes an elementary mistake of physics.

The joke always makes me flinch. I feel a slight psychosomatic twinge in my ankles whenever I tell it. Oddly, the joke reminds us of Jesus’s humanity and torment in the body at the same time it mocks the gravity of the moment. Like the cruelty jokes and Helen Keller jokes, it reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies and pushes fear into laughter. The person enacting the joke is Christ, but a stupid Christ, a mortal who is not going to return from the dead. Who, then, is the joke on?

The more trouble I had sustaining the simple faith I yearned for, the harder I tried. That’s one reason I became a camp counselor for the Royal Ambassadors the summer before beginning college, at a camp affiliated with the Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center in the woods outside Talladega, Alabama. The Royal Ambassadors were the Southern Baptist approximation of the Boy Scouts.

It all started the previous March, when Mr. Baldwin, the camp director, addressed the Sunday night prayer meeting at my family’s church and urged parents to send their boys to camp. After the meeting, my father hurried forward, buttonholed him, and pushed him to interview me. Dad was practically chattering! And it worked. Later that week, Mr. Baldwin drove over to our house one evening to size me up.

“I really prefer college men,” Mr. B said, dubiously eyeing the scrawny, affectless eighteen-year-old sitting on the couch next to
his father. Across from us, Mr. B perched on my mother’s red velvet Queen Anne chair. I’d never seen anyone actually sit on that chair before.

“Who are your counselors?” Dad asked.

“College students,” Mr. B said. “Some of them are on their way to seminary at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.” Not the relatively liberal Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, he meant for us to understand. “All of them are men with a strong sense of Christian vocation.”

“College men? That’s just a technicality,” Dad said. “He’ll be in college three months from now.”

For every objection Mr. B raised, my father, suddenly voluble, had an answer prepared.

“Have you been active in the Royal Ambassadors program?

“He’s been in Cub Scouts, Webelos, and Boy Scouts.”

“Is your family active in the church?”

“Two of his uncles, my brothers, are ministers. I’m a deacon. He’s at services two or three times a week, regular as clockwork, and he goes to all the revivals.”

I jerked my head. Revivals? I’d gone to a lot, but not to all of them; they sometimes fell on school nights.

My father talked eagerly about what a fine counselor I would make, what a wonderful leader of men I would be. Except when directly asked, I said nothing. Where was my father’s almost frantic passion to get me this job coming from? The one time I’d complained to Dad that all my friends’ fathers helped them find summer jobs, he’d told me to go put my shoes on. He’d get me a job.

Suspicious, I asked him where and he told me that he’d be happy to drive me to the recruiting office himself. I’d have a job by the end of the day.

“Thanks,” I’d said. “I can join the army by myself.”

Yet here he was falling all over himself to get me a job that,
as Mr. B explained, paid fifteen dollars for a week that began at 10:00
AM
. Monday morning, when the campers arrived, and lasted until noon Saturday, when they left. The rest of Saturday and all day Sunday were free, though I would of course be expected to attend Baptist services Sunday morning and evening, both for my own spiritual good and to assure the local churches that we were working with them, not competing with them, in the saving of adolescent souls.

As Mr. B and my father talked, I saw Dad wasn’t concerned about the money. He wanted to immerse me in a Christian world so I could be saved. Saved again. Perhaps he’d seen how I’d twisted myself into bowlines and clove hitches (not just any knots) over whether God existed. Had Dad detected that reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and Anne Frank’s diary had rocked my sense of a God-ordered world? Had he overheard one of the Jesus jokes I’d been telling?

More likely he’d seen the look of contempt on my face when businessmen prayed publicly in church, their prayers making it clear to me and anyone who bothered to listen that they considered their wealth an outward and visible manifestation of inner grace. The obvious corollary was left unstated: The poor deserved their poverty. I liked to remind the boys in my Sunday school class that Jesus said a rich man is as likely to enter heaven as a camel is to pass through the eye of a needle—because, as a smartass, I took mean-spirited pleasure in listening to biblical literalists explain that Jesus was alluding to one of the gates into Jerusalem, which was called “the eye of a needle.” The gate was narrow, they insisted, but a camel could, in fact, pass through if it knelt down. I did not inquire why Jesus would bother to stroll barefoot through Judea assuring the whores, publicans, and sinners that the wealthy had nothing to fear in the afterlife, as long as their camels knew how to do the limbo. The church was an important, if increasingly strained, part
of my life. I yearned to be comfortable there. I secretly hoped that, by some process I could not imagine, I too would become rich and would need to ponder how to slip a camel through a needle’s eye.

I don’t know why I was offered the job. Maybe it was late in the year and Mr. B had a poorly paid position to fill and no ready candidate. Maybe he simply yielded to my father’s ardor. As they talked around me, though, the two men entered into a tacit collaboration. I’d be a spiritual reclamation project they would share.

I took the job anyway.
I could simply ignore the pressure
, I thought, and a summer in the woods beat living in my father’s house and another three months of flipping charbroiled burgers at Hardee’s for ninety cents an hour.