The Joker: A Memoir (25 page)

“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.

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 classmates. 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.

The film itself was so discreet that, though I understood that seed left the boy, entered the girl, and fertilized one of her eggs, I was unclear how the transfer took place. Extrapolating from the shapeless representations of the implicated organs, I developed a vague idea that the boy shoved sperm from his mouth into the girl’s mouth with his tongue, and it then somehow slid downhill to her fallopian tubes. How it got to the boy’s mouth to begin with was a puzzlement. I was puzzled too that women, like chickens, carried around inside them a clutch of eggs, and that the eggs could still
be eggs though they were not—I asked this—covered with a hard brown shell or suitable for frying. Not that they couldn’t be fried, they just
weren’t
.

I knew my junior high friends were goofing with me now because I’d read “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby.” For years, I’d pondered letters from pregnant girls who claimed they did not understand how they’d come to that delicate situation thanks to a boyfriend who’d taken off without leaving behind a forwarding address. My pre-adolescent heart went out to them. I could easily imagine how an impassioned kiss might lead to an accidental transfer of sperm. But as I learned more I began to wonder. If a girl had assumed a posture inelegant enough to facilitate a boy’s inserting his barely mentionable into her truly unmentionable, she could hardly assert she did not know how she’d been fertilized.

Nope, I wasn’t buying it. My friends were always feeding me some line so they could make fun of me when I went along with them, but I wasn’t falling for this one. As I pointed out triumphantly, how could they call it
tail
when it was in the
front
? They had no answer for that one.

As we walked back to take showers and then headed to class, the discussion nagged at me. The curly-headed boy had asked in exasperation if I hadn’t ever seen two dogs screwing, the boy dog on top, trying to stab his penis into the girl dog. I had, and I’d thought it was a peculiar way to wrestle. Now I was troubled to find myself wondering if humans might possibly make love—and babies—the same way that dogs might possibly make puppies. This new and startling understanding of procreation meshed so neatly with other stray bits of information that I couldn’t brush it aside. And my friends’ persistent derision of the sexually ignorant moron in their midst kept my anguished turmoil alive.

The crew-cut kid’s joke was what tipped the balance for me. He was obviously repeating a joke he’d heard, not one invented just to
fool me. Didn’t there, then, have to be a core of common knowledge embedded in the punch line? But my still-immature body did not corroborate either the scientific information on the half-remembered filmstrip or the debauched version hooted at me by my friends.

Before the end of the week, I worked up my courage. As casually as I could, I sidled up to my mother as she shredded cabbage and carrots for coleslaw, and blurted out my question. I had composed and recomposed it to be sensitive to the feelings of a woman who might resent the insinuation she was an egg-bearing mammal who had squeezed three boys out of the darkness of her tinkle place nine months after having copulated like a wild dog. But the question also had to be so clearly stated she couldn’t weasel out of answering it.

“Do we have babies the same way dogs do?”

“No,” my mother said. “Not exactly.” Long pause. “Don’t you have homework to do?”

“No ma’am. Done done it.”

“All of it? Even your math?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Then work on next week’s homework.”

The following afternoon when I returned home from school there were two library books on the end of my bed. One, by a Jesuit, was an introduction to sex that limited itself to instructions about remaining pure, respecting women, saving myself for marriage, and restricting intercourse to the making of babies—many, many babies. At twelve, without the benefit of puberty to provide a countervailing dialectic, I found Father O’Whosit’s arguments compelling. He also railed against the spiritual and mental degeneracy that were the inevitable consequence of young men touching and pulling on themselves where they shouldn’t. The curled-lip disdain with which he used the words
touch
and
pull
leapt off the page, and touched and pulled at my curiosity.

Since I had never handled myself in the shouldn’t area except to pee, I stood over the toilet and touched. Nothing. Pulled. Nothing. Yanked. Ouch. Five or six ouches were all it took to make me stop. I could see why the priest called it self-abuse, though given the pain, it was difficult to imagine the attraction. Father O’Whatsis made self-abuse sound like a sort of exquisitely filthy urination, but the dark secret of how the illuminati unleash the sinister magic was yet closed to me.

The other book lying on my beige Roy Rogers bedspread that afternoon was a college-level physiology textbook, with an emphasis on sexual reproduction. For hours, I meditated over the plastic overlays of the male and female skeletal, muscular, nervous, lymphatic, and reproductive systems. The knowledge that women possess ovaries, fallopian tubes, and cervixes did nothing to enlighten me about my original question: whether they screwed like dogs. A concomitant question that arrived late and that I did not welcome was whether at some point I’d be expected to accommodate one of them in this process, like a dog myself. Woof.