The Joker: A Memoir (41 page)

“Then why is she being so nice?”

“Well, she dragged you upstairs to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you kept yelling, ‘Leave me alone, lady. I’m a married man.’ ”

For the twenty years we’ve been married, I’ve been so happy I can barely conceive of happiness without marriage. A good-humored wife who appreciates most if not all of my humor—her price is far above rubies, as the book of Proverbs doesn’t quite say. How good is this marriage? The day before trash day, we
compete
to sneak the trash can and recycle bins to the curb before the other notices. We alternate making dinner and have an iron clad rule that the one who didn’t cook cannot criticize the meal. Usually the cook is the tougher critic anyway. Most of my joking now is centered on making Erin laugh, and one of my great pleasures is e-mailing her a joke and then hearing from her office, which is on the second floor directly above me, a guffaw reverberate down through my ceiling. As Erin and I grow old together, I hope Mikhail Bakhtin, the literary theorist, was right when he wrote, “Death is inseparable from laughter.” He must be, judging from the jokes about aging, decrepitude, dementia, and death e-mailed to me by friends my age. Of all the logical impasses, unknowings, paradoxes, and terrors that provoke
laughter, death by its finality and unsolvable mystery is paramount. I am older than Erin by seven years, and we both know she is likely to outlive me. Her grief and the life she’ll live will be a blank to me. (Andrew: My wife’s an angel. Some other guy: You’re lucky, mine’s still alive.)

When someone dies, people say life goes on. Or we think it. Life goes on, until of course it doesn’t. First I’ll go, then Erin, and later still, you and those who come after you. As a child, I gnawed at this leapfrogging chain of obliterations night after night, as I lay awake unconvinced by my parents’ vague, easy assurances of a happy afterlife, my longing for it stymied by my inability to believe in it or convincingly imagine it. Angels? Wings? Harps, for God’s sake! It was all just too stupid even as a parody of a hope of paradise.

One Sunday, a preacher declared from the pulpit that in heaven the saved sang God’s greatness eternally and without cease, and if we didn’t like praising the Lord now on earth, we weren’t going to have the opportunity to do it in paradise. His definition of eternal bliss was unintentionally helpful. Though I knew he was either wrong or heaven was eternally, mind-wrenchingly boring, I saw that he, though a supposed expert on the subject, was as inadequate to the task of imagining paradise as I was. The door between life and death has only ever opened in one direction. We have not even the first scant fact to begin working from and our imaginations are too poor to construct a feasible alternative to oblivion, except by conceiving of one that looks pretty much like the lives we live. Life, in that way too, goes on. But some people recover from grief more quickly than others, and if your husband comes home one evening and tells you that he’s going to die in twelve hours, you will understand that, whether his soul is in heaven or nonexistent, in the morning you will still have a life to live.

A man returns from a visit to the doctor and tells his wife, I’ve got twelve hours to live. I’ll be dead by sunrise. At first they are
stunned, grief-stricken, unable to comprehend the news. But soon the wife fixes the husband a good meal, and they open the expensive bottle of wine they’d been saving since their vacation in France twenty years ago, because if this isn’t the special occasion they’d been saving it for, what is? They reminisce fondly, if elegiacally, about their life together before they go to bed, make long, slow, and deeply meaningful love, and then drift off to sleep. An hour later the husband, unable to sleep and still yearning for the love he is leaving behind, wakes his wife and again they make love. She falls back asleep, but he is still unable to sleep, fretting about dying, and, Eros defeating Thanatos however briefly, he nudges her yet again for more love, and she says, “That’s fine for you, but I’ve got to get up in the morning.” As she knows, life goes on, and it’s better to face the first day alone after a good night’s sleep.

Or to die laughing.

Until I started keeping a short list of people who died laughing, I thought I’d outgrown role models. Theirs is a death to which I aspire. In 1975, Alex Mitchell, a bricklayer in Norfolk, England, started laughing at a TV show called
The Goodies
and did not stop until he died twenty-five minutes later. In the fatal skit, a master of the esoteric and imaginary Lancastrian martial art of “Ecky Thump” is challenged, successively, by a karate master; a blackfaced minstrel parody of Muhammad Ali; a baguette-wielding French mime; and an Australian in outback garb who flings a boomerang at him. The boomerang misses. The Ecky Thump master pulls a blood pudding from his waistband and in turn thumps each on the head. Finally, he is challenged by a Scotsman in full Highlands regalia. The Scot prances about, quickstepping in place, emitting guttural “Scottish” vocalizations, and jabbing at the Ecky Thumper with the drone tubes of his bagpipe. Just as he is about to dispatch the Ecky Thump master with a final swipe of his bagpipes, the Australian’s boomerang circles back out of the sky and lays him out. The ridiculous,
prancing Scot always makes me laugh, but not for as long or as wholeheartedly as he did Alex Mitchell.
Slapstick!: The Illustrated History of Knockabout Comedy
quotes Mitchell’s wife about her husband’s final twenty-five minutes:

Alex just couldn’t stop laughing. He was a Scot, you see, so he was especially tickled to see a Scotsman wrestling with his bagpipes! And he kept laughing, right through the programme. Well I think he just laughed too heartily and too long, because just before the closing titles he gave a tremendous belly-laugh, slumped on the sofa, and died.

The BBC apologized, and Mrs. Mitchell wrote
The Goodies
and thanked them for making her husband’s last twenty-five minutes of life happy ones.

As impressive as Mitchell’s death is, the most famous hilarity-induced final exit in history belongs to Chrysippus, the Stoic philosopher, who committed the faux pas of laughing himself to death
at his own joke
. When he saw his donkey eat figs that had been prepared for his meal, he told his servant to give the donkey unmixed wine to drink too—and he laughed so violently that he died. Apparently the joke is that the ass was eating not just Chrysippus’s own food, but food exclusively for humans, and that by ordering the servant to serve the beast wine he was treating it even more like a privileged human guest. I like to think the notoriously arrogant philosopher glimpsed himself in the ass and collapsed in appreciative laughter. There is no evidence of his wife writing a thank-you note to the donkey—or of Chrysippus ever having carried it about town on his shoulders.

With the whole of human history to survey, my list of people dead of hilarity has stalled at a paltry ten. So I have to confront the sad fact that I am unlikely to be number eleven and that Erin will
never be afforded the pleasure of thanking someone for making my last minutes mirthful. I will have to do that bit of work myself.

Last year, when my father was in the hospital dying, he tried to say something as I stood by his hospital bed. His throat was raw and his voice whispery from dehydrating medicine, and I asked him twice to repeat himself before I leaned down, ear to lips, and asked for a third time. Suddenly, clearly, he said, “What’s the matter? You losing your hearing?”

Was it a joke? Mike, standing at the foot of the bed, laughed.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been diagnosed with hearing loss.”

“What caused it?”

“You.” He looked confused. “Genetically, I mean,” I added, and forced a smile. Like a couple of my brothers, I’ve inherited his hearing loss.

I do think he was trying to joke, and so was I. But the old, sad father-son aggression was hard to miss. He was angry at not being understood, and I, annoyed at being snapped at, instinctively reacted in kind. Still, Mike laughed. Dad was three months short of his ninetieth birthday, in pain, dying, and Mike admired his spunk—and Dad and I had both tried to make the moment funny. Better to go out with a misunderstood joke on your lips than no joke at all. And it was better, I hope, to joke with the dying man than moon over him.

At noon, Dad didn’t want us to leave him alone, so Mike went to Subway and brought back sandwiches. After we’d eaten, Mike, Roger, and I balled our sandwich wrappers around the uneaten pickles and shot them like basketballs at the trash can by the head of Dad’s bed. As each shot missed, we taunted the shooter, laughing. I gathered the wadded paper off the floor, and we each shot again. One errant shot bounced off Dad’s pillow, but he was asleep by then and didn’t stir as we giggled sheepishly. Mike’s wife, Gina, and Erin,
though they’d been laughing too, told us it was time to stop acting like children and let Dad sleep.

A few days later, just after ten
PM
on June 30, Dad died, exactly three months shy of his ninetieth birthday, all of us—sons and daughters-in-law—plus Tim and his wife, who’d driven in from Atlanta, gathered in a small room in the hospital to discuss the funeral. Mike mentioned with a truncated laugh that if Dad had lived two hours longer we’d have his July pension check to split among us. I chuckled briefly, reassuringly. Mike didn’t care about the money for himself, but his mind, in the autonomous way of minds, was both grieving and already moving on to the practical business of arranging and paying for Dad’s funeral. Mike told us there was some confusion in the cemetery office about where Dad’s plot was. He’d double-check to make sure the grave was dug in the right place.

Before I could stop myself I said, “If we let them bury Dad in the wrong plot, we can probably sneak out without paying.” In the silence that followed, all three of my brothers looking at me quizzically, Erin put her hand on my knee and said firmly, “Not now.”

At the funeral on a hilltop in Griffin, Georgia, while my cousin Julie led the funeral service, a solemn service with an air force honor guard, I looked down at the highway and thought of the joke in which a preacher new to town is rushing out into the country to conduct a funeral for a homeless man. Because he’s driven down the wrong road a couple of times, he’s running very late when he sees two men standing in a field with shovels in their hands. He races toward them, and glancing into the grave, he sees that the concrete grave liner is already in place. Determined to give the poor homeless man, with no family or friends to mourn him, as fine a farewell as any rich man could wish for, he launches into an impassioned sermon. When he finishes the eulogy, he leads the two diggers in a mournful chorus of “Amazing Grace” that leaves the three of them
in tears. He shakes their hands, and as he walks back to his car, proud of his efforts, he hears one man say to the other, “I ain’t never seen nothing like that before—and I been puttin’ in septic tanks for almost forty years.”

I waited until Erin and I were back in the car before I told her what I’d been thinking.

“I’m glad you waited,” she said.

I too am glad I waited, but I cherish the skewed pleasure of finding something funny, and thus life affirming, in sorrow: the reminder that not every hole in the ground is a grave and that our rituals are both deeply meaningful and deeply meaningless at the same time; they are both consoling and ineffectual. The mind recognizes the simultaneously opposing truths, and the mind’s having a mind of its own is one of the great delights of human intelligence. Humor is thus a way of being serious in a serious world. Laughter seems to me the only viable response to having a speeding mind in a slowing body, logic in the skull of an animal. We love a life we cannot keep, and so I want to go out cracking wise—even if my idea of cracked wisdom is a fart joke.

A good ending for Erin and me might be the two of us lying in adjoining beds in a nursing home forty years from now, and we overhear the head nurse (that’s the one with the dirty knees, you know) tell her supervisor, “I think we are losing that old couple in Room 5C. They talk to each other in the voice of a dog that’s been dead for fifty years, and then they laugh till I think they are going to die.”

I’ll look at Erin and say, “You two just crack each other up, doncha?”

In heaven we will be joined by that dead yellow dog, and he’ll greet us by saying, “Hi, ma’am. Hi, sir. Glad to see you. Hey, sir, pull my dewclaw.”

“No, I know what you are going to do. You’re going to fart.”

“Oh, no, Sir. I’d never do that to you.”

“Yeah, you would.”

“Oh, honey, go ahead and pull his dewclaw. You know how much he loves that joke,” Erin will say.

So, yeah, I’ll pull the damn dead dog’s dewclaw—and then look into heaven or the void and listen hopefully for laughter.

So maybe I die in a car wreck along with my good friend Tom Doherty and my brother Mike. As we line up at the pearly gates, St. Peter says to Tom, “Thomas Patrick Doherty, you old reprobate, I never thought I’d see you here. But let me ask you this: When you are in your casket and your friends and family are standing around mourning your passing, what would you like to hear them say about you?”

Tom says, “I want to hear them say I was a great film scholar, a demanding teacher, and a loving husband.”

“How about you, Mike?” St. Peter asks.

Mike says, “I’d like them to say I was a wonderful husband and father—and a businessman who always kept his word.”

“And you, Andrew, what would you like to hear the people gathered at your casket say about you?”

“I’d like them to say, ‘Andrew loved Erin with his whole heart—and hey, look, he’s moving!’ ”

1. A Moth Flies into A Podiatrist’s Window

A moth flies into a podiatrist’s window and alights on his desk. The podiatrist looks at the moth for a moment and says, “What’s the problem?”

The moth says, “I don’t even know where to begin. I get up in the morning and go to work, and I don’t even know why I’m doing it. My boss is a tyrant who’s never satisfied, and the pay is terrible. I barely make enough to support my family. So on my way home I flew in here in despair. . . .”