Zizek's Jokes (3 page)

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, Slovene feminists reacted with a great outcry to the publicity poster of a large cosmetics factory that made suntan lotion, depicting a series of well-tanned women's behinds in tight bathing suits, accompanied with the logo “Each has her own factor.” Of course, this publicity is based on a rather vulgar double-entendre: the logo ostensibly refers to the suntan lotion, which is offered to customers with different sun-protection factors for different skin types; however, its entire effect is based on its obvious male-chauvinist reading: “Each woman can be had, if only the man knows her factor, her specific catalyst, what arouses her!” The Freudian point regarding fundamental fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses such a “factor” that regulates her or his desire: “a woman, viewed from behind, on her hands and knees” was the Wolfman's factor; a statue—like a woman without pubic hair—was Ruskin's factor; etc., etc. There is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this “factor”: this awareness can never be subjectivized; it is uncanny, even horrifying, since it somehow “depossesses” the subject, reducing her or him to a puppet-like level “beyond dignity and freedom.”

THE DEBATE ABOUT WHETHER or not waterboarding is torture should be dropped as obvious nonsense: how, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? As to the replacement of the word “torture” with “enhanced interrogation technique,” one should note that we are dealing here with an extension of Politically Correct logic: in exactly the same way that “disabled” becomes “physically challenged,” “torture” becomes “enhanced interrogation technique” (and, why not, “rape” could become “enhanced seduction technique”). The crucial point is that torture—brutal violence practiced by the state—was made publicly acceptable at the very moment when public language was rendered Politically Correct in order to protect victims from symbolic violence. These two phenomena are the two sides of the same coin.

THERE IS A UNIQUE COMICAL MOMENT in Kierkegaard's
Concept of Anxiety
where he describes in a mockingly anti-Hegelian way how Simon Tornacensis (the thirteenth-century Parisian scholastic theologian) “thought that God must be obliged to him for having furnished a proof of the Trinity. … This story has numerous analogies, and in our time speculation has assumed such authority that it has practically tried to make God feel uncertain of himself, like a monarch who is anxiously waiting to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a limited monarch.”

Kierkegaard of course dismisses the attempts to logically demonstrate the existence of God as absurd and pointless logical exercises (his model of such professorial blindness for the authentic religious experience was Hegel's dialectical machinery); however, his sense of humor cannot withstand the wonderful image of God in anxiety, dreading for his own status as if it depends on the logical exercises of a philosopher, as if the philosopher's reasoning has consequences in the real, so that, if the proof fails, God's existence itself is threatened. And one can go even further in this line of Kierkegaardian reasoning: what undoubtedly attracted him to the remark of Tornacensis was the blasphemous idea of a God himself in anxiety. The political parallel here is crucial, since Kierkegaard himself resorts to the comparison of God and king: God exposed to the philosopher's whimsy is like a king exposed to the whimsy of a popular assembly. But what is his point here? Is it simply that, in both cases, we should reject liberal decadence and opt for absolute monarchy? What complicates this simple and apparently obvious solution is that, for Kierkegaard, the (properly comical) point of the Incarnation is that that God-king becomes a beggar, a low ordinary human. Would it thus not be more correct to conceive Christianity as the paradox of God's abdication—God steps down to be replaced by the assembly of believers called the Holy Spirit?

THERE ARE MANY OBJECTS or gadgets that promise to deliver excessive pleasure but that effectively reproduce only its absence. The latest fashion is the Stamina Training Unit, a counterpart to the vibrator: a masturbatory device that resembles a battery-powered light (so we're not embarrassed when carrying it around). You put your erect penis into the opening at the top, push the button, and the object vibrates until satisfaction. The product is available in different colors, sizes, and forms (hairy or hairless, etc.) that imitate all three main openings for sexual penetration (mouth, vagina, anus). What one buys here is the partial object (erogenous zone) alone, deprived of the embarrassing additional burden of the entire person. How are we to cope with this brave new world that undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy. So maybe, if our hands meet while pouring tea, we may end up in bed as part of a real romance, enjoying it outside any superego pressure to enjoy.

IN AN OLD YUGOSLAV JOKE mocking police corruption, a policeman returns home unexpectedly and finds his wife naked in their marital bed, obviously hot and excited. Suspecting that he surprised her with a lover, he starts to look around the room for a hidden man. The wife goes pale when he leans down to look under the bed; but after some brief whispering, the husband rises with a satisfied, smug smile and says “Sorry, my love, false alarm. There is no one under the bed!,” while his hand is holding tightly a couple of high denomination banknotes.

WHEN THE UNCONDITIONAL CHRISTIAN fundamentalist supporters of Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argumentation is best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily
Die Presse
: it shows two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” THESE are today's allies of the state of Israel.
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YEARS AGO, ON THE CAMPUS OF SANTA CRUZ, one of the capitals of Political Correctness, I was told that that they developed jokes that are funny without hurting, humiliating, or even making fun of anyone, like “what happens when a triangle meets a circle?” As one might expect, I immediately exploded back: I don't care what happens when a triangle meets a circle; the whole enjoyment of a joke is that there must be someone who is hurt, humiliated ... But what if was I wrong, what if I missed the purely formal aspect that is what makes a joke funny much more than its direct content, in the same way that sexuality is not a matter of direct content, but of the way this content is formally treated? The question is, of course, can this form do its work alone, or does it need “a little piece of reality” in the sense of some contingent positive content related to “dirty” topics (sex, violence)?
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IN A WONDERFULLY STUPID (and apolitical!) Russian joke from the time of the Soviet Union, two strangers sit in the same train compartment. After a long silence, one suddenly addresses the other: “Have you ever fucked a dog?” Surprised, the other replies: “No—have you?” “Of course not. That's disgusting. I just asked it to start a conversation!”
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IN CHINA, THE LOCAL PARTY BOSSES are popular targets of obscene jokes that mock their vulgar tastes and sexual obsessions. (Far from emanating from ordinary people, these jokes mostly express the attitude of the higher
nomenklatura
toward the lower cadres.) In one of them, a small provincial party boss has just returned from the big city where he bought himself expensive shiny new black shoes. When his young secretary brings him tea, he wants to impress her with the quality of his shoes; so when she leans over his table and his foot is under her, he tells her that he can see (reflected in his shoe) that her underpants are blue; the next day the flirting goes on, and he tells her that today her underpants are green. On the third day, the secretary decides to come without underpants; looking at his shoes for the reflection, the party boss desperately exclaims: “I've just bought these shoes, and already there's a large crack on their surface!”

In the final displacement, precisely when the boss is able to see the reflected “thing itself” (the vaginal crack, no longer just the underpants covering it), he withdraws from recognizing it and reads it as the feature of the mirror reflecting it (the crack of his polished shoes). One can even detect here, beneath the surface of the boss's vulgar boastfulness, a sign of hidden politeness: in a gentle misrecognition, he prefers to appear as an idiot rather than to declare rudely what he can see. The procedure here is different from that of fetishist displacement: the subject's perception doesn't stop at the last thing he sees before the direct view of the vaginal opening (as in the fetishist fixation); that is, his shoe is not his fetish, the last thing he sees before seeing the vaginal crack; when, unexpectedly and inadvertently, he does get a view of the vaginal crack, he assumes the crack as his own, as his own deficiency.
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A JOKE THAT RENDERS THE HEGELIAN TRIAD inclusive of the final “reconciliation” is a particularly cruel variation of the first-bad-news-then-good-news medical jokes, encompassing the entire triad of good-bad-good news. After his wife had undergone a long and risky operation, the husband approaches the doctor and inquires about the outcome. The doctor begins: “Your wife survived; she will probably live longer than you. But there are some complications: she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles, so shit will drift continuously out of her anus. There will also be a continuous flow of a bad smelling yellow jelly from her vagina, so any sex is out. Plus her mouth will malfunction and food will be falling out of it.” Noting the growing expression of panic on the husband's face, the doctor taps him friendly on the shoulder and smiles: “Don't worry, I was just joking! Everything is OK—she died during the operation.”
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THERE IS A WONDERFULLY VULGAR JEWISH JOKE about a Polish-Jewish wife, tired after a hard day's work; when her husband comes home, also tired, but horny, he tells her: “I cannot make love to you now, but I need a release—can you suck me and swallow my sperm? That would help me a lot!” The wife replies: “I am too tired to do that now, darling—why don't you just masturbate into a glass, and I will drink it in the morning!”

Does this wife—contrary to the cliché about the holistic-intuitive reasoning of women as opposed to the masculine rational analysis—not provide an example of the ruthless feminine use of Understanding, of its power to separate what naturally belongs together?
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RECALL THE ITALIAN EXPRESSION
se non è vero, è ben trovato
— “even if it is not true, it is well conceived.” In this sense, anecdotes about famous persons, even when invented, often characterize the core of their personality more appropriately than the enumeration of their real qualities—here also, “truth has the structure of a fiction,” as Lacan put it. There is a wonderfully obscene Serbo-Croat version of this expression that perfectly renders the protopsychotic rejection of the symbolic fiction:
se non è vero, jebem ti mater!
“Jebem ti mater” (pronounced “yebem ti mater,” meaning “I'll fuck your mother”) is one of the most popular vulgar insults; the joke, of course, relies on the perfect correspondence, with the same accents and number of syllables, between
e ben trovato
and
jebem ti mater
. The meaning thus changes into the explosion of rage in the incestuous direction, attacking the other's most intimate primordial object: “It better be true—if it is not true, I'll fuck your mother!” These two versions thus clearly enact the two reactions to what literally turns out to be a lie: its furious rejection, or its “subl(im)ation” into a “higher” truth. In psychoanalytic terms, their difference is the one between foreclosure (
Verwerfung
) and symbolic transubstantiation.
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WE ALL KNOW THE OLD JOKE referring to the enigma of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays: “Not William Shakespeare, but someone else with the same name.” This is what Lacan means by the “decentered subject”; this is how a subject relates to the name that fixes its symbolic identity: John Smith is (always, by definition, in its very notion) not John Smith, but someone else with the same name. As Shakespeare's Juliet knew, I am never “that name”—the John Smith who really thinks he is John Smith is a psychotic.
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THIS LACK OR IMPERFECTION of the (big) Other is rendered in a wonderfully simple way in a joke about two friends who are playing a game where you have to hit a can with a ball. After repeated kicks, one of them says: “For the devil's sake, I missed it!” His friend, a religious fanatic, comments: “How dare you talk like that; it's blasphemy! May God strike you with lightning as punishment!” A moment later, lightning does strike, but it hits the religious guy who, shaken and barely alive, turns his gaze up and asks: “But why did you hit me, my Lord, and not the culprit?” A deep voice resonates from above: “For the devil's sake, I missed!”
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SUCH AN IMPOSSIBLE POINT OF VIEW is often mobilized in jokes. A contemporary Chinese sexual joke reports on a conversation between twin brothers who are still fetuses in their mother's womb; one says to the other: “I love it when our father visits us, but why is he so rude at the end of each visit, spitting all over us?” The other replies: “True, our uncle is much nicer: he always comes with a nice hat made of rubber on his head, so that he doesn't spit on us!”
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