The Joker: A Memoir (15 page)

Finally his silence wore me down, and I prodded him. “Did you hear me? I said I don’t want . . .”

“I heard you. I’m thinking about it.”

After a long silence, staring at the TV, never letting his eyes drift in my direction, he said, “No one is going to make you go to church if you don’t want to go.”

“Okay,” I said softly, “I don’t want to go.”

He stood up from the lounger, leaving it open, the footrest stretched out in front of it, and walked out of the room. I was halfway up the stairs to my bedroom when my mother raced across the den, where the TV was still blaring, and at the foot of the stairs she yelled, “Just who do you think you are? Just who do you think you are not to believe in God? As long as you live in this house, you’re going to get your butt up and go to church whether you want to or not. Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

Her eyes were slightly unfocused and her jaw was clenched combatively. I’d expected Dad to go berserk, not her. She had always seemed to take church with a grain of salt, sometimes griping about
having to go, occasionally implying that Dad made her go when she didn’t want to. As I stood on the stairs gaping at her, unable to speak, I realized that Dad, as a strong believer, must have struggled with faith and could accept, though unhappily, those struggles in his son, who was still poring over C. S. Lewis,
The Lives of the Saints,
Teilhard de Chardin, and everything in print by or about Thomas Merton. But Mom, because she accepted without challenge the faith she’d been born into, was enraged by my rejection of it. I was getting too big for my britches, showing off, trying to be a smarty-pants intellectual.

Dad walked up beside her, put his arm around her shoulders, and pulled her around so she stood at an angle to the two of us.

“Roberta, you don’t force somebody to go to church. That isn’t what it’s about.”

But the next Sunday, when I didn’t come down for breakfast, he knocked on my door and said, “You’re going to be late for church,” just as if nothing had happened. And just as if nothing had happened, I got up and I went, confused and sullen. And the next Sunday, and the next.

On the fourth Sunday, when he knocked, I called back through the door, “I don’t want to go.”

“You’re not going to church?” He sounded surprised.

“Only if you make me,” I said—one of several lines I’d practiced.

“No, I’m not going to make you,” he said, and he left to dress for church.

•  •  •

In the hall of the church I no longer attended, I’d seen tacked on the bulletin board one of the most shocking pictures I’ve ever seen. It was the famous Ralph Kozak painting of Jesus, his head thrown back in manly, open-mouthed laughter, delight untouched by malice, his upper teeth in a straight pearly row, unlike any ever seen
in a grown man’s face in Greco-Roman Palestine. I stared at it with amazement, amazement and longing. I so wanted the picture to be true that I felt a physical craving, a craving as pure as hunger, and I didn’t believe it for a second.

As G. K. Chesterton and others have pointed out, the story of Christ is technically a comedy. If his life ended with his death, it would be a tragedy. But he returns from the dead, and, if you believe in what the faith teaches, he brings eternal life to all believers. That’s a lot to rejoice over. And the laughing Christ is right to see this. Yet it is impossible not to notice that in the gospels Jesus is the Man of Sorrows. He famously never laughs or jokes, and the only time he is confronted with a riddle, he doesn’t answer, though his life could depend on the answer. Francis Bacon retells the story this way: “What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting.” If he is who he says he is, Jesus must know, but he doesn’t say. Perhaps he disdains to answer. Some answers are only for those who can hear them.

The Oxford don turned Episcopal priest M. A. Screech says in
Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
that the religious and the non-religious will always find each other amusing because they understand the world in fundamentally different ways. The spiritually inclined value things that, to the worldly, don’t exist, which makes their actions comic; and the worldly, to the sad amusement of the otherworldly, cherish evanescent delights that will cost them eternal bliss. Paul says it in almost those words, in Corinthians: “Hath God not made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.”

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven,” wrote Mark Twain. Baudelaire, his contemporary,
went further. Baudelaire declares that because there was no sadness in Eden, there was no laughter either. Harmony prevailed. Laughter didn’t exist till disharmony provoked it: “The comic is a damnable element born of diabolic parentage.” But I doubt there is much laughter in hell either. Laughter isn’t demonic, but the result of our human double vision. We see both the perfect world we desire and the flawed one we live in. Believers and unbelievers live in different flawed worlds and conceive different perfections.

What we see around us is often disorderly and impossible to understand as meaningful. Christianity, like all religions, offers meaning. Jokes home in on the disordered places where meaning fails. They are drawn to chaos but they are terrified of it too because they cannot
not
see where meaning breaks down. Once they find those inconsistencies and breakdowns, they play with them, toss them in the air like a juggler keeping aloft a ball, two flaming torches, a cat, and a milking stool. Their attraction to chaos can be satanic delight or a godly attempt to heal by cauterizing a wound. They are both revolutionary and profoundly conservative. They are suspicious of systems of thought and enamored of the anomalies in them, but mostly they are content to mock, not destroy, those spindly systems.

Walking through a small town, Jesus sees a crowd milling about, preparing to stone to death a woman who has committed adultery. Just as in the Bible, he steps forward, raises his hand, and proclaims, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

The crowd falls silent, abashed. They begin to disperse, and then a lightning bolt zings out of a clear sky and blasts the woman to a charred lump of flesh.

In an anguished voice, Jesus looks up at the sky and, through clenched teeth, says, “I’m trying to make a point here, Dad!”

The joke depicts people’s uneasiness with forgiveness, especially for sexual sins. But more than that, it brings together as comedy the tensions of the faith. How do those two forces at the core of
Christianity—judgment and forgiveness—work in practice? For all its talk of forgiveness, and the real dedication of many believers to that ideal, the faith I grew up in often took more pleasure in the failings of others than joy at redemption. The knowing remarks about how Mr. Holcomb was going to roast in hell for all eternity and how Mrs. Sloan might be enjoying life now but she was going to be paying for it for a long time in a very warm place elicited more smiles than any confession of faith I saw. So I appreciated the beleaguered Jesus of the joke who was balked in his effort to teach compassion. And it’s just fun to see one of the great trump lines of the Bible trumped, one of the great moments of enduring wisdom turned upside down.

The tension between judgment and compassion is at the base of a religion that rests on the paradoxes of its tenets. I love the Christian faith for those paradoxes. Whether we are believers or not, we make judgments; we extend or withhold forgiveness every day. The two impulses are rich, true, decent, and irresolvably in conflict. So it’s impossible not to imagine that those Christians who see this life as a tragic fleshly trial and those who see it as a wonderful precursor to heaven are simply living out visions that are determined more by temperament than theology. Their preconceived worldviews determine which side of the gospel they focus their eyes on. And that, sadly enough, is something else to laugh about.

Here’s how I resolve them. Here’s my theology:

At the end of a powerful and emotional sermon, Billy Graham looks out over a packed arena and asks those who have felt the Lord working on their hearts to come forward and be saved.

One man slowly makes his way down the aisle. When he reaches the front, Reverend Graham holds up his hands, the music stops, silence falls over the huge hall, and into the microphone Billy Graham says, “Brother, who put those clothes on your body?”

The man replies, “The Lord did!”

“Amen!” roar a hundred thousand voices.

“And who, my brother, puts food on your table?”

The man replies, “The Lord does!”

“Amen!” roars the crowd with one voice.

“And who, my dear brother in Christ, put that smile on your face and the joy in your heart?”

“The Lord did.”

“Amen! Hallelujah!” roars the crowd.

Billy raises his hands again and calls for silence. He leans in, holds the microphone closer to the flushed face of the new convert, and asks, “And, brother, what did the devil ever do for you?”

The man pauses for a second, thinking. “Nothing,” he says. “Fuck him.”

Amen, brother.

“Get in the car. Find your brothers, and everybody get in the car! Right now!” my father yelled out the side door of my uncle’s house. Behind him in the kitchen, Uncle Buddy yelled at Dad’s back and kept yelling. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but as we moved in confusion through the carport to the car I heard despair in my mother’s placating voice, trying to calm her husband and her brother. Then we were slamming out of the driveway, braking hard, and still slipping backward on loose gravel and red clay as Dad banged the shift lever from reverse to drive, and our green Impala wagon with the big fins accelerated furiously away.

From the backseat I studied the side of my father’s face. He glared down the road in front of him, violently silent, his jaw tight, his neck rigid and flushed. Several times my mother turned to him and opened her mouth to say something. Each time she stopped herself, turned, and stared hopelessly out the window away from
my father, twisting a damp Kleenex in her hands. My brothers and I were very quiet.

Only much later did I work up the courage to ask Mom what had happened. After everyone’s nerves had stopped humming and I had wheedled a bit, Mom said Buddy had told a joke Dad didn’t approve of. After I wheedled a bit more, she told me the joke.

A colored man collapses on the street, clutching at his heart. He thrashes around for a moment and then quits moving. Two white men dash over and kneel at his side. One man says, “I think he’s having a heart attack!”

“He needs artificial respiration,” the other says.

“What’s that?”

“You put your lips on his and blow down into his mouth to keep him breathing.”

“You do what? You put your lips on his lips? I’m not going to do that. You do it.”

The second man thinks for a moment. He curled each hand till it formed a tube and stacked one atop the other.

My mother acted out the scene. She looked at me through the tube of curled fingers, letting me see that the man could breathe through them without letting his lips touch a black man’s.

“Then the man,” Mom said, “leaned down and put his hands next to the black man’s ear,” and, imitating the man in the joke, Mom put her fingers to her mouth, leaned over, and whispered through the trumpet of her fingers, “Nigger, you gonna
die!
”

The last word—
die!
—blasted through her hands with delighted triumph, propelled by the laugh she was already laughing. I laughed too, enjoying the twist in the joke and the delight Mom took when the Good Samaritan’s concern for a dying man is trumped by his racism.

Dad didn’t think any part of such a joke was funny. When Buddy had told it in his living room, Mom laughed, though
nervously, knowing Dad was steaming. Driven over the edge by the punch line, Dad had angrily ordered Buddy not to use that kind of language in front of children. The only children in the room were my brother Mike, who was three, and my cousin Steve, who was two. What my uncle had been screaming as we rushed to the car, my mother told me later, was “This is my house! You can’t tell me how to talk in my own goddamn house!”

“Nigger” would’ve rocketed Dad into Earth orbit. “Goddamn” would’ve kicked in the afterburners.

The joke sparked the first racial quarrel I’d seen, but I had begun to be wary about race a couple of years earlier, when I was six. When my father was transferred from Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, to Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina, our family had to wait a year for a unit to open up in on-base housing. My parents rented a small brick ranch house out in the country, and I rode the bus to the county’s consolidated school for first grade. The second week of school, as I hunched over the dining room table, coloring in a picture of Porky Pig with smooth, even sweeps of pink crayon, my mother asked me if any of the kids were different.

“I don’t know,” I said, and kept on pinking in Porky’s outline while trying to decide if pigs’ feet were black or brown. In real life, they seemed to be somewhere in-between. And were cartoon pigs’ feet the same color as real ones? I didn’t know what
different
meant. Tall or short, mean or dirty, bulge-eyed or hare-lipped? I’d been preoccupied with keeping my juice money and lunch money separate, my pencils sharp in the cracked plastic pencil box, and my sandwich unsquashed. It’s very difficult not to sit on your lunch bag, step on it, or clutch it too tightly when you are six, drowsy, and your bus jounces off asphalt and down a dirt road and then back onto asphalt again five times on a forty-five-minute circuit through a North Carolina dawn.

“I mean, do any of the kids look different?” Mom asked.

“I guess.”

“Well, are any of them a different color?”