The Joker: A Memoir (24 page)

I remain certain that these jokes, representative of my geopolitical acumen, drew the future secretary of state into our all-male group of joke tellers.

She listened for a minute, laughing easily, until I got to, I’m sorry to confess, the one about the group of leprechauns who knock on the door of the convent. When the mother superior answers, the leprechauns shove one member of their group toward her, and say, “Dewey here has a question for you.”

“Sister,” says Dewey shyly, “are there any nuns in the convent here about my height?”

“No,” says the mother superior. “There aren’t any nuns here as short as you.”

Behind Dewey, the other leprechauns begin to titter, but he ignores them and says, “Now, Mother, surely you know of at least one nun somewhere in the whole of Ireland who would be about my height, wouldn’t you say?”

“No,” says the mother superior. “I know all the nuns in Ireland and there’s not one who isn’t at least two feet taller than you.”

The other leprechauns are laughing openly now, but Dewey continues, wheedling desperately.

“But surely you’ll agree that in the whole of the world it is theoretically possible that there’s one nun who is as short as I am, wouldn’t you now, Mother?”

The mother superior thinks for a moment and then says, “As a matter of fact, I know, from international conferences, all the nuns in the world and there isn’t one as short as you.”

All the other leprechauns burst into raucous laughter, and chant, “Dewey fucked a penguin! Dewey fucked a penguin!”

The men in the group laughed cheerfully at the deluded and
lusty leprechaun, but Ms. Poised pursed her lips and flashed me an aggrieved look.

Man, had I called it wrong. She was a prude, and the punch line, mild by my debased standards, had earned me the skunk eye.

The joking foundered for a moment, and then Condoleezza stepped in to fill the awkwardness she had imposed.

“Why is September fifteenth a national holiday for blacks?”

I’d heard the joke but couldn’t come up with the answer, my memory fuddled by the music pumping in from the living room. Also, I was trying to figure out how to catch her attention, exquisitely aware she was three years younger than I and already famous, while I was a thirty-one-year-old graduate student living hand to mouth, nervous, poorly dressed, about a quarter drunk, and sporting a bad haircut and a black plastic digital watch I’d bought at Safeway for two bucks after my Timex stopped.

“I don’t know. Why?” someone said, as I stared off at the wall, face scrunched in concentration, still trying to remember the answer—as if bigfooting her punch line was going to impress her.

“That’s the day the new Cadillacs are introduced.” She smiled broadly. We laughed politely at the old joke. I studied her smile, trying to see if she was playing with us, leading us white men down a racist path so she could turn on us once we had committed ourselves to laughter. No, that wasn’t right. Her laugh was open, if temperate. She enjoyed her joke. But she also enjoyed making the men nervous, clearing out a space for herself in our group, taking charge.

“What’s a definition of
mass confusion
?” she asked.

This one I knew, and I wasn’t about to answer it. I was only a
quarter
-drunk.

“Father’s Day in Harlem,” she said, and laughed more deeply, more openly than before. I laughed unhappily. Her first joke was relatively benign, turning only on African-Americans’ supposed predilection for Cadillacs, but it made me squirm. The second joke was
more treacherous. It mocks the serious social problem of unmarried and often teenaged African-American mothers raising children by different fathers, a charged subject to say the least—and all the slipperier when told by a highly accomplished black woman who had herself avoided that fate. I’d first heard the joke told with triumphant contempt by my uncle. To him, it was a devastating commentary on the moral degeneracy of African-Americans, and now I was hearing it from a woman who might be implying that she too felt superior to women who had made less careful choices than she had. But didn’t she deserve to feel superior? If she did, was it okay to say so? Or was she just telling a joke?

Sipping my jug wine, trying to look amiable and encouraging, the way a good sport must with a joke teller, I was myself the definition of mass confusion. Not for the first time, I was in the precarious position I’d often put people in. I was like the character in Walker Percy’s
The Last Gentleman
: “Jokes always made him nervous. He had to attend to the perilous needs of the joke teller.”

If she could tell mildly racist jokes, could I reciprocate with similar ones? I wanted to banter, maybe flirt, with the good-looking woman with a sense of humor, the one I’d already offended once. Would she see it as intruding on turf I had no right to walk on? What would my jokes sound like to her when told in my Alabama accent? I might easily step over whatever line she had drawn for herself. And what was it in her jokes that she found funny? That they were scornful of black men? Or were they jokes about class? Were they her way of saying, however obliquely, “I’m not like those people. I don’t act or think like them”? That was certainly one of the reasons my friends and I told redneck and hillbilly jokes. Were her jokes her way of showing she was at ease with herself? Was she showing us she was as tough in her way as we were in ours? Was her motivation some volatile combination of all these reasons, plus others I couldn’t see?

Or, again, did she simply like jokes?

I listened while someone else told a joke and then drifted back to the jug of wine and refilled my glass. I felt like poor Dewey. But instead of fucking a penguin, I’d simply screwed the pooch: I’d failed completely. I was seeing the future diplomat at work. She entered the room, deftly sized up the group of men she found herself in, and redirected the joking toward a place where she was completely in charge.

•  •  •

In the years since 1983, I’ve heard exactly three new-to-me racist jokes. Maybe I’d have heard more if I still lived in Alabama, though I haven’t heard any when visiting my father and brother there. I’ve worked for the last twenty-five years in universities, and academics, while they value wit, get squirmy around the atavistic psychology that drives most jokes. But I think racist jokes have mostly died out because the social stigma has become greater and more onerous in every stratum of America, and that intensifying of the taboo has been facilitated by the jokes’ migration to the Internet. I very seldom hear a joke anymore. Or tell one. I receive and forward them as e-mail, but they are not racist jokes, coming or going. Very few of us want to risk forwarding a scurrilous joke that might be traced back to us. Besides, writing out an ugly joke makes it even uglier. In person, we can judge how it’s being heard and change it as we tell it. We can signal with a shrug, a raised eyebrow, or a grimace how we feel about different aspects of what we are saying. If worse comes to worst, we can simply explain why we are telling it. The printed page and the pixilated screen permit none of these ameliorations.

So, in the mid-eighties, when I was visiting my friend Sara in Tuscaloosa, I had a good idea of what was coming when she asked, “What’s the definition of
renege
?”

“A shift change at McDonald’s,” she answered quickly, before I could work out where the riddle had to go. Her eyes were shining
with pleasure, and I laughed a little, buoyed by her irresistible delight in puns and trespassed taboos. It wasn’t her telling the joke that troubled me, but the joke itself. It’s clearly racist; it links blacks with low-paying, crappy jobs, and the premise wildly at odds with reality: McDonald’s work crews are not all black. It’s hard not to guess someone saw the possible pun buried in
renege
and contrived a way to bring it forth, rather than observing a situation that sparked ugly wit. The very real racism embedded in the joke is used to make the joke; the joke is not formed to advance racism, even though it does.

In other words, it’s a forced pun. The ins and outs of effective punning were brilliantly dissected by Charles Lamb, the great nineteenth-century essayist, who admits to loving a bit of wordplay found in the writings of Jonathan Swift. Lamb’s logic is too tight and too charming to condense:

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: “Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?”

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very common, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place—a
public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,—which the fellow was beginning to understand; but then the wig again comes in, and he can make nothing of it: all put together constitute a picture: Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass.

Lamb contrasts this spur-of-the-moment pun with others in which the pun is “too good to be natural”: “One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line.” Just so
renege
. With racist jokes that’s a good thing because it exposes the distortion of reality racism depends on. But it makes a bad joke.

•  •  •

I encountered the next of these three jokes in a joke book, an uncommon experience. I don’t remember what book or when it was published, only that one joke in it jolted an amoral laugh out of me.

Q: What comes out of a cocoon?

A:
A n-n-n-n-nigger.

I stared at the joke for a few seconds and, when the coin finally dropped, I barked out a laugh before, in embarrassment and shame, I caught myself. The joke effortlessly transported me back to an idealized childhood I never lived—
What comes out of a cocoon, children, is a beautiful butterfly!
—and then turned old, mean, and strange, shocking me into laughter. The strangeness is the stutter.
Cocoon
is revealed, presto-changeo, to be a stutterer’s attempt to say
coon
. The joke not only corrupts innocence, it puts the
nigger
and
coon
in the
mouth of someone with an actual affliction who hates black people for their imagined racial inferiority, invoking and then undercutting our tendency to infantilize the disabled, imagining them more innocent than the rest of us. About wordplay, Charles Lamb says:

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders.

This pun is more of a howitzer by the ear than a pistol.

Because I was so troubled by having laughed at the joke, however briefly, I have told the joke at a couple of dinner parties, prefacing it with the question, “Is this joke racist?” Or “What’s racist about this joke?” For some hearers, the n-word blots out any subtleties about implied speakers. For them, the stuttering speaker is just an excuse for the joke teller to say
nigger
for a cheap startle response that sometimes jars loose an uneasy laugh. And that is the truest measure of the joke, I think.

But the joke also possesses curiosities worth parsing. Even though it was a new joke to me, it sounds as if it’s at least forty years old, dating back to a time when
coon
, the antiquated slur, was common. It doesn’t sound contemporary. But at one level the joke is not deeply racist: The butt of the joke is the supposed racist stutterer who must not be very bright since he’s never heard of a
cocoon
. And the joke does not really advance any stereotype or criticism of African-Americans, though one may, by squinting, glimpse a bit of the old recalcitrant slam that niggers will always and only be niggers, and, even more tenuously, perhaps a distaste for African-American sexuality and reproduction. In the main, the racism is bound up in the history and connotations of one word, about which Randall
Kennedy patiently explains, “The word nigger, you see, sums up for those of us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America.” The joke exploits the electric jolt, the transgressive power, of “that fucking devastating word,” as Richard Pryor called it, to shock the hearer, the electricity sparking the volatile mix of pun-pleasure and guilt into complicated laughter.

Something similar happens in the one other new racist joke I’ve heard. Actually I didn’t hear it. It may be the only racist joke I’ve ever received via e-mail.

An old man from out in the country drives into town to a divorce attorney and announces, “I want one of them DEE-vorces.”

The divorce attorney is surprised. Wondering if the old man might be addled, he starts questioning him.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Eighty-six.”

“Well, if you want a divorce, I need to know if you have grounds.”

“Sure do. About a hundred acres.”

“No, I mean, do you have a case?”

“Don’t have no Case. Got me a John Deere, though.”

“No, I mean do you have a grudge?”