Robert Pinsky, On Jokes
from “A Symposium on Jokes” in the fall 2015 issue of The Threepenny Review.
“That’s clever, but it’s not funny.”
So says Simon, an eleven year old with a good mind for words, reading jokes aloud in a flat, skeptical voice from the back seat of the car. The book is entitled Seriously Silly School Jokes and they are funny only when Simon gracefully makes them funny with his what-a-yawn delivery.
A joke is not a witticism, and though it may be written it is something more than a piece of writing. For me the joke, like the lyric poem, is a vocal form. Its words on a digital screen or a page are mere notation, distinct from the actual joke as a musical score is distinct from actual music.
As the great Sid Caesar compactly says: “Comedy is music. It has a melody.”
This is equally true of both the traditional one-liner and the traditional long-form, with its set-up, elaboration, misdirection and punch line.
“One-liner” is not literally accurate. Some of the classics come with three lines. For instance, Henny Youngman’s:
Man-goes-to-the-doctor.
He-tells-the-doctor, “It hurts me when I do this.”
The doctor says, “Don’t do that.”
The joke needs to be delivered rapidly, giving a one-line feeling, but with meaningful phrasing, including jazzy little pauses that might be a bit different with each telling. Maybe a semi-italicized rising of pitch to the same note, let’s call it an A-sharp, on “hurts” and “this” in the second line, then in the third line partways down the scale for “the doctor says” and back up to A-sharp on the second “do,” at the end. I’ve typed “Don’t do that,” but the binary toggle between roman and italic, like the hyphens I’ve used to evoke speed, is too crude. It’s more of a three-eighths italics on “hurts” and maybe seven-sixteenths on “this.”
And the stand-up master Youngman delivers this three-part joke as one rapid line. His joke feels like a single line, it sounds like a single line, and by his artistry of both composition and delivery the comic makes it be a single line. In a word, lyrical.
Like a musician, Youngman feels the joke anew with each telling, and that feeling shapes the phrasing. The first, introductory movement is a kind of title, telling us the genre of what we will hear: it will be a doctor joke. (Youngman had a million of them.) The second movement is the set-up, and the third is the punch line, delivered by the doctor and by the comedian. I like the triple repetition, with the word “doctor” appearing in all three parts, as a matter of rhythmical emphasis as well as form. The doctor is the poem’s hero: he slays the dull dragon of expectation.
I have violated one of my favorite jokes with transcription. I have blunted it with description. But these transgressions don’t matter because the joke, with its little quantum of profundity, survives and endures beyond analysis and study. It rises above explanation. In that, too, it resembles a lyric poem.
