PARTISAN REVIEW
365
driver raps on partition, driver looks round, man waggles piece of
string at him and grins, driver glowers apoplectically and hunches
over wheel. Repetitions. Finally spectator asks obvious question.
"Oh," says the string-wagger, "'e's got no sense of humour;
'is
brother was 'anged this morning."
Now, the first joke, as I said, is of a familiar kind, and a
number of other examples would have done just as well: e.g., the
Helen Keller doll-you wind it up and it bumps into the furniture;
or, "Mummy, mummy, why can't I go out and play?" "How
many times do I have to tell you you've got leukemia?"; or, "But
apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" Jokes
of this sort (which on a first hearing are sometimes disturbingly
funny) are essentially "idea" jokes - jokes rather akin, in certain
ways, to some of the movies of Godard or to a novel like
Naked
Lunch.
They are nasty, of course, but that is precisely their point.
They are a form of counteraggression. They affront all the liberal–
suburbanizing pressures making for uniform, unrelaxed postures of
Sympathy, Pity, Good Works and so on - pressures, in other words,
towards a bland, ego-suppressing and essentially not thought through
niceness - and they often make a valid point of sorts. I mean,
if
they are "inhuman," the cliche-attitudes that they are going up
against do, themselves, dehumanize people by reducing them all to
types (the sick and maimed all martyrs, children all little loveable
purities, the great suburban-liberal heroes all impossible paragons
of nobility in a
Readers Digest
way, etc.). However, they are only
endurable because of the very mechanism that makes them funny,
that the mind directed at first toward very real people or kinds
of people, recognizes almost instantaneously that what is really
under attack is certain other kinds of people
thinking
about them,
and so veers away from a serious contemplation of the objects them–
selves. A derealizing of the physical occurs in other kinds of humor
too, of course, especially the Tom-and-Jerry kind and the Ruthless
Rhymes kind. But in the former the protagonists' interminable, ballet–
like pursuit and counterpursuit, aggression and counteraggression (in
which nothing
is
irrevocable and the body is indestructible), are in
effect simply a kind of expressive heightening of the deadpan trading
of insults between friends who know each other's deeper attitudes
so well that they can afford to be abominably rude to each other.
