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JOHN FRASER
(The Importance
0/
Being Earnest
comes to mind here too, as do
certain kinds of clown acts and comedy teams.) And in the Ruthless
Rhymes, such as "Eating more than he was able, / John fell dead
at the breakfast table. / 'Mummy dear,' said sister Meg, / 'May I
have Johnny's other egg?' ", the plots are impossible, the callousness
presented as such, and the pleasures those of a tidied-up and harm–
less fantasy violence so outrageous that there is no possibility of
confusing it with actuality. The derealizations involved here,
in
other words, are of the sort that enables one to withdraw tem–
porarily, with a clear conscience, from the complexities of human
behavior and from certain kinds of ethical claims.
In the second of the two bus jokes, in contrast, there is neither
derealization nor escape, and in fact the more one goes on filling
in the human realities of the three characters, the weightier the
joke becomes. One has, I mean, the trapped rage of the driver who
is
dutifully Doing His Job and allowing the other man to remain
inviolable behind his magic badge of Member of the Public, and
the devastating unwitting self-exposure of the joke maker to a
neutral observer; and with that self-exposure comes an agreeably
tart subverting of the English overexaltation of the value of a sense
of humor. Though the action may be a distasteful one, the repre–
sentative attitudes and relationships of the three men are a good
deal more lasting, I think, than the kind of shadowy cliche-liberal
opponent implicit in the school bus joke, and I suspect that the
latter and other jokes like
it,
along with a good deal of what passes
for "cruel" art at present, will shrivel up and blow away as soon as
its antagonists have gone. The second bus, however, can go chugging
along for ever in the mind through Clapham or Birmingham or
wherever it is, and it will continue to carry a very solid cargo of
Englishness - and not just of Englishness - but of the three
es–
sential figures of the violated, the violator and the more or less
decent spectator.
What I am getting at will be obvious by now, of course. I
am
suggesting that the most meaningful kind of deployment of violence
consists not in a direct aggression against the reader or viewer
with
the aid of it (for the auditors of sick jokes are themselves, insofar
as they are decent, partly their targets) in a way that involves
thwarting or disparaging his more qecent responses? but in a leading
