That's No Joke
What two bad-landing stories in this week's news do & don't have in common
There are two stories in the current news cycle centering on jobs lost for jokes told — or, at least, it seems that way.
In Mississippi, a school administrator has been fired for reading elementary students a children’s book titled I Need a New Butt as a last minute replacement when a guest reader couldn’t be there (the compounded tragedy of being fired for doing nothing wrong while covering for somebody else calls to mind Judge Reinhold in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, pounding on the staff washroom door after being shitcanned, shouting, “I hope you had a hell of a piss, Arnold!”). I Need a New Butt pertains to the story of a nameless young protagonist who, upon discovering the crack in his bottom, sets out to imagine a fitting replacement.
The young man dreams up a number of potential butt substitutes: the chrome bumper of a classic car; a knight’s armour-plated posterior; even a kind of avant-garde mural piece. Finally, upon noticing his father’s crack as the latter works at fixing some of the under-sink kitchen plumbing, the boy arrives at self-acceptance. Sorry, spoilers!
Then, here in British Columbia, the CEO of the Harrison Hot Springs Fairmont, Vivek Sharma, has been placed on leave from his position after a wildly ill-advised bit of opening banter at a conference presentation which happened to fall on International Women’s Day. After asking the women in the audience to stand and be acknowledged, Sharma then abruptly told them to “go clean some rooms and do some dishes.”
On the surface, these two stories bear a family resemblance: two male authority figures reverse their lives’ fortunes, each in a moment’s decision to indulge in a bit of jocularity poorly calibrated to their professional surroundings. Superficially, the takeaway would seem to be, depending on one’s political or cultural point of view, either that everyone should be more careful about what they say, or else that everyone is just too sensitive these days.
And yet that isn’t the natural, instinctive response of a normal person reading of these two sets of circumstances. Without even being able to say exactly why — besides the obvious difference of the mean-spiritedness of Sharma’s speech-starter versus the literally cheeky whimsy of the new butt book — we know right away that Toby Price, the terminated principal, was unjustly dismissed by a gaggle of humourless functionaries, whereas Sharma’s mock command to go do the dishes is just ugly; it feels vicious, and we wince with embarrassment for him, for ourselves, and particularly for the women who were asked to stand at the conference, when we read it. Why is that?
I have to first cop to a heavy bias in favour of any humour based on the idea that a bum crack is indicative of a bum’s being broken. This was a recurring motif in my late mother’s household comedy, and she worked it as richly as Scorcese has treated male violence or Michael Moore has explored the false promise of the American Dream. No one’s crack could show in our house even a little without my mother promising to Spackle it, and decades later, when my toddler daughter would fall on her backside on the playground and I asked her if she might have broken it in half, I did so as though I were carefully handing her a set of her granny’s jewels.
Even still, I feel confident in affirming that I Need a New Butt does precisely what comedy is supposed to do: gives us a fresh perspective on the possible by allowing us to consider the incongruous as reasonable. The philosopher Simon Critchley borrows Peter Berger’s phrase, “signals of transcendence,” to describe what jokes offer us; Edward De Bono, pioneer of the idea of ‘lateral thinking,’ explained that jokes create a pattern, subvert it, and then, with the punchline, assert a new sense to the pattern, flooding us with cognitive pleasure.
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are giving a colloquium about mortality. The moderator asks, as a final question, what each man would like to have said about them at their funeral.
The priest thinks, then says: “I should like them to say, ‘He was a godly man.’”
The minister thinks, then says: “I should like them to say, ‘He was a loving man.’”
The rabbi thinks, then says: “I should like them to say — ‘LOOK, HE’S MOVING!’”
Almost every semi-folkloric ‘street joke’ you’ve ever heard shares this structure — called, in comedy, the Rule of Three. The reason that three is funny is that it is the shortest space possible in which to imply one pattern (the rabbi is going to share the noble and holy thing he wants remembered of him as well) but instead to subvert it in a way which is both incongruous and subversively logical (the rabbi, for all his holy learning, is just as terrified of mortality as any of the rest of us).
Even when they don’t work in threes, jokes function in terms of a basic opposition, a creative tension between a premise or set-up (which implies a pattern by creating expectation) and a punchline, or pay-off, which upends it with a new, outlaw logic. The Fawlty Towers line “Pretentious? Moi?” is sometimes credited as being the world’s shortest joke, containing all those dimensions in just two words.
One-off narrative comedy, like a film or a children’s book (as opposed to an ongoing TV sitcom), sets up worlds where incongruities can be sustained long enough to let us imagine even more expansive outlaw logics: what if the underdog Little Tramp played by Charlie Chaplin swapped places with that dictator who has the Charlie Chaplin moustache? What if Rodney Dangerfield was a university freshman? What if, in getting to choose my own butt as though it were any other consumer freedom afforded me in an infinitely personally-adaptable capitalist market, that butt would actually make me less myself than does the plain old butt I was born with and did nothing to acquire? What if the sight of my father’s plumber cleavage afforded me a liberating epiphany of self-acceptance?
You can likely piece together, by this point, why Mr. Price has not only my moral support, but fifty of my joke-telling-earned dollars for his GoFundMe.
I’m willing to entertain, however, the possibility that there are some people who might feel that while I Need a New Butt might be edifying, it ought not to be read by a principal at school. The failure and the ugliness of Vivek Sharma’s joke, on the other hand, weren’t just contextual; his opening line wouldn’t have been any funnier on the ‘Dark ’n’ Dirty’ late show in any comedy club’s calendar, because it fails to generate any pleasurable incongruities or sideways views of the world, either as it is or as it could be.
The technical name for the kind of joke that Sharma was attempting was a misdirection (careful, pal, before you started barking orders at women again — I didn’t say ‘Miss direction.’ [the technical name for what I just did there is a pun; don’t ever let anybody tell you it’s the lowest form of humour.]) The misdirection is a kind of joke that takes its audience even further afield of its expectations than a regular one, suggesting that they were even wrong about what they thought they knew about the premise, let alone where it was heading. A contemporary master of the craft is my friend Phil Hanley: “Even though I had dyslexia I was a bizarrely confident kid. I called my sixth grade teacher ‘Sweetheart.’ He hated it.” A classic, and also gender politics-adjacent misdirection was Henny Youngman’s immortal one-liner: “Take my wife… please!” Which incidentally goes to show that a joke doesn’t have to conform to a forward-thinking worldview in order to be, objectively, clever.
Asking the women at a conference to stand and be acknowledged on IWD, then crassly ordering them to go clean rooms and do dishes, is a bid at a misdirection in service, I have to imagine, of an attempted burlesque of sexist attitudes. It is not remotely impossible to make brilliantly funny comedy from an exaggeration of sexism and misogyny; with skill, it could be, and many times has been, done. In one of the Codco sketches seared into my memory as an awed teenager watching reruns on TV, Mary Walsh and Cathy Jones played a timorous woman and her grease-ball boyfriend, respectively, attending a pre-natal class. Throughout the scene, Jones’s over-the-top leather jacket macho keeps bucking against every one of the exercises he’s being asked to participate in, until finally he is offered an ‘empathy belly’ — a weighted body-vest simulating a pregnant torso for him to wear over his chest and stomach in order to feel what his partner is feeling. He and his girlfriend step out into the hall, and when they come back into the room, Walsh, who is heavily pregnant, is now also wearing the prosthetic belly on her back. In a perfectly overemphasized Newfoundland accent, Jones explains over a cigarette: “She’s gonna do de empat’izin’ fer de bot’ of us.”
Dark, disturbing, hilarious. And again, the incongruity embodied by this broken humanity, like a cracked butt, invites us into its alternate logic. Having seen this sexism, or even just basic human callousness, displayed ad absurdum, the viewer is invited not only to laugh but, through their laughter, to reflect on when, in their life, they might have seen, or been, that boyfriend. When Critchley used Berger’s phrase, he, too, subverted it, taking a religious idea and desacralizing it — insisting that even though jokes might offer us a signal of transcendence, they bring us right back down into the real world as it is and force us to look at it.
There is no outlaw logic or revelatory incongruity in a resort CEO’s commanding women to clean rooms or do dishes. First of all, in the hyper-exploitative field of hospitality, it’s an implicit part of his job, or those of his immediate subordinates, every other day of the year, too. But it still wouldn’t have been funny coming from a dishwasher or a Vegas headliner, because there’s none of the playful, irreverent, miraculous everyday magic of the joke about it. There’s no creative tension between set-up and punchline. ‘It’s International Women’s Day, now go do the dishes” isn’t any more of a joke than saying “You like French Toast? Go fuck yourself!” — in fact, the latter is funnier, because at least it’s genuinely unexpected, rather than being merely the aggressive reassertion of the power prerogatives of a male employer on a day meant to celebrate the opposite. Sharma’s joke didn’t fail because of context or because of evolving social sensitivities; or, at least, it didn’t fail only because of them. It was genuinely ugly; a mean ejaculation halfway dressed up like a joke, but with none of the qualifications.
So it would be wrong to come away from this coincidence of headlines with the impression that we should, as a society in general or in professional environments particularly, steer clear of telling jokes. The point also isn’t that some people are bum cracks, and others are just assholes — though as a by-product sub-conclusion, that’s probably not bad.
The takeaway is that the joke, as a form, is revelatory; it is a genuine miracle of everyday life, in the sense of the miraculous put forward by the twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich defined miracles inseparably from revelation — as essentially the mind’s full congruence with the divine comprehensibility of reality itself, to the very ground of its being. For Tillich — as well as for secular thinkers like Einstein — the fact that we can understand reality in the first place is almost unimaginably fortuitous. A joke suggests that even when we break apart the rationality of the given world by introducing wild ironies, incongruities, reversals, and subversions, reality will still make a hilarious kind of sense; one that lets light in from new angles and lets us see what we couldn’t before. The joke is a gift that hides its momentousness behind its humility. It deserves to be heard.
A man sits in a confession booth, and the priest opens the grille.
“Father, I’m a fifty-year-old man, and I’ve just slept with two women at once, each just half my age.”
“I see. When was your last confession?”
“Father, I’ve never confessed.”
“You haven’t? That’s very serious.”
“Father, I’m Presbyterian, not Catholic.”
“Oh — then why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling EVERYBODY!”
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While we’re on the subject of jokes: I’m thrilled to announce that this Friday, March 25th, I’m releasing my new comedy album from 604 Records, “I HOPE I DON’T REMEMBER THIS MY WHOLE LIFE”! Recorded this past October at the wonderful Hecklers in Victoria BC in front of a full-capacity crowd, this album is my second one & I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Streaming everywhere as of Friday — please enjoy and spread the word!