Jeremy Beer (with flaccid cigar and look of bewilderment, left) and the Bar Jester Himself, Chez Peters, aka Tap O’ The Morning (photo by My Lady Scrutiny)

ROCK ISLAND A boy was sitting on a curb shaking a can of turpentine. A priest walked by and said, “What’s that you have there, my child?” The boy said, “Turpentine, Father. It’s the most powerful liquid on earth.”

“Oh, no,” the priest replied. “Holy water is much more powerful. If you rub holy water on the belly of a pregnant woman, she’ll pass a healthy baby.”

“That a fact,” the boy said. “Well you rub a little of this on a cat’s ass, he’ll pass a Harley Davidson.”

We should never murder to dissect, whether in art or love or joke-telling. But the question of what makes a thing funny certainly is an interesting one, at least in my correct opinion. Part of what makes this joke work is that the boy picks up on the priest’s example and then, with considerable felicity, one-ups him. The coarse language adds to the element of surprise, as does the boy’s introducing an alternate meaning of “pass.” And then there’s the efficiency of the joke. It gets where it wants to without getting in its own way.

It’s almost as efficient as this one: Hear about the bulimic stag party? The cake came out of the girl.

That comes from Jim Holt’s book, Stop Me if You’ve Heard This (Profile, 2008). I picked it up in Grasmere back in the fall in a little bookstore I ducked into to avoid the 96th rain shower of the morning, and I finally read it this past Saturday on a bus to Chicago, where I was to see a troupe of thespians affecting to enact The Tempest at the Steppenwolf. First the book, and then Goose Island Brewery later that night, saw to it that the day wasn’t entirely wasted, though I cannot say as much for the colleague who accompanied me.

Notwithstanding the opinions of all those deeply distressed about eating disorders (which, I own, are deeply distressing), the bulimic joke’s a good one, and there you have it. It’s quick and vivid and rhythmically memorable: two iambs and an anapest in the punch line.

But, again, I would not murder to dissect, even though I have managed so far to note that felicity, surprise, efficiency, and rhythm all contribute to a successful joke. And Holt, who aspires to give us “a history and philosophy of jokes,” does a credible job of keeping the object of his vivisection alive and squirming. It helps that he does as much joke-telling as philosophizing—a strategy that ensures his readers will actually learn something.

For example, I had been operating under the delusion that the only agelasts* on the planet are feminists. (How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? That’s not funny! What do feminists use for birth control? Their personalities.) It turns out that several august figures in history were also utterly without humor. “Isaac Newton,” Holt says, “is reported to have laughed precisely once in his life—when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid’s Elements.” Spinoza managed to laugh only while watching spiders fight to the death. A disinclination to laughter seems to be at least one similarity between Joseph Stalin and Margaret Thatcher. That “Jesus wept” is apparently all that the blinkered readers of the Gospels need to convince themselves that there is no humor in the Bible. Alfred North Whitehead was convinced of this putative paucity in sacred writ: it “is one of the most singular things in all literature,” he said—which is almost as singular as Whitehead’s apparent deafness to the story of the man born blind (St. John ix). Every time that lesson is appointed I get a relapse of the adolescent church-giggles. I don’t know if blindness taught the man to distrust the Pharisees, but getting his sight apparently didn’t impede his ability to screw with them. And what of St. Paul’s “digestive hierarchy,” as Holt calls it in his index (and thank God for the index!)? “After considering the relative merits of the different body parts, [St.] Paul concludes that ‘God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part’—a part which, despite its usefulness, the epistle had earlier deemed ‘unpresentable.’”

By my lights this is biblical precedent for never calling your enemy a yonder socket, which part serves a most useful bodily purpose and which, when shut down, renders the rest of the somatic mass very miserable indeed. And Holt reminds us that there are worse things than the nether eye. Guy walks into a bar, orders a drink, and says “Agents are all a bunch of assholes!” Another guy at the end of the bar says, “Hey! I resent that!” First guy says, “Why, you an agent?” Second guy: “No. I’m an asshole!”

Holt lays out the three main competing theories arrogating themselves to the position of Humor Explainer. There’s the Superiority theory “propounded in various forms by Plato, Hobbes, and Bergson,” according to which “all humor is rooted in mockery and derision, all laughter a slightly spiritualized snarl.” There’s the Incongruity theory held by, among others, Pascal, Kant, and Schopenhauer, according to which what is orderly suddenly turns into an incongruous absurdity. Then there’s the Relief theory, for which Freud seems to have had some sympathies and according to which we get pleasure from satisfying urges that are normally repressed.

To let us know what he thinks of these theories, Holt falls into a seizure of joke-telling for about four pages, at the end of which he asks whether we think a single theory accounts for them all. We don’t.

In his discussion of Freud, who was a great amasser of jokes, especially Jewish jokes, Holt parts with some gems:

A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, “Please, God, save my only grandson! Bring him back.” And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up to heaven and says, “He had a hat.”

Mr. and Mrs. X live in fairly grand style. Some people think that the husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; others think that the wife has lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] and so has been able to earn a lot.

Holt tells us that Freud regarded this latter joke “really diabolically ingenious.” But is it superiority, incongruity, or relief? Or none of the above?

None of the above for this one: How do you tell when a cop has died? The donut rolls out of his hand.

Nor for this one: What’s brown and sounds like a bell? Dung.

Most people know this classic: ‘Who was that lady I saw you with last night?’ ‘ That was no lady; that was my wife.’ Holt offers two variations, the first of which is the “hip-hop” version: ‘Who was that ho I saw you with last night? That was no ho; that was my bitch.’ This one he calls “philosophical pastiche”: ‘Socrates, who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady; that was Alcibiades.’ I mentioned these to a colleague in the philosophy department, who offered a third: Guy says to his local hardware man, ‘Who was that ladle I saw you with last night?’ ‘That was no ladle; that was my knife.’

Hard-core joke-tellers will not be surprised on every page of this book, because hard-core joke-tellers know a lot of jokes. Holt mentions one I’ve been telling for a while: How do you scare a family of Unitarians out of the neighborhood? Burn a question mark in their front yard. It’s not unlike this one: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your front door for no apparent reason.

Such religious jokes are good for us, I think. They relieve us of the burden of taking ourselves too seriously in matters we can’t possible get entirely right. Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up? It might lead to dancing. How many Eastern Orthodox bishops does it take to change a light bulb? Change? How do you kill ten Dutch Calvinists? Throw a penny into heavy traffic. Why don’t Episcopalians play chess? They can’t tell a queen from a bishop.

And let’s not forget this chestnut: Ol’ Butch used to fire up the charcoal each Friday and grill steaks. All his neighbors were Catholics and disliked the smell of charcoal, and especially the smell of steaks, wafting their way each Friday. It reminded them too much of their being Catholics. But misery loves company, so instead of asking Butch to change his diet, they persuaded him to become a Catholic. At his reception into the Roman obedience Fr. O’Reilly, sprinkling the holy water, said, “You were born a Baptist and raised a Baptist, but today you are a Catholic!” There was rejoicing all around. But next Friday those same smells came wafting from Butch’s back yard. All the Catholic neighbors came running. What didn’t Butch understand about being Catholic? And there was Butch, drinking a Budweiser and sprinkling water on the grill and saying, “You was born a cow and you was raised a cow, but today you is a catfish!”

Although I can manage to be curious about what makes a thing funny, and even about the physiology of smiling and laughing (why this seemingly universal physical response to humor?), I would caution the mad theorizers from neglecting the matter of delivery. One of my dad’s jokes is about the guy who is spending his first night in the pokey. In the still of the night the number “four-hundred thirty-two” rings out, and the whole cell block erupts in laughter. After a few minutes someone else shouts out, “Nineteen!” Again, uproarious laughter. A few other prisoners shout out a few other numbers, to the same response, and finally the new guy asks the prisoner in the cell next to him, “What the hell’s going on?” The veteran says, “Well, we have a lot of jokes here, and so in the interest of saving time we decided to number them. That way we can tell more of them on any given night.” (People often laugh at this, thinking it to be the punch line. A premature laugh, I’ve learned, can sometimes ruin the climax.) The new guy thinks this is very reasonable. After a minute he decides to give it a try. “Sixty-nine!” he yells, and no one laughs, so he says to his neighbor, “I guess sixty-nine isn’t a very good one, is it.” His neighbor says, “Actually, it’s one of the funniest jokes I’ve ever heard. It’s just that some guys can tell a joke and some guys can’t.”

And that’s the truth. I’ve heard people so thoroughly mangle some of my best jokes that have wondered whether I should abandon the joke or kill the mangler; I’ve heard bad jokes that have made me wet myself—entirely on account of the teller. I was in a brew pub once with my brother. We were telling jokes at our table, and another guy was telling jokes at his. At one point I leaned over and, with what joke I’m not sure, set down a challenge. The imposter at the other table picked up the gauntlet and replied with something not unimpressive. Soon this upstart and I were in a contest that went on close to an hour. He told one about halfway into the match that just about won him the laurel right then and there. Neither I nor my brother could remember it on the way home, so I returned the following night to get the joke, thinking the bartender, who was the upstart’s brother, would know it. He didn’t, and I languished for months and months until, almost exactly a year to the day of that beery contest, I saw the upstart again and got the joke out of him. He told it in the exact manner of his first telling: passing—indeed, exceeding—well. I’ve used the joke many times, to vast approbation, because it’s a good joke. But much of it’s in the telling.

(It’s not one I’m going to duplicate here, at least not today.)

Many of us can point to a moment in our lives when we became aware that a thing could be funny. This comes after our ability to laugh, obviously. I remember the first time I got a gay joke. Racial humor, which I regard as sacred, came to me a bit earlier. What do you call an Irishman who marries a black woman? A social climber.

Now why does that joke work? Obviously because it insults two groups at once—one a little more than the other, and not necessarily the one auditors of racial jokes expect. But it’s a traveling gag. You can use it as a formula. Holt in fact has a variation: Why do the Americans have the Negroes and the Belgians have the Flemish? Because the Americans had first choice.

I would not be misunderstood here. I have nothing against the Flemish—not any more than I have something against skeletons. (Skeleton walks into a bar and says, “Give me a beer and a mop.”) I am the only straight white person I know who had a black gay housemate in college. We would spend a lot of homework time telling racial and sexual jokes—at each other’s expense—and then spend the rest of the time jamming on whatever available pianos we could find on campus. None of it was about superiority, incongruity, or relief. It was all about friendship.

__________________________

* from the Greek, a + gelastes, “without laughter”

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