Bookends
Bad Jokes
By Terry Caesar
Recently I chanced to hear on NPR a story titled “A Bad Joke,” by Ha Jin. Two peasants go to a store to buy some shoes. But the price is too high. “Damn, all the prices go up,” one declares to the other. “Only our chairman ever grows.” Salesgirls titter.
The words soon become the following joke: “All the prices go up, but Deng Xioping never grows.” The joke spreads. Soon the peasants are interrogated by police. They protest that they’ve never heard of Deng Xioping. Their reference was to the chairman of their commune.
The local chairman is summoned. He turns out to be three feet two inches. No matter. The joke must have a source, and someone must be held accountable for it. The guilt of the two peasants is reaffirmed. They are returned to prison, “among the political criminals.”
Ah, we think, bad old Communism. Blessedly, we live in America, where we are free. Such a joke would never turn out to be so bad here. So I felt, until I recalled the story of an academic friend who made her own version of just such a joke.
It seems a notice had recently appeared on her institution’s home page touting the reception of a colleague’s book in her country of birth. The colleague is notoriously vain and self-promoting. Few like her.
My friend e-mailed a mock news story to another colleague, with the headline that the book had “taken the country by storm.” (In fact, the book is impeccably academic, of interest to few in any country.) The colleague said he laughed till he cried. But wait.
He advised my friend not to make such jokes over e-mail. Somebody could get hold of a post. You never know with e-mail. Watch yourself. You had better be discreet. He wouldn’t write such things himself.
My friend was shocked. The man was a prominent leftist! How could he be so concerned about a private communication? And even if it somehow became public, so what? The mock story was, as we say, “just” a joke!
Except of course that it wasn’t. How many jokes of any kind are? Not all humor aims to be—or even has the potential to be—subversive. Yet most does, especially in an organizational context or in a national context that duplicates the totality of specific organizations.
In this respect, educational institutions merely constitute specialized forms of all governmental or private organizations. In each of them are people quick to take offense. Some of them are in positions of authority. If they can’t arrest you, they can punish you in other ways.
What ways? There are too many factors to generalize. In my friend’s case, she could conceivably fail to receive tenure or promotion. In other cases, if a bad joke would not actually lead to a hearing, and even dismissal, it could lead to social consequences almost as severe.
Trouble is, any consequence of any kind will not easily appear as such within our own American ideology of freedom, individualism, and other good things. If we can’t make bad jokes, though, how are we ultimately different from—well, nowadays, from who?
Today we certainly need more stories like Ha Jin’s. He reminds us of the days when we enjoyed the existence of a Communist Other. Not only were Communists godless and militant. Unlike us, they had no humor. Under their regime, all jokes were bad.
Perhaps the most protracted fictional example of this is dramatized in Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke. A college student, Lud-vik, vents his frustration to a girl he is pursuing by writing on a postcard to her, “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!”
Woe to Ludvik! The girl shows Party officials the postcard. He is summoned to appear before a committee. “These three comrades, whom I knew well and had bantered with, wore severe expressions.” They read Ludvik his own words, and suddenly the words sound “terrifying.”
Even though he is friends with the local Party chairman, and despite the public act of self-criticism he performs, Ludvik is eventually expelled from the university, as well as from the Party. Who wants someone who acts one way at meetings and another way in private?
Ludvik himself is forced to agree: a man is either a revolutionary or he is not. Even if he wants to be one, he is thereby guilty of not being one. Identity is one and indivisible. Humor, in effect, attests to division and must not be permitted.
Of course, we must draw distinctions between jokes that are offhand and those that are deliberate. Both my friend and Ludvik intended their respective acts of humor, even as each presumed to restrict its scope. Ha Jin’s peasants had no such intention.
Yet in this, the peasants are curiously akin to all manner of people in the public realm of American society today, such as, say, the anchor of the Golf Channel who once opined that younger players should “lynch Tiger Woods in a back alley.”
Racism! The anchor can only feebly protest. Her words alone condemn her. No matter that they exemplify how low humor itself has fallen among us. The most offhanded remarks now become inseparable from jokes, and all jokes are bad, fraught with possible offense.
Of course, we might reply—that’s why they’re jokes! Thus, in many respects, the more suspect they are, the funnier. But this logic only flourishes privately (or in comedy clubs). Publicly, humor of any sort in our society today is better off censoring itself before it gets uttered.
In fact, it’s finally better off not being uttered at all, for the private world is constantly in danger of being exposed on (or to) the public realm, deliberately or not, as we see, for example, each day, or each hour, on YouTube.
Insofar as the sheer provocation of humor is concerned, the immense differences between the world of the Chinese peasant and the American academic may not finally count so much. Moreover, anyone who has seen a joke gone bad may discover more in common with Kundera’s Ludvik than hitherto imagined.
He is haunted, he states, with the image of a hundred people assembled in a hall who all raise their hands in order to expel him from the Party and the university. Would it have been different if the vote had been to hang him? He thinks not.
Now when he makes new acquaintances, he projects them back to this hall and asks himself if they would have raised their hands. No one has ever passed the test. “Every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues raised theirs.”
Poor Ludvik. Now (he adds) it’s hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it’s hard to be intimate with them, it’s hard to love them. Perhaps (he doesn’t add) the easiest way to try to do so for starters is not to make any jokes at all about them. •
