This post will be about the aesthetics of violent joking as it relates to the guilt we feel about laughing at violence. But first, a brief reflection in the source of the joke that will serve as the focus of my analysis in this post.
The joke cited below comes from folklorist Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968), which along with its companion volume No Laughing Matter, constitutes a nearly 2000-page study of dirty jokes. A true labor of love! Rationale of the Dirty Joke (the first nine chapters of Legman’s study) has been re-released based on its inclusion in the recent film The Aristocrats. No Laughing Matter (the final six chapters of the study), which contained the dirtiest jokes—what Legman called the “dirty dirties”—had to be paid for by subscription, has never been re-released, and is, for the most part, only available through Interlibrary Loan in college libraries (how I got my copy). Legman’s meticulous cataloguing of where and when he heard each joke adds to the interest of these volumes. While Legman’s Freudian approach to the significance of dirty jokes may seem outdated to many—it certainly does to me—anyone who is interested in the study of humor should know about the existence of these works.
Informative digression aside, onto the joke:
The groom asks his best man if there is any sure test of his bride’s virginity, and is told to take a bucket of red paint, a bucket of blue paint, and a shovel along on his honeymoon. “Paint one ball red and one ball blue, and then if she says, ‘That’s the funniest pair of balls I ever saw,’ hit her over the head with the shovel!” (496)
First let me say that, ideologically, this joke is repugnant (it needs to be to illustrate my point). Aside from the obvious idea that sex before marriage validates extreme violence against women,* the instrumentalization of the bride and assumption of male authority over female sexuality contains an inherent violence.** But there are two personal facts about this joke that make me want to explore it further:
- I am inclined to laugh at it (even in repetition)
- I feel guilty about my laughter (for the ideological reasons outlined above)
*Legman, who heard this joke in New York in 1943, cites an even more violent variant—heard in DC during the same year—in which the man wields a hammer rather than a shovel.
**A charitable interpretation redeems the joke somewhat. If we feel we are laughing at two bumblers and their ridiculous “test” then the joke demeans the men rather than the woman. However, even in this case, the violence of the joke is purely gratuitous and, bumblers or not, the men’s ideology is no less threatening, even if the joke itself doesn’t endorse that ideology (by ridiculing the sexist and violent men).
To account for the simultaneous existence of my guilt and my laughter, I want to propose a distinction between the aesthetics (or pleasure) of a joke and its ideological content. I have always been fascinated by people who felt it reasonable to collapse the distinction between aesthetics and ideology, who believed that something had to be ideologically sound in order to be aesthetically good. Though many people I know would profess to hold a position similar to this (though probably a more nuanced one), I don’t think this approach to culture withstands scrutiny, as I highly doubt that it is possible to be moved only by things one agrees with (or is neutral toward) ideologically or to be moved by such things all the time.* Though none of us are royalists, we (at times) mourn the deaths of kings in literature; we dance to music that endorses vulgar consumerism and materialism; and I feel a propensity to laugh at jokes like the one above.
*I realize here that I am conflating the idea that something is aesthetically good with whether or not it moves me. These are not always the same thing (I am moved by some pretty crappy art). But since both involve taking some pleasure in a text, they will serve my purpose here.
The key fact for my contention that the aesthetics of a joke are separate from its ideology is that humor is involuntary. Certainly there are those who would argue that our culture conditions the kinds of things we laugh at (and I wouldn’t disagree). Others suggest that we laugh in submission to those more powerful than ourselves (this I highly doubt). In social situations in which such laughter would embarrass me in front of my peers, I have enough self control to stifle the “grotesque facial expressions and barking sounds” that Vonnegut characterizes as laughter's physical manifestation, but what I cannot stop is my inclination or reflex to laugh at the violent joke above. And given that I am generally averse to depictions of violence in my daily life—I don’t watch violent television shows, listen to violent music, play violent video games, &c.—I have a hard time accepting that my culture has conditioned me to laugh at the violence in this joke or at its aggressively sexist content.
So why am I inclined to laugh?
I would suggest that I laugh primarily because this joke is clever (to some extent at least). The best man’s proposed test of the bride’s virginity is superficially shrewd and realistically idiotic, and this incongruity is amusing, particularly in light of the groom’s (misplaced) anxiety about his wife’s purity. The tensions within the joking scenario—which I would characterize as a joke’s aesthetic—are funny, and these are largely (though not completely) separate from its sexist and violent content. Of course this aesthetic is not culturally independent. The history of American humor is loaded with laughter at bumblers’ bizarre machinations, and as a good American—or a tool of American culture—I find myself inclined to laugh at such jokes.
My theory that the pleasure of a joke is distinct from its ideology is reinforced by the many (many) other jokes in Legman’s study. I don’t really laugh at most of them. However, this is not because I don’t like their ideological content (and generally I don’t), but because they are crappy jokes—poorly constructed, weak tensions, predictable punchline, &c. Some violent jokes are better than others, not because they are less problematic ideologically, but because they are simply better at using their form to do the kinds of things that good jokes do to make us laugh.
So is it okay to laugh at sexist and violent jokes? I’ll pick up on this question in my next entry….
