Editorial 7.4, April 2005, by Deirdre Helfferich The Butt of the Joke, One of my favorite jokes goes like this: Q: What is the difference between a duck? A: One of its legs is both alike. Now, only a linguist, a logician, an English teacher, or an editor is going to appreciate this joke (and only some of them), which is highly obscure to just about everybody else. Most people, when I tell them this joke and then crack up, look at me with a somewhat fuddled expression, wondering when I’m going to give them the punch line. They simply don’t recognize it as a joke. They can tell that I’ve said something strange, not quite kosher grammatically, but the fact that I’m holding my sides and can’t speak because I’m laughing so hard makes them think that perhaps I’m touched in the head, and need a little sympathy, or perhaps padded wall décor. I’ve told this joke to dozens of people, and only once did someone get it. But I love it so much that I keep trying. My Aunt Alice told me the joke back when I was in high school, and I didn’t get it the first time, either. She repeated it and I was able to figure out what was weird about the way it was phrased, and after I said it to myself a couple of times I suddenly got it. It kept getting funnier the more often I repeated it, sort of the way a banana-banana knock-knock joke does for a four-year-old. I didn’t annoy my aunt by repeating it incessantly to her or everybody around me, though. I only try it on people once. (They usually ask me to repeat it, however, because they are never quite sure they heard me correctly the first time.) The thing that is funny about this is how absurdly wrong it is: it is a nonsense question with a nonsense answer, but question and answer alike almost make sense. Together, they provide an internal consistency of silliness. It’s the humor of the oxymoron, the juxtaposition of logic and illogic within two consistently absurd parallel phrases that fool you if you don’t pay attention. (They remind me of politics and religion, actually, as the same sort of thinking seems to apply. Just don’t look too closely at their framework, and you’ll do fine. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up on the floor from laughter, which your pastor or legislator really wouldn’t appreciate.) The absurd is all around us, keeping life worth living if you look at it and laugh, or driving you to drink, mayhem, and suicide if you don’t. Here’s a couple of examples from the everyday: the news comes on and the weather announcer starts talking about “snow showers” as though that flaky white stuff is what comes out of the tap in the bathroom, and a similar effect is going to take place in the outdoors. There’s a perfectly good—and much more appropriate—word to describe snowfall: a snow flurry. Somehow it has gone out of fashion. Maybe in the south the snow melts before it hits the ground, so the showering aspect can be excused, but this is Alaska! It hasn’t warmed up that much yet. If it’s snowing hard, one can use “snowstorm” or “blizzard.” So every time I hear the weather and “snow showers” comes out of the speaker, I either get annoyed or I laugh. Laughter is more fun. Another good example is that classic insult, the moon. Someone gets annoyed enough that they feel they must drop their pants and bend over in your general direction, exposing pale butt cheeks to you and the world. Now, how silly is that? It isn’t your ass hanging out there in the breeze in a vulnerable position! There is something intrinsically funny about being mooned—and more because the mooner looks a heck of a lot stupider than the moonee. I suppose the risk of getting zapped in the tush by whatever’s handy is worth it for the thrill of the dare. It’s a joke where the perpetrator is literally the butt of their own insult, although they never seem to realize it. But then, what can you expect from someone fool enough to do this in the first place? My husband and I were mooned on the way north from Anchorage recently, returning from the Alaska Press Club conference, apparently because we weren’t going fast enough on the snowy and gusty highway between Cantwell and Denali. (It was more than a “shower,” believe me, but not quite a blizzard.) The young stalwart whose bare posterior we witnessed speeding north past us must have gotten rather chilled, as his hind end was thrust quite far out the window of the little black sportscar, and that cold snowy wind must surely have gotten to some very private parts indeed. I laughed for several miles (although my husband looked pretty disgruntled), imagining the stupid dork sitting inside that car with a wet cold butt, laughing his head off and not once realizing just how silly he’d looked. (Moral: never moon a writer; you might get your butt in print.) We passed three accidents a little farther on—none of them involving the gang of mooners—one of them very serious. I didn’t mind a bit that we’d been poking along. The level of seriousness increased as we drove along: first was a car with a flat tire, but help had arrived. Next was a van in a UAF convoy of two that had gone sailing off the road into a deep ditch, but managed to land upright. We stopped, but everyone seemed to be fine, help had been sent for, and they were unpacking the wrecked van and moving things to the van still on the road. The third accident was grimmer: the car had gone off the road and landed sideways. Windows were broken, the Remote Response Unit was there, along with a couple of amublances and the troopers. We couldn’t tell and didn’t ask if the people had survived. The snow was blowing and the road was very icy. We drove slowly by per the rescue crew’s instructions. We kept going, and as the visibility and traction improved as we came down out of the storm, the juxtaposition of this obviously serious accident and the lighthearted and reckless act of the young men who mooned us jarred in my mind, nonsensical and strange in light of the very real risk of death. So the logic of this kind of insult is pretty much of a kind with the duck joke, or the showering snow: it makes a sort of weird internal sense, but looked at from the outside, it’s absurd, and yet that’s what makes it funny. And because death and insanity are always just around the corner, it’s a good thing to hold onto the lighter side of this world, and keep the grimness at bay with a good belly laugh when we can. | ||
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