Why Humor Matters

I read the New Yorker, even though I find it infuriating. Actually, that's probably why I read it. It irritates me by its condescension, its utter disregard for any part of America west of the Hudson (except for stories dedicated to showing what a bunch of meth-addled, backwards, McCain-voting, hick jug rednecks the rest of us are), and its implicit assertion that New York is the cultural, intellectual, and most likely physical center of the Universe. 

What makes me even madder is that they're probably right. 

But what really burns me is that they've got the chunk of pages right in the middle of the magazine devoted to Serious Literature, and then, sequestered off elsewhere, the "Shouts and Murmurs" section, which is devoted to humor. Or what the New Yorker considers humor. Because it's never funny. Ever. In the least. 

It ain't just the New Yorker. The way that humor is treated by the mandarins of Serious Literature absolutely burns my ass. 

The fact that Joseph Heller never won the Pulitzer Prize is a crime and a sin and a disgrace. He didn't win it for no better reason than he was funny, and brilliantly funny. And because he was, he was not taken as seriously as he should be. Joseph Heller isn't taught in Serious Literature classes. He's not studied, parsed, deconstructed, sliced, diced, chopped and served warm over rice as are other mid-20th century writers. Which, as I type this, I realize might not be a bad thing, because there's no quicker way to make something unfunny than by spending too much time on wondering what makes it funny. 

But it's the lack of respect he gets that fries me. Heller and his ilk don't get any, and they should. "Catch-22" has made it into the canon largely because of an accident of chronology. It was a scathingly, bitingly anti-war piece that first began to be read widely during the Vietnam War and helped influence a generation of activists. But it isn't studied on account of its literary merits, which are legion. 

Heller isn't alone. David Kaufmann, in an excellent piece on Kenneth Koch in the Jewish Daily Forward, writes, "Kenneth Koch has not received his due, in part because his Harvard classmates and close friends, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, have overshadowed him, and in part because he could be rambunctiously funny. Poetry, after all, is serious business, and we have never really known what to do with comic poets beyond relegating them to the seventh circle of 'light verse.'" 

Nope, we don't. And it's not just poetry. We really don't know what to do with humor at all. I'm not sure why this is. For some reason, the Serious Literatteurs out there--the ones who do the reviews, edit the magazines, run the academy, sit on the prize committees, and teach the classes--decide what's taken seriously and what isn't--don't seem to like or trust or respect anything that's funny. 

My suspicion is that America's double cultural whammy--our Puritan roots and our slavish 19th century aping of Victorian England--is what's responsible for humor's shoddy treatment. 

Someone funnier than me once defined Puritanism as the suspicion that somewhere, someone may be having a good time. It's a joyless and cheerless way of looking at the world. Calvinism, the miserable doctrine on which Puritan theology was (and in large part still is) based is a dry and sawdusty interpretation of the Cosmos--it's all preordained, there's no such thing as free will, you're either saved or (more likely) damned since before the beginning of time, and the Unseen World is divided neatly into little boxes and categories. Pleasure is sinful, laughter practically a heresy. The virtuous and boring are rewarded, the less stringent will probably burn in a lake of fire. If there's anything left after we get done burning them at the stake. 

Victorianism is an extension of this taken to pathological degrees with greater thoroughness. 

And it's this ethos that affects damn near every aspect of our cultural life. America's roots have no room for tenderness, compassion, honest emotion, or even basic humanity. We're good at puffing ourselves up and pretending that we do, but we don't, and we know it. It's why there are Republicans. It's a joyless worldview that still affects how we view humor. The academy looks upon humor as suspect. Frivolous. Good for a few laughs, maybe, but certainly nothing to be taken seriously. And the literature that we consider to be worthy of serious consideration reflects that--as Michael Chabon (who is very funny) once brilliantly described it, the current state of American literature is a joyless desert of "quotidian, plotless, moment of truth, revelatory stories, sparkling with epiphanic dew." 

In a country where Joyce Carol Oates is considered a Serious Writer for, apparently, no better reason than because you'd have a better chance of finding a porcupine in the silverware drawer than of finding anything funny in her work, is there any hope? 

I don't see why something that makes you want to slash your wrists is inherently any deeper an insight into the human condition as something that makes you laugh out loud. Because, at the end of the day, laughter is very often the only sane response to the tragic, horrific, and, in my darkest moments, what I fear is the irretrievably fucked up world we inhabit. And what the best humorists know is that very often, at its root, what we're laughing about really isn't very funny. 

One of my favorite scenes in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is the scene where Huck is desperately trying to decide whether to turn in his friend, the escaped slave Jim. It's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. 

Huck is absolutely convinced that he should turn Jim in. The law demands it, all the conventions of a slave-holding society demand it, and, since God Himself ordains society and is inevitably press-ganged into the service of the power holders, he's pretty sure that God would want him to turn Jim in as well. But his conscience is telling him that he shouldn't do it. At his core, he knows turning Jim in is wrong. So he makes his decision--let Jim go. And he announces, "Well, I'll just go to hell, then." 

Which is kind of a funny scene. You could mock the social mores of the nineteenth century, or mock Huck's really appalling grasp of theology. But the underlying story is tragic. A little boy thinks he's just condemned his soul to eternal perdition for following the dictates of his conscience. Horrifying. Appalling. And, at the same time, kind of funny. 

Certainly not all humor touches us that deeply. There's a lot of really bad sophomoric humor out there. But there's a lot of really bad sophomoric nonhumor fiction out there, and if you don't believe me, read the egregious garbage that passes for serious literature in the New Yorker. 

Even stuff that's considered the ultimate in Serious Literature, if read correctly, is funny. The Brothers Karamazov, in the original Russian, is a deeply funny book. If you don't believe me, read it first translated by Constance Garnett and Andrew MacAndrew and then read the translation by Larisa Volokhonskaya and Richard Pevear. The difference is night and day, and Volokhonskaya and Pevear, God bless them, have managed to preserve the dry, wry humor that permeates the Russian version of Brothers K. It's a funny book, but you'd never know it from reading the old translations. Nor from how it's taught. 

I try to throw something funny into everything I write. Whether or not I succeed isn't really up to me to decide. But I attempt it. I do so because laughter, regardless as to how Puritan America regards it, is part of the human experience. It's part of being alive, just as much as grief is. It is part of the human range of emotions, and it is an emotionally and spiritually appropriate response to much of life. 

But there's another reason I do so. I do it because it's fun. Because it makes you enjoy what you're reading more. Because it's entertaining. Because laughing is more pleasurable than crying. And because, as David Kaufmann concludes the aforequoted piece on Kenneth Koch, "Poetry has little justification if it does not--first and foremost--provide us with pleasure."