People laugh when you fall on your ass. What’s humour? - Jean Michel-Basquiat
After my first break-in, after the first man with a knife, I pack a small black bag on wheels and book a flight to Johannesburg leaving out of East London. Perhaps I cry most of the flight. Maybe I read a few pages, fall asleep in between. My mother is waiting for me at the Burger King in Park Station At home she performs the over-concerned mother in the way that she does. She asks me to tell her, again and again, how it happened..We stand in the kitchen, each of us on one end of the island, conjuring the man with the knife on the table in front of us. In that time my father will come home and we will not hear him. He closes the door and tip-toes behind us. I am describing the texture of the man’s anxieties and anger, how they sat hard on his face and cracked his lips and made his face break out in rage-filled pustules. And that thing that covered his eyes, violent and unsure. My father creeps up behind, crooks his arm like so, so the it looks he’s holding a weapon and jumps out from behind a wall. We scream. He laughs. “Hayi Bafana,” says Mother. “It’s too soon. You’re scaring the child.” I cry.
Humour. What are the ways in which it functions? How is it that my father might have found that funny? What exists between appropriate and asshole? My creative work tackles dark things, terrible things, it tackles death and hurt and violence, as both a personal experience and as a system deeply embedded in the language and politics we run up against every day. Yet more often than not this violence is medicated through humour, through jokes and comedy memes that infect social mediate. We are dying but we are also laughing ourselves to death. How does one write this? How do disgust, desperation, and anger, share the page with necessary a degree of dark humour?
During his Presidential Campaign, current US President Donald Trump made a comment about the second amendment (referring to the right bear arms) and fellow candidate Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick – if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
In a video that circulated online, a man in red shirt seated behind Donald Trump reacts visibly, viscerally. A few giggles from the crowd. From Trump. In essence, Trump has ahem, suggested, that the uhm, people who want to defend their right to bear arms, use their arms to protect the right. Trumps calls for Clinton to get shot. From his followers and defenders, justification. The statement was joke. Not to be taken seriously. Not a real call for violence. Jason Steed, an appellate lawyer and former English professor took to twitter to broadcast his views on what constitutes a joke, and what humour does. In 22 tweets of less than 140 characters each, he broke down how humour works to create allegiances. How it delineates who’s in, and who’s out. Or in his won words, “joking/ humour is one tool by which we assimilate/alienate”. He explains further, “We use humour to bring people into – or keep them out of – our social groups. This is what humour does. This is what it’s for.”
Paul Beatty’s Hokum: An Anthology of African American Humour includes everything from Sojourner Truth to Colson Whitehead, From Malcolm X to Mohammed Ali and Mike Tyson. Hokum is like a lyrical mixtape, a sampling and selecting, mixed and graded to assert a certain something about what constitutes funny and fierce. Paul Beatty’s humour is like the Kool-Aid of Jim Jones and his acolytes - sweet and smooth but laced with something toxic, something that hurts in the throat and the gut.
“Okay, I’m ready. You listening?”
“If listening means I haven’t choked you to death yet, then yes.”
“All right, two black guys, George Washington Robinson and Roosevelt Lincoln Kennedy...”
I smirked, and a noise that sounded something between a chuckle or a snort rumbled from my throat.
“You’re laughing. I knew it!”
“Knew what?”
“Professor Boskin said you would laugh.”
“Professor Boskin. Who’s Professor Boskin?”
“Today in class he said there were forms and styles of humour that only certain people of certain demographic groups find funny.”
“What group, and more importantly, what joke?”
“You’re in the African-American group and you laughed at a joke designed to appeal to African-Americans.”
“You haven’t even got to the punchline.”
“That’s the joke.”
Here in South Africa, there are jokes that are as staple as samp and pap. They circulate, sometimes changing from, substituting one name for another but the basic tenets remain the same. Race. Sex. Gender. Politics. Money. The things that make the world go around. There’s the temperature jokes; white people wearing shorts and sandals in winter, the air-con in the boardroom freezing the blacks into silence and submission. The Politics jokes accompanied by the obligatory flat, black, comrade accent. An aural black face that we let slide, because, well, it’s the other blacks they’re making fun of. Not us.
Take our dear President, Jacob Zuma who is constantly dropping quips that play on the edges of being funny and endearing, or hurtful and alienating, or all of the above. He uses humour as fire blanket of sorts, or more appropriately in his case, a fire pool with which he douses the flames of scandal. At the height of the Nkandla story, the homestead he built for himself and his family using R246 million of public funds, he used humour to deflect from actually speaking about the issue. In response to the Public Prosecutor’s finding that President had profited unduly from Public Funds, our dear leader took to the mic in Parliament, and mocked the mispronunciations of Nkandla from other cabinet members. “A few days ago you didn’t know the place. And now it’s Nkhand-la. Nkhaand-la. Nkhaaaaaand-la.” The cabinet breaks into mirth.
An earlier example. A press conference held in 2006 during the rape trial of President Jacob Zuma. A journalist from the free television channel, e.tv, questions Jacob Zuma on a comment made by the then deputy president in court. Jacob Zuma stated, under oath, that he had taken a shower after sex with an HIV positive woman to minimise the risk of him contracting the virus.
President Zuma: "But if you've been in the kitchen, my dear, peeling onions, you wash your hands, not so? What was funny about washing my hands after doing something? What's the problem?"
The reporter: "But Mr Zuma, AIDS is a big problem in this country and saying things like taking a shower..."
President Zuma: "And hygiene is a big problem in this country. Clean yourself."
What is even left for a writer to do?
My resentment has become so overbearing that these days I’m unable to take anything seriously, much less humorously. .... Not to say offensiveness can’t be funny, but everyone’s so insecure we’re afraid to laugh at ourselves and for anyone to laugh at us. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Fuck ‘em if they can tell a joke. Fuck ‘em if you can’t fuck ‘em.
Paul Beatty from the introduction to Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humour.
A man breaks into the house while I am home alone on the couch. My dad jumps out from behind a wall imitating the man, to scare me. Another man will break in and another man and another and I will no longer trust gates and windows and doors and roofs and floors.
I write a story that births another story. In the first one, bricks are things made of sadnesses. With these sadnesses, with her hurts and disappointments the unnamed narrating character builds houses that keep men with knives out and her in. Windows and doors become different things, take on different meanings and she furnishes the house with soft moments, with warm, with velvety things that feel like love.
I have stacked my sadness like bricks inside me. The bricks were outside, their own quiet weight in the corner behind the car, behind the bins. One by one I brought them in. Eight sadnesses to hold the mirror up, four on each side. One sadness to balance the broken bed base and one that only comes out on hot days, that props doors open, leaving everything slightly ajar. The sadness of being sad.
In the story that follows from this, the house floats away. Perhaps it is not this house, perhaps it is another. The house twitches, shifts a little when it thinks no-one is paying attention. The narrator, aware of the shifting, begins to stockpile stones, bricks and rocks to weight the house down, so “it can feel itself moving”.
Are these houses sentient things? What makes a house want to become weightless, light and floaty? What does it mean when a house defies its fundamental nature to be fixed, to be immoveable, to remain? Is a flying house freedom, or is it a lack of stability and security, a loss of control?
In “The Balloon” by Donald Barthelme, a gargantuan balloon appears suddenly above New York.
In January, the balloon, beginning at a point on 14th St., expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There I stopped it. It expanded upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, throughout the morning. ... For the 22 days of its existence, the balloon offered the possibility, in its randomness, of getting lost, of losing oneself, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet. I met you under the balloon on the occasion of your return form Norway. I said the balloon was an autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence. Now you are back, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy. It is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness.
Similarities can be drawn between how the narrator speaks of the balloon, and how critics discuss Barthelme’s work and particularly, the functioning of humour and irony. In the same way the balloon offers “the possibility, in its randomness, of getting lost, of losing oneself, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet” so does irony in his texts.
Scholar Mark Caughlin, in his paper, “Irony is Liking Things: Donald Barthelme’s Post- Modern Poetics,” argues that Barthelme’s use of irony, parody and collage is what threads his works together, and keeps it coherent.
Irony is, in fact, of paramount importance to Barthelme's vision and expression of the world. His adoption of the mode is both expansive and elusive .. Barthelme could be considered an ironist above al1 else. His irony gives his writing its distinguishing tone and voice; it is his author-function.
Is the “slipperiness of signs” and the “wasteland of late capitalist culture” not signified by a large floating balloon that disappears as randomly as it appears.
It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless, or at least less purposeful than the activities of those who, for example, hung green and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside, in certain streets, or seized the occasion to write messages on the surface, announcing their availability for the performance of unnatural acts or the availability of acquaintances.
In the above passage the narrator eschews the need for meanings and explanations. A dull, muted humour here is used refract the why’s. I write about humour, and irony and anxiety and fear and send it to my supervisor, who responds:
Do I set out to use humour, or is that all the traumas build and line themselves up like that, colouring horror with something like acerbic comedic relief. A moment for the writing to breathe, for the events to settle, for the reader to pass judgment.
My supervisor recommends I read Daniel Borzutzky, who “uses humour the way you do”. So I read Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human, a book I can only describe as having turned me inside-out and sideways.
In the Performance of Becoming Human, the biting humour dares the reader to laugh and implicate themselves in this messy, inhumane performance. It’s as though by laughing, by recognising the humour the reader becomes equally guilty of the outlined outrage and atrocities.
“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Fuck ‘em if they can tell a joke. Fuck ‘em if you can’t fuck ‘em”
Jason P. Steed, “This is why we’re never “just joking”. To the in-group, no defence of the joke is needed; the idea conveyed is accepted/ acceptable. So when Trump jokes about assassination or armed revolt, he’s asking the in-group to assimilate/ accept the idea. That’s what jokes do.”