Speaking of Humor and Power

One of the early ways I tried to improve my spoken English was to watch television. This sounds easy, but my graduate studies and a part-time job made it hard to find the time and the right program: something late at night with dialogue that was not too fast or difficult. One program that fit the criteria was The Love Boat. The series was in reruns by the time I first watched Captain Stubing steer the Pacific Princess toward the many “exotic ports of call” that made up the set. Although it was full of cheesy romance and famous guest stars I did not recognize, I liked the idea that some of the characters who were unattached at the beginning would fall in love with each other by the end of the show.

But the lessons I learned watching The Love Boat went beyond pronunciation: I learned something about humor because that program was one of the first hour-long series to use a laugh track. Often I did not find anything humorous when the “audience” laughed, so I began asking my husband what was funny. This drove him crazy at first, but gradually we entered into discussions about what constitutes humor in different cultures. The easiest for me to comprehend were those jokes caused by the words themselves, as in puns and jokes that depend on double entendre. Once I understood the multiple meanings of the words involved, they were fairly easy to understand. The more complex moments where the “audience” laughed, the ones where I understood all the words but had no idea what they were talking about, led our discussions to the context-dependent nature of humor.

Humor is relative. No event, person, or thing is intrinsically humorous. Thus, what one culture finds amusing may or may not be funny in another. Trying to grasp humor in a culture with which one is only superficially familiar is hard because an important part of humor requires the ability to understand a situation from a multitude of perspectives. The tension exploited by The Love Boat humor was that between an earlier conservative perspective concerning adult sexuality on the one hand, and the sexual liberation characterizing the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s on the other. The show’s compromise with the earlier standard seemed to be that all the non-married characters had at least to say they loved each other before hopping into the same bed. Coming from a society with an even narrower perspective on human sexuality than that of the TV audience, I could grasp this part of the humor even if I did not fully understand its cultural context.

While I struggled to learn, I began to wonder whether people in the same culture could ever have all the information they needed to grasp the humor often present in their daily lives. The answer seems to be both yes and no. With my limited knowledge of American norms, I could find the nervous mannerisms of a White passenger trying to seduce an African- American passenger to be funny, without understanding the challenge that scene presented to the prevailing attitude about interracial couples. But the scene would have had a stronger impact had I understood the full context. This is the difference between slapstick and satire. Humor on The Love Boat coated criticisms of prevailing norms with laughter, and you could simply laugh at the slapstick coating or you could also appreciate the rather gentle underlying satire: either way you were entertained.

Although the sugar coating of slapstick is funny, jokes that tell the truth about something while joking seem more interesting. The essence of satire is an implied criticism of something that falls short of a standard the comedian wants to hold up to us. It was this that led me from The Love Boat to Lenny Bruce. As a part of exploring the idea of humor and culture, my husband gave me a book containing Lenny Bruce’s routines from the 1960s. His performance style is considered tame now but Lenny Bruce was, for me, a crash course in humor that I still have not entirely completed. Bruce’s humor stripped away the sugar coating, leaving only satirical commentary on social, cultural, and political conventions. Bruce’s use of strong language and extreme perspectives was designed to shock us into recognizing the dissonance between what we thought we believed and how we actually behaved.

This is the intention behind his routine that begins with the incendiary line: “By the way, are there any niggers here tonight?” Although I know many comedians use this expression today, when I saw that word, one that carried all the baggage of oppression, I wondered how it could be considered humorous. But Bruce went on in something like a jazz riff to say that he knew of one nigger that worked there, and that there were two niggers in the audience, and then he described other audience members by other racial epithets - “one mick, one spic, one hick, thick, funky, spunky boogey.” Finally, like an auctioneer selling a roomful of items, Bruce rapid- ired a long series of racial epithets aimed at everyone.

Was it funny? Perhaps the tension between knowing those words are taboo and hearing someone use them in public is a kind of slapstick, but Bruce wanted more out of the humor than that. Bruce ended that portion of his routine by saying, “the word’s suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” So he wanted to use the word until it had no meaning left.

Of course, as the reactions to Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word demonstrated, the history of that word is not so simple. It is difficult to drain all the connotations of a word that still retains its power to wound. Perhaps humor cannot yet completely undermine that power by speaking truth, but it is very important to try, and to keep trying. Why? Because on one level people know that racism contradicts the values they claim to hold, but they often succumb to it anyway. Satirical humor reminds us of this tension by shocking us in a way that forces us to recognize the way we act. Because this shock is based on values we share, it reminds rather than instructs. Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate this month, uses the same kind of tension in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. When he tells us his dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal,” he highlights the fact that uch equality has still not been attained. By describing his dream, he exposes the behavioral reality we must change as he reminds us of the standards we have set for ourselves.

It should not be surprising that King’s “I Have a Dream” speech would eventually be riffed on. Nor, some forty years later, that such riffs would be Hip Hop rather than jazz. In her book, Your Negro Tour Guide: Truths in Black and White, Kathy Wilson renews the dream and adds a satirical riff to its power. Wilson’s dream is that “the sons of former wage slaves and the sons of former owners of payday loan centers will one day cease using each other as a means to a dead end.” Her dream is that one day her two nephews “will live in a city where they will not be profiled by the color of their skin, nor by the expensiveness of their cars or educations, but by the range of their respectability.” That one day, in the neighborhoods infested with daylight drug deals, “little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with black mothers and black fathers and walk together as intact families.” And “one day every guilty cop shall be prosecuted, every councilman and councilwoman shall be made accountable, and the homeless will be given shelter, and the crooked politicians will be made straight, and the needs of the unregistered voter shall be revealed, and the rest of us shall see it together.” With this hope, we will “mow down out of the mountain of status quo a stone of progressiveness” and “strangle dissonance into four- art harmony.” And, on that day, “all of God’s children – B-boys and white boys, gays, lesbians, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants, Catholics, anti-Semites and non-believers – will be able to hook arms and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

Jian Leng, Associate Director
The Center for the Humanities

St. Louis Literary Calendar

Check out the most recent literary events in the St. Louis area.

The Center for the Humanities
Advisory Board 2005-2006

Nancy Berg
Associate Professor of The Jewish, Islamic
and Near Eastern Studies Program

Ken Botnick
Associate Professor of Art

Lorenzo Carcaterra
Writer

Letty Chen
Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature

Robert Henke
Associate Professor of Drama and
Comparative Literature Chair of Comparative Literature

Michael Kahn
Attorney at Law, Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin

Larry May
Professor of Philosophy

Steven Meyer
Associate Professor of English

Angela Miller
Associate Professor of Art History and Archeology

Linda Nicholson
Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies

Dolores Pesce
Professor and Chair of Music Department

Joe Pollack
KWMU Theatre & Film Critic

Bart Schneider
Editor of Speakeasy

Jeff Smith
Associate Professor of Performing Arts
Director of Film and Media Studies Department

Robert Vinson
Assistant Professor of History and African
and African- American Studies

James V. Wertsch
Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts and Sciences in Education
Director of the International and Area Studies Program

Ex officio

Edward S. Macias
Executive Vice Chancellor & Dean of Arts and Sciences,
Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences