laughing matters 2: the powa of yuma
Tragedy is when I get a paper cut. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks
I got in trouble in fourth grade. Mrs. Schloss had just given us an oral spelling test and was grading it at her desk. “Dale McGowan!” she said, curtly. “Come here at once.”
Ooooo, purred my classmates.
My breath quickened as I walked to the front of the room. She was a tiny woman with half glasses on a chain and an odd accent I never could place. Her head barely cleared the top of her enormous wooden desk.
“What is this?” she said, pointing to one of the words on my test.
I looked. “Yuma,” I said, helplessly.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Wha…no! I…I didn’t know what that word was. I never heard it before you said it. So I just…I wrote it like it sounds.”
“I am supposed to believe you’ve never heard the word ‘yuma’ before.”
“Never.”
She straightened up. “Well allow me to expand your vocabulary, mister. YUMA, noun. ‘I hev a good sense of yuma.’ Now set doon and write it 100 tames.”
It’s not nice to make fun. But in this case, for once in my school career, I was innocent of the charge of attempted comedy.
redressing the balance of power
Laughing at someone is considered less kosher than blistering argumentation for several reasons. For one thing, satire is almost impossible to respond to. George Carlin calls comedy
a socially acceptable form of aggression. It’s an unfair response to an unfair imbalance of power – a seizing of the joystick. You get to name the targets, you get to fire the bullets – and what you’re essentially doing is putting those people in an impossible situation where they’re forced to like it. There’s a great deal of hostility involved – and the wonderful part is, after you’re finished, you say, ‘What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke? This is humor, sir!’ You can shame them into agreeing that the attack is acceptable. Nobody wants to be accused of not taking a joke. It’s a double-bind.
This “response to an unfair imbalance of power” is an important point. Jokes directed downward in the power continuum are considered in bad taste – ethnic jokes by powerful whites, jokes about the disabled by those who are not, and so on – while jokes directed upward at the more powerful can be a means of redressing the imbalance.
But there’s more to the strong reaction against satirical comedy than just the victim’s difficulty in responding. Much of it has to do with what satire actually is.
“I fear that the item you have posted engages in mere ridicule,” said the theologian in his note protesting the office-door satire I mentioned last time. “Ridicule does nothing to enlighten.”
Tell that to Erasmus, buddy. Tell it to Voltaire. Time for some definitions:
Ridicule
The contemptuous declaration that something is ridiculous and worthy of scorn.
Satire
The use of wit to attack the vices and follies of humankind.
Ridicule can be an element of satire and often is. The difference is that ridicule outside of satire often exists as a simple attack for its own sake. Satire by definition has a point to make, a critique to offer, and the Onion satire, to my mind, made a damning point about the inconsistency of the Vatican’s simultaneous work toward ecumenism (cooperation and understanding among religions) and the continued position that only Catholics are saved.
so…what is yuma?
Satire seeks change using humor as a medium. So what is humor? There’ve been many theories of comedy, but three elements consistently pop up: contrast, truth, and what I’ll call the revealed obvious.
Humor works best when it deals in sudden, shocking juxtapositions. The contrast between appearance and reality, between expectation and actual outcome, between someone’s self-image and the way others see him, between what should be and what is – contrast is indispensable to comedy.
The truth element is most important to its critical value. A joke is often funny in direct proportion to its revelation of something that is true but hidden by a fig leaf. The laugh comes as the fig leaf is yanked away, and the strength of the laugh is like a Geiger counter for the truthfulness of the joke’s premise. I’ll try to demonstrate this later in this series.
But the third piece is the really damning one, the one that makes satire such anathema to its targets. In delivering a satirical attack – and it is a form of attack, just like most types of critical challenge, let’s not mince words – in writing satire, I am essentially saying not just that someone’s actions or beliefs are ridiculous, but that I am counting on the ridiculousness to be so immediately obvious that the audience will roar with laughter when I strip that fig leaf.
What I’m saying to my target, really, is this: not only are you wrong, but the wrongness is so obvious that when I point it out, there will be a spontaneous and delighted recognition of truth from my audience.
Pretty insulting, right? Better not insult the target. Oh, unless it matters – unless we’re talking about institutions and attitudes that really need changing if we are to strike a blow for justice and compassion and reason. When that’s the case, why not bring out the big guns?
But the opening quote by Mel Brooks also reveals the pitfall of comedy: that it can, when uninformed, simply reflect the inability to see things from another person’s point of view. Fortunately the truth meter comes to the rescue again. A joke based on ignorance is generally less funny. It’s the revealed obvious that really kills.
Whether or not it rings true (and therefore rings funny) often depends on your point of view. Next week I’ll post some short satires I wrote for the faculty e-newsletter at the aforementioned Catholic college. The difference between those who found them hilarious, and those who found them pointless, had everything to do with diet — specifically, whether a faculty member’s diet included a regular infusion of wafers.