I had a
conversation recently with my dad about when him and my mom first started
dating; he told me about how my grandma hated him and made little to no effort
to disguise that fact. My dad, a
man who had previously in his life been sent to his elementary school principal
for putting a tack on his teacher’s chair (something I respectfully refuse to
believe actually happened in the old days), saw her feelings towards him as an
opportunity or incentive rather than a deterrent. He used her own hostility to his advantage by actively
poking fun at her distaste for him, much to bystanders’ delight, and her
dismay. He used these jokes as a
leverage of sorts to, however briefly, implicate my grandma for her unfounded and
biased opinions of him and question the soundness of the system of parental
approval. In this way, my dad took
the liberties Turner claims are afforded to THE CLOWN when he “scoffs,
lampoons, and judges people’s foibles, crimes, sins, and folly” without
negative repercussions [Turner, 260].
“As much as they may want to, they can’t attack you if you’re just
making a joke,” my Dad said as he was finishing up his story, “humor is an
important tool to have at your disposal.”
I’m sure there’s
no way my Dad could have recognized how what he said fit in with the
anthropological, philosophical, and sociological theories of humor we have
encountered in this class, but the connections certainly didn’t elude me. This was a perfect example of the power
dynamic being altered and questioned (as the superiority theory presents as a
possibility) as well as a form of a sort of Freudian release of my dad’s own
animosity. He took up the mantle
of the archetypal clown in order to criticize what he saw as injustice towards
him (from a safe distance of course).
As Douglass says in Jokes,
“humour chastises insincerity, pomposity, stupidity” and a joke is “seen as an
attack on control” [Douglass, 148-149].
I think my dad,
along with many others including myself, at some point in time came to the
conclusion that humor is sometimes the only viable resort in situations where
you feel powerless or confronted with something that is beyond your control is
some manner. This sentiment is
echoed in Anne Lamott’s piece, Ham of God,
as the narrator struggles to make sense of the chaotic and violent world that
she is living in. She is
overwhelmed by the stories of the death and destruction in Iraq that she is
bombarded with by every news outlet and despairs at the state of humanity. Her story is purposefully exaggerated
and light-hearted, but her question to her ‘Jesuit friend Father Tom’ is not
meant in jest and resonates with readers who may have felt the same sort of
dread: “How are we going to get through this craziness” [Lamott, 5]? Lamott makes use of a playful, almost
sacrilegious, tone to bring up her very serious doubts concerning a higher
power or greater purpose to life.
It may be funny when she says that “the problem with God—or at any rate,
one of the top five most annoying things about God—is that He or She rarely
answers right away,” but, it also raises questions that are too large for any
individual to approach [Lamott, 9].
Where is this God when horrible things are happening in the world? This is a question that we can never
truly grapple with and so, what better to do than use humor to try to make
light of what we can?
As I am beginning
to piece together from our studies of the various uses of humor- a clown, joke,
or laugh are so much more than just manifestations of our amusement. They are also tools that we must use to
face the inexplicable and unsettling aspects in our lives.
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