You Have to be Liberated to Laugh

I know a young man who claims he can judge the fuckability of a woman by her shoes (e.g., a high-heeled, naked-looking sling-back connotes readier availability than a clog); and while this method of assessing female willingness is not to be guaranteed for its infallibility, it has at least the distinction of being the most amusing thing I've heard about sex in a long time.

Alas, it did seem that much of the humor and whimsy went out of sex in the sullen Seventies. The young man with the incipient shoe fetish--which he finds as funny as anyone--is one of the few people still liberated enough to laugh about sex. What hath sexual liberation wrought? How (continued on page 162)You have to be Liberated(continued from page 154) did sex get so grim and the Seventies so sullen?

The screaming Sixties did not give way to the sullen Seventies all at once, of course. In fact, that frenetic period we usually refer to as the Sixties is really the late Sixties and the sullen Seventies are really the late Seventies--as if we were not sure what the flavor of a particular decade was until it was almost over. But now it does, indeed, seem clear that since 1975 or so, the decade turned sullener and sullener, sexually speaking, and a sense of humor between the sexes began to go the way of the myth of vaginal orgasm and condoms behind the drugstore counter.

Is there any reason to believe this will change in the Eighties? I hope so, but the signs hardly look promising. The women's movement, for all its vital work, seems to have left a legacy of male nervousness about offending "new" women; the "sexual revolution" (which to my mind has hardly even begun) seems to have unleashed a mammoth backlash among America's ever-present guardians of morality; reproductive freedom seems once again under attack; book banning, if not burning, is still going strong (when school libraries ban Gnomes for its "nudity"--perhaps we should say "gnudity"?--you know that somebody's funny bone has been amputated); and while grim female separatists argue about whether or not women who sleep with men are "really feminists," even grimmer Right-to-Lifers argue about the civil rights of fetuses our daughters aren't even old enough to gestate. (What would the founding fathers--not to mention mothers--have thought of a Right-to-Life Amendment to the Constitution?) Not a situation designed to tickle the funny bone--assuming that America still has one.

It does seem significant to me that in one of the most highly praised and widely read books of 1979--the richly interesting (though almost pornographically violent) John Irving novel The World According to Garp--the pivotal love affair results in no less than one dead child, one partially blinded child, one bitten-off penis and the decisions on the part of both main characters to give up, at least for the time being, both sex and their careers. No--sex was certainly no laughing matter in 1979.

Whence this sexual grimness? To say "puritanism" and leave it at that explains nothing, although, in essence, that is the answer. America, like most sexually terrified cultures, is subject to periods of feast and periods of famine. The feast is just getting started (and people are beginning to pick at the hors d'oeuvres without feeling too guilty) when the protectors of public morality march in again, deploring that very "license" and "moral depravity" that, in fact, has scarcely surfaced. Suddenly, we are in the midst of another backlash, and the moral guardians--those people who, according to Freud's biographer Ernest Jones, busy themselves with removing public temptations so that they will not be tempted themselves--are back among us, rapping our knuckles every time we reach for a goody.

It's pointless to tell them that they're rapping other people's knuckles just to keep from playing with themselves. Moral guardians are never self-aware (or they wouldn't become moral guardians). Might as well tell the Ayatollah that he's a male chauvinist or Anita Bryant and Marabel Morgan that they'd really like to strangle their husbands and that's why they preach submission. Freud's true message--that the unconscious exists and that it lives our lives unbeknownst to us--has not been understood by the country that so often takes his name in vain. Self-aware people rarely concern themselves with public morality, gnudity among gnomes or what other people do in bed with whom. The fear of sexuality that has been a major component in American culture at least as far back as the 17th Century has never been eradicated--though in the late Sixties it may have appeared that way. In short, reports of the death of puritanism are much exaggerated.

All the same, those reports have managed to generate new repression. The women's movement, the decline of censorship in magazine and book publishing, the ready availability of written pornography and sexually explicit films may create the illusion that America's morality is profoundly altered, but puritanical, patriarchal attitudes persist under the gaudy artifacts of the so-called sexual revolution. I believe, in fact, that pornography is a symptom of puritanism rather than an indicator of its demise. A sexually healthy culture does not divide books into "clean" and "dirty" and does not fragment life into sexual and non-sexual components. A sexually healthy culture is one in which sex is received into the mainstream of life and neither overestimated nor underestimated. We can scarcely say we have such a culture today.

What does that have to do with humor between the sexes? A great deal. The ability to laugh at ourselves is a sign of health; and the capacity for laughter about sexuality is a sign of security about our sexual identities. Just as humor about the Church was tolerated during the Middle Ages (when religion was a living force for great numbers of people) and not tolerated in the 17th Century (when faith was beginning to wane in favor of rationalism and scientism), the ability to joke about something implies an underlying security of belief. It is my conviction that the general humorlessness of the women's movement (there are some exceptions to this, but not, alas, enough) stems from a great uncertainty on the part of many women that they can really tolerate--psychologically--the freedom they are demanding. That is understandable, even poignant. The most outwardly liberated woman today is likely to have a far less liberated mother; thus, she is bound to feel two sets of values in conflict. The part of herself that heeds the parental imperative, with all its emotional seductions, longs to go back to the old security of home, hearth and oppression. The more cerebral part of herself chooses liberation--at least intellectually. In such a state of psychological turmoil, where is there room for humor? Humor may be the consolation of the underdog, but the ability to laugh is the privilege of the already liberated. Ready laughter implies a doubleness of vision and a sense of security about gains already won.

I remember that when Fear of Flying was first published, in 1973, I heard grumbling from several radical feminists about the deficiencies of my vision: My heroine was too sexually oriented, too male-oriented and too full of wisecracks. A writer friend finally told me to my face why my book was seen as somewhat treasonous by certain feminists: "You're writing humorously about the battle between the sexes," she said, "and it's no laughing matter!"

I can understand that position, even, at times, wholly sympathize with it. What revolution, after all, has ever been humorous? Most revolutions begin by banning privilege and end by banning sex and burning books. Moreover, revolutionaries need slogans in black and white to make their grievances with the status quo widely known. Humor cannot serve their purpose, because it deals in shades of gray, in double--even triple--visions. How can it not risk confusion? How can it not offend some just as surely as it amuses others?

The list of writers who have been put (continued on page 206) You have to be Liberated (continued from page 162) in the pillory or the jailhouse for their humor is very long; it includes Rabelais, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, and also the relatively dour Defoe, whose attempt at a satirical essay about the mistreatment of dissenters misfired utterly, landing him in the stocks.

Nothing is quite as dangerous to its author as satire, for satire depends upon tone, subtle word use, topical social reference and, especially, the capacity for humor of its readers--something the writer can neither predict nor control. Since the funny bone is a vestigial organ in times of social change, and since the gift for irony is always a rather rare human trait, the satirist always runs the risk of being misunderstood by both sides of any issue: If the king doesn't behead him, the revolutionary tribunal surely will.

Thus, I fear that we will restore a sense of humor between the sexes only when we are more secure about our new roles in society. When women truly feel liberated, they will be able to laugh at themselves again, and when men truly accept female equality, they will not worry so much about how to act with liberated women.

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Neither literature nor life can be reduced to revolutionary slogans without great violence being done to our humanity. There is a tendency in this country to try to reduce both writers and their books to slogans and to attempt to recruit them as soldiers in various ideological battles. "What do you really mean by the ending of your novel?" readers are always asking; and books are often reviewed according to the sides they seem to be taking--when, in fact, it should be obvious that if one wished merely to take sides, one would hardly go to the trouble of writing a 300-page novel. The novelist writes novels precisely because the human events he or she wishes to chronicle cannot be reduced to slogans.

Nevertheless, the books that fascinate us at any given historical moment are indicative of certain cultural trends. The popularity of a novel like Garp, for example, with its obsessive concentration on various forms of castration--both real and symbolic--bespeaks a rather different historical moment in the relations between the sexes than the popularity of a book like Fear of Flying (in which sex is more often absurd and humorous than tragic and destructive).

What conclusions we draw from those differing attitudes toward sex is another matter. Patterns of sexual change take years to emerge and we are not very good at recognizing them in our own culture. Still, it is true, as Henry Miller once said, that "books are created in answer to our inner needs." Thus, it is important to recognize the grim and violent component in a novel like Garp and to meditate on why so many readers find in that violent sexuality a mirror of their own lives. I often become discouraged by the amount of violence I see in American novels (and, of course, in movies and on TV) because it seems to me that we turn toward violence as a source of titillation, a way out of emotional numbness, an excitement beyond that of sexuality (but which also has a sexual component). I have always marveled at the curious double standard that sees sex as dirty and mayhem as acceptable for family consumption. Even in the old days of censorship, a disemboweling wouldn't get you banned in Boston, but a blow job surely would.

If books are created in response to our inner needs, so, too, is humor. As our sexual roles begin to change, our humor about sex must also change. Jokes that degrade women are not as funny as they once were. Mother-in-law jokes and sexy-secretary jokes seem more and more irrelevant and tasteless as we come to recognize the humanity of women. Some of us are beginning to find we can no longer laugh at women as fragmented organs. But when the old humor of oppression dies, what will come to take its place? The humor of derogation must have a scapegoat as surely as a circus must have a clown, and for centuries, women served that purpose. I think that much of the current nervousness about men and women, as well as the current uncertainty about what is or is not funny, stems from the fact that sexual values are changing at different rates in different parts of the world. What may be funny in Woody Allen's Manhattan is tragic in Iran, a matter of total indifference in the gay bars of San Francisco and almost incomprehensible in the truck stops of Montana. While gentle irony runs the risk of being baffling to the unsophisticated, the most outrageous and iconoclastic humor runs the risk of sending its author to the gibbet or the guillotine--especially in times of changing values. And that is one reason why humor between the sexes is so problematical right now: We have literally dozens of sexual cultures coexisting side by side.

While I am not the sort of feminist who feels offended by nude female centerfolds (on the contrary, I think they serve a useful social function--if you consider masturbation useful, that is), I do wince at the unrecognized sexism in a film like Manhattan--which poses as being sexually hip but really takes a series of not-so-funny swipes at women. Jokes about wives turning lesbian and writing books about their ex-husbands don't tickle my funny bone. Just as my gut feeling says that anti-Semitic jokes are funny only when told by Jews, I tend to feel that jokes about women turning lesbian (or turning writer) are funny only when told by women writers. And even then, people are likely to misunderstand.

When I attempted a spoof of lesbian chic in How to Save Your Own Life, lots of people thought I was questioning gay rights, or attacking lesbian sex, when I was only trying to parody the absurd situation that results when people choose their sexual partners out of duty, faddishness or status seeking rather than out of true inclination. But you see how tricky this whole matter is: What is sexually funny depends not only on the joke but on the teller, not only on the teller but on the audience.

Well, where does that leave us? We cannot have only men telling jokes about men and women telling jokes about women and a high commissar of sexual humor arbitrating it all. That would be even worse than the present anarchy. And it remains regrettably true that one man's humor is another man's bad taste, while one woman's funny bone is another woman's soapbox. Just as there are people who consider any humor counterrevolutionary, the majority of people consider their own jokes funny and someone else's jokes tasteless. Nor does one's sense of humor fail to change in the course of one's development. Fart jokes are not as sublimely humorous to me as they were when I was ten (though they're still a whole lot better than most of the jokes I hear). Polish jokes are, I guess, funny to me only because I'm not Polish. I adore The Benny Hill Show, despite the fact that my English intellectual friends think it's the pits; and I am more offended by a Woody Allen slur upon women than by a Benny Hill one, because I expect things from a fellow New Yorker, fellow Jew, fellow writer that I would never expect from a British vaudevillian.

Aha. Perhaps that is the crux of the matter with sexual humor: our expectations. What is funny coming from an unenlightened boob is not so funny coming from a sophisticate. As women's status (presumably) rises and various sexual standards coexist, it becomes more and more difficult to separate humor from bad taste. Moreover, that separation must be made again and again and on all levels. Since we judge not only the joke itself but the joke in the context of teller and hearer, we are constantly being called upon to make subtle adjustments in the tuning of our funny bones. We need a veritable xylophone of funny bones to deal with our present cultural chaos.

In the past, the dependably low status of women provided a rather easy, ever-available target for humor. "Never trust a woman, not even a dead one," goes an old Slavic proverb. "Women are only children of a larger growth," said Lord Chesterfield. "Here lies my wife: here let her lie./Now she's at rest. And so am I," said John Dryden in a characteristic couplet. Female gabbiness, wiliness, stupidity, stubbornness, lecherousness, extravagance, fecklessness, fickleness, and so on, provided unfailing sources of sexual jokes. As long as society at large accepted those givens about female character--or the lack of it--there was never any dearth of material for jokes about the sexual status quo. No one seemed to notice that the sexual stereotypes about women often contradicted one another totally. In fact, if you study a compendium of dirty jokes about women, you will find that our sex is condemned for being sexless and insatiable, stingy and extravagant, duplicitous and naïve, dominant and submissive. Never mind what we really are; the only constant is constant condemnation.

In his brilliant (if occasionally daft and dogmatically Freudian) book, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, Gershon Legman points out that humor is in reality verbal aggression and that most jokes about women derive from men's fear of female dominance. Sexual humor about women is, in fact, a way of settling scores. Men feel that women have too much power in sex (and perhaps in all of life) and they use hostile humor as the great equalizer. Samuel Johnson summed up this basic male fear and envy of women in his famous line "Nature has given women so much power, that the Law has wisely given them little." Here, I suspect, is the origin of patriarchy and of patriarchal humor as well.

Woman's awesome ability to create life, together with man's uncertainty about paternity, potency and performance, leads to the frantic male need to control women that results in patriarchy. Since we are all inheritors of patriarchal culture, patriarchal assumptions, patriarchal literature, art, religion, sex and sexual jokes, it is hard for us to see how truly pervasive and distorting an influence it is upon our lives--particularly our sexual lives. But we must try. The very fact that our Bible shows man giving birth to woman (rather than birth happening in that ordinary yet miraculous way it happens all over the earth, every millisecond) should alert us to the topsy-turvy way our culture has chosen to misperceive reality. But all of man's attempts to hold women down have availed him nought. He has succeeded in making us economic semislaves, social inferiors and handmaidens rather than matriarchs; but the battlefield of the bed still defeats him. Hence, the function of sexual humor: a last-ditch defense against that last ditch that entices him, mocks him, pleasures him, fascinates him, repels him, gives birth to him and, finally, buries him.

Can we honestly expect this to change because of a decade of media hype about "women's liberation" and the nervousness it has wrought? Doubtful. Even if the sexes had complete social equality (which we are far from having--despite working mothers, the cultural changes wrought by the two-pay-check family and the general acceptance of oral-genital sex), male fear of women would still have the same physiological and psychological roots.

Perhaps male fear is even greater today than in the past because women's social status is rising, if only, as yet, in token ways.

Perhaps, too, one of the reasons for the great discomfort we see around us derives from the fact that men still have the same psychological need to attack women (the joke as verbal aggression) but it is no longer chic or sophisticated to do so. Thus, two imperatives come into conflict: The desire to be trendy, with it, sophisticated, cool (so crucial in our status-seeking culture) dictates that the hip man be "sensitive" to women and pay lip service to "women's liberation," but the old, primitive castration anxieties still push him to release his fear of female dominance in jokes that degrade women. Where does this conflict leave him? Silent, usually. Silent and confused. He can't make the old jokes without appearing déclassé, and nobody seems to have invented new ones. To return to my earlier point about humor and mental health, I think that, paradoxically, we are in a worse psychological situation now than when we could all laugh at some of the classic subjects of sexual jokes--big vaginas, small penises, female secretions and smells, impotent penises and, of course, the masturbating nuns.

Why? Because we have lost the escape valve of the sexual joke and found no replacement for it. Perhaps that's why there is so much sexual gloom and newly repressive movements seem to be burgeoning everywhere. Women's liberation made some cosmetic changes and inflation sent millions of mothers and wives to work, but our basically repressive patriarchal society has never really been restructured, yet we are not supposed to talk about this evident truth. We are supposed to mouth platitudes about "growing liberation for women" and "sensitive" men as if we were blind to the reality of our society's underlying structures. Both men and women suffer as a result of this lying, particularly this lying to self. The old humor of oppression at least reflected certain basic truths about society. Men were afraid of women sexually; women were socially manipulated by men. Now we have lost that tradition of hostile humor, but we have yet to create a humor of liberation--so either we laugh at the old degrading jokes and feel guilty and smarmy or we shut up and feel repressed. Neither one provides much outlet for our psychological needs.

•

But perhaps the Eighties will be a time of sexual reconciliation through humor. Maybe the concept of a liberated jokebook isn't a contradiction in terms. Dottie Archibald, one of the brightest of the new breed of women stand-up comedians and now a regular on The Merv Griffin Show, may be pointing us in the right direction.

"Certainly, humor needs a scapegoat," says Archibald. "But the scapegoat can be the situation, not a gender-linked trait." Archibald herself, who writes her material with her husband, has two rules for her humor: no self-deprecation and no female retaliation against men (e.g., small-dick jokes--to compensate for all those years of big-vagina jokes). She honors Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers for opening the field of comedy to women but notes (as I have often noted myself) that their humor often sadly relies on self-attack.

She wants, rather, to portray "the intelligent woman baffled by the world"--and she succeeds admirably, I think. She has created the persona of a working woman with house and spouse, but though she pokes fun at her husband, she pokes equal fun at herself--albeit not in the way of Diller or Rivers. There is no talk of her inability to snare a husband and no making herself look freakish. She comes on stage looking like a pretty, 30ish woman, dressed in ordinary but attractive clothes. Her mystification by life may then represent that of her women viewers. "She has walked out of the audience and turned around," Griffin says of her.

Dottie Archibald maintains that things are certainly getting better in the field of liberated humor. Few of the younger male comics rely on sexist jokes anymore, she says, and the opportunities for women are greater than ever. We may finally be entering an age, she insists, in which it is possible to make fun of human traits rather than of those of either men or women.

I certainly hope the Eighties prove that true. Whatever else the decade brings, it'll be a lot easier for all of us to take if we can have our laughs--and be liberated, too.

"A sexually healthy culture does not fragment life into sexual and nonsexual components."

"One man's humor is another's bad taste, while one woman's funny bone is another woman's soapbox."