Goofing

Because nobody asked, my theory of humor

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First, the obligatory Old Man’s Reminiscence. By the time you get to my age, you’ve got a reminiscence for pretty much every situation. But usually only one, and people are sick to death of hearing it.

When I was in high school I took a Public Speaking class. I think it was there that I figured out I was good at public speaking, or at least that I enjoyed it, whether anybody enjoyed listening or not. I did a speech one week on Humor. I forget what I said – something about humor being related to truth. My teacher gave me a good grade, and said she’d like to see me develop it into an Original Oration, for district competition.

I thought about it, and wanted to do it. But I gave it up, because what I’d already said (little as it was) was pretty much all I could think of on the subject. And all I could find written on the subject seemed to agree that nobody knew how humor worked.

Well, more than fifty years have passed. And I think I have a theory. If it’s any good, it’s probably been said before. If it’s original, it’s probably twaddle. So I can’t really win with this. But I don’t have a book to review tonight, and I’m arrogant enough to post the theory here.

As I was saying in high school, before I was so rudely interrupted by time, humor is about truth. Doesn’t have to be a major, serious truth. It could be a small truth. All it needs to be is something we all recognize and share as part of our common life on this planet.

The humorist, instead of just stating bald fact, plays with the truth. It’s like a game of… Dodgeball, I guess. In Dodgeball, you have to keep on the lookout, because the ball might come at you from any direction. The humorist lobs the truth at you from a direction you don’t expect. You see it in a new way, you’re surprised, and (here the Dodgeball analogy breaks down), you’re amused. You laugh.

Or perhaps I could put it more crudely. Humor is the truth mooning you. Showing its backside.

“But,” you might say (especially if you viewed the clip above, the funniest scene from possibly the funniest film every made, “Duck Soup”), “that doesn’t apply to anarchic humor like the Marx Brothers or Monty Python.”

True, but I am prepared with an equivocation. Anarchic humor is the obverse of the same game. Here the truth does not surprise by its appearance, but by its absence. It’s made conspicuous by said absence. Ultimately, it declares the truth too.

(That, by the way, is why Monty Python generally didn’t offend me. People spoke of their humor subverting rationality. But I thought it emphasized rationality. Monty Python’s world was what we’d live in if the Postmodern philosophers were right. But the fact that the world isn’t like that – that Monty Python is funny, not a documentary – seemed to me to reinforce rationality.)

This theory is available for purchase by any large, wealthy, soulless corporation, in return for extravagant sums of money and the services of a valet.

I’ve been reading Lord Peter Wimsey stories, and I’m relatively sure I need a valet pretty badly.

Non-fiction

We Live in Technopoly

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Carl R. Trueman writes in a debut World Opinion article that Big Tech is working us over and we could barely care less.

“Parents who still think the educational choice they make for their children is the most critical decision they make are sadly mistaken. That they decide whether their children can have smartphones is likely of more importance. “

He doesn’t invoke Neil Postman’s name, but he does repeats ideas I heard from Postman first. We think of technology as assisting us, as doing our bidding, but when we ask our tech what it would like us to do, then we surrender to the tech in our hands and begin to live in a technopoly.

Trueman says technology “mediates reality to us, and in doing so, it reshapes how we imagine the world and our place within it.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Clouds of Witness,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“It is possible, my lord, if your lordship will excuse my saying so, that the liveliness of your lordship’s manner may be misleading to persons of limited—”

“Be careful, Bunter!”

“Limited imagination, my lord.”

“Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.”

“Certainly not, my lord. I meant nothing disparaging.”

I was first introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey through the BBC production of Clouds of Witness (the subject, in its book form, of this review) broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre back in 1973, with the irresistible Ian Carmichael starring. (He didn’t actually resemble the character described in the books, but once seen, he’s impossible to get rid of.)

Clouds of Witness is one of those stories where coincidence and withheld information combine to confuse a fairly simple problem. Lord Peter Wimsey is in Paris, on his way home from a holiday in Corsica, when he learns that his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder.

The fatal events occurred at a hunting lodge in Yorkshire, where the duke and his family and friends were staying. Denis Cathcart, a slightly-too-smooth young gentleman to whom Peter’s sister Mary is engaged, is discovered in the early hours of the morning, shot to death outside the conservatory. Sir Gerald is standing over him.

Mary claims she was awakened by a gunshot, which is a lie, since the shot had been fired more than an hour earlier. Gerald refuses to explain what he was doing outside at that hour.

Sir Gerald’s lawyer, at his client’s wishes, plans to base his defense on reasonable doubt; the gunshot wound could reasonably have been self-inflicted. But Lord Peter, when he shows up, is determined to get past the intersecting lies and discover what really happened. The true murderer must not be allowed to escape. The investigation will lead him to be shot at, to nearly drown in a Yorkshire bog, and to risk his life on a trans-Atlantic airplane flight in a storm (this story is set in 1920, you must remember).

Clouds of Witness is not Dorothy Sayers at the height of her powers, but it’s a fascinating and original detective problem, enjoyable and well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the English nobility and their quaint customs.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“…You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”

It had been a while since I’d read any of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books. Two collections showed up at bargain prices on Amazon recently, so I snapped them up. Then I settled down with the first novel, Whose Body? The author was still finding her voice as a mystery writer here, but it’s a very enjoyable read.

Lord Peter Wimsey, if you’re not familiar with him, is an English nobleman, the younger brother of a duke. He suffered “combat fatigue” in World War I, and immediately after was jilted by his fiancée. He took up detecting crime as a sort of therapy hobby, and is good at it. His success is aided by the fact that he looks and acts very much like Bertie Wooster (Ian Carmichael played both roles creditably), so people underestimate him. (His valet Bunter, by the way, is hard to distinguish from Jeeves.)

When the man who is repairing the church roof at the Wimsey ducal estate is detained by the police, the dowager duchess turns to her son Peter to figure out what’s really going on. The poor workman walked into his bathroom one morning and found a dead man in his tub, naked except for a pair of pince nez glasses. Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard (a stereotypical character whom the author wisely faded out of succeeding books) loses no time arresting the poor man and his housemaid.

Meanwhile, a well-known Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He bore a superficial resemblance to the mysterious body in the bath, but is not the same man.

Lord Peter, assisted by his good friend Inspector Parker, takes advantage of the considerable license the police authorities allow the nobility, and starts his own investigation. It will lead to a horrible discovery and a terrible revelation.

Whose Body? is an enjoyable introduction to a stellar (and groundbreaking) detective series. I was particularly intrigued, on this reading, by certain instances of what today we’d call “cultural stereotypes.” Sir Reuben Levy’s description sounds like a standard, slightly antisemitic trope. But the author is delving deeper. We learn from those who knew him that the man was in fact a capital fellow, and much loved. The same goes for an American character who talks in the kind of broad American accent one sees so often (painfully) in old English books. But again, on getting to know him, we learn he’s an admirable guy. I’ve heard Sayers criticized for “snobbery,” but I think it’s deeper than that. She uses the stereotypes in order to transcend them, and makes a subtextual statement in doing so (Hey! I used subtextual in a sentence!)

I highly recommend Whose Body? Not only is it an intriguing, well-plotted mystery, but there are few literary pleasures that compare with listening to Lord Peter talk piffle.

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Would You Say God’s Love Scandalizes You?

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Jamie: [in English] It’s my favorite time of day, driving you.
Aurelia: [in Portuguese] It’s the saddest part of my day, leaving you.

Jared C. Wilson has a new book out called, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing. The quote above from the movie Love, Actually doesn’t make it into the book, but many song lyrics do as Jared plays with popular sentiments on his way to expounding God’s marvelous love.

He posted quotes from the book on his blog the other day.

  • “Think of what love might result if we all put each other’s interests ahead of our own. We’d find ourselves in a beautiful stalemate.”
  • “Most of us are prepared to love others only up to the point where it begins to actually cost us.”

Actively suppressing our self-interest out of concern for God and each other would certainly rework how we live in society. And they thought Christians were weird before.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Killer Aboard,’ by Sean Blaise

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Long ago, when his career was young, Bernard Cornwell used to write mysteries set in the yachting world. I found some of them in a public library (in Florida, as I recall), and enjoyed them very much. Cornwell stopped writing them because they weren’t selling, and went on to write historical epics, winning fame and fortune. But I’ve often mourned those sailing stories.

So when I saw a bargain on Killer Aboard, by Sean Blaise, about murder on a trans-Atlantic sailing voyage, I grabbed it up, hoping for the same kind of magic.

I was disappointed.

The hero of Killer Aboard is John Otter, who usually works as a skipper of yachts for the wealthy. But he’s bored with that, looking for something more elemental. When he hears of an English university program that would have him captaining a crew including several students who’ll be learning as they go, it seems like just the challenge he’s been looking for, and he signs up. The voyage begins in South Africa.

Among the sailors are the university instructor, who thinks she ought to command the ship, a South African on the run from loan sharks, and several university students whose true motivation is not educational, but a treasure hunt involving Napoleon’s (empty) tomb when they stop over on the island of St. Helena. By the time they leave St. Helena, a local will have been murdered (unknown to Capt. Otter), and the students will be bound in a deadly pact of silence. Then there’s a murder. Then the great storm hits and all the communications equipment is fried.

I had two problems with Killer Aboard. One was the weak writing. Author Blaise’s diction is often awkward, and he never knows where to place his commas. My second problem was the hero. John Otter is not, it seems to me, a very good commander. He commands as I would in his place (I’d be a bad commander too), letting discipline slide until it’s too late. He knows and cites the proper principles – start out like a dictator so there’ll be no question when things get rough – but he doesn’t follow them.

Once the storm comes up and things get hairy, the book does its job as a thriller. But I wasn’t happy about it all, and don’t recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightmare in Pink,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Captain McGee. Private cruises. Personalized therapy. And a little twinge of pain when the plane took off, pain for McGee, because she was too close to what-might-have-been. If there’s no pain and no loss, it’s only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.

In 1963, Fawcett Publications (which began, as I’ve told you before, in Robbinsdale, Minn., the town where I live, but had by this time been in New York state for decades) faced a business crisis. Fawcett was one of the pioneers in the field of “paperback originals” – novels published specifically for the paperback market, generally sensational and lowbrow in character. Their most popular writer was Richard S. Prather, author of a series of racy hard-boileds starring a randy private eye named Shell Scott. Prather had received an irresistible offer from Pocket Books, and was jumping over to their house. Fawcett desperately needed a new series detective.

In a moment of sanity (fairly rare in publishers) they turned to one of their most dependable and talented writers, John D. MacDonald. “Give us a series hero,” they said.

MacDonald’s response was a character he planned to call Dallas McGee. Dallas would be a lanky beach bum, living on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Instead of a private eye, he would call himself a “salvage specialist.” When people were robbed or cheated out of valuable possessions or large sums of money, they could go to McGee. He would try to retrieve them, and if he succeeded he got to keep half.

Fawcett green-lighted the project, and McDonald quickly churned out several short novels starring Dallas McGee to launch the series rapidly. They were nearly ready to release the first one when disaster struck – inconvenience for Fawcett, but tragedy for the nation. Pres. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22. Everyone understood that it would be very poor taste to offer a series hero named Dallas in the present atmosphere. They consulted with the author and settled on a new name – Travis McGee. The pages were all re-set, and the first book, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in early 1964.

Not long ago, a sale price showed up for the e-book version of Nightmare in Pink, the second offering in the series. I figured, “Why not? Let’s see how it holds up.”

I was amazed how much I enjoyed it.

Travis McGee, it is explained, is a veteran of the Korean War. One day during the war, his buddy Mike Gibson was substituting for McGee while he was on leave. Mike came under attack, and ended up crippled and blinded. Today he lives in a VA hospital. McGee visits him from time to time. Now he’s facing life-threatening surgery. He has a favor to ask.

His sister Nina, he says, is a commercial artist in Manhattan. She’s gotten engaged to a businessman, an investment broker. Would McGee check the guy out, see if he’s kosher?

McGee can’t say no. But by the time he’s arrived, the issue seems moot. Nina’s fiancé is dead, victim of an apparent mugging. Only the evidence doesn’t add up. When McGee starts poking around his life and his associations, it looks as if he suspected some crooked goings-on. Could he have been murdered to keep him quiet?

As McGee slips into a relationship with Nina (no surprise there), he also steps on some trip wires, alerting people who are very powerful and very ruthless, who will not hesitate to destroy both him and his new girl.

I had a strange sensation as I read Nightmare in Pink. A clarity, a cleanness I don’t experience with most contemporary novels, even ones with better sexual morals. It was a feeling something like stepping out of a smoke-filled room into the fresh outdoor air.

What Nightmare in Pink was not polluted with was Wokeness. Travis McGee came before men felt obligated to be apologetic about being men. He’s proud to be a man, comfortable in his masculinity. He likes women and they like him. I read books like these to live vicariously, and Travis McGee offers a mainline shot of pure, vicarious testosterone.

I’ve often written about my pleasure in hard-boiled narration. McGee does hard-boiled narration, but in his own way. Instead of the jewel-like aphorisms you find in Raymond Chandler, MacDonald’s McGee offers thoughtful meditations. He makes observations of the world, of humanity, and right and wrong. I don’t always agree with him, but there’s more genuine thought going on here than you’d expect in a straight-to-paperback potboiler from Fawcett.

In short, I had a blast with Nightmare in Pink, and recommend the whole series (though I consider the e-books a little overpriced).

[The book has a new introduction by Lee Child which does little to advance MacDonald criticism, in my opinion. His best argument to persuade modern people to read the books seems to be that MacDonald was ecologically aware. That’s true, but misleading. Current environmentalism tends to the Luddite side, and MacDonald was no Luddite. He had a business degree, and sympathetic businessmen are not rare in his books.]

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The Fight for North Koreans

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Part two of The World and Everything in It’s story on North Korea is out, and it’s explosive. I haven’t heard these details before. It gives you hope that the regime cannot continue.

However, the current president of South Korea Moon Jae-in works against that hope. From the transcript:

Gordon G. Chang is a China analyst and author of The Coming Collapse of China. He thinks that Moon’s hard-left economic policies and his history suggest that he really wants to establish socialism in a unified Korea. He’s limited because South Korea has a democratic government.

CHANG: But if he could do what he wants to do he would formally merge South Korea and North Korea and I think he would impose a strict socialism in the South so it would be a very different South Korea. It wouldn’t be a democracy, it wouldn’t be a free market society, it would resemble in many respects what we see today in North Korea.

What’s more, Chang says, Moon hopes to align this unified Korea with China.

CHANG: Moon Jae-in, if it were up to him, he would end the alliance with United States, throw out American troops, and essentially become a satellite of China.

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Return of the Cruiser

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My long automotive nightmare is over. I find it almost impossible to believe. I’d grown accustomed over the last 3 ½ months to thinking of my old PT Cruiser as a long-ago dream, like lost love or a chance to play Hamlet. But it happened at last, though not without drama. (I was sure I had a picture of my car I could post here, but it appears I don’t. Don’t want to take one now, because it’s been sitting in a lot all summer and looks kind of grungy. Imagine, if you will, a white PT Cruiser with woody panels.)

The call came just after 7:00 this morning. The lady at the auto shop said my car was done and ready to pick up. She said they’d actually gotten a call the other day from the supplier, saying we’d have to wait another two weeks, but (as usual) they didn’t know what they were talking about. The part (a shifter cable) showed up yesterday, and they’d installed it and it was working.

I drove over, submitted my credit card, and got my keys back. The bill was steep – north of $1200. I have the money, thanks to the Lord’s provision, but it would put a big dent in my bank account.

The next step was to install new license plates. They’d actually expired back in July – not merely the tabs, but the metal plates themselves. I’d brought a screwdriver, but I found the screws were corroded, and some of them wouldn’t move at all. Finally got a mechanic (a young woman, just to make it humiliating) to do the job for me.

Then I discovered that the radio didn’t work anymore. I don’t know what it is about this garage and car radios – the one in the loaner I’d been driving didn’t work either. A guy checked the fuses, said they seemed all right. He’d have to take the dashboard off and check the ground wire. Couldn’t do it right away, could I bring it back at 1:00 this afternoon?

I took the car home, then drove it back at the time appointed. This time, thankfully, it didn’t take too long. He said it was a fuse after all. The diagram in the car, he said, was wrong. I said I wasn’t in the least surprised.

I was glad to have my wheels back, but sad about the cost. And what do you know? I opened my mail today, and there was a property tax refund from the state, covering the bulk of the bill.

Proof that God lets His rain fall upon the unjust.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Act One,’ by Moss Hart

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It is a childish game I have always played and have never been able to resist—a game of arranging life, whenever possible, in a series of scenes that make perfect first-act or third-act curtains.

Wikipedia’s biographical article on Moss Hart, author of the autobiography, Act One, includes what seems to me a very telling detail. In the book, Hart describes his relationship with his aunt Kate, an eccentric semi-delusional who fancied herself a grand dame. She shamelessly sponged off her family, dressed in an affected “fashionable” style assembled from other people’s cast-offs, and was devoted to her nephew Moss. It was she who introduced him to the theater (cheap seats, of course), and who nurtured his fascination with that world. In the book, Hart tells how Aunt Kate died, tragically, while his first produced play was in rehearsals. She never knew of it, because he’d saved it as a surprise.

In actual fact, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Kate lived on for some time, becoming increasingly eccentric. Finally she turned on her nephew, breaking in on his play rehearsals and wrecking scenery. Once she set a fire backstage.

Now that I’ve finished Act One, it seems clear why Hart “edited” this scene of his life. The whole book is a lesson in storytelling. The truth spoiled the mood of the act, so he fixed it, as a good playwright does.

Moss Hart was born into an impoverished Jewish family in New York City (not apparently a religious family – they celebrate Christmas and he speaks occasionally of his love for lobster). His immigrant grandfather had come from a prosperous English family, but broke with them and emigrated. When his profession (cigar making) fell to automation, he was left without a living, a severe humiliation. Young  Moss was the child on whom he lavished his attention. After his death, Aunt Kate took his place.

Thanks to Aunt Kate, Moss knew he wanted to be part of the theater, a ticket out of the poverty he hated, though he wasn’t sure what he’d do in the business. He tried, and abandoned, acting. Eventually he and a friend took jobs as social directors at a Jewish “summer camp,” an established cultural tradition in those days. These jobs were mostly about arranging entertainment, and Moss learned a lot, eventually becoming the best paid social director in the old “Borscht Belt.” But then he came up with an idea for his first comedy. Without his knowledge, a friend sent the play to the Broadway producer Sam Harris, who amazed him by calling him to ask if he’d mind collaborating with George S. Kaufman to bring the play up to professional standards.

George S. Kaufman was like a god to Hart. The rest of the book is a journey through the writing and production process for that single play. They “fixed it,” and tried it out in Atlantic City. The audience liked the first act, but it went downhill from there. Convinced they still have a salvageable show, the pair plunge into re-write after re-write, as out-of-town audiences continue to fail to find it funny. Then Kaufman gives up. Hart despairs. And then he has an inspiration and persuades Kaufman to give it one last re-write before the New York opening in four days. Then the big payoff.

Act One is a brilliant drama, disguised as an autobiography. I’m not sure how much to trust it in terms of facts, in light of the Aunt Kate episode, but the mechanics of storytelling are exemplified beat for beat, and they work wonderfully. Act One is a fascinating, amusing, bittersweet and ultimately triumphant personal story. It’s a masterful short course in plotting for a writer in any discipline.

Highly recommended.