Humor me
What makes us laugh? Does it depend on our mood, our personality? Why is Adam Sandler hilarious to some, a complete puzzle to others? I have no answers to these questions, but two essay collections I just finished reading made me laugh, albeit in very different ways.
David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (his final essay collection, it turns out; he committed suicide last year) is not something you’d normally read back-to-back with David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames, but both collections share a definite post-9/11 vibe, dealing with matters of mortality.
Sedaris, as acerbic as he is, turns out to be the gentler wit of the two. His essays on living in Paris and Normandy start out like Peter Mayle-type travel pieces: a bit of local color, some small incident — then they veer off in strange directions, only to circle around to the original point somewhere by the final paragraph or two. This has become the Sedaris method: digress as quickly as possible, because that’s where the real laughs tend to be. (It made me think of Holden Caulfield’s fondness for the Pencey student who never failed to digress during class discussions). If he’s talking about the North Carolina Museum of Modern Art, he’ll end up discussing the eclectic décor of his parent’s home while growing up; if he’s writing about a stint working in a morgue, he’ll end up warning a supermarket customer that slipping on grapes can be fatal.
Fewer now are the tics of his earlier writing: his fondness for white trash characters and accents, the over-reliance on foul language. That stuff did make books like Naked and parts of Me Talk Pretty One Day laugh-out-loud funny; but Sedaris has tapped a more refined vein in recent essays: they’re personal, but they’re also universal, in a weird way. Empathy makes it so.
Oh, he does a great job of rendering Helen, his foul-mouthed Sicilian neighbor in the essay “That’s Amore.”
The door jerked open before I could knock, and she stood in the frame, her lower jaw sunken, the lip invisible. It seemed she had been at her window, surveying the scene below, and when the super in the building across the street threw a lit cigarette into our trash can, she yelled at him with such force that she blew her lower plate right out of her mouth. “Itch in da schwubs,” she said. “Go giddit.”
A minute later I was downstairs searching the planter in front of our building. There I found a beer bottle, a slice of pizza with ants on it, and, finally, the dentures, incredibly unbroken by their five-story fall. Back upstairs, I found Helen waiting on the landing. She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries into a particularly foul toy. “Rat bastard motherf***er could have set our whole building on fire.”
The funny thing is, despite Sedaris’s careful attention to the grotesque, most of his less-than-perfect characters gain our sympathy and understanding. A lesser writer couldn’t pull this off.
Many of Sedaris’s encounters take place during air travel, where he recounts the irritation factor of his seatmates. Or in cabs. Or in medical waiting rooms. Death — its suddenness, its inevitability, its sneakiness, and yes, its humor — is the motif tinkling behind most of these seemingly light essays. One of the more anthologized essays here concerns the author purchasing a human skeleton to placate his boyfriend, Hugh (“Memento Mori”). Buying it is one thing; having the thing displayed in their bedroom, where it expresses one unspoken message to Sedaris day in and day out (“You are going to die”) is another.
Sedaris has whittled his style down to short essays, mostly New Yorker length. David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, deals in leviathan-size tomes, which are then painstakingly chiseled down to magazine length by the editors of Premiere, Rolling Stone and Gourmet (something tells me Hunter S. Thompson never had this problem; his kilometric pieces were probably left to stand on the page as is, like some kind of anthropological artifact).
Wallace is an altogether different creature, humor-wise, from Sedaris. To appreciate the humor of Wallace, sometimes it is necessary to imagine that he is one of those big-brained aliens, like in Warner Brothers Cartoons, basically all cerebral mass trapped in a quivering, uncomprehending body. There is that kind of dread in Wallace’s tone, and also our humor at registering the outpourings of someone who is trapped in his own mind.
Why is this funny? Because Wallace, in his way, is every bit as befuddled by life as Sedaris, and that self-deprecation comes through. Whether “covering” the US porn industry’s version of the Oscars in Las Vegas back in 1998, or following the 2000 campaign of John McCain (who lost the nomination to George W. Bush, of course), Wallace is still the quintessential outsider: a guy as bemused by all the rhetoric and jargon that “insiders” use as we are. Sometimes, I’d argue, Wallace wears a bit too much heart on his sleeve: he is taken in by McCain’s “straight talk,” and he goes on too much about the corrosive effects of porn and the talk radio phenomenon. But throughout the last decade, he was an incisive critic of whatever subject he chose to level his gaze at — whether the generic nature of sports biographies (“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”) or John Updike’s outdated sexism (“Certainly the End of Something or Other”). Most effective, I think, are the two essays that are arguably the most difficult to plow through: “Authority and American Usage” and “Consider the Lobster.”
In the first, you have to wade through a lot of critical theory — focusing on Brian Garner’s Dictionary of American Usage, H.L. Mencken, Chomsky and others — before Wallace takes up his central point: that it’s really hard, as a college professor, to teach “standard” English to minorities without informing them of the political nature of language: how adopting it is the key to a better job future, social acceptance, etc.; whereas using their own version of English is every bit as valid and reflective of the true evolution of American English, but he can’t give them a good grade if they do so.
The laughs are cerebral here; you feel Wallace’s pain. You recognize the dilemma of knowing both sides of the equation are right. He’s a liberal who knows how hard being a liberal can be. (In “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” he comes to the self-damning conclusion, in the days following 9/11, that he and his ironic, over-educated ilk are the reason that terrorists hate America; not the people of the Midwest and their gentle way of life.)
“Consider the Lobster” goes even further in Wallace’s perverse pursuit of the alternative: assigned to write a piece about an annual lobster festival in Maine, he instead turns in a rumination on how lobsters are cooked, and questions whether they feel any pain. He notes how, historically, lobster enthusiasts have had to think of the crustacean as a kind of alien, an insect (Maine residents refer to them as “bugs”) in order to feel better about throwing the creatures — alive — into boiling vats of water. He goes even further, making sure that the very people reading the magazine he’s being paid to write for squirm in their seats:
Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I’m also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused. For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc: Do you think about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?
Wallace is surely not the first writer to bite the hand that feeds him; but surely few did it as entertainingly as Wallace did. If “man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to,” as Mark Twain wrote, Wallace shows that man might also be the only animal that laughs at itself — or has reason to.
