The Munich Pagoda Factor

Part twelve of How to Sit Down

Humor is the most bedeviled category in literature. It does claim undisputed classics: Aristophanes, Tristram Shandy, Ubu Roi, works that sting as hard as the day they were written. But most funny writing has an expiration date, and that’s even assuming that it was funny for some readers at some point. The shared human experience that underlies great literature meets its test with humor. People have always laughed at their friends slipping on banana peels, but verbal humor is restricted in its range and based on semiotic codes that last a generation, if that. When I was a kid I always checked the humor section in libraries and used bookstores, and what I found was not just unfunny, but direly unfunny, such as the nineteenth century American humorists: Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby; that they mostly wrote in dialect was not the greatest of their sins. But I’ve seen many instances of fading humor within my lifetime. I can actually remember, as a child, chuckling at Art Buchwald’s columns. I wouldn’t try that today. And the meme you laughed at this morning won’t seem funny two weeks from now.

There are two kinds of humor in literature. Situational humor, based on character, is the most likely to last, e.g. Shakespeare, Molière, Mark Twain. That sort of work provokes a deep, mellow internal chortle that communes with centuries of ancestral titters. It always deserves the Nobel Prize, especially because there’s so little of it, because the people who swing for the fences always go for the far more reliably bankable option of tragedy. Language-based humor, meanwhile, will never win the Nobel. It is often parochial, largely untranslatable, depends on prior knowledge by the reader, and usually has to be eaten or frozen within thirty days. But it alone can provoke guffaws. And some of it does last. Historically, the earliest writer to have succeeded in making me laugh out loud is Ring Lardner (1885-1933).

Went to N.Y. city to get a hair cut and was walking along 7th. ave. and seen a man teaseing a musk rat so I went up to the man and busted him in the jaw and knocked him down. A policeman come along and picked the man up and asked him who he was. It turned out that he was Jack Dempsey. I went over to the athletic club and exercised as I ain’t been getting none lately. (“A Literary Diary”)

But isn’t he doing dialect? I hear you ask. Yes, but notice the difference: he’s doing written dialect! What else could work on the page? (All writing is made of other writing.) The idea of a muskrat on Seventh Avenue is funny; the idea of a man teasing a muskrat is funnier; writing muskrat as two words is funniest (also “teaseing”). The class Lardner is mocking is the rising middle class of his day, very likely born on a farm and barely educated, now making money and living well in the suburbs. You get a vivid sense of the character—you can imagine him in a movie, played by somebody like Jack Carson. He’s bumptious and loud, not malicious but entitled, a little too friendly, still a yokel even if he works on Wall Street. And this is the kind of thing he writes on the postcards he occasionally mails back to the family. The spelling, punctuation, and syntax smoothly convey the regional accent that decorates his spoken voice.

Every year in my writing classes I’d include a session on parody. One year I discovered that nobody in the class could define the word. “Is it like…satire?” one girl ventured. Yes, but it’s close-up and language-based. As the French-Uruguayan poet Isidore Ducasse, aka Comte de Lautréamont, wrote in his Poésies: “Parody is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author’s sentence, uses his expresssions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” Actually he wrote “plagiarism,” not “parody,” but the idea is the same. Parody is among other things a critique of style, whether personal or institutional, and parodies are quite perishable. I once spent an hour leafing through an early-twentieth-century anthology of parodies of Walt Whitman, and despite knowing Whitman’s work reasonably well, could find nothing to so much as smile at. One thing that can never be discounted is what I call the Munich Pagoda factor. This is a reference to a story the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter tells in a book I don’t have at hand. A Chinese pagoda was erected in Munich in 1900, and everyone said it was the most radically Asian construction ever built in Europe. To us today it just looks Bavarian. The 1900 parodies of Whitman don’t work for us because we don’t see the same things in him as the first and second generations to read him did.

The best parodies are not only funny but deadly; it’s a blood sport. It exposes all the hypocrisies, prevarications, assumptions, and denials of official prose.

The marriage of Nancy Creamer Teas, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Ruckhyde Teas of Glen Frieburg, N.Y., and Point Pedro, Sri Lanka, to John Potomac Mining, son of Mr. Potomac B. Mining of Buffet Hills, Va., and the late Mrs. Mining, took place at the First Episcopal Church of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The bride attended the Bodice School, the Earl Grey Seminary, Fence Academy, Railroad Country Day School, and the Credit School, and made her début at the Alexander Hamilton’s Birthday Cotillion at Lazard Frères. She is a student in the premedical program at M.I.T. and will spend her junior year at Cartier & Cie. in Paris.

The bridegroom recently graduated from Harvard College. He spent his junior year at the Pentagon, a military concern in Washington, D.C. He will join his father on the board of directors of the Municipal Choate Assistance Corporation. His previous marriage ended in divorce. (Veronica Geng, “Partners”)

The New York Times hasn’t run that sort of marriage announcement in decades, but even if you’ve never seen an example in the wild you know exactly what you’re looking at here. Geng follows the language, the tone, the conventions to the letter while doing something like saying the quiet part out loud. Times wedding notices were always about the consolidation of fortune and power; she just makes it explicit, not unlike the way the Weimar-era collagist John Heartfield shows money pouring down Hitler’s gullet, or a family at dinner scarfing machine parts. Lardner, in his character-driven satire, is parodying the written language of a class of well-to-do semi-literates. Geng is parodying the society pages of the newspaper of record, and her satire is aimed both at the paper and at its core readership, the old money that then ruled things. (I’ve always loved the story that Mrs. Iphigenia Sulzberger was given every day with her breakfast a copy of the paper printed on foolscap, so she wouldn’t muss her hands.)

Parody only works if it is exact—only if it can ding enough little recognition bells in our heads. I’d suspect that neurologically those bells must function much the way hooks do in music. I first tested the principle in college, when at a reading I read a poem that included the line “I’ve been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true.” Suddenly the room came to life. People sat up straighter, mumbled to one another, hoisted their beers. It was Pavlovian. But effects like that must not be overcooked and must be controlled. (I once went to see John Cage perform one of his late Variations, which used timed sounds coming from a variety of sources, including a randomly tuned radio that happened to have landed on the oldies station. It suddenly blasted “Little Girl,” by the Syndicate of Sound, which completely overwhelmed the delicate balance Cage was building.) Humor is a dance between the expected and the unexpected, and for the pairing to work the expected must be polished and manicured. Parody is an essential skill to learn, even if you have no intention of pursuing it as a métier. It will teach you exactitude and—*buffs fingernails*—emotional manipulation.

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