Free The Joker: A Memoir by Andrew Hudgins Page A

long, elephant jokes were on TV and in magazines. They were printed in the newspapers. What was the fun of knowing something that everybody else already knew? By then I’d moved on to the dead-baby jokes, mutilation jokes, and Helen Keller jokes that boys began telling when I was in junior high and high school. I laughed at them hysterically, in both senses of the word, with a sense of pleasurable fear that approached panic. I was thrilled as what could be said slid toward the unspeakable, the unthinkable, and the forbidden. These subversive jokes were thoroughly disapproved of by adults and squeamish kids, unlike the Little Moron, Polack, and elephant jokes—and having to keep them secret from adults sharpened the edge of laughter.
    Dead-baby jokes, quadriplegic jokes, and Helen Keller jokes were over the line. They could get you yelled at, smacked, wept over, prayed for, and sent to bed hungry. At least in my house. I loved having the power, even if I knew better than to use it, to provoke such a passionate response. I loved being wicked without doing anything mean. The jokes were so far beyond common decency that they always startled me, no matter how often I told them, and the more graphic they were the better I liked them. My favorite was “How is a truckload of dead babies different from a truckload of bowling balls?” “You can’t unload the bowling ballswith a pitchfork.” Because I was familiar with both bowling balls and pitchforks, I reveled in the tactile uneasiness that shuddered along my nerve endings every time I told the joke. I imagined, without intending to, what the difference would be between the tines of a pitchfork clinking against a bowling ball and sliding into baby flesh. It was unthinkable, but I thought it. Nobody else, not even the hardened thirteen-year-old joke tellers I hung out with, thought the joke was as funny as I did. I suspected they had never held a pitchfork, much less tossed hay with one, and so the visceral disgust the joke evokes was lost on them. I was thinking of myself on both sides of the pitchfork, pushing the pitchfork into the body and being the body the pitchfork slid into. I was at the age when I was beginning to see in myself the power to harm awfully and the power to be harmed awfully.
    For some of the same reasons, I adored the pun in “How do you make a dead baby float?” “Two scoops dead baby. Fill with root beer.” The gross—or is it sentimental?—image of a dead baby suddenly becomes grosser—cannibalism played for laughs. Sure, the idea was revolting. But by disgusting ourselves, we boys were assuring ourselves we’d never do something just because we could imagine it. Basic as it seems, the point was important to me because in church I sat through many sermons that, paraphrasing Jesus, assured me that to think something was the same as doing it. All that stood between thinking and doing was volition—as if volition was nothing! To be pure, I had to make myself an unblemished vessel, untainted in thought and deed. But my thoughts, I knew, moved in their own ways. Logic clumped along on its ordained path while imagination buzzed erratically from lilac to honeysuckle to rosebud, as well as violet, dandelion, red clover, morning glory, and all the other weeds I spent long afternoons prying out of the yard with a forked cultivator. I saw no harm in seeing where logic went—or imagination either, as long as I didn’t do anything dumb or immoral.
    With these adolescent jokes I was separating myself from the world of adults, who would be appalled, and from little kids, who wouldn’t be mentally tough enough to take them. I also loved these jokes as things in and of themselves—not things of beauty exactly, though I can imagine a definition of beauty that includes their linguistic efficiency, their powerful imagery, their probing of social norms, and their provoking strong, often conflicting, emotions. Because I loved them and admired them as art and as