Free The Joker: A Memoir by Andrew Hudgins Page B

craft, my emerging sense of discretion was balanced, and all too often outweighed, by my desire to share them. Who would laugh? How far could people be pushed? How far could I push myself? I knew not to tell them to my father, but did I dare tell them to my mother?
    I sprawled across the vinyl recliner, legs flung over the arm, watching my mother, who sat in a child’s rocker by the sliding glass door, using the natural light to see the sock she was darning. She was petite, heavily freckled, with auburn hair that she called red. All her life—she died of leukemia before she turned fifty—she considered herself a tomboy. She loved the small, cane-bottom rocker because it was the perfect size for her small body and it was easy to pull around the living room, from the TV set to the glass door to the telephone. I was sixteen, hesitating on the edge of a joke, trying to decide if I should tell it to her. Mom liked to feign toughness since she was raising a houseful of boys, four of us that she called “rug rats,” “house apes,” “yard monkeys,” and “carpet munchers” when we were younger—she’d heard that last phrase and absorbed it into her vocabulary, thinking it meant something other than it does. But how tough was she with jokes?
    “How do you stop a kid from running in circles?” I asked her. I paused a moment to let the question sink in.
    “I don’t know. How?” she said, once she determined that I was not asking for advice.
    “Nail his other foot to the floor,” I said.
    The moment between the last words of the joke and the laugh, if there is a laugh, is a fraught and complicated expanse of time. The listener has to resolve the confusion of the joke’s anti-logical logic to “get” the joke and then assent to it, if she finds it funny or clever. But the teller depends totally on the listener’s willingness to go along with the joke, to play with absurdity instead of rejecting it, and then to laugh with you. It’s asking a lot. Even friends who know you well might suddenly, instinctively, decide a joke about abusing and mutilating a child is revolting—and that you are a pervert for telling it. I did not want my mother to think I was a perv, but damn, I wanted to tell my joke. I’d already told it to everyone I could find to tell it to and it was burning a hole in my brain.
    Her blank look crumpled into laughter, which she tried to suppress. That joke shouldn’t be funny! But the natural impulse won out. She laughed, stopped to sputter, “That’s terrible!” and then laughed some more. The amoral logic of the joke surprised her. For a parent who’d nailed one of her child’s feet to the floor, it makes sense to solve the problem of his running in circles by nailing the other one down. For me, I couldn’t imagine a house in which it was acceptable to hammer nails into the floor. As a military family, we moved a lot and Mom was scrupulous in caring for the houses we rented. She wanted her entire security deposit back.
    I suspect my mother also laughed because these jokes couldn’t be shared with my father. The anarchy of this kind of joke troubled his sense of a moral universe. A lot of serious people assume that anybody telling a cruel joke is in fact a perv, advocating cruelty instead of flinching from it. My mother, thank God, wasn’t one of those always oh-so-serious people. Actually, I’ve always thought jokes affirm established morality by imagining a world so amorally unaware of our deepest convictions that we can’t help laughing. Without knowing it, I was testing to see if my mother and I could share a laugh behind my father’s back. It was an illicit pleasure todiscover that we could laugh with each other almost like adults, just for the pure joy of laughing.
    I already knew I wasn’t a perv, though. I’d learned that two years before when my ninth-grade world history teacher played a recording of Medea , and I failed at listening to it. When the scratchy LP of