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Carte Blanche
DISSEC TING THE FROG
MICHAEL CART is the editor of Taking Aim: Teens and Guns (Harper Teen, 2015).
The great humorist E. B. White once observed that “humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the
pure scientific mind. Humor has a certain fragility,” he continued, “an evasiveness which one had better respect. Essentially it
is a complete mystery.” Well, maybe, but it seems to me there are
some clues strewn about that help us find the solution to who—
or what—done it.
Maybe we should start by acknowledging that human beings
are the only animal that laughs (though anthropomorphized
animal characters in literature, like Freddy the Pig—you saw
that coming—have been known to guffaw a time or two). We
humans laugh, I’d suggest, in order to survive. Cumbered by a
load of quotidian care, we find that a hearty laugh is liberating,
a medicine for what ails us. If you doubt that, have a gander
at Joseph Heller’s and Norman Cousins’ respective books No
Laughing Matter and Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the
Patient, in both of which the respective authors report on
the therapeutic value of humor. Or hear psychologist Martha
Wolfenstein, who has opined, “
Joking is a gallant attempt to ward off
the oppressive difficulties of life, a bit
of humble heroism, which, for the
moment that it succeeds, provides elation.” Get out the party hats!
So what, to make life tolerable, do
we laugh at? Well, Freud would tell us that we laugh at the forbidden, at what we fear, death being one powerful example. If
you doubt that we can laugh in the face of oblivion, check out
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Jesse Andrews’ extraordinarily
deft balance of glee and grief. As my colleague Daniel Kraus
noted in his Booklist review, “This is one funny book.”
Ironically, all of this talk of the funny is actually important,
serious stuff, and yet humor remains the Rodney Dangerfield
of literary forms: it gets no respect. Here’s E. B. White again:
“The world likes humor. But it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel and its wags with Brussels
sprouts.” This is why I was so pleasantly surprised when Louise
Rennison’s laugh-out-loud novel Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging was crowned with laurels when it copped a Printz
Honor Award. Also ironically, some observers, those who
routinely complain that Printz titles are too literary to appeal
to teen readers, also groused that Angus was too lighthearted
to have been honored. Make up your minds, people! Happily, there was less dissension when Libba Bray’s antic Going
Bovine then won the Printz Award itself, or when Jack Gantos’
exercise in self-deprecation, Hole in My Life, garnered a Printz
Honor.
I hate to say it, but we humans do laugh at self-deprecation for
a rather ignoble reason: we enjoy feeling superior to others. That
merry madcap philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said, “Sudden
glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called ‘laugh-
ter.’ It arises from a sudden conception of some eminency in
ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”
You may have noticed that I’ve now invoked the idea of irony
twice. As this implies, irony—saying one thing while meaning
another; for example, looking outside at a driving rainstorm and
saying, “My, what a beautiful day”—is a staple form of humor,
as is its twin, sarcasm. Another reliable form of humor, which
might be called irony’s cousin, is incongruity, the pairing of two
generally accepted incompatibles. One of my favorite examples
of this comes (again) from the Freddy books: it’s found in the
character of Leo the Lion, who has a penchant for getting per-
manent waves to keep his mane looking spiffy (“And I ought to
have another permanent; there isn’t hardly a crinkle left in the
darn thing”). At the heart of the humor of irony and incongru-
ity is another element: surprise. Marcel Gutwirth in his book
Laughing Matter writes, “Wired for laughter from birth, we ap-
pear to have evolved this capacity to laugh from no other motive
than a pleasurable surprise that serves no end but the enjoyment
of our own momentary invulnerability in euphoria.”
The forbidden, self-deprecation, irony, sarcasm, incongruity,
surprise—what else makes us laugh? Well, how about exaggeration
and eccentricity, especially when applied to character? Consider
the pixilated, self-styled impresario Uncle Cornelius in Ben Tripp’s
The Accidental Highwayman, one of my favorite YA books of
2014. “Before the door stood a thin, bent man with a white fringe
of hair and white mustaches. He wore a soup-stained nightshirt
and house-slippers. ‘Great wheels of Parmesan cheese is that young
Myrtle?’ the old man cried. ‘Bless my barometer it’s good to see
you.’” And it’s good for the reader to see him, for the eccentrici-
ties the elderly gent betrays are always good for a laugh, not least
because of the inflated rhetoric he employs.
Of course, I’ve always been a fool for idiosyncratic voice,
which is one reason why I so enjoyed Daniel Kraus’ The Death
and Life of Zebulon Finch and its protagonist narrator’s use of
what he calls his “flamboyant elocution,” a hallmark of which is
the polysyllabic. The voice isn’t really intended as humor, but it
invokes a feeling of delight, which humor at its best does.
The most satisfying humor is a kind of portmanteau contrap-
tion that incorporates a variety of elements. Ultimately, it is a
playful way of looking at the world. As Beverly Cleary has noted,
“Humor must spring from a writer’s view of life.”
Let us crown those writers with laurel wreaths or, what the
heck, with Brussel sprouts, too, for, really, wouldn’t that be fun-
nier than stuffy laurel? I think so. Ah, but what do I know? After
all, I’m just a humble columnist with a penchant for the prolix.
“All of this talk of the funny is actually important, serious
stuff, and yet humor remains the Rodney Dangerfield of
literary forms: it gets no respect.”
