Ha!

By Joan Guenther

I like a good joke and I like a good joke well told. A joke is by way of a narrative. I’ve

got more than a few funny anecdotes of my own. I’m working on my timing.

A good joke has settings and characters we recognize, description we can appreciate. A

good joke is an account of the familiar gone slant.

So I’m solving the Sudoku over my coffee this morning, it’s Thursday, right, so ask

yourself, what’s the front page headline: “Free sex on proposes vote Harper marriage

same issue” (36). Guy never misses a Thursday headline.

A joke needs an audience, the audience has to agree to pay attention to the story, to take

the time it takes to get a laugh, in the expectation there’s going to be a laugh. Those are

the stakes for the jokester. It can get tense telling a joke.

But the audience does agree and further agrees as to exactly what constitutes the

‘familiar,’ agrees with the jokester on what they share in the world, the mores, ideologies,

life styles, cultural practices, realities. Generally, that’s how a joke works:

defamiliarization. BANG!

So how is having a poet around the house just like having a pet around the house?

Telling a joke is meaningful behaviour. Sharing a joke is a specific form of relationship.

A good joke invites identification on the part of the audience. Without identification

between the audience and the jokester and more importantly the world of the jokester

there is only the terrible failed joke, the lifeless punch line, the pained silence as tension

fails to release (ouch).

Telling the joke is taking the risk. But a good joke can change things through the

manoeuvre of defamiliarization. CRASH! There’s nothing so much fun as the established

value refused, the cliché denaturalized, the banal made strange or, in every case, the

reverse.

A good joke demonstrates other possible ways to be in the familiar or other possible ways

for the familiar to be. That’s how a good joke might be political.

Say, ever hear of binaries, they can get ridiculous, out of hand: flexing over against

flicking, nipples over against trees, x-box over against masturbation, fuck you over

against fuck-you.

Humour can be subversive but is not necessarily subversive. A good joke shows us the

familiar is a contingent affair, ha, ha, but the familiar is also an effective fantasy that

obscures the play of power. Oh what the hell let’s just put it out there, lay it on the funny

bone, the familiar is the fantasy that veils the lately quite hysterical looniness of twenty-

first-century capitalism, as global and patriarchal a phenomenon as we might not care to

think about. Predatory. SPLAT!

Humour can comfort the afflicted and reinforce the stable meanings we gather

protectively around us, the dream that keeps us going. It’s a little embarrassing to be the

one who rants; people get nervous.

There are things to be said, about breastfeeding. It is moving and important to chronicle

this most absolute intimacy of exchange, an intimacy as ephemeral as some kid’s

fontanel. Makes me think about the familiar as it organizes the body. Makes me think

about the body rescued by laughter, by smiles, which are all very nice in their own way,

as Samuel Beckett would say if I let him. Makes me think about justice to come. I feel it

in my gut.