Explaining the Joke

Two cannibals are eating a clown;
one turns to the other and asks—
“Does this taste funny to you?”

1.

When I told the clown joke to Nelson, he said,
“The scary part is, how do they know he’s a clown,
not just some guy dressed up in a clown suit?”
So, one joke within the clown joke is that
the juxtaposition of characters is itself a joke
about the roles we play and the costumes we wear:
cannibals are cannibals, but a clown is just a guy
with a goofy wig and a rubber ball on his nose.
Each may be an outlier on the identity spectrum,
an Ultima Thule of possible behavior, yet both,
however unsettling, are indisputably human.
Another joke within the setup of the clown joke
is that the clown is being eaten by cannibals,
which is funny due to its absurd unlikeliness—
what context could account for this conjunction
of antipodal extremophiles?—and because
it taps into a hidden desire to see clowns
beaten, shamed, dismembered, etc. Why?
Because clowns are existentially disturbing.
In their exaggerated embrace of external signifiers—
garish makeup, huge bowties, and tiny hats—
clowns expose our fear of nonconformity,
they rebuke our servitude to social conventions.
Clowns mock the uniform of our cowardice,
and nobody wants to see that face in the mirror.

xxx
2.

According to Aristotle, tragedy is the noble mode
and comedy the sidekick, the second banana,
a country bumpkin with his pants falling down.
Tragedy’s avowed payoff is catharsis,
a compassionate release of joy and sorrow
sprung from the coupling of pity with terror,
a state of mind much admired in classical Athens
which today would be diagnosed as a mood disorder.
Tragedy depicts actions of profound magnitude
performed by allegedly serious people
who have become entangled with the gods,
while comedy focuses on human weakness—
greed, sycophancy, social climbing
intellectual pretensions, egotism, lust: in short,
the bumptious smorgasbord of real life.
How much simpler to blame imaginary beings
for our shortcomings, to have actors to applaud
or laugh at or boo—Look, there go the gods,
cause of all our tribulations, vanishing
into the wings! And remember, please,
that the science of weather forecasting
is still today called “Meteorology” because Aristotle
thought meteors were unusual weather-events.
Personally, I joke only about what is most
consequential; reverence I reserve for trivialities.

xxx
3.

The actual joke within the clown joke
picks at a knot in the weave of our language,
“tasting funny” being a colloquial expression
related neither to cannibalism nor clownishness
but to spoiled food: there’s funny weird
and funny ha ha and then there is funny
as in possibly tainted with botulism.
Like most jokes, it pulls a single unruly thread
until the garment of language unravels
and words are revealed for what they are—
guttural blurts, sibilant hisses, laryngeal
jibber-jabber to which the label of meaning
gets stitched in the brain’s humming
garment factory, T-shirt by T-shirt,
phoneme by phoneme, boa by feathered boa.
Language is how we understand the world,
but jokes are how we protect ourselves from it.
People eat rotten milk and call it frozen yogurt,
people eat people and call it the free market,
look away, refuse to look away,
the world’s suffering carries on regardless.
So, if it makes you happy, go ahead,
put on the wig and the harlequin getup,
but understand that comedy is serious business.
If you botch the gag or step on a punch line
you can always blame the floppy shoes.
But if you need to explain the joke,
it means you’ve told it wrong—
or it just wasn’t funny to begin with.