In his writing on subjects ranging from identity politics to antisemitism, Mordecai Richler used humour in part as a diagnostic tool.Kipper Mathews/The Globe and Mail
Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, seven collections of non-fiction and a book of poetry. His latest book is The Right to Be Wrong, from which this essay has been adapted.
“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt,” H.L. Mencken wrote in his essay What I Believe. Agreed. The world is a better place when no one thinks that they walk in the unadulterated, indisputable light of the truth.
Above all else, though, human beings crave confirmation of – and often demand obedience toward – what they consider true and false and right and wrong. Will even die for it. And will censor, bully, and kill for it, and all in good conscience.
Unfortunately, no matter how sanguine our temperament or the depth of our philosophical detachment, other people’s anger tends to make us angry. Combativeness encourages combativeness. Intolerance breeds intolerance. Monkey see tends to lead to monkey do, and when the foul-mouthed monkey next door starts hurling insults or worse your way, sometimes it’s difficult to remain calm and contemplative and be the best primate you can be and not shout back.
Becoming a stand-up comedian meant succeeding at failure
Which is why, thankfully, we have humour. Muriel Spark, in her 1970 lecture The Desegregation of Art, claimed that, ultimately, humour is more impactful than yelling (a typical response) when one is confronted by ignorance, anger, or aggression. “Crude invective can rouse us for a time,” she said, “and perhaps only end in physical violence … But the art of ridicule, if it is on the mark – and if it is not on the mark it is not art at all – can penetrate to the marrow. It can leave a salutary scar. It is unnerving. It can paralyze its object.” Ms. Spark gave an example of humour in action that, while perhaps hyperbolic, nonetheless illustrated her point:
We have all seen on the television those documentaries of the thirties and of the Second World War, where Hitler and his goose-stepping troops advance in their course of liberating, as they called it, some city, some country or other; we have seen the strutting and posturing of Mussolini. It looks like something out of comic opera to us. If the massed populations of those times and in those countries had been moved to break up into helpless laughter at the sight, those tyrants wouldn’t have had a chance.
“The final test of truth is ridicule,” H.L. Menken wrote half a century earlier in Damn! A Book of Calumny. “Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.”
The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote something similar in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, making the case for what he calls “the carnivalization of literature,” a literature that “is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness ... which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order.” Using as his model the medieval carnival – an annual opportunity for society’s members to drop all official positions and postures in the name of letting go and loosening society’s authoritarian grip on what is and what isn’t considered “reality” – Bakhtin advocated the literary adoption of several characteristics of carnival, including laughter (particularly laughter at the expense of authority figures and officialdom in general). Employed in this way, Bakhtin argued, such literature aids us in recognizing “the joyful relativity of all structure and order.”
As necessary as humour obviously is, though – to our lives, to our art – it sure is hard to find. Have a look around and take the tee-hee temperature to see and hear what I mean. It’s especially difficult to locate when you’re discussing literature, my particular vocation. When I want a piece of art that’s not afraid to say uncomfortable things about uncomfortable topics, I’m much more confident I’ll find it in a long-form television comedy series like Curb Your Enthusiasm or Saxondale or Extras or The Office (the original, British version – the one that’s funny) than in this season’s morally uplifting, socially redeeming must-read novel. That’s because literature is a serious business – all the big prizes say so – and the best way for a writer to seem serious to others is never to appear unserious. Which would be laughable if it wasn’t so injurious to the voluntary reading impulses of so many people, the majority of whom would rather visit the dentist than go to the library.
Humour can remake the world aslant, puncturing pieties and pretensions and uncovering obscured contradictions and inconsistencies, while necessarily encouraging fresh points of view. (Which is one of the reasons that fundamentalists despise it and fear it; laughter is the enemy of fanaticism.) What Henry James had to say in his essay The Art of Fiction about art can just as convincingly be said about life: “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” Meaning: simply apply a little humour to whatever hot-button, hot-take topic occupies today’s headlines – safe consumption sites, transgender athletes, immigration, medical assistance in dying, homelessness, freedom of speech, whatever – and observe how humour is able to trample over taboos and strictures and turn a subject upside-down and pull it apart and scrutinize it in all sorts of interesting ways that are simply not possible otherwise. Because humour isn’t serious, you see.
So, for example, if one were to raise the topic (if only hypothetically, if only because no subject should ever be exempt from contemplation and discussion) of how awarding jobs or other opportunities to people because of the colour of their skin or their gender – as opposed to their actual qualifications – is, perhaps, a less-than-ideal solution to legitimate concerns of equity, this would very likely result in angry accusations of racism, sexism, and unrepentant right-wingerism (or worse), and the immediate establishment of a decidedly intransigent “us” versus “them” dynamic.
Mordecai Richler is one of those rare literary writers who frequently employs humour in their work as a diagnostic tool, which is simply another way of saying that he’s often a very funny writer. So, by way of illustrating the logical conclusion to what can sometimes happen when identity triumphs ability, Mordecai Richler tells the following joke in his book of essays Hunting Tigers Under Glass: “A man sitting by a pool sees a lady drowning. `Help, help,’ she cries. The man rushes over to the French-Canadian lifeguard and shouts, `Aren’t you going to do anything?’ `I can’t swim,’ he says. `What! You’re a lifeguard and you can’t swim?’ ‘I don’t have to. I’m bilingual.’”
If it’s silly to select lifeguards or heart surgeons or airplane pilots or nuclear technicians or any other people who hold our lives in their hands on the basis of anything other than their capacity to do the job well, Mr. Richler appears to be saying, why should the standard be any different if applied to civil servant applications or academic posts or university admissions?
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Of course, he might not be right – a strong case can be made for the opposite point of view – but it’s surely wrong to discourage him from wondering whether he is or isn’t. Mr. Richler employs humour in a similar fashion when wanting to explore the subject of antisemitism. From his essay Mencken:
A Jewish boy, determined to become a TV anchorman, is sent to the best elocution teacher money can buy. Handsome, impeccably groomed, he goes on to dazzle Harvard political science professors with his acumen, but he is turned down in succession by CBS, NBC, and ABC. “How come?” his exasperated mother asks.
The young man replies, “B-b-because the-the-they’re a-a-antisemites, a-a-all of th-them.”
Before the shouting begins – before the accusations of antisemitism or self-hating Jew or the unacceptable mocking of the speech-impaired start flying – hear out Mr. Richler’s justification in the next paragraph: “I am repeating this old chestnut to illustrate that I have no patience with Jews who blame all their inadequacies on discrimination. Or who unfailingly label a bigot anyone appalled by the intransigence of successive Israeli governments. Or who invoke the six million glibly, trivializing the Holocaust.”
Turns out Mr. Richler was being serious after all. Extremely serious. You just didn’t know it because you were laughing. And laughter is contagious; laughter leads to laughter. It’s also hard to hate when you’re laughing.
Not incidentally, in Mr. Richler’s essay Mencken, after cleverly castigating those who conveniently blame their own personal failures on causes beyond their control, like antisemites, Mr. Richler takes his essay in an entirely different direction, quickly adding that “However, the real thing [antisemitism] does occasionally surface in the most unfortunate places, which brings me to the sad case of H.L. Mencken, a hero of mine.” Mr. Richler, one of my heroes, then goes on to call out Mencken for his own dangerous delusions regarding Jews, race, and other such subjects, some of his arguments of which I agree with, some of which I don’t.
I don’t think he would have minded if I disagreed with him. In fact, I bet we would have even had a few laughs along the way.