If there is such a thing as the perfect joke, it’s this one, from Tina Fey’s absurd “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” a show that ran for a few seasons on Netflix but never quite caught on. It has, however, produced a disproportionate share of memes, which is good and right.
A woman, wincing in pain as she struggles to walk in a pair of stilettos:
“You know how I know a man invented high heels?
Because women never invented anything.”
(There’s also Maya Rudolph as Dionne Warwick, puzzling over whether global warming is a “Chinese hoax,” but the genius of that bit is equal parts the writing and Maya. The mispronunciation of “perpetrated,” the jarring breaking out into song. “Why would Xi Jinping want to flood *my* basement, and rust *my* bowflex"?” There should be an Oscar for best bit, and she should win it every year, just for this.)
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This past week, I was in Florida with my husband and girls at a conference with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Seth Dillon, founder of The Babylon Bee, spoke, and was unexpectedly — and I’m sorry to use this word, but it’s the right one — chill. He wasn’t arrogant or bullyish and he made a remarkably compelling case for using satire to higher ends. I’m pretty well persuaded.
I grew up with a brilliantly sarcastic Dad and an inferiority complex, mostly because I’m very short and have never been particularly pretty. Theoretically, I used humor (especially sarcasm) to make up for the social difference, and it worked sometimes. Now late in my 30s, though, while sarcasm remains my love language among my family and husband and friends, I think I’m justifiably timid about wielding it too much publicly.
I’ve decades of personal experience in this and can say with great confidence that I’ll always regret what I say much more than what I don’t, and at this point I’ve also spent a decade and a half as a writer and journalist practicing the brutal art of “killing your darlings” and seen how much better it makes everything. By and large I identify the “darlings” in my writing by how I felt when I wrote them — was this phrase calculated and thoughtful, or did it come to me in a rush of what felt like brilliant inspiration? The stuff that comes with a rush is a darling. Jokes come to me exclusively in a rush, so I tend to not trust them on principle.
But Seth Dillon shared this Orwell quote, followed up by some of the Babylon Bee’s own receipts, and, man. It was compelling:
”Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
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It’s risky to diagram a joke, because nothing kills a jovial mood like hard focus, but the thing that makes the Babylon Bee’s jokes so precisely brutal is that they trade in what we all know to be true without having to say it first. I guess all good joke-telling does this. A bait-and-switch is only funny when you know what was switched. The woman knows men invented high heels because a woman would have known enough about the painful contortion of a four-inch slingback never to venture anything so dumb. Wait, no, it’s because women never invented anything. It’s a misdirection, and it can’t work unless you saw the natural direction first.
So when CNN or whoever it was names Admiral Rachel Levine, a man who playacts a woman and wants everyone around him to pretend he is one, “Woman of the Year,” and the Babylon Bee responds by naming Admiral Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year,” it’s funny because we all know already that Rachel Levine is a man, and that no one is supposed to say that. It wouldn’t be funny to say "Babylon Bee names Donald Trump Woman of the Year” because no one knows what that would even be referring to.
Seth made the case that humor can be shorthand for defending the truth, because it demands you acknowledge the truth if you want to be in on the joke. And aside from, let’s say, the avoidance of pain and the desire to have heroically “overcome” something, wanting to be in on the joke might be the most powerful human emotion. It’s definitely top 5.
I’m in therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which is kind of an umbrella term, but in my case it looks like ruminating on a lot of irrational (and sometimes debilitating) anxiety. One of the *official exercises* my therapist often assigns me is “writing headlines.” The idea is to take some irrational fear and pretend it came true, so that I can see how absurd the fear really is. “Local Children Die of Neglect After Mom Gets Them Takeout, Opts Out of Cooking Dinner Third Night in a Row.” “Local Woman Charged with Murder After Failing to Pray Hard Enough for Safety Before Flight; Plane Crash Kills 250.”
These are funny and weird, but my therapist doesn’t make me do it purely for comic relief. Making a joke out of an irrational fear is funny because the fear is irrational. If planes actually crashed every day because the moms in seat 18D didn’t pray hard enough before it took off, the headline wouldn’t be a joke, it would be painful and terrifying. We don’t articulate our thoughts as much as we think we do, and in the grip of OCD it can be hard to realize we’re believing something that’s truly irrational until we actually write it down and look at it for a minute. Making a joke creates that distance.
Victor Frankl, the Jewish psychologist who survived the Holocaust, asserted that humor literally kept men alive in Auschwitz. If they knew, for example, that in a few days the German guards would let a man tell a few jokes to a group in the barracks in the evening, men would find a reason to keep going until then. They’d joke about their circumstances. They’d make terrible, horrifying jokes.
“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Frankl wrote.
I guess I hadn’t given enough consideration to the proposition that humor, like the Babylon Bee, could be one of those “tiny little decisions” I wrote about here a few weeks ago; a way to refuse to engage the Delusion du jour. Rachel Levine is a man. It’s legitimately scary that he is actually the actual head of the actual freaking U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It’s also funny, and laughing about it for a second burns some of the pressure off the scary part.
Obviously I know humor can still be used badly - not just poorly (#RIP SNL) - but badly; to bully someone or deflect negative attention or dismiss legitimate criticism or whatever else. I also don’t like when I feel like I’ve used humor merely to sound clever or cool, although I always definitely sound clever or cool when I use it. But Seth Dillon thinks we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn’t stop using jokes as tiny rebellions just because they’re morally risky sometimes. I think he’s right.
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I listen to Breakpoint every single day thanks to a habit built during the Colson Fellows program, so I heard Maria’s voice in my head as I read this. I chortled and snorted my way through and gleefully clicked on the Maya clip at the end. Imagine then how much I laughed to find YouTube’s suggested follow-up videos to be about mental health and anxiety. Then I noticed a video of Hilary Hahn playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto #3 in the mix and, remembering Maria’s discussion about learning violin for the sake of experiencing beauty, I clicked on it. 27 minutes later…I’m in awe of someone named Hilary whom I’ve never met but somehow feel like I got to see her soul bared in some of the most breathtaking violin playing I’ve ever heard. Thanks for the rabbit hole today, Maria. It gave us a homeschool lesson on beauty, hard work, and humor all in one. And now I will be low-key obsessing over Hilary Hahn for the next week or so. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a link and you’re welcome:
https://youtu.be/IhQAtkXOK6o?si=bE55bT7cp7JNkyDn