Lunchtime O’Jokes
Decca Aitkenhead’s article on Hitchens is very snide, but one suspects there is a good deal of truth in it. In particular I can’t help being amused by her portrayal of his sense of humor.
The march of time certainly hasn’t altered one thing about Hitchens, which is, alas, his unaccountable pleasure in word games of the most puerile variety. Page after page is devoted to the infinite hilarity derived by Amis, Rushdie, McEwan and Hitchens from substituting in the titles of well-known books, films and songs the word “dick” for “heart”, or “fuck” for “love”, or “cunt” for “man”.
“Oh, I know,” he chortles, when I bring this up. “Shameful.” He surely can’t still find these jokes funny, can he? “Oh yeah, I do. I sometimes wake up laughing at them. Yup. Never get bored of it.” And this from a man who once wrote that women weren’t funny.
Now, I can imagine a few of those being funny (except for the cunt part, but we’ve already found out that the word has a somewhat modified meaning in British English), but an infinite stream of them? Not so much. Endless repetition really isn’t all that funny, yet I do know some people who really think it is, and tirelessly engage in it. They’re all men. And they are all peculiarly (indeed, conceitedly) blind to humor in women. One shouldn’t generalize from one’s own narrow experience, but all the same, I find Aikenhead’s weary incredulity quite funny. I too have spotted what looks like a correlation between unfunny jokes in the self and inability to recognize funny jokes in the other – something that is more than just ‘I am funny and you are not’; it’s a peculiar kind of humor coupled with a peculiar kind of tin ear.
Still. To be fair, it’s hard to believe that that really applies to any of the males Aikenhead mentions, since they can be genuinely funny as well as boringly pseudofunny.
Still again…there is that pub joke of Hitchens’s…
Why does he say to the barmaid, “Put a Xerox in that” when he wants another drink? He’s meant to be an international sophisticate, not a home counties golf club bore.
“I think it’s rather ingenious.” He beams. “You don’t want to say, ‘Same again’, like everyone else. It works like a sonnet. It gets them every time.”
Hmmmm…
That’s a joke?
But I have to admit I laugh at jokes about blondes and dead babies every single time. And, yes, at “How do you make a five-year-old cry twice?”, too.
“Put a Xerox in that”
Mildly amusing once, but after that as unoriginal as “Same again” and longer-winded.
Still the same old joker. Still the same old joke.
On the other hand, Hitchens is paid to amuse. Why should he be funny- or even try to be funny- when he isn’t paid?
I don’t recall much in the way of jokes from Hitch over the years, either in his writings or his TV appearances. Humor, erudition and passion he has always displayed. But jokes I don’t remember ever hearing or reading.
If he enjoys playing the old bore when he’s not on duty I’m not too distressed. Of course if I had to sit through it for an extended period I might not be so forgiving.
Yes exactly – wit but not jokes. There’s a difference. God is there a difference. I developed a kind of argument about this once when I did a feature for TPM on philosophy and jokes.
This is one observation about wit v jokes from that piece –
Clearly Aikenhead and I see these things in a similar way.
I love wit, I love humor – funniness that arises spontaneously and naturally out of a conversation or situation. I can’t stand deliberate, calling-attention-to-itself joking. It seems to me the first is adult and the second is teenage if not younger. Look at me: I am being funny now. Oh please.
As an American, I wasn’t aware of Christopher Hitchens’s prior left wing incarnation. I find the Hitchens of present to be a rather disagreeable person, and I have no interest in reading his memoir. However, I also find him to be an extraordinarily gifted writer, and I was bothered by Decca Aitkenhead’s profile to the extent that she seems to want to dismiss this. To suggest that A Death in the Family is flawed because it didn’t address Iraqi civilian deaths seems really petty. And
Are you kidding? The point of engaging in a battle of ideas is to present them forcefully, not persuasively.
Thank you, that pins it down. Aikenhead may be right about his personal qualities, but he is indeed an extraordinarily gifted writer. This is not something to sneeze at.
As you point out, humor that points to itself is childish and isn’t funny. If you need to put “ha, ha” or “lol” after a joke, better start over. Good humor takes you by surprise; it’s that unexpected break in the rhythm and semantic direction of Woody Allen’s sentence, the punch-line where you don’t expect it, the sudden shift into irony in your best prose, Ophelia.
Thank you, amos. That’s a hell of a compliment.
It’s entirely forgivable for Hitchens and Amis and friends to find their mutual jokes hilarious. Putting them in a book…not so much.
Some of the funniest stuff I have ever ever read is the early correspondence between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin – which is not in one book alas but in the respective Letters of each. They were both just brilliantly funny.
The Seattle Public Library lost its only copy of Amis’s letters – damn them! I need to read it again, and can’t. It’s an outrage.
@Kenneth – it is? No, the point really is to win the battle of ideas. That means actually persuading people to adopt and/or retain the ideas that you’re fighting for. Sure, you may gain enjoyment from letting off steam and being forceful. So there can be a psychological point in just being forceful. It may be therapeutic. But it’s not contributing to the battle of ideas unless it persuades someone – not necessarily to change their mind, but at least to be reinforced in their agreement with you. This is why I get pissed off with people who expect me to be nasty to Christians in settings where it would be counterproductive. There’s plenty of room for mockery and satire, but it’s just plain silly being gratuitously nasty. You’re trying to persuade people, or at least trying to get them to think and have doubts. Satire may do the job; in a certain context it may be exactly what’s needed. But beyond a certain point you may be counterproductive if you concentrate on forcefulness. If your forcefulness just make people in your audience think that you and people like you are arseholes … you’ve failed as an advocate for your position.
Anyone who’s ever appeared in court knows this. There, the stakes are clear. No matter how forceful you are, you’ve failed (and have an unhappy client) if the judge/jury/tribunal member/whatever ends up ruling for the other side. The best advocates – which I don’t claim to be – know when to be forceful, but they also know when to lead the person they’re addressing along by a series of quietly worded propositions, each of which seems simply reasonable as a matter of law or an inference from the evidence, until a seemingly-irresistible conclusion is reached: “There’s all sorts of doubt about Mr X’s guilt,” “This is not an appropriate spot, in terms of the zoning regulations, to build high-rise apartments,” “The union’s wage claim is well-justified,” “Y was negligent,” or whatever it is.
In a more inchoate battle of ideas, we still need to keep in mind that we are advocates for the ideas we favour. We are trying to get people to adopt or at least retain those ideas. We’re not just having fun or giving ourselves therapy. Speak confidently, because confidence is persuasive, but persuasiveness is what you want; everything else is merely a means to that end.
Which is what Neil DeGrasse Tyson told Richard Dawkins on that famous video. You don’t just put the ideas out there and say take them or leave them; that’s not education.
I concede your every point, and already have. Looking to find evidence, I googled “Ken Pidcock accommodationist”, and hit a comment to one of your tpm articles, Voicing our disbelief.
Funny world, ain’t it?
There’s a humor where people laugh at others, feel superior to others, and there’s a humor where people laugh at themselves. The first type of humor is programmed and all too predictable. The second type of humor is courageous, not because it is subversive or because it is irreverent or anything so lofty, but because it is a shot in the dark, unpredictable. Humor 2 works when it touches what psychologists call resistances: one laughes when one recognizes that one is aware of something that until then one has never explicitly admitted to oneself, but however, all of us defend our resistances and the witticism (of the second type) may produce only hostility or rejection, instead of laughter. That is why it is a shot in the dark.
That’s what she said.
I bought Kingsley Amis’s letters for £5 in a remainder shop. They’re terrific value, with their wildly exaggerated diatribes against people like his father-in-law. In his Memoirs Kingsley A. likes to talk about the same kind of running word jokes that he and his mates keep repeating to each other though has the grace to say that women will find them puerile in the extreme. Those kinds of jokes are hilarious when you’re in the pub, capping each other’s nonsense, but never read that well in print. They always conjure up a self-satisfied coterie and make the rest of us feel we weren’t invited to the party.
There’s this French film Ridicule where some savants of the ancien regime discuss the difference between “French wit” and “English humour”. They have a lot of trouble conveying what “humour” is – I think it’s ironic commentary on a situation. “That was clever,” you say when someone muffs something. Or “that will bring down the government” about a demo of 150 people. It’s related to a sense of proportion.
But as OB says in her essay, humour is easy to recognise but difficult to explain.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart – Neil Diamond
I’m sorry I had to do one.
It was obvious from the first sentence that Hitch was being set up for a hatchet job. The Guardian hates his politics so they have sent a hack writer to scribble as unflattering a portrait as possible. Or possibly Aitkenhead is a Mother Thesesa acolyte and it’s payback time.
Aren’t they just. (And Daddy B of course was the model for Neddy Welch in Lucky Jim.) Amis I was brutal to women, and Difficult in many ways, but he was supremely funny. My mother handed me Lucky Jim when I was about 12, and I never looked back.
“The point of engaging in a battle of ideas is to present them forcefully, not persuasively.”
“No, the point really is to win the battle of ideas. ”
I’ve never been persuaded by Hitchens’s arguments, even when I agreed with them, but I’ve always enjoyed them immensely. However, there’s the further question of whether the way an idea is presented should be given more weight than the idea itself. Surely the sheer quality of an idea is moreimportant than how well it is presented. There is something dishonest about using anything but an idea itself to win the battle of ideas. What did Hitchens study at his public- i.e. private- school and university? In my own old-fashioned grammar school education rhetoric was emphasised in classics as much so that we could recognise how it was used and disregard the attempts at persuasion as learn how to use it.
In The Green Man, Kingsley Amis has one of the most convincing portaits of god in English literature.
@15 – KB, that’s sarcasm. I know, because I’m good at it. As I recall the film, it ends with the emigrated aristocrat losing his hat to a gust of wind on the English coast – ‘Better your hat than your head’, says an Englishman; ‘Ah! L’humour anglais!’ cries the Frenchman, getting it at last…
But, hey, I may misremember.
Meanwhile, this, “rhetoric was emphasised in classics as much so that we could recognise how it was used and disregard the attempts at persuasion as learn how to use it” is an interesting point. Since the function of rhetoric is to be persuasive by appealing to the three cardinal values of personal authority [ethos], rational argument [logos], AND emotional identification [pathos], suggesting that it can be ‘bypassed’ to get to the heart of an argument is very odd. Insofar as any argument has a core, it IS its rhetoric. By this standard, Hitchens’ characteristic approach is to hurl logos at you, uncaring of pathos, and with his personal mannerisms actively devaluing his ethos. No wonder his success is a bit patchy.
I found a lot of Aikenhead’s depiction of Hitchens to be rather endearing, to be perfectly honest… which I know was probably not her intention. :) I suppose that pins me down as alcoholic, hopelessly male, perennially adolescent… bah, oh well.
I like that “ghostly locker room” image in relation to prepared jokes. It is very true. At it’s best, that can actually be an asset, creating a sort of self-referential meta-humor that mocks its own juvenility; at worst, it’s a thin cover for misogyny, racism, or other prejudices. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to take the very real effects of the latter far more seriously, which has reduced my appreciation for the ol’ prepared joke. Probably for the best, I suppose.
In any case, Hitchens is what he is, not a hero to be admired, but rather a legendary figure worthy of equal parts awe and revulsion. It surprises me that Aikenhead never makes explicit the comparison to Hemingway, even though the article drips with parallels waiting to be drawn. Epic drunkards who nonetheless remain functional and more or less in control, obsessing with maleness and bravery to cover an deep underlying cowardice — and yet with both, their shining prose imbuing the whole package with a beautiful/terrible poetry that makes each figure impossible to resist.
Nobody should aspire to be anything like Hemingway <i>or</i> Hitchens. But goddamn, aren’t they a joy to read…
I’m suspicious of the call that people should “make their case persuasive” or as Hitchens put it “be sales conscious”.
In a court of law, okay, if you’re an advocate you have a professional duty to your client to do all you can (within the bounds of professional ethics) to achieve the right result for him, her or it. But that’s a special professional situation, and one where outcomes are clear-cut. If you can persuade a jury to acquit by framing your argument in way (a) rather than way (b), fine – you still have the right outcome from your client’s point of view, and whichever frame you adopted, you either achieved that outcome or failed to. If somehow you compromised your argument in order to secure a not-guilty verdict (say), you didn’t thereby abandon an even better option.
Public debating on moral and political issues is different, partly because there’s not the same direct personal duty owed, for instance by Hitchens to George Bush or those of any nationality who were killed in Iraq to try to achieve a certain result, such as to persuade a jury of Guardian readers to agree the war was right.
Secondly, there isn’t such a clear-cut menu of possible outcomes on offer, but rather a continuum of views available. I don’t see why anyone who actually takes view (a) of such an issue should instead argue for position (b) if he doesn’t actually believe in it just because he or she thinks it’s more palatable and more likely to “persuade” those who start at position (c). You could call that intellectual dishonesty, couldn’t it? And arguing for (b) may, depending on the issues, actually miss your real point. You wouldn’t have even argued for your real position, let alone persuaded people to adopt it.
Carl – you could indeed – see the boot camp post. I have a visceral loathing of PR and related tricks of persuasion…but I also think there is such a thing as honest persuasion; skill at communication combined with free inquiry and truth-telling and the like – ethos and pathos, as Dave says.
James – I too found some of Aikenhead’s picture not entirely unattractive. The thing is, Hitchens in person, even when hungover and (in his word) “seedy,” is fairly compelling. When not hungover (and when, presumably, since it was evening, he is well-oiled) he is more than fairly compelling. He doesn’t in the least put me in mind of Hemingway though. He’s almost the opposite of Hemingway – erudite, highly verbal, complicated.
He is a bit gangsterish though. That’s part of his schtick. He never cracks a smile, and he pours out a stream of argument, and he can’t be ruffled. It has a certain glamor.
The second time I saw him on a book tour (for the Kissinger book – the first was for the Clinton book), when I got my books signed I managed to make him laugh; it was the first time he’d smiled, let alone laughed, all evening. I was rather proud of that; I now realize it was because of his abiding love for Martin Amis. (Explain. Ok. One of the books was one he’d signed before, and it wasn’t clear what he should write in it, and I said something like “Any old thing; you can write ‘sinister balls’ if you like.” That was a Martin Amis joke from their New Statesman days.)
The “Timothy Spall” jibe was cruelly accurate. I think Hitchens looks like an English squire talking bawdy over his port only with much better brains.