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CRACKING UP

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.............................................................................xiIntroduction......................................................................................11 | "One, Two, Freddy's Coming for You" KILLING JOKES OF THE 1980S AND 1990S.....................232 | Red Noses at the Ready! THE POSITIVE HUMOR MOVEMENT..........................................633 | Shut Up! No, You Shut Up! FIGHTING WITH AND ABOUT HUMOR......................................1094 | Ridicule to Rule THE STRANGE CASE OF GEORGE W. BUSH..........................................155Conclusion........................................................................................201Acknowledgments...................................................................................207Notes.............................................................................................211Index.............................................................................................227

Chapter One

KILLING JOKES OF THE 1980S AND 1990S

FIRST TEENAGE GIRL: Freddy, no question.

SECOND TEENAGE GIRL: You're crazy. Jason just chops your head off and it's finished, but Freddy makes you suffer first.

FIRST TEENAGE GIRL: I know. That's the whole point. If I have to be murdered, I'd rather be murdered by a guy with imagination.

SECOND TEENAGE GIRL: You're crazy! Jason or that Halloween guy, they just kill you and you're dead.... Freddy makes you a nervous wreck and then kills you and then turns you into a face sticking out of his chest!

FIRST TEENAGE GIRL: Yeah, but he's so funny. Conversation overheard in a video store, reported in the Youthanasia column of Premiere Magazine, August 1990

In the late summer and fall of 1991-as the story of Jeffrey Dahmer's cannibalistic serial murders ran its course and before much was known about his personality-jokes about Dahmer started to circulate. A typical and much-varied one about a dinner party attended by the killer's mother just prior to her son's arrest constructed Dahmer as a sadistic humorist. "I don't like your friends," his mother says during the meal, and he replies, "Try the vegetables."

On June 18, 1994, following a televised chase on the Los Angeles freeway system, O. J. Simpson was arrested for the double murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Within hours the first O. J. jokes began to appear on the Internet, on talk shows, in comedy clubs, and in private conversations across the Unites States. In the context of earlier joke cycles about Dahmer, Polly Klass, Lorena Bobbitt, Michael Jackson, and Tanya Harding-the O. J. jokes were predictable. Indeed, joking about violent crime had become so much a convention of folk culture that sensational stories about child molestation, murder, rape, or kidnapping raised the expectation that humor would follow, as in the question asked across the country on the morning after Simspon was apprehended: "So, have you heard any O. J. jokes yet?" How did these expectations-that violent criminals tend to joke about their victims and that crimes will inspire jokes-develop?

For an answer to this question, we might turn to March of 1981, when, at the dawn of the contemporary horror film, reviewer Roger Ebert had an experience that alarmed him. At a showing of United Artist's I Spit on Your Grave, Ebert was disturbed to find the audience supporting the film's killer, applauding and cheering as one victim after another was tortured and/or murdered. What appalled Ebert most was his sense that "the audience seemed to take [the film's many acts of cruelty] as a comedy," as there were "shouts and loud laughs at the climaxes of violence." In 1983, looking back over recent horror films, Philip Brophy argued that the work of such filmmakers as George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Tobe Hooper is defined by a repudiation of "social realism, cultural enlightenment or emotional humanism." Audience response to contemporary horror films, Brophy noted, follows a series of shocks in which one moves through a set of emotions including frozen terror and screaming laughter. Far from random or coincidental, the audiences observed by Ebert and Brophy were reacting to early examples of what would become a strain of sadistic humor, of killing jokes, in the American 1980s, the decade of Freddy Krueger, Ronald Reagan, and the Vampire Lestat.

Frequently accompanied by twisted facial expressions and cruel laughter, these jokes invite us to be amused by images of bodily mutilation, vulnerability, and victimization. That a line of such humor can be traced through the 1980s and 1990s in American horror films, comic books, joke anthologies, advertising, cartoons, reality TV, and political discourse-from Freddy Krueger to Hannibal Lecter, from Blanche Knott to Mike Judge, from Ronald Reagan to Abu Ghraib, and from Robert Chambers to Old Joe Camel-must be significant. The apparent intensification of cruel humor over the decade-the increasing popularity and acceptability of killing jokes and jokers-suggests that they constituted an evolving and resonant humor convention, one that both revealed and supported a widely shared desire or need.

Unbridled and extreme cruelty distinguishes these jokes from such milder forms of potentially aggressive humor as tickling and teasing. The tickler, often an overpowering adult, can hover or tower Freddy-like over the person being tickled, often a child; the teaser can use ridicule to reprimand, embarrass, even humiliate the target of derision. In such situations, kidders dance up to and even cross the line between play and seriousness, friendliness and enmity. But only if they charge across this line, combining physical violence and pain with their wit, moving beyond teasing or tickling to torture and attack, do they start to resemble killing jokers. For, with killing jokes, though the attacker adopts a playful pose and often seems to be having fun, the accompanying violence bars the butt/victim from joining in the laughter and puts the viewer in the awkward position of laughing with a monster, refusing to do so, or sustaining an uneasy ambivalence.

Most striking about these jokes are the mixed responses they are meant to evoke. Beyond mere humor but built around it, killing jokes assume socio- and/or psychopathic values and defy standards of decency not only to amuse but to shock, terrify, and appall as well: shock by amusing, amuse by shocking. A reading of these jokes based on established work on humor appreciation and audience disposition toward butts will demonstrate that as a group they provide (and therefore must appeal to a need for) an antisentimental detachment from their human targets and, by extension, from the human race broadly considered. This observation will lead to speculation, based on the work of Anthony Giddens and Joanna Macy, about the rise of the killing joke in a decade of increasing anxiety about (and denial of) global risks and dangers that seemed to threaten the survival not just of nations and groups but also of mankind. But, before this point about the appeal and function of killing jokes can be developed, an overview of their evolution is called for, if only to bring readers who have never seen a Nightmare on Elm Street film,...