Joking our way out of isolation

The old ones, perhaps slightly customised, are best. Paddy Irishman dies suddenly in his sleep and goes straight to heaven. On his very first trip to the heavenly canteen, he's just about to tuck into his fatted calf when, looking about him, he spots a familiar face at the top table. A curly-haired chap in a crumpled suit and an open-necked shirt appears to be dominating proceedings at the table, engaging all around him in what has all the appearances of a gang-interrogation. The man spits out questions and responses with an air of exasperation and heavy sarcasm. Looking out from underneath his bushy eyebrows, and alternating between smirks and sneers, the man affects an elaborate show of boredom and impatience, sighing profoundly at most of the contributions of his victims. "Is that the best you can come up with?" he demands of one. "I've never heard anything so pathetic! Tell you what, why don't you think it over for a minute or two and see if you can arrive at an explanation that isn't quite so embarrassingly ridiculous".

He goes from one to the other of his audience in this fashion. The hapless victims twist and squirm, seeking to denounce and expose each other in an effort to deflect the curly-haired man's attention from themselves. Paddy Irishman is astonished. He turns to the man sitting beside him, who is paying no attention to the events at the top table. "I never heard Vincent Browne was dead," he whispers. "He was on the radio only last night as I was going to sleep. I thought my exit was sudden, but this is unbelievable!" The man beside him looks up briefly towards the top table. "Oh that's not Vincent Browne," he says. "That's God. He just thinks he's Vincent Browne."

I'm at a loss to say whether God or Vincent should be more offended by this joke, but either way, if the prescription outlined in last week's Village editorial is followed, relaying such fantasies would become some kind of offence.

"The blaspheming of Islam is not protected by freedom of speech," declared the headline on a leader, signed by Vincent Browne, which seemed to argue that it was time this situation were addressed. It must be presumed, too, that the core sentiment may be extrapolated and extended to benefit groups other than Muslims, which suggests that anything anyone finds objectionable on the grounds that it "offends" their religious convictions should be prohibited or suppressed. This strikes me as a recipe for handing ownership of our public culture over to the humourless, the feeble-minded, the neurotic and the fanatic. There are certain forms on which the health of a culture depends for reasons much deeper than any capacity to articulate a singular viewpoint. One such is the novel, which makes possible a multi-dimensional representation of human existence in which truth is extended beyond literal statement and simple opinion. One of the many revealing aspects of the fuss during the 1990s about Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was that, by and large, Muslims had no capacity to understand this complex cultural form. Interpreting the book as though it were a literal statement of the author's, they in effect insisted that a novel be read like a speech or a sermon.

The joke is a quite different cultural form but it has its own values and is, in its own way, just as precious. In his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote that the tragedy of man is that, caught in the trap of the joke, he is deprived of the right to tragedy. Man, seen from outside himself, is ludicrous, condemned to triviality. The same paradox afflicts man in his political dimension. The joke, then, is multi-faceted: it undermines the pretensions of the powerful and egotistical, but it also removes from all of us the means to avoid responsibility for our actions. By destroying our claim to a tragic explanation, it makes us individually accountable for our role and place in the world. A joke embraces multiple dimensions of meaning and one of its most effective functions is as counterbalance to the human tendency to see things as good/bad, black/white, for/against, which shuts out those elements of complexity and contradiction that provide safeguards against over-simplification. Even the most pious of us can nurture, in his heart of hearts, a sense of ironic subversion about beliefs and rituals that can, in a certain sense, oppress us. Humour gives us a release for this without requiring us to think about it too much. It is no coincidence that humour is one of the first targets of those – like fascists, feminists and fanatics – who seek to abuse power. Underlining the fear both the joke and an understanding of it represented for the powerful and corrupt, Kundera's novel was banned in Communist Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Prague Spring of 1968. Published the year before in an edition of 150,000, it was withdrawn from all public libraries and erased from the history of Czech literature, its author denounced as a "counter-revolutionary" and forced to emigrate to Paris. Kundera afterwards recalled his terror in "a world that is losing its sense of humour".

After oxygen, water and food, laughter may be the most vital ingredient of a healthy life. A joke is the means by which, in the collective dimension of our reality, we conduct controlled explosions on our darker individual thoughts. A good joke brings together the incongruous and the culturally subversive, creating a resonance with that secret impulse, offering permission to laugh at something that, deep down, we always felt, knew, wondered about, but didn't feel permitted to articulate. A joke tells us, perhaps more immediately than any other form of communication, that we are not alone in our fearful and irreverent thoughts. And so, even the offence intrinsic to much humour can be a release from the loneliness of individual impiety, relieving an otherwise total subjugation by the culture of collective insincerity.