A Comedy of Pretzels

There is an old joke about the wisdom of crowds. A group of people united for a cause. More people joined, and then more, and more. They were in it together, all of a kind, all standing up to be herd.A phrase like “people’s humor” calls up notions that common sense is unequivocally a good thing, that there is something like a shared sense of what is funny (and not), and that laughter is universal among humans. Indeed, that our condition is fundamentally a human comedy is grounds enough to celebrate a general will to laugh in spite of ourselves.Then again, imagining such a will of the body politic recalls another joke about taking care not to underestimate the strange power of people in large groups. Laughter, too, can beget herd mentalities. It can provoke the will to power. Ecce homo—behold the human.In A Comedy of Pretzels, longtime patron of humor studies and now emeritus professor of American social and ethnic history at Boston University J. J. Boskin betrays his affection for “people’s humor” by translating decades of scholarship into material for the stand-up comedy stage. For those familiar with Boskin’s work, this book will undoubtedly remind them of Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (1997). However, A Comedy of Pretzels is not an academic manuscript; it is a novel.Its setup is straightforward enough. The main character, Reuben Lamberth, is an assistant professor of sociology at a prestigious albeit nondescript university in the northeast. It’s the mid-1980s, and he is doing research in line with the activism of the postcivil rights era and second-wave feminism. The hook is that he is also leading a double life as a stand-up comedian. His stage name is Josh Sandberg, which is derived from the “joys of joshing” and the surname of poet Carl Sandburg. Fittingly, what he dubs his “riff-guides” are not simply his own but rather assemblages of wordplays, puns, and “grass-roots” tales (96), coherent expressions of the people from which they came that he has catalogued and that he draws on to develop his stand-up sets. At a crucial moment in the novel, Josh is waiting to go on at Rouser’s-in-the-Basement, a popular club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is nervous both because it is the first time he is being billed as “the People’s Comic” and because the very content of his comedy might blow his cover.Here is where, as they say, the plot thickens. Reuben’s wife, Byrra, a tenured professor at the same institution, is unaware of his moonlighting gig and assumes he is having an affair. While keeping the truth from his wife, he is also facing heat from a brash, chauvinistic, dictatorial university president with one false eye, Jeremiah Brittle, who has found out his secret. During a meeting in the president’s office, after Reuben is outed, Brittle unsmilingly characterizes him as “a heretic without standards, an intellectual, ahem, without a core.” Reuben channels Josh, mockingly embracing his role as, in his words, a “multicultural barbarian,” only to have Brittle lash out at the “lefty pop-cult faddist . . . [making] muck of the classics and the brilliance of Western European culture” in the “power-grab of identity politics” (184). To add insult to what might otherwise be considered injurious punch lines, Brittle taps his glass eye as a form of intimidation.Bristle’s reaction validates Reuben’s—and no doubt Boskin’s—deep belief in the comic way as a manifestation of the people’s will “to find a way around power” (89). Josh is Reuben’s way. In fact, Byrra has hers, too. She is secretly plotting with other female members of the faculty to bring down Brittle and expose his misogyny, which is especially reflected in his approach to awarding tenure and promotion. The self-proclaimed Bella Abzug University Brigade—named for the feminist, antiwar congresswoman—crafts a report on the status of women faculty, holds a coordinated press event to encourage its circulation, and tops it all off with a campus protest at which Abzug herself gives a speech that plays like a stand-up routine. Of course, this all happens after Byrra is turned on to Josh, and she and Reuben make amends and essentially end up in cahoots, reinforcing an idea introduced earlier in the novel that comedy is as comedy does, that the comic way is a way of being in the world, of doing things, of dealing, sometimes of double dealing, and always about dealing with. Reuben’s father, Solly (aka “Hood-Solly”) was a small-time gangster who served as courier for Murder, Inc. in Brooklyn. As a child, Reuben once tagged along with his father on a job, helping him deliver boxes of beer and soda to a backstreet establishment. There, he discovered the “color” of laughter in more ways than one. He also learned that his father was renowned “throughout the working-class streets” for his funny side. Hood-Solly was something of a comic folk hero, who told and retold “comical stories” of “the people,” repeated their “needling jabs,” “irreverent riffs,” and “acrid jokes” (51), and maintained a “vigorous, defying, wisecracking, hustling, gallows-spouting” attitude (21). Even when apparently on his deathbed, Solly made his family and friends laugh.As an undergrad in the Vietnam era, Reuben hones a playful, retaliatory spirit. He debates with his roommate about Henri Bergson, Alan Dundes, Sigmund Freud, Constance Rourke, and others in exchanges that make this literary fiction read like literature reviews. Once he settles into his joy-of-joshing schtick, he puts his theories of humor into practice. At Orion, a comedy club in Kansas, he does a set on signs. We live, he says, in “a sign-in society” (120). Graffiti. Bumper stickers. Scrawls on bathroom walls. These are all signs, according to Josh. Heck, joke cycles are signs unto themselves, which he demonstrates with a litany of gags about how many college students, power brokers, feminists, gays, and so on it takes to change a lightbulb. In his official “coming-out gig” at a club in Minneapolis (214), Reuben does Josh telling a series of “goodnews/badnews jokes” to showcase what he calls the “comic bipolar” of the American psyche. His material is inspired by the aforementioned women’s protest and culminates with a revision of the myth of Adam and Eve that turns the tables on men, making fun of their insecurities about (and inadequacies with) sex, their insouciance around infidelity, and their matricidal impulses. Reuben kills it. He exposes the truth that comedy is the message. So don’t, he urges those who might be offended, “kill the messenger” (225). Everything comes back to this sentiment, to this ostensive truth.A Comedy of Pretzels is a good novel. Not only does it have believable characters and compelling prose (albeit tripped up by typos at times) but it also reveals the paradoxes of questioning the legitimacy of comedy as a subject of intellectual inquiry while celebrating its status as fundamental to ordinary life. It establishes a basis for exploring the tradition of real comedians commenting on their craft, including those scholars in our field who do the very thing they study. After all, as Josh, Reuben often defends his joke telling as he does each comic bit. The book also shows how storytelling can be a way of theorizing, of doing theory, and therefore adding to bodies of work that feature lyric as comedy (in Calista McRae’s terms), that study comedy in literature, and that take narrative approaches to scholarship. A potential quandary, though, is that while Reuben sort of embodies Boskin’s theory of humor in playing the tenure-track sociologist who wants to be a stand-up comic, he ends up tying himself in knots—as the title suggests—whenever his woke politics collide with the 1980s cultural warfare on which his stage is set.The point here is that although Boskin still sees comedians as being like shamans and people’s humor as ever and always the sign of the times, quite a bit has changed in twenty-first century cultures of comedy. Humor might be endemic and laughter universal, but it is not the case that humor and laughter are universally used as catalysts for progressive change, let alone as comic instruments of good.In Rebellious Laughter, Boskin suggests that it is folly to take no notice of the complex social, cultural, political, and truly historical factors of how people make fun. We might therefore consider Brittle to be as much a signifier of comedy as Reuben, er, Josh. For instance, when Brittle is confronted by the women’s brigade, he goes on a tear in his office, spouting about the “loony” left, calling appeals to gender equity a bunch of “crap,” and referring to a female faculty member as “Henry VIII with breasts” (199). Brittle here sounds a lot like President Donald J. Trump, who was called by many the insult comic in chief. His rantings sound a lot like the scripts of online shitposters who rail against what Brittle labels “marshmallow multiculturalism” (156). His way of being reeks of a far-right comedy industrial complex. So what Boskin finds to be objectionable in Brittle is what many these days might find to be objectively funny. Brittle, then, is a comic foil for comedy gone wrong. The jokes in Reuben’s sets, in contrast, are like those one might hear in the monologues for Real Time with Bill Maher—except, for Maher, they would be too woke. What is more, Reuben might remind people of the wannabe stand-up comedians in Maher’s novel True Story (1994), who have names like Dick, Shit, Fat, Chink, and Buck—gender and racial identifiers that are part of larger caricatures of male stand-ups on the prowl—and who flog the “fairer sex” not with tongues wagging but with tongues accursedly in cheeks and who taunt audiences that deign to esteem them with laughter. All of this is to say that, fun as A Comedy of Pretzels might be, its familiar identity politics and thinly veiled pop psychology seem to ignore the power of comedy in our present age of outrage and the cruel, vindictive senses of humor it has fomented.Nevertheless, this book might just reaffirm “people’s humor” as part and parcel of a comedy of family and friends. It just so happens that prior to my reading Boskin’s novel, my brother and father and I began a cycle of jokes via text message. I don’t remember who started it. But it carried on for months, with each of us at no particular time and for no particular reason reaching out with a joke. My brother “watched his wife drop a laundry basket and then get mad at him because he just stood and watched as it all unfolded.” My father recalled that I “did not like to nap as a child,” raising the question of whether I was “guilty of resisting a rest.” When I shared some of these jokes out loud with my seven- and nine-year-olds, they promptly got into the mix. “How,” my daughter asked, “does a bee brush her hair”? “With a honeycomb.” “Never trust atoms,” proclaimed my son. “They make up everything.”We do good by comedy when we use it to do good by each other. By “our” people. By perfect strangers. We cannot forget this when comedy is the sign of the times—when it is a bad sign, say, or a sign of things to come.At the time of writing, the last joke I shared in the text thread is this: “I bought a colleague who just joined my department an elephant for her office. She thanked me. ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said.”A Comedy of Pretzels does well in telling a story about humor then and now. One might wonder what it tells us about where humor will be tomorrow. One thing is for sure, though: whenever the past, the present, and the future converge on humor, things are bound to get tense.