Cracking wise

 

When Edith Wharton’s dramatization of her novel, The Age of Innocence, flopped on Broadway, William Howells consoled her by saying that Americans prefer their tragedies to have a happy ending.

I like this because Edith Wharton and William Howells seem class stratospheres above the bootlegger or the private detective, and yet here they are, cracking wise.

The wisecrack has not gotten the philosophical respect it, perhaps, deserves, even as it encodes a very urban American notion of wise. Wise is wisened up. Wise is not a stage in the quest to understand what I know, it is knowledge roughened on the street, knowledge that knows the gangster and the banker, knowledge that drank bathtub gin in the twenties and snorted cocaine in the eighties.

Americans like their wisecracks. I am hopelessly American in that respect.

George Nathan, Mencken’s partner in crime in the twenties, anatomized  the stereotypical comic wisecrack in American theatre in an essay published in his theater column for the American Mercury in 1926. He presents a collection of forms that are still recognizable in tv sitcoms on Netflix - never reaching their sell-by date. There is the What do you think you are? A …. Which is varied by where do you think you are, who do you think you are, etc. There’s the This isn’t a x, it’s a y – that isn’t a stomach, it’s Mount McKinley, ta da, ta da. Variations of if that’s a x, I’m a y – if that’s a diamond, I’m a Rockerfeller – to be said when looking at paste jewels.  There’s the “if I had a x like that, I’d y” – Nathan’s example is, If I had a face like that, I’d sue myself for damages.

Nathan’s conclusion cracks wise on the wisdom of the wisecrack:

“What we obviously have in these forms are a half dozen branches on the family tree of the so-called wise-crack. The wise-crack, as I have noted before, is the species of repartee that from time immemorial has been accompanied on the vaudeville and burlesque stages either by a boot applied to its sponsor’s seat or by a newspaper applied to his nose. It is humor that proceeds in no wise from character but simply from a dummy that serves as the mouthpiece of the state writer. It relies for laughter solely upon itself’; what has gone before it, whether in dialogue or character drawing or dramatic action or what not, is utterly immaterial. It may be isolated from its context and, unlike ture comedic humor, loses nothing in the process. And it is today the worst handicap under which American comedy writing is laboring.”

I am not so down on the wisecrack as Nathan. I object to the idea that the wisecrack is a wholly textual devise – I see in it some oral grace, or at least some oral descent. It is cousin to playing the dozens, and to the barbershop quartet of jokes and remarks which carry the flow between haircuts and shave and gel and the mirror. The waitresses putdown, the bartender’s assessment.  All of which are routines. Routines, behind the back of literary critics still looking for rituals, are the real repetitions in modernity.

And that is the reason that the wisecrack can be isolated from its context. Its context is the drama of the routine, the scheduled action, the expected time. And the great wisecrack writers – Thurber, Lardner, Hammett, Chandler, Parker, Ephron, Perelman, etc. etc – all work with routines, and in some cases – I’m thinking here of Lardner and Parker – of routine as existence itself. Wisecracking leads to a certain savagery: the deadeyed cliches mouthed by Jim Thompson’s deputy sheriff in The Killer Inside me is all about the wisecrack frozen in murder.

And that is American comedy with an unhappy ending. Slip the yoke and reverse the joke.