I Ran Across a Biting Satire for Our Modern Times

Mischief – Chris Wilson (1993)

            I often spend much of my lunch hour at work reading (lucky me!).  One day, as I was leaving the Baylor College of Medicine cafeteria, I noticed a bookshelf tucked away in the corner.  Taped to the top shelf was a sign reading “Your Free Library.”  I am always drawn to Libraries of any type, even tiny ones.  I perused the contents of the shelves, finding many magazines, medical periodicals, and quite a few books, both fiction and non-fiction, that were interesting to me.  Among these was a well-worn paperback titled Mischief, by English author Chris Wilson.  Reading the blurbs and the synopsis on the back page I was intrigued, and took the book with me.

            From the moment I began to read this novel I found myself both engaged and amused by turn, and began to really relate to the protagonist, one Charlie Duckworth.  He narrates his own tale, describing himself then his humble beginnings, where he was found beside a Brazilian river by a British botanist who brings Charlie back to the UK as his adopted son.  This book resonantly speaks to the outsider’s experience upon being thrust into British society and culture, mirroring somewhat my experience as an outsider Puerto Rican who was brought to Houston, Texas, leaving behind every bit of societal culture I understood, and having to adapt and join the alien American culture I had seen so much on TV and movies.

            Like the very best works of satire, this is one funny book.  Also, like the very best works of satire, the jokes are there to shed light upon the horror inherent in the culture being savaged.  Charlie is, in nearly all respects, the opposite of a British gentleman.  His skin is yellow, his body is hairless, and his frame is tall and gangly.  He is a devout vegetarian.  He is so overcome with empathy and sympathy for anyone who appears in pain or suffering that he unconsciously mimics their afflictions, thereby causing the very people he is sympathizing with to reject him, fearing that he is only ridiculing their woe.  He does not understand sarcasm, nor lies, nor the very British trait of extreme politeness to the point of delusion.  He sees himself as an animal, not a Homo Sapiens Sapiens human being, and the responses and reactions he receives from the British people as he maneuvers school and life only reinforce that idea.

            Charlie Duckworth is also an astute observer of humanity, sharing with the reader the many conclusions he has come to regarding the human creature and the actions of such.  Here is an example of the type of interactions Charlie had with his University professors,

            “Holzinger gave a rhesus Monkey an electric shock every time it ate a banana,” Dr. Jobson told our seminar group. “Why do you suppose he did this?

            “Was he a sadist, a psychopath?” I asked.  It seemed a rhetorical question, but I wanted to make a contribution.

            “Duckworth,” Dr. Jobson declared…”don’t be a smart-arse.  Not in my seminars.”

            “But look at it from the monkey’s point of view…” I protested.

            “The monkey doesn’t have a point of view,” he snapped.  There was this prevalent view in psychology that animals didn’t have pleasures or feelings.  There were only things that happened to them, and things they did in reflex reply – stimuli and responses.  I knew better.  Though, I didn’t say so.

            Charlie experiences much of what constitutes a “typical” British upbringing, always experiencing things in a way that exasperates the Brits around him.  They do not know how to cope with someone who has not yet assimilated all their self-delusion mechanisms.  This is very much how life is like in our modern world for anyone not interested in acquiring wealth and/or power, or for someone whose personal values are deemed worthless by the society he finds himself in.  The kind, giving, friendly person is the first victim of the mean, selfish, and antagonistic person. 

Charlie’s insights into us humans may cut deep, but they are true insights, and exceedingly valuable.  I would recommend this book to anyone who has felt marginalized by the world at large, or out of place within a world that you did not create.  I know it resonated deeply with me, and my experiences.  Author Chris Wilson has created a profound book, dripping with the sharply observed satire expected out of someone like Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift.  It is a satire for our modern age, asking what being human really means, and whether it is worth it to try.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Mischief-Christopher-Wilson/dp/0233987134 )

From Great Pain Comes Great Humor...Thank Goodness For That!

 

Black Comedians on Black Comedy: How African-Americans Taught Us to Laugh – Darryl J. Littleton (2008)

            One of the best book-buying days of the year in Houston is when the Friends of the Houston Public Library hold their annual book sale.  Most years it is in a large convention center floor with hundreds of thousands of books that are available for purchase.  Many of these are donations that did not fit into the collections, or were multiple copies, or were discarded due to either damage or a new edition being published.  The volunteers divide all the books into different categories.  I rarely look through the Humor section but on this particular day the other tables were running thin.  That is how I found this cool book, which reads like an oral history of black comedy.

            The history of black folks in the USA always starts with the lowest of the low, the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans brought to the New World as property to be used in the service of white plantations and farms, and to breed the next generation of new slaves.  The author discusses how the very earliest forms of black humor in America, the post-Civil-War minstrel shows, began in the plantations, where the African slaves would sing songs and crack jokes ridiculing their white owners.  These antics, especially the ones where the slaves would exaggeratedly play-act what they saw their masters doing, were seen by the plantation owners as entertaining.  They did not understand that they were the butt of the joke.  The slave-owners found the slaves’ cracking jokes and acting the fool to be hilarious, and demanded them to do it for the slave-owner’s amusement.

            This is very ironic, and still happens to this day.  The oppressed mock the oppressors, and the oppressors, in their willful ignorance, find it amusing and start to believe that the oppressed are actually that way, instead of understanding that they were pretending/acting/cracking jokes.  The original minstrel shows were white entertainers painting themselves up in black-face and imitating the antics they saw the slaves do.  Black entertainers after the Civil War figured they could do the same and earn a living, even though they still had to put on the black-face themselves!  Ridiculous, but then again, everything about racism is ridiculous.

            This book traces a history from those original minstrel shows to the development of what today is called “stand-up comedy,” with a focus on African-American comedians.  It proceeds chronologically and touches upon most of the comedians of note, splitting time between the history lessons of the author and quotes from the countless interviews the writer did with modern-day comedians.  Many times these interludes are straight jokes, and others are discussions of comedic heroes.  It is very cool to read about what current comics think of the old masters, and to share in their understanding that the comedians that had to suffer the black-face and the minstrel shows and the demeaning roles in movies and television did so because otherwise they would not have worked at all. 

            One of my favorite comedians is a man named Robin Harris, who died in his late 30’s, and was integral as an M.C. in helping create the comedy club scene that sprang up in the early 1980’s.  Like most comedians, he had to hustle and scrape to develop a career, and was well on his way to being the next Redd Foxx type when he died.  Having come up at a time before ubiquitous cameras and the internet, there is not much out there to remember Mr. Harris by.  What there is out there is pure gold, but it is very cool to read a full background of Robin Harris as well as the comments from many comedians who revered this master of the put-down.  It is in this respect that I most enjoyed this book.  Unlike many other performers, a comedian’s personal history is not really shared with us regular folks.  This book does this and makes these comics much more real.

            No art is created in a vacuum and comedy is most definitely an aggregate of its previous history.  Today’s African-American comedians and their personae were earned by the many that came before them, and it is this shared history that makes black comedy stand out from the generic comedy on stage at many of our comedy clubs.  The influence of black comedians and black comedy on the general American sense of humor is second to none, and carries a lot of pain and suffering through it, much like the other ethnic comedy that shapes American humor, that of the Hebrew comics and vaudeville acts. 

From great suffering comes great art, and from great pain comes great humor.  The least funny among us is usually the most content and satisfied.  Humor is a weapon against pain, and when we share the laughs, we share in the easing of that pain.  We’re all in this together people!  It is hard to imagine that it was only a few decades back that black folks were still relegated to “n****r heaven” at clubs and theaters.  Not only were these paying African-American patrons relegated to the hottest part of any theater (the upper balcony) but they were actually instructed to wait until the white audience laughed before they laughed themselves.  The privileged white audience could not be made to feel uncomfortable because the blacks were laughing at a joke they did not get.  Horrible.  Humor allows us to look directly at the ugliest parts of ourselves, and to laugh at them, and hopefully defuse them enough to be changed.  A clever joke can make one think more deeply than the best written and persuasive oratory could ever hope to do.  Thank goodness for the comedians.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

The Mouse is your God now. Do not denigrate the Mouse....

The Pirates and The Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture – Bob Levin (2003)

I have loved comic books ever since I would read Donald Duck comics off of the rack at my aunt’s bodega in Puerto Rico.  The first time I came across underground/adult comic books I was in shock!  How were they allowed to draw such things?  Would I get in trouble for reading this?  I think this trepidation is part of the allure of underground art and literature.  They speak of things that the mainstream publishers just do not wish to be involved in.

Comic books have always scared a certain segment of the population.  Some people, too old to understand what the youth appreciate, find all comic books to be lacking anything remotely beneficial to the reader.  Others see them as downright damaging to a developing child’s mind.  It gets really weird though when the comic books in question are specifically aimed at adults.  The backlash can be immense, and the full weight of the legal system can be used to squash the artist’s efforts.  This is what happened to the comic artists whose story makes up The Pirates and The Mouse.

The biggest topic of this book is that of copyright, specifically asking if a company’s copyright on their material prevents an artist from creating art using such copyrighted material.  The USA Supreme Court has continually extended copyright longer and longer, at the request of giant corporations such as Disney, whose earlier copyrights were due to expire, leaving characters such as Mickey Mouse in the public domain.  However, the Supreme Court has also constantly backed an artist’s right to create parody, critique, and satire based on copyrighted material.  Combine all of this with the sea-change occurring in the 60’s and 70’s with the rising up of a counterculture and you have a situation primed for litigation and conflict.

The cool part of this book is that Mr. Levin does not just discuss the underground comic books that offended Disney and the litigation that ensued, but he also takes great care to inform the reader of what exactly was happening in the world at the time, framing the reactions of the angry and dissatisfied counterculture with the political and social brutality and horror that is all too easily ignored these days when discussing the decades following WWII in the USA.  Too often we hear about the counterculture as some sort of freak fruit that grew out of a perfectly fine tree, when it was actually a new and healthy fruit growing out of a rotten, diseased, and crumbling old tree. 

The Disney Corporation grew from a small group of creative people to a multi-national corporation whose main product, Mickey Mouse and the gang, were so ingrained in the fabric of America that Walt Disney saw any attack on them as an attack on the idyllic, conservative America that his Disney theme parks and movies sought to portray.  The underground comic book artists based out of southern California saw Disney and its characters as the perfect target for parody, using them to show all that they saw as wrong in the culture at large.  Much of this book describes the creators of these comics, as well as detailing exactly why they were not in a prime position to defend themselves against Disney’s charges.  It is hard to organize and function as a cohesive unit when the mindset they held was closer to pure anarchism and rebellion.

While much of this book was very interesting, there were long passages where the main topic was the legal actions taken, and I find legalities very boring.  The author is an attorney himself, and is very interested in describing the back and forth of the legal attacks.  He is honest in describing the reasons why Disney managed to win against the comic book creators, but it makes for tough reading sometimes.  The fight for free speech in life and in art is not a glorious, dramatic battle, but a sequence of nearly endless skirmishes, for there are always new ways to try and silence the social critics, regardless of the medium they choose to use.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )