Small Universe Ain’t It?

November 13th, 2007 Posted in Sociology of Jokes, Small World

My joke was not funny. It was like an automobile without a transmission. It wasn’t going anywhere. But at the time (1959-1960) I thought it was. Building on that delusion, a remarkable sequence of events followed over the next 25 years that would take a sociology of incredulity to explain.

I had heard of a social-psychological experiment by Stanley Milgram that claimed our social worlds in the USA were so enmeshed that one person A could get a message through to a stranger F by contacting in his own circle of acquaintances B who within his own circle would then contact C, and so on until F was reached. Multiple steps through a series of known linked intermediaries would be enough. A only knows B who only knows C …to E who only knows F.

They made a fine movie out of the concept (”Six Degrees of Separation” directed by Fred Schepisi)–we are all on the edge of closeness even though strangers, all we need are five intermediaries to introduce us. Also the implication that the ones we know might also be, in some way, strangers.

I don’t mean to carp but when I read Milgram’s report I thought it was brilliant but flawed. But reality hardly matters in this kind of work It pits a warm togetherness against the cold fact of indifference and aggression which are never too far away. The net is not a happy place for the free swimming fish.

My impossible method also suggests a close fuzzy reality-mystery. Whatever is out there universe-wise is sure to be nice folks like us. You betcha.

My joke of a joke was invented haphazardly in a Shadyside bar in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The joke: A visitor from outer space lands at the local airport and takes a taxi to the very bar where I am having a short beer. He trundles through the door and over to the sparkling jukebox and asks, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

I was so happy with the idea that I had made up a joke that I didn’t notice I wasn’t laughing. I immediately decided to run a small world test using this misshapen little clinker as the message. My method: a word-of-mouth medium–I would tell other people and then wait until the joke returned. I actually thought that some day, somewhere, some person, a total stranger, would turn to me and repeat the joke. Circle closed. Small world ain’t it.

I started telling the joke to I don’t know how many, maybe ten people or maybe fifty. I kept no records. I never forgot the joke though. It became a mantra, a sociability ploy. I don’t remember anyone ever laughing–maybe a pained smile is all. Sometime I would relate its circumstance as well and my hope for the echo that would prove the small world really existed. I was like Robinson Crusoe or Ben Gunn awaiting the rescue ship. I pretended it didn’t matter. Small world, large world–one person with a beach to himself or not. Over time my interest shifted and the project seemed to follow the joke into oblivion.

One night around about 1982 through 1985, the joke and my near obsession in abeyance for years, I was watching “All in the Family” on TV and Archie Bunker told my joke to a waitress. It was a throw-away, used as a vapid indirect way of flirting. The waitress curtly put old Archie in his place and the show went on.

“That’s my joke!” I told my family. And I repeated this very same tale to them. They all thought I was telling a bedtime story and they began to yawn, their eyes glazing over. But my eldest son roused himself and said, “Hey, you know Dad I heard this same joke recently on ‘The Love Boat.’ It got the same treatment. Sort of an anti-joke told by the Captain and then derided by someone else.”

I didn’t say much more. I was staggered. The boat had arrived. The bad penny had returned. The circle had closed. I had done something improbable. I had whispered into the ear of the universe and received an answer.

The very fact that my little narrative was straining so hard and so unsuccessfully to be a joke was its saving grace. But even a winning error needs to be corrected. I now suspect that I never really had a joke, only a few words pointing to a science-fiction story. I should have kept it to myself and worked it until the yarn unraveled and I could see the awake dream as Freud would have done. But the symbols diverting the energetic, and in that way exposing it, are concepts from the language of culture and social order. On one side the interior person, on the other the socio-cultural setting.

The sock, the boffo, in this story is the sudden revelation that the supposed electronic-mechanical gadget is alive and is a female of some social value since she is being degraded by her working environment. Further she and the male who just arrived from outer space represent the category of electro-mechanical contrivances that fit into our social order as co-equal actors. There is a human-machine encounter and the possibility of interaction between the two. The machine as servant, as competitor, as boss–the machine as another ethnic-like group.

Then there is the struggle of the sexes. The hint of a conflict, she trying to escape from him or to hold back closeness. He applying a too simple moral test. Then the projecting of the observer’s feelings onto the alien other, another representation of the newly arrived immigrant who seems to carry, and threaten us with, all of our rejected qualities.

My story had returned, the medium converted from direct personal face-to-face to an electronic and commercial screen. Yet it still soars out there in a universal conceptual space, a hungry seagull ready to swoop down again to squawk in my face another “not funny”.

The loneliness of an empty late night Hooper diner where the electrical gadget seems alive. The image dispatched seeking friendship, love and approval, returning after a long cold transit through distant space in the voice of another impersonal gadget.

 

^^^^^

Bringing you up to date, starting with the moment after the initial confrontation of the aliens. Gerty, the female alien, went ballistic, yelling and kicking. “What do you expect you creep after you drove me away from my home and my children.” Her sound track became garbled. I heard the “Star Spangled Banner.” I heard General Eisenhower reciting his revised version of the “Pledge of Allegiance” and becoming stuck at “under God.” Undergodundergodundergod. And Gerty sobbing “I’m a good girl.” Meanwhile Woooffie, the male alien, held his ground and began kicking Gerty’s front panel and shouting, “Filthy putain.” over and over and pointing his Buck Roger’s pistol at her plastic hood.

Jerry Pripitchik, the owner-manager of the bar and his bartender, Lee Enfield, assisted by yours truly engaged Woooffie in a titanic struggle for about an hour and a half until we finally prevailed and dumped his clanking body out the door. Meanwhile the girls in the bar consoled Gerty who began to cry so copiously that she was in danger of short-circuiting.

The Federal Immigration guys arrested Woooffie, rendered him to an isolated ice island prison off the northern coast of Alaska where though he was water boarded repeatedly he never veered from his story that he was a simple ordinary guy from a far off galaxy who had a domestic problem.

He was expelled from earth and is now parked at the International Space Station awaiting transportation onward. He plays Rimsky Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” 24/7 for the space cadets in residence.

Girty moved to Miami Beach where she works at a local, off-beach luncheonette. Once a day she plays a sentimental version of “Moon River,” each time with a new combo of two languages. Her upcoming Spanish-Tibetan translation with a horn solo has been fully booked for weeks.

The one who recorded all this in the name of soft science became, of course, your obedient host for this blog who no longer drinks short beers in Pittsburgh.

And so to bed.