Theory of Humor Series, part 23: a Buddhist Jokebook

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

That having been said, I am going to spend this month examining an individual book. My wife gave me a jokebook called Letting Go is All We Have to Hold Onto, by Gregg Eisenberg. He describes himself as a Buddhist-Jewish standup philosopher. Many of the jokes relate to Buddhist ideas.

I am not an expert on Buddhist culture and theology, but I have gotten through an Alan Watts book or two, I have read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and I did spend a weekend once at a Zen Buddhist monastery in New York State. So one could argue that I am not unfamiliar with many of the concepts. You could say I know enough to culturally appropriate, or culturally inappropriate as the case may be.

From my experience, Buddhism, especially Zen, confronts practitioners with paradoxes. Part of the point, I believe, is to reject rational explanations for mystical experience. Also, the goal is often to negate the self, turning away from the instinctual drives that motivate much of human behavior. So many Buddhist proverbs feature either a logical contradiction or a rejection of the social status dynamic or both.

In the theory of humor that I have articulated in this series on this blog (as well as in my book chapter in the book "Theology and Geometry") I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: a) a cognitive incongruity and b) a social aspect. An absurdist joke highlights the incongruity more than the social aspect, and put-down humor often highlights the social over the incongruous.

Because Buddhist ideas often deal with incongruities or social abasement, they easily supply the framework for jokes. Many koans have the structure of jokes, especially absurdist jokes. One famous question is: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Because clapping is a two-handed activity (barring variations such as slapping the thigh), just one hand cannot actually clap. Woody Allen easily riffed off that koan by claiming that he got kicked out of the boy scouts because he tried to start a fire with one stick rubbed together.

In Eisenberg's book, he uses the full range of both incongruity and social dynamics. Many of the jokes play off the fact that some quality that is not generally valued in the rest of society is highly valued within Buddhism. So there is the joke: "When I see how little progress I've made in my Buddhist practice lately, I feel emptiness inside." Generally, when someone says they feel emptiness, it means that they are emotionally depressed. But with Buddhism's value on abasing or negating the self, feeling emptiness inside is a good thing. The first part of the sentence cues the reader toward a negative, but the punchline flips the reader from the mundane value system to the Buddhist value system.

The Buddhist value on self abasement leads to paradox. The Zen master is held in high esteem, yet she achieves that high esteem by negating her self. So someone motivated by ambition for self enhancement within a Zen community has to strive toward self abasement. This leads to jokes such as: "I am so much more than just a guy sitting here stripping away his delusions of grandeur." If you think you are so much more than that, then you are not a guy stripping away his delusions of grandeur at all. Another in this vein: "I always figured a little false humility is better than no humility at all." False humility is in fact the state of having no humility at all.

Within some branches of Buddhism there is the concept of the altruistic master. The peak of enlightenment is nirvana, where the individual eliminates the desires of the self so successfully that the individual escapes from the cycle of suffering in the world. Or something like that. The Bodhisattva is a person who can reach nirvana, but who delays doing so to help others along the path. Therefore, those not close to nirvana are lower in status than those closer. This leads to jokes such as: "I want to become a Bodhisattva in this lifetime, and when I do, I'm taking all you schmucks with me." By referring to others with disparagement, the speaker is far from enlightenment (maybe). The joke nicely combines the disparagement tradition within Jewish humor with the paradox of the Buddhist concept. The paradoxical social dynamic is built into Buddhism, and the joke merely highlights it.

Therefore, IMHO, I find that my theory of humor is well illustrated by the material in this jokebook.