My Work-in-Progress: The Killing Joke

Forthcoming from The Mute Canary

I’m excited to tell you about what I’ve been writing for the last couple of years - with still another nine months or so to go. Thanks to publisher Jared Schickling, I can work on the final third+ of the book and know it has a home with The Mute Canary.

Strange pressure and openness in this: though thoroughly outlined and researched, what is so far left undone - left to be done - gapes with the unknown.

That’s where you come in now, if you like: in being open to surprise, I’m open to supplementing my research with input you might have along lines I’ll set out below. Surprise me and I’ll surprise you. We’ll surprise each other.

That is, we’ll open ourselves to “expect the unexpected,” as Heraclitus would say. Speaking of - in form, this current hybrid work (with poems, prose poems, and poetic prose, also text collage from a variety of sources) is similar to my poetic-philosophical book on Heraclitus, Heraclitean Pride (Furniture Press Books, 2010); in counterpart to interpretive delving into the fragments of an ancient Greek philosopher for wholeness out of flux, the trajectory of this project’s poetic arc reveals a contemporary pop cultural concept in its obscure - yet increasingly apparent and terrible - portent.

Concept and Phrase: “The Killing Joke”

Killing Joke is the name of a band I saw at least once in Los Angeles as a teenager, a band still going strong. It’s also the title of a Batman comic by Alan Moore, starkly influential on psychologically realist/grim renderings of the Joker down the line. Moore followed the band and the band itself attributes its name to the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with its lethal joke sketch: Ernest Scribbler writes a joke so funny that “no one can hear it and live” - so it’s weaponized against the Nazis in World War II. The band, the comic, the “killer joke.” A tricky triangulation.

In the past few years, the phrase began to intrigue me more and more. It’s edgy, but of more than a surface menace. Traced into the mentioned three nodes, its history and concept discover an eerie and ominous hilarity. I couldn’t shake the recurrence of its venom in my spleen: the killing, the joke. Ha-ha bile, these times. From the top, gleeful irresponsibility has put us all in danger. The pandemic with its hundreds of thousands dead in the U.S. alone, millions worldwide, is only one outcome of reckless pranking against facts for power, reality played for a fool, and who has the last laugh? (Weirdly, the band Killing Joke has a prescient 2015 song - won’t make much of its righteous fury/conspiracy theory at this time, but - click here for "I Am The Virus”). We can’t do anything now for the ludicrous sinking low of our societal discourse, cynicism and sneering distrust render cooperation ridiculous, the future is bunk, words of hope troll, propaganda wears the jester’s motley and makes truth a laughingstock. All such a joke! Hence, immersion in the hollow guffaw.

Then, through the killing joke’s bitter negation, an archetype emerges. It’s the Trickster! Hateful in its taunting carelessness, it’s nevertheless a reverberation of the ultimate. Such a consideration connects to my just previous entry, "If the Poetic Speaks Upon an Echo", for the decisive thought-arc of my Killing Joke inquiry - beyond the poetry itself - lurches after the “poetic,” what traces might be barely utterable of the sense and resonance of the Trickster archetype in the looming of its echo-reflected image. This image resounds in its funhouse mirror warping: here now it presents, orange-haired, as the Evil Clown and here now a cartoon Joker comes to life in infinite varied reiteration and here now again death enters as dancing skeleton Jester, quick sequential shifts threatening dire consequence. The poetic: echoes and reechoes of a seemingly malevolent universe’s crazy cackle. The poetic: sound of the shuffling of a deck of cards, and there’s the joker, and the joker again - again and again - the joker appears, “like magic”; yet in the shuffling, in its sound, there’s sense, there’s the sense that even if the deck is stacked, it’s gonna get shuffled again.

A-maze-ing Laughter by Yue Minjun

For further research, adding to the deck. You can help. More cards, more and more chances - more chance.

I’m already grateful for some crucial leads given to me by participants in the online seminar I gave in the midst of early Covid-19 shutdowns, “The Desperate Poetic Concept of the Killing Joke.” Stephanie Barber, whose work influenced the form and approach of my Killing Joke project in the first place, brought to my attention The Artist’s Joke (Documents of Contemporary Art) - lest I take too seriously my own ordered categorizations. Carlo Parcelli - not sure if I should include Rosalie Gancie in the credit or blame - brought up John Wayne Gacy as an actual serial killer clown: paintings Gacy did on death row belong in an art gallery from hell. Parcelli also recommended the Lenny Bruce bit, “Adolf Hitler and the MCA” - Hollywood agent casts the next great dictator.

Hey, this brings us right into an entertainment news item of the last couple of weeks: John Cleese (who played a German officer in the “killer joke” sketch) withdrew from an event at his alma mater, Cambridge University, out of solidarity with an art historian who was blacklisted from the debating society after his Hitler impression offended students. “I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does.”

Fodder for discussion, Gacy art and Hitler parodies: can art qualified as “good” along particular aesthetic values ever be produced by truly bad people? Or is there such a thing as diabolic beauty? The devil needs his seductive tricks and allurements. Beyond good and evil, I find it useful to distinguish the daemonic from the demonic.

And do we really need to dispense with Monty Python and Lenny Bruce, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for that matter, or Mel Brooks’ The Producers? Is there a justified sentiment that some things are too horrible for jest? I for one think the “Inquisition” song and dance from Brooks’ History of the World, Part I is indispensable for the salvation of humanity.

These discussion are ongoing right now all over the place, so why not here?

Meanwhile, I’d welcome any breaking through of my tunnel vision on these topics:

• Your favorite Trickster story or icon from world traditions.

• True tales of clown fear, whether personal or from recorded incidents.

• I return often to plays or other works of art converging on a poem - or a joke. Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music for the poem, Endgame for the pants. Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. Others?

• People who died laughing. For one, Chrysippus - an ancient Greek stoic - is said to have died laughing at his own joke after watching a donkey eat his figs. Based on some distressing physiological symptoms I experience in response to some of the dumbest (but brilliant, brilliant!) humor on television, this is quite possibly the way I’ll go… my family doesn’t think it funny at all.

Feel free to share by email or in the Substack comments anything that pops out to you - grinning Jack-in-the-Box style - along these lines.