Three women died and went to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter asked each what she had died from.
“Cancer,” said the first woman.
“Diabetes,” said the second.
“Gonorrhea,” said the third, a foxy black chick.
“Gonorrhea?” said Saint Peter. “Young people like you don’t die from gonorrhea.”
“When you gives it to a man like Leroy, you does!”
— Julius Alvin, Gross Jokes, 13

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Wednesday night, my friend Emily and I went to the Bottom of the Hill’s Bottom-of-the-Hillbilly Jamboree. Three great old-time bands: Jeanie and Chuck’s Country Roundup, the Mercury Dimes, and the Earl Brothers.

The Bottom of the Hill is an unusual venue for this sort of line-up: it’s really more of a punk/independent rock location. On the floor where I had moshed at my last three shows, a sixty-year-old couple was waltzing, and an amazing Chinese woman in a bonnet was tap-dancing as percussion for the three all-string bands. The most striking aspect of the performance, however, was not the odd venue, but the presence of an additional performative element: In addition to the three bands, the Bottom of the Hill had three women (presumably staff) on the stage and placed in the audience to act the part of hillbilly women.

The first woman stood on-stage behind Jeanie and Chuck’s Country Roundup while they played. She wore slippers, a night-gown, and a hair bonnet. She’d stuffed a pillow under her gown to fake a pregnancy, and sported a fake black eye. She ironed a man’s shirt on the stage while sipping a beer.

The second woman shucked corn while sitting against a pillar, her legs spread improbably wide, her blue dress hiked up just this side of PG. (While hillbilliess number two wasn’t looking, the tap-dancer stole an ear of corn which she split with Emily and me.)

The third wore shorts that cut off right below her buttocks, a halter top, and a tremongous red wig. She couldn’t stop fiddling with her fake locks until it was her turn on the stage. Then, she peeled potatoes, and picked her teeth with a knife.

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I imagine that almost anyone who reads this blog will find the joke which begins this entry pretty seriously offensive. The stereotypes that it entails — black female promiscuity, black female dirtiness, black male violence — are dangerous, deeply hurtful, and wildly off-base. I’ve heard three, maybe four jokes about black people told by white people in my life. I grew up in progressive portions of the Northeast and in hippie Eugene, Oregon. I went to a politically radical college. I hang out, now, with punks and poets. In some ways, mine is a very sheltered America, but we’re also dealing with a new taboo: To find this joke, I had to go digging through a twenty-two-year-old book that my friend Britton salvaged from a dumpster. And don’t ignore the title — Even in 1983, an anti-black joke could only be printed in a book that specialised in offensiveness.

However. In 2005, at a punk-hipster venue in what may be the most Left-leaning city in America, the management and staff seem to have no qualms about putting on whiteface and perpetuating class prejudices of a nature very similar to the race prejudices present in that joke: poor Southern white men are chauvinistic and abusive; poor Southern white women concern themselves (are forced to concern themselves?) entirely with domestic affairs; poor Southern white women are sexually irresponsible…

Why do we tolerate this? Why do we do it?

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I know I know I know I know I know… As a good Geertzian anthropologist, I should be wary of general theories of cultural interpretation. As a post-modern, I should be distrustful of metanarratives. But allow me to take a tack, here, that I think applies in the specific instance, and may be of some use beyond the present case.

Humour takes shared truths, and communicates them in a winking way (’we both know this is true’) between at least two people by pretending that these truths are false. Because pretence is necessarily false, the truth is semi-subtley expressed through a double negative. By affirming these shared perceptions of truth, a social bond is created between those who laugh, and the joy we get from humour is the joy of that social affirmation — that’s why humour often includes a decidedly exclusionary component.

This might be clearer if we dissect the first joke. Perhaps the most startling aspect of this joke is that it doesn’t have to be racist — our stereotypes of black people, while they enhance the humour, are not the key thereto. The humour actually functions on a very basic, non-exclusionary level: its core is the usage of the English language. Any native speaker of English knows that the indirect causality that the young woman in the joke describes is not what is generally meant by ‘dying from’. The joke turns on this quirky misuse of our shared language. That’s what makes it funny.

For most of us, though, language is a pretty weak basis for a joke. Samuel Johnson may or may not have claimed that the pun was the lowest form of humour, and, in a sense, he was right, as the lowest common denominator between two people who share a verbal joke is language. (Though it should be noted that slapstick translates beautifully.) Thus, you wouldn’t expect a person to find a linguistic joke such as the above funny unless a) they were enormously insecure, and had little in common with others that they could draw from humorously aside from shared language, or b) they thought about language on a somewhat deeper basis with regularity (scholars, writers, teachers, poets). These two groups probably wouldn’t be expected to enjoy the same jokes, but would likely enjoy the same types of jokes.

Thus, this joke has a few ornaments added to increase the humour by increasing the affirmation. It takes the quick-and-easy way out: exclusion. The white joker and the white laugher set themselves apart from black people by attributing to them (and denying for themselves) female promiscuity, female dirtiness, and male hyper-violence.

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It is possible to deny what’s really there.

The three women Wednesday night served to affirm our progressivism — we don’t run about making babies willy-nilly; we don’t accept the gendered division of labour; we don’t accept the abuse of women; we don’t think that the skanky is sexy. The way in which this was done, however, was harmful on two levels, which I’ll treat in what might seem like a reversed order:

We make fun of sexism. That which is play is unreal, so sexism, for us, does not exist. But the context of the Bottom of the Hill is a borderland between hipsterdom and punkitude. This denial of our own sexism covers up the fact that hipsterdom is deeply misogynistic and that the punk world is largely androcentric. We nouveau-beatniks may not beat our women, or make them iron our clothes, but we’re still a long way from equality.

Equally disturbing is the class differentiation that’s inherent in this kind of humour. By pretending to be something, we state that we are not really it. The something that we are not, in this case, is the rural lower class. Unlike the joke that starts this blog entry, the heart of this kind of humour is prejudice. It is less offensive only because on the Left, today, there is a taboo against overt racism. There is no such taboo against hating the poor rural whites whom we deem to be racist, to be retrogressive, to be the enemy’s voting bloc. In this sort of humour, we take our revenge upon them for not doing as we wish by emphasising their not-us-ness, by dehumanising them. And the class implications are disturbingly obvious: the activities mocked and devalued are the production of food and reproduction. (Hipsters ♥ sex, but that ain’t exactly the same thing as baby-makin’. Note the difference in reproductive rates between the classes, in this country.) For progressives and radicals who aim to be sensitive to class issues, this should be disturbing.

All those times last November when we asked ourselves ‘What’s the matter with Kansas?’ we were just kidding. We thought we already knew.

This entry was posted on Saturday, 17 September 2005 at 09:00 and is filed under Race and Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.