'A Kind of Good Humoured Growl'

We like a neat and predictable understanding of our fellows. No surprises. An honest man never lies and an angry man is never forgiving -- convictions rooted in naïveté about human nature, which is willful and contradictory. Few of us even understand our own motives. Here is James Boswell writing of his friend in May 1775: 

“I passed many hours with him on the 17th, of which I find all my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain.”

 

I can hear the chorus of amateur psychologists: “bipolar.” After all, every human complexity can be “solved” and even “cured.” There’s plenty of precedent for funny men living in “perpetual gloom.” S.J. Perelman nominates himself in everything he ever wrote, including the Marx Brothers scripts. Think of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. To paraphrase a very funny and serious man, Kingsley Amis, the opposite of funny is not serious but unfunny. Take this untitled epigram by X.J. Kennedy:

 

“Have I ‘matured’ at last? My blood congeals.

 Have I so soon discarded my ideals?”

 

The humor is in the adolescent defiance of the couplet and the reader's recognition of himself in its lines. And another one, “A Farting Babbler,” also from the Fall 1992 issue of The Classical Outlook:

 

“His gaseous anus, though it give offense,

 Comes closer than his mouth to making sense.”

 

We all know the type, which despite conventional wisdom is not limited to politicians. Fill in the blank. One more, about the incestuous world of writers, especially poets:

 

“Swap got a wildly favorable review

Written, of course, by some kiss-ass he knew

To whose last work he’d suckled up in turn.

Better to marry, said St. Paul, than burn.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe. Kennedy, our funniest serious poet, turns ninety-five today. Boswell continues the passage above from his Life of Johnson like this: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”