Trade Secrets

I am funny. Sometimes I am funny. Sometimes parts of my poems are funny. I understand this as a function of God’s love for me: a gift, this instinct, an appetite for humor—that base material possible in all things.

There’s a kind of poem I’ve been writing for about 6 years now wherein I gather objects I find remarkable. They form a list; it’s a receptive practice; I’ve thought of it before as “nouning.” Whatever verbal material moves me—whether generated from my own mind, another’s, read, overheard, whatever—so long as it announces itself with a particular force, a ping, let’s just call it (and that ping is undeniable), I’ll it write down. Things ping me to the extent they’re beautiful or true or funny, all of which are ways of saying: true. But the pings I am collecting in these poems also get their power—for me—as a function of their total novelty. I record things I’ve never thought or felt or heard before. As expressed by a person on some podcast (this was a ping): We are here to express through discovery.

I thought I might look at a few instances of funny, at a few individual lines of my own poems, and consider how it is that they’re working, how the humor comes about. I’m looking at four lines, each from distinct, structurally similar poems—and I’ll provide some context for the first one. Ok, here’s an excerpt of “How did a nub of ginger end up in the bed?”

Figured out what a gallery is/does

They are like churches where one can purchase the furniture

Does the cat Fried Egg understand me as a large, coconut-smelling cat?

[page break]

Later this week I take my big titties to Florida

From not to fine

Next to already

Sky to ground

Reality’s regardless

From which could to is

Would like to what

Cool to corny

Transparent to uncovered

Shame to embarrassment 

Tumblr to telepathy

Large hands to large feet

For support with this exercise, I skimmed the Wikipedia entry on “Theories of humor," and discovered that things can be funny to the extent they’re mistakes that don’t hurt, and we’re aware of them as such—this is called the Benign Violation Theory and it is one of a good many. In the Relief Theory, which I find quite resonant with my own experience on this planet, laughter serves to relieve the tension generated by all the ways reality can be excessive—unfastening, frightful, devastating, dense. 

Later this week I take my big titties to Florida 

The idea that I could travel without them is a mistake no one is hurt by—that is correct. But look, if I took out big it wouldn’t be funny:

Later this week I take my titties to Florida

That’s a little okay/so what/who cares. Though it still has a tiny punch because one isn’t supposed to talk about her titties, period. Beyond that, is it a joke to be a (big) titty-having ass bard? I live in a former/extant British colony: maybe you do, too. Then there’s this matter of taking them to Florida. That’s funny because it’s supposed to be the case that there are enough big titties down there as it is. So this business of breasts and being, object and authorhood is not not-funny if you can and cannot cry about it. What I mean is, I realize now this line is funny to me because something continues to hurt.

THUMB HAVING ASS BITCH

This one’s stolen: it’s an excerpt, the punctum, of a phrase from a meme. Picture a long-necked cat standing on its hind legs entirely vertically (read: human-like) at the entrance to someone’s bedroom. The caption on the top reads: When I try to sleep in past 7:30 am. The phrase is the cat’s message: Wake the fuck up you thumb having ass bitch.

Now, having ass bitch is grammatically the butt end of what is often a diss, so this one’s a joke by default. But, like, thumb having ass bitch? Too real: the hostility, the resentment—thumb having ass bitch: an objectification born from a need: our opposable thumbs, their tin of turkey pâté. All of this, yes, in a rousing a.m. meow: Fuck you, feed me. Like, who’s the motherfucking boss, bitch?

I was fasting from everything and it was boring and it sucked

Of course fasting from everything is gonna suck. It’s funny because its obviousness rhymes with the redundancy of “boring” and “sucked”—it’s juvenile. We’re multiple. Someone ordered a fasting; and someone else is like, Fuck this. And the speaker “was fasting” or, we can presume, continued to fast despite the fact that doing so, apparently and obviously, was bad—as in she didn’t stop; no, she’s (just) whining, beholden to some inner fast-everything-ordering daddy. The fast wasn’t working—or it was working, maybe, actually—if sourness is a substance a fast might excrete from a soul. Also—fasting from everything? 

I don't want to eat a spoonful of crunchy organic peanut butter again

Okay well fine then don’t? Our (ahem) fair speaker rails (again) against an inner orderer. For some of us that tussle with Big Poppa is colorfully, crunchily, excessively real. Haha (crying face emoji). The speaker doesn’t want to eat the spoonful of crunchy organic peanut butter again, she claims. I don’t believe her. It’s like saying I don’t want to think about your soft bouncing titties. 

If a tyrant or bore is a force you find yourself in unhappy dialogue with, if you’re lucky, you can choose to be naughty—and one of the ways that choice might appear is draped in giggles. Is laughter not an instance of possession—an automatic, overcoming, surprise, disrupting burst of energy? I am motivated by and toward humor because of my love of ecstasy and smile—it’s physical. And it’s physically political.