Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

by Ladies

  “Hello there, sourpuss,” riffed the king. “What is your problem? Don’t you want to giggle? Are you afraid that if I tickle your belly with words that you will wet your toga? Well, fear is no way to live so start laughing yourself well! That’s it, double over as though you have been punched in the side. Bend! Do not fear buggery. A laughing man is seldom seduced. This is because when you laugh, others are often inclined to laugh, too. Yes, they will think twice about defiling you once a giggle has become lodged like battle shrapnel in their heart.”

  He would then send the cured man away, laughing, weeping, wiping sweat.

  “When I first started I relied on slapstick—killing giants and that—but then I moved toward more advanced forms of humor—like wordplay. Irony!” David cocked one eyebrow. “Right now I am being ironic. Observe: ‘You are beginning to piss me off. I am going to pull out my Egyptian poleax and make you into a human Torah scroll.’ See? Irony. How can you tell? You just have to trust your gut. Watch: ‘Boy, am I happy.’ What makes that statement ironic? The prefacing word ‘boy’? The fact that no one is ever really happy? Or both of these things working in tandem? Irony misused can destroy the universe in the way that it is able to create as it uncreates. It creates things that are already uncreated.

  “I am not kidding,” he continued, cocking his eyebrow once more. “Really, I am not.”

  He would lean back and await laughter and applause. If it did not happen, he would send his soldiers in to coax out their chuckles. Later in bed, King David would weep.

  At this time, the best thing in David’s life was his son Absalom. His son’s birth was one of the few occasions in which David believed his heart had not stabbed his back. His son, he felt, was the only one who truly got him. With Absalom, for the first time in King David’s life, he had the comedic sidekick he had always craved. Just being around his son made David feel fifteen percent more jocular.

  Absalom had long, curly hair, which he used to drape over the front of his face to play a character called “Backwards Man.” He twisted his feet to the side and walked and talked backwards while David, his partner in comedy, gigglingly followed behind, repeating each punch line seconds after Absalom spoke it.

  But that Backwards Man stuff was more of what Absalom considered old-timer funny—stuff to please his dad. From David’s boyhood to his son’s, comedy had changed. It had become more subtle, no longer something that had to spring from violence. Comedy could do your violence for you and it was an area of battle in which Absalom excelled. Through mimicry, and caricature, Absalom was always able to take his rivals down a peg.

  Absalom was also a brave warrior. He had developed this move where, while on horseback, he would stretch his hair out like a clothesline and intersect it with a foe’s neck. He especially enjoyed racing into battle against the wind, because of the way his hair was made to whip backward in a very flattering manner.

  * * *

  When David wasn’t ruling, he would ponder all the various forms of laughter there could be. So far, he had only categorized four: laughter at your own expense, laughter at the expense of others, laughter at the human predicament, and laughter at small animals falling off tables. Absalom, on the other hand, was not one for rabbinic musings—he just was funny and he didn’t have to think about it.

  David did not resent Absalom for his gifts. He did not want to be another King Saul—bitter and jealous. So when Absalom took center stage and the people laughed, David laughed, too. It hurt his throat a bit, this laughing, but it also made him feel like a good person—so much love for his son he had, that he could look through the tunnel of his own comedic failures and offer up a royal chortle.

  What David did not know, though, was that he was his son’s favorite comic subject, and whenever his father wasn’t around, he would test the water with the royal subjects, throwing in an innocuous jest here and there, like how David hums when he eats—just to see how it would go over. Usually people fell silent. Absalom could see they were afraid to laugh and so he leveraged their discomfort in the service of further laugh getting.

  “You know who lays some stinky farts?” Absalom would ask a table full of dining guests. “The King of Israel, that’s who. And when he’s braced for battle is the worst. His stomach gets so bad—forget about using the out house when he’s finished with it! I tell you, boys, it wasn’t my father’s stone that felled Goliath but the vapors produced by his battle-anxious colon. Peeyoo!”

  Whereas at first people did not know how to respond, slowly, over time, they began to warm to Absalom’s routines. Because it felt so naughty to be laughing behind the king’s back like that, it often made the laughter more intense—like it came from a deeper, more hidden place inside themselves. Absalom gave them a chance to laugh at authority and it helped everyone to feel like he was a man of the people. As a result, Absalom’s popularity as a chief grew.

  As David got older, he began to leave more of his ruling and millitary work to his sons and other subordinates. It allowed him more time to muse upon the nature of comedy. He did so while sitting on his throne, a serious look on his face. If he could just bring his lifetime of experience—of laughing and loving—to bear, he believed he could crack the pit of what comedy was and then share it with Absalom. Such a thing would be the greatest gift a father could give a son.

  One day, he called Absalom to his side.

  “Comedy should help remind people of what is real,” he told his son. “Everyone gets used to the way things appear, but comedy can awaken us to what is.”

  Everyone went through life pretending, and revealing this pretending was at the core of all jokes. Everyone pretends they were born with clothes on, pretends they have an understanding with God, that they’re just taking some time apart, that they’ll talk later. Now that David was older, he saw all of this clearly. It was, he believed, what would allow him to be even funnier.

  He was, of course, wrong.

  Absalom listened to his father’s musings, receiving them as the babblings of an old man, for he knew what the true secret to comedy was: farts. Farts were funny, and his father’s farts were hilarious.

  “You know what would really surprise old King Farty-Pants?” asked Absalom to his men. “Staging a coup. Can you imagine? It will so befoul his colon that his battle stallion shall retreat in horror.”

  The men listened laughingly, and laughingly did they suit up and laughingly did they choose their weapons. And then, with an occasional titter, they leaned in and listened to Absalom’s plan to take over his father’s kingdom.

  Not being firstborn, Absalom knew that even though his father adored him, he would never be made king and so he knew he had to take matters into his own hands. With the solid support of his troops, he believed he had a good chance of taking his leadership to the next level.

  But despite his age and increased sentimentality, David was still a brilliant military strategist and made short work of his son’s rebellion. In no time at all, his laughing supporters became frightened retreaters and Absalom was left alone.

  “Do what you must,” David told Joab, his first in command, as they laid down their battle plans. “But no harm must come to Absalom.”

  Even though Joab knew David loved Absalom, Joab loved David enough to know that Absalom would, if not today or tomorrow, eventually lead to his undoing. So when Joab found Absalom, on his horse, caught by his long, curly hair in the branches of a tree, he knew he had no choice but to act.

  As he drew near, his blade drawn, Joab paused to listen to Absalom’s last words.

  “Tell my father he was never funny,” he said.

  Joab did not repeat any of this to David, for to have done so would have been cruel and Joab was not a cruel man.

  Absalom’s funeral was a small affair. As David stood over his dead son and stroked hair from his face, he recalled the first funeral he had ever been to. It was his grandfather’s and he was ten years old. It was there that David had made his first joke. His father, Jess
e, was making a eulogy. “My father is still alive in all of our hearts,” said Jesse, and David cried out while pounding himself on the chest, “Wake up, Zeyde! Everyone out here thinks you’re dead.”

  David’s father had wiped away the tears from his eyes, put his hand on his son’s shoulder, and smiled.

  He remembered back to a time when it seemed he could not lose, a time when he was so often victorious, had God so on his side, that life became boring. It was hard to imagine that such a time had ever existed, hard to imagine that as a young soldier, he had prayed to God to let him go into battle on his own. He wanted to see what it would be like to set forth without God. He only wanted to do it once, for the hell of it.

  “Just to see,” he had said, his eyes closed in prayer. He did not think it would hurt God’s feelings. After all, it was normal to be curious.

  After the battle, when he came home, his arm dangling dead at the elbow, his eyeball crooked in the socket, and both his ears bleeding, David discovered that without God he was nothing. It wasn’t even that he was a pip-squeak, or a dried-up leaf. He was nothing. No one was anything. Everything was God. He was. His enemies were. To understand this, to feel it with clarity, was to be stronger than an army of a thousand men. But it was also terrifying. It was to know that all accomplishments were unreal. It was to know that nothing mattered except God.

  As he buried his son, David thought: I will shrink and wrinkle more and more, like soup on the fire, until I am only this hard black crust. First I will be a person, then a memory of a person, then words about a memory, then a catch phrase, and then, black crust.

  After I am dead, thought David, everything will be revealed and so there will be no more jokes, no more need for jokes, and God, because he has always loved and supported me, will take me up to Heaven where I will sit around for thousands and thousands of years. Then a million years. And I will keep going. Then one day I will go before God and beg him to kill me. And God will say, “I cannot kill you because you are already dead.” And I will say I do not even remember being alive. And he will say, “What is it that you want, because whatever it is I will bring it to you.” And I will say, “With all due respect, I don’t think you get it. I’m sick of all this. I’m full. I’ve had enough. I want to be evaporated. I want my dust to be squashed like fruit flies. I don’t want one tiny insect wing of consciousness to remain. I’m sick of my own thoughts.” I will say this while rubbing my eyes. God will suggest I speak with Moses. “That guy only makes me feel worse,” I will say. “I want it to be over.” And God will make this face, like, “I hear you, I hear you.”

  David left the burial ground and went home. When he arrived back at the palace, he sat down with a quill and parchment and tried to make himself understood—to himself and to God—for that one day in Heaven to come.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” he riffed. “I shall not want—cannot want. What is there to want?”

  Jonah and the Big Fish

  Vito worried about his brother constantly, always nervous that Jonah wasn’t going to turn out normal. All because of the penis incident.

  It was as a child, while watching Jonah sleep one night, watching his face—breathing, dreaming—that it struck Vito very hard: Just as I am me, he is he. I could have been born Jonah as easily as I was born myself. And how did he punctuate this epiphany? By touching Jonah’s penis. Right on the tip. And as he did so, Jonah’s eyes popped open. In the darkness Vito’s other me stared at him blankly, his mouth hanging open.

  The way he remembered it, before that moment Jonah had always been normal. Normal. Not normal. It was like pushing a button. A penis-shaped button.

  Vito was the brother who left the womb first. “I should have left a note. ‘Stay put. This whole outside world thing—not for you. For you it will only be delusions and obliterating disappointment.’ ”

  Their mother lived and breathed for her boys. A pious woman, she wore her babushka tied so tightly around her head that she had to speak through gritted teeth. She worried for her sons with laserlike intensity, as though worry was mystical work, a positive force that moved the planets.

  “Jonah is not strong like you,” said the mother to Vito before her death, “and so you must take care of him.”

  “Jonah is not sexy like you,” said the father to Vito before his death, “and so you must get him laid.”

  The father did not overly concern himself with kids. He saw raising children as women’s work and spent most of his time whore-mongering, debauching, frolicking, and making whoopee.

  “You should see some of the foxes I have laid with,” he’d brag to Vito. “All tens—not an eight or nine in the bunch.”

  Vito vowed to both his parents to do as they bid him. And he did—yelling, “Whatsamatter with you!” right in Jonah’s ear when he got too quiet. Weird, unlayable, and quiet.

  On the odd occasion when Jonah did actually speak, it was always about things that stopped conversation dead.

  “Do you ever see swirly circles in the air?” he’d ask Vito and the gang as they played draughts. “Sometimes it looks like everyone and everything is made of tiny swirling circles. Sometimes I can see it all so clearly, how we’re all connected—by circles.”

  “This is what happens when you touch a brother’s penis,” Vito would think. “You scramble the brains.”

  He also feared that he might have scrambled Jonah down below, too, and so it made carrying out his father’s orders harder than carrying out his mother’s. But still, he tried. Like his father, Vito took pride in knowing a great many women, and he set his brother up on date after date—each one more disastrous than the last: Toga sleeves catching on fire. Swarms of cicadas. Piles attacks. But most horrible of all were the things that Jonah said, and so Vito chaperoned. In this way, he could constantly cut Jonah off when he began to say something embarrassing, something that might unwittingly provide a glimpse into the Yiddish circus that was their family life—accidentally reveal how their mother loved them so much she followed them around all day, hiding behind bushes to make sure they were safe. So passionate was she in her adoration that she gave their penises names. Vito’s she called Raffi and Jonah’s was Morris. Vito was always antsy during these dates, worried Jonah might let something inappropriate slip out.

  “It’s like that one time Vito touched my Morris.” Who knew what he could say?

  And so Vito sat on pins and needles, waiting for Jonah to say something to embarrass them both. He waited, perched like a hawk, ready to reach under the table and pinch a clump of Jonah’s thigh hair to shut him up. In this way, he believed he was taking care of Jonah and helping him get laid. It was hard work.

  At night after the dates, Vito felt the guilt lay heavily on his chest. It pressed down upon him with such insistence he feared he might wake up one morning under his bed—under the earth—impish little men prodding him with their pointy goat horns.

  “Manhandle our privates,” the tiny demons would scream.

  * * *

  The first time Jonah heard God, he knew right away that Vito would not like it at all.

  “In forty days,” Jonah told Vito meekly, “God is going to destroy Jerusalem.”

  This was all he needed. He was already working day and night to head off every crazy word that came out of Jonah’s mouth. He mulled the situation over.

  “Don’t say you heard God,” Vito corrected. “Say you think you heard God. There’s a difference.”

  “I think I’m pretty sure about it, though,” said Jonah.

  “What did He sound like?” Vito asked.

  “Like air. Like the mountains.”

  “Why can’t you ever give a straight answer? ‘He had a low gravelly voice. He drawled his vowels and had a wet t.’ Those are answers.”

  “It wasn’t even an actual voice. It was more like a feeling I got.”

  “So you feel like you think you heard God.”

  “I guess so.”

  And so when Jonah told people the news a
bout Jerusalem, Vito would jump in with, “He only thinks he felt he heard God.” Then Jonah would stop prophesizing, and then Vito would start talking about pomegranate crops.

  Still, news of Jonah’s prophecy got around. People spoke of the weird and gentle man from Gath who had heard God foretell of Jerusalem’s doom and, to be on the safe side, Jerusalemites began to repent, but after a few weeks, with Jerusalem doing better than ever, people stopped repenting and started kibitzing.

  “Sure your brother heard God,” they said to Vito. “The only problem is, God lied to him.”

  Vito would shake his head and try to laugh in a way that said, “You win some; you lose some.” But instead he laughed in a way that said, “I am sweating and humiliated.” Jonah was on his way to becoming a laughingstock and Vito was going down with him.

  With all this prophesizing stuff, what chance did Jonah have of enjoying a normal life?

  At night, in dreams, his father looked at him expectantly.

  “Nu?” his face said.

  After the disaster of the first prophecy, years later, when God came to him again, Jonah tried to ignore Him, giving no external sign he’d heard.

  “Go to Nineveh,” the voice commanded. “Warn them that if they do not change their evil ways they will be destroyed in forty days.”

  All the while, Jonah twiddled his beard as though pondering what he might eat for lunch. When God’s voice finally stopped, he ran to tell Vito what had happened.

  “Again with the forty days,” Vito said. “Listen to me good: You are not to go to Nineveh. You are not to tell anyone about this. We don’t need another Jerusalem. To this day I can’t set foot in the market without getting lip from every smart-ass with a pied-à-terre in the holy city. ‘I’ve still got a bag packed by the door.’ Jerks. Let’s just sit tight on this one. Wait and see.”