Zizek's Jokes

by Slavoj Zizek

  THERE IS THUS AN ELEMENT OF TRUTH in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!”—in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life with impunity.43

  WAS CHRIST, in effect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke about the rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking him what he should do with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmly answers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”44

  SUCH A FALL by means of which God loses his distance and becomes involved, steps into the human series, is discernible in a classic joke from the German Democratic Republic in which Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, and Erich Honecker confront God, asking him about the future of their countries. To Nixon, God answers: “In 2000, the United States will be Communist!” Nixon turns away and starts to cry. To Brezhnev, He says: “In 2000, the Soviet Union will be under Chinese control.” After Brezhnev has also turned away and started to cry, Honecker finally asks: “And how will it be in my beloved GDR?” God turns away and starts to cry.

  And here is the ultimate version: three Russians who share the same cell in Lubyanka prison have all been condemned for political offenses. While they are getting acquainted, the first says: “I was condemned to five years for opposing Popov.” The second says: “Ah, but then the party line changed, and I was condemned to ten years for supporting Popov.” Finally, the third one says: “I was condemned for life, and I am Popov.”45

  THIS ALSO MAKES MEANINGLESS the Christian joke according to which, when, in John 8:1–11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!” he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: “Mother! I asked you to stay at home!”46

  IN HIS BOOK ON JOKES, Freud refers to the story of a middleman who tries to convince a young man to marry a woman he represents; his strategy is to change every objection into something praiseworthy. When the man says “But the woman is ugly!” he answers, “So you will not have to worry that she will deceive you with others!” “She is poor!” “So she will be accustomed not to spend too much of your money!” and so on, until, finally, when the man formulates a reproach impossible to reinterpret in this way, the middleman explodes, “But what do you want? Perfection? Nobody is totally without faults!”

  Would it not also be possible to discern in this joke the underlying structure of the legitimization of a Real Socialist regime? “There is not enough meat and rich food in the stores!” “So you don’t have to worry about getting fat and suffering a heart attack!” “There are not enough interesting theatrical and cinema performances or good books available!” “Does this not enable you to cultivate all the more an intense social life, visiting friends and neighbors?” “The secret police exerts total control over my life!” “So you can just relax and lead a life safe from worries!” and so on, until … “But the air is so polluted from the nearby factory that all my children have life-threatening lung diseases!” “What do you want? No system is without faults!”47

  VARIATION

  In an old Soviet joke, a customer goes to a bank, announces his intention to deposit 100 rubles, and inquires about how safe the deposits are. The bank clerk tells him that the bank guarantees all deposits, but the customer asks: “What if the bank collapses?” The clerk answers that the central bank also guarantees all local banks and their deposits. The customer persists: but what if the central bank itself collapses? The clerk again replies: “Then the Soviet state guarantees all bank deposits!” Still unconvinced, the customer raises the stakes to the top: “But what if the Soviet state itself disintegrates?” To this, the bank clerk explodes: “Are you telling me that you are not ready to lose the lousy 100 rubles as the price for such a wonderful event as the disappearance of the Soviet Union!”

  WOULD IT NOT BE POSSIBLE to retell, in this way, the elementary story of Christianity, namely, as a joke with the final unexpected twist? A believer is complaining, “I was promised contact with God, divine grace, but now I am totally alone, abandoned by God, destitute, suffering, with only a miserable death awaiting me!” The divine voice then answers him, “You see, now you are effectively one with God—with Christ suffering on the cross!”48

  RECALL THIS JOKE that perfectly renders the logic of the (in)famous Hegelian triad: Three friends have a drink at a bar; the first one says, “A horrible thing happened to me. At my travel agency, I wanted to say ‘A ticket to Pittsburgh!’ and I said ‘A picket to Tittsburgh!’” The second one replies, “That’s nothing. At breakfast, I wanted to say to my wife ‘Could you pass me the sugar, honey?’ and what I said was ‘You dirty bitch, you ruined my entire life!’” The third one concludes, “Wait till you hear what happened to me. After gathering my courage all night, I decided to say to my wife at breakfast exactly what you said to yours, and I ended up saying ‘Could you pass me the sugar, honey?’”49

  A COMIC HEGELIAN INTERLUDE:

  DUMB AND DUMBER

  How many people noticed that Hegelian dialectics is unconsciously practiced by Dan Quayle and George W. Bush? We thought we had seen it all with Quayle two decades ago; however, in comparison with Bush, Quayle emerges as a rather intelligent person. With regard to his famous mistake of correcting the spelling of “potato” into “potatoe,” I myself must admit it always seemed to me that Quayle was somehow right: “potatoe” comes closer to what Humboldt would have called the true “inner form” of potato. (Nonetheless, I must admit that I feel something similar apropos of Bush’s recent “Grecians” instead of “Greeks”: “Keep good relations with the Grecians.” “Grecian” does seem somehow more dignified, like “thou art” instead of “you are,” while “Greek” sounds all too close to “geek”—were the founders of our noble Western civilization really just a bunch of geeks?)

  How, then, does Bush compare with Quayle? Are Bush’s slips, like those of Quayle at his best, at the level of the Marx Brothers’ supreme slips (“No wonder you remind me of Emanuel Ravelli, since you ARE Ravelli!”), or of no less ingenious “goldwynisms,” the sayings attributed to the larger-than-life Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn (from “An oral agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on!” to the notorious “Include me out!”)? Most of Quayle’s and Bush’s slips follow the basic formula of what the French call lapalissades, the tautological statings of the obvious attributed to the mythical figure of Monsieur la Palice, like “One hour before his death, Monsieur la Palice was still fully alive.” Indeed, la Palice’s ingenious “Why don’t we build cities in the countryside where the air is much cleaner?” comes pretty close to a concise formulation of the Republican Party’s ecological policy, rendered perfectly by Bush’s truism: “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

  Here, then, are some examples of this elementary type of slip from Bush and Quayle: “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure”; “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls”; “For NASA, space is still a high priority.” These lapalissades get a little bit more interesting when pure tautology is emphatically offered as a causal explanation; see the following slip of Quayle: “When I have been asked who caused the riots and the killing in Los Angeles, my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.” (There is, of course, an implicit conservative political logic in this tautology, that is, this quote relies on an implicit negation: don’t look for the “deeper” causes in social circumstances, it is the immediate perpetrators who bear the full responsibility.) Things get even more interesting when, in a strangely Hegelian way, Quayle explodes the identity by opposing the notion and its empirical exemplifications: “It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” />
  While Bush is not able to follow Quayle along this road, he often does catch up with him in producing slips in which a conceptual opposition is raised to the level of dialectical self-relating Selbstbeziehung. Recall how he posited the very opposition between irreversibility and reversibility as reversible: “I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy—but that could change.” So it’s not simply that things are either reversible or irreversible: a situation that appears irreversible could change into a reversible one. Here is an even nicer example of this reflexivity: “The future will be better tomorrow.” The point is not simply that Quayle made a mistake, intending to claim that tomorrow things will be better: in the near future (tomorrow), future itself will look brighter to us. Did Bush not reproduce exactly the same structure in his statement “One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected”?

  With Quayle, this reflexivity culminates in the following quote in which the series of three evasions/disavowals is consummated in the speaker’s self-erasure from the picture: “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” The logic of progress in this series is inexorable: first, in his eagerness to square the accounts with the dark past of his own nation, Quayle attributes to it the crime of the century that it did NOT commit; then he retracts, specifying that the act was not committed by his nation; in a desperate attempt to return to the logic of settling the accounts with one’s past, he then constitutes a new community—no longer “our nation,” but all of us who lived in the last century and are thus coresponsible for the Holocaust; finally, becoming aware of the mess he talked himself into, he as it were automatically opts for a quick escape, excluding himself from his own century. In short, in a gesture that forms the perfect reversal of Goldwyn’s “include me out,” Quayle “excludes himself in” his century! No wonder, then, that, after this imbroglio, he makes a statement that provides the most succinct characterization of Bush: “People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”

  There are, however, two domains in which Bush goes further than Quayle; the first is that of the postmodern dialectics of certainty and uncertainty. In Bush’s thought, uncertainty (about the empirical figure of the enemy), far from diminishing the danger, dialectically inverts itself into the higher certainty that there MUST BE an enemy, all the more dangerous for the fact that we don’t know who, exactly, he is. So the more uncertainty about the enemy, the more we can be certain of him lurking out there: “This is a world that is much more uncertain than the past. In the past we were certain, we were certain it was us versus the Russians in the past. We were certain, and therefore we had huge nuclear arsenals aimed at each other to keep peace. … Even though it’s an uncertain world, we’re certain of some things. … We’re certain there are madmen in this world, and there’s terror, and there’s missiles and I’m certain of this too.” Bush also surpasses Quayle with regard to the refined reflexive twist of the simple Christian precept “Love your neighbor like yourself!” Bush took the lesson of the dialectics of the desire for recognition from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: we do not directly love ourselves—what we effectively love is to be loved by others, that is, we love others to love us: “We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself.”

  So what should the unfortunate Bush do to avoid Quayle’s sad fate and to dispel the blindness of the stupid liberal public, which is unable to appreciate the hidden dialectical finesse of his statements? As we all know, not only is it true that du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas; the same goes also the other way round. So, perhaps, Bush should just learn the Heideggerian art of generating deep insights from tautological reversals. That is to say, when we recall Heidegger’s famous reversal “das Wesen der Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit des Wesens [the essence of truth is the truth of the essence],” or his rhetorical strategy of excluding das Wesen of some domain from this domain itself (“the essence of technology is nothing technological”), it cannot but strike us how easy it would have been to change some bushism into a deep thought. “This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve” could be translated into: “The essence of preservation has nothing to do with the ontic preservation of our physical resources. The essence of preservation is the preservation of the essence of our society itself—and this is what the president of the United States has to do, even if, at the vulgar ontic level, he allows the destruction of more natural resources than in the entire previous history of the United States.”

  In learning this art, Bush will regain a chance of proving himself a worthy successor to Bill Clinton, since this Heideggerian trend in the American presidency was discernible already in the Clinton era: when Clinton answered the prosecutor’s question about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (“Is it true that …?”) with the infamous “It depends on what you mean by ‘is,’” was he not pointing toward the Heideggerian Seinsfrage?50

  RECALL THE CLASSIC GROUCHO MARX LINE: “This man may look like an idiot and act like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you—he really is an idiot!” Is the denouement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo not a version of this joke? “This woman (Judy) may look like Madeleine and act like Madeleine, but don’t let that fool you—she really is Madeleine!”51

  VARIATION

  Recall the often quoted Marx Brothers joke about Ravelli: Spaulding: Say, I used to know a fellow looked exactly like you, by the name of ... ah ... Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother? Ravelli: I’m Emanuel Ravelli. Spaulding: You’re Emanuel Ravelli? Ravelli: I'm Emanuel Ravelli. Spaulding: Well, no wonder you look like him ... But I still insist, there is a resemblance.52

  TODAY, THE OLD JOKE ABOUT A RICH MAN telling his servant “Throw out this destitute beggar—I’m so sensitive that I can’t stand seeing people suffer!” is more appropriate than ever.53

  IN AN OLD JOKE from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

  And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc.—are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.54

  IN A CLASSIC LINE from a Hollywood screwball comedy, the girl asks her boyfriend: “Do you want to marry me?” “No!” “Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!” In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptable straight answer for the girl is “Yes!” so anything else, inclusive of a straight “No!” counts as evasion. This underlying logic, of course, is again that of the forced choice: you are free to decide, on condition that you make the right choice. Would a priest not rely on the same paradox in a dispute with a skeptic layman? “Do you believe in God?” “No.” “Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!” Again, in the eyes of the priest, the only straight answer is to assert one’s belief in God: far from standing for a symmetrical clear stance, the atheist denial of belief is an attempt to dodge the issue of the divine encounter. And is it not the same today
with the choice “democracy or fundamentalism”? Is it not that, within the terms of this choice, it is simply not possible to choose “fundamentalism”? What is problematic in the way the ruling ideology imposes on us this choice is not “fundamentalism” but, rather, democracy itself: as if the only alternative to “fundamentalism” is the political system of the parliamentary liberal democracy.55

  THERE IS AN ISRAELI JOKE about Bill Clinton visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when Clinton sees a mysterious blue phone in Bibi’s office, he asks Bibi what it is, and Bibi answers that it allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his return to the States, the envious Clinton demands that his secret service should provide him with such a phone—at any cost. They deliver it within two weeks, and it works, but the phone bill is exorbitant—two million dollars for a one-minute talk with Him up there. So Clinton furiously calls Bibi and complains: “How can you afford such a phone, if even we, who support you financially, can’t? Is this how you spend our money?” Bibi answers calmly: “No, it’s not that—you see, for us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!”

  Interestingly, in the Soviet version of the joke, God is replaced by hell: when Nixon visits Brezhnev and sees a special phone, Brezhnev explains to him that this is a link to hell; at the end of the joke, when Nixon complains about the price of the call, Brezhnev calmly answers: “For us in the Soviet Union, the call to hell counts as a local call.”56