Zizek's Jokes

by Slavoj Zizek

  ONE SHOULD THEREFORE ASSUME the paradox that concentration camps and refugee camps for the delivery of humanitarian aid are the two faces, “human” and “inhuman,” of the same socio-logical formal matrix. In both cases, the cruel joke from Lubitch’s To Be or Not to Be applies: when asked about the German concentration camps in the occupied Poland, the character called “Concentration Camp Erhardt” snaps back “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” (And does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in January 2002, which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of risk society? Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without any true choice—the risk appeared to them as blind fate. Those, on the contrary, who effectively did have an insight into the risks as well as a possibility to intervene into the situation [the top managers], minimized their risks by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy—actual risks and choices were thus nicely distributed. So, again, apropos of the popular notion that today’s society is that of risky choices, one can say that some [the Enron managers] do the choices, while others [the common employees] do the risking.)57

  IN ONE OF THE FUNNIEST SCENES in To Be or Not to Be, the pretentious Polish actor Josef Tura who, as the part of a secret mission, has to impersonate the cruel high Gestapo officer Erhardt, does this impersonation in an exaggerated way, reacting to the remarks of his interlocutor about his cruel treatment of the Poles with a loud vulgar laughter and a satisfied reply, “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt, hahaha!” We, the spectators, see this as a ridiculous caricature—however, a little bit later, Tura has to escape and the real Erhardt arrives; when the conversation again touches rumors about him, he reacts to his interlocutors in exactly the same ridiculously exaggerated way as his impersonator did. The message is clear: even Ehrhardt himself is not immediately himself, he also imitates his own copy or, more precisely, the ridiculous idea of himself. While Tura acts him, Erhardt acts himself.

  In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, we find a more tragic version of the same uncanny coincidence: the low-class Judy who, under the pressure exerted by Scottie and out of her love for him, endeavors to look and act like the high-class and ethereal Madeleine, turns out to BE Madeleine: they are the same person, since the “true” Madeleine Scottie encountered was already a fake. However, this identity of Judy and Judy-Madeleine again renders all the more palpable the absolute otherness of Madeleine with regard to Judy—the Madeleine that is given nowhere, who is present just in the guise of the ethereal “aura” that envelops Judy-Madeleine.58

  JEREMY BENTHAM deployed the unique notion of “self-icon,” that is, the notion that a thing is its own best sign (as in the Lewis Carroll joke about Englishmen using ever larger maps, until they finally settled on using England itself as its own map).59

  IN SO FAR AS THE MELANCHOLIC MOURNS what he has not yet lost, there is an inherent comic subversion of the tragic procedure of mourning at work in melancholy, as in the old racist joke about gypsies: when it rains, they are happy because they know that after rain there is always sunshine; when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that after sunshine it will, at some point, rain.60

  IN AN OLD SOVIET JOKE, a listener asks Radio Erevan: “Did Rabinovitch win a new car in the state lottery?” Radio Erevan replies: “In principle, yes—he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!”61

  THERE IS AN OLD RACIST JOKE, popular in the former Yugoslavia, about a gypsy being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist first explains to the gypsy what free associations are: you immediately say what is on your mind in response to the psychiatrist’s cue. Then the psychiatrist proceeds to the test itself: he says “table”; the gypsy answers: “fucking Fatima”; he says “sky”; the gypsy answers: “fucking Fatima,” and so on, until the psychiatrist explodes: “But you didn’t understand me! You must tell me what crops up in your mind, what you are thinking of, when I say my word!” The gypsy calmly answers: “Yes, I got your point, I’m not stupid, but I think all the time about fucking Fatima!”62

  THIS JOKE, which clearly displays the structure of Hegelian “abstract universality,” has none the less to be supplemented by the crucial final twist at work in another joke about a pupil being examined by his biology teacher about different animals, and always reducing the answer to the definition of a horse: “What is an elephant?” “An animal that lives in the jungle, where there are no horses. A horse is a domestic mammal with four legs, used for riding, working in the fields or pulling vehicles.” “What is a fish?” “An animal that has no legs, unlike a horse. A horse is a domestic mammal …” “What is a dog?” “An animal that, unlike horses, barks. A horse is a domestic mammal …” and so forth, until finally, the desperate teacher asks the pupil: “OK, what is a horse?” Perplexed and totally thrown off balance, the poor surprised pupil starts to mumble and cry, unable to provide an answer.63

  JOKES ABOUT THE CROATIAN PRESIDENT Franjo Tudjman in general display a structure of some interest for Lacanian theory—for example: Why is it impossible to play “hide-and-seek” with Tudjman? Because if he were to hide, nobody would bother to seek him … a nice libidinal point about how hiding works only if people actually want to find you. But the supreme example is that of Tudjman and his large family in a plane above Croatia. Aware of the rumors that a lot of Croats lead miserable, unhappy lives, while he and his cronies amass wealth, Tudjman says: “What if I were to throw a check for a million dollars out of the window, to make at least one Croat, who will catch it, happy?” His flattering wife says: “But Franjo, my dear, why don’t you throw out two checks for half a million each, and thus make two Croats happy?” His daughter adds: “Why not four checks for a quarter of a million each, and make four Croats happy?” and so on, until finally, his grandson—the proverbial innocent youth who unknowingly blurts out the truth—says: “But Grandpa, why don’t you simply throw yourself out of the window, and thus make all the Croats happy?”64

  THERE IS A STANDARD SERBO-CROAT vulgar riddle-joke: “How do you make eggs on the eye? By putting a cock on the forehead!” (In Slavic languages, the vulgar term for testicles is eggs, not balls.) It accounts for the scene I witnessed in the barracks: after a particularly tasteless dinner, which was left uneaten by most of the soldiers, the unfortunate soldier, lying on his bed, the victim of a practical joke, loudly complained that he was still very hungry and wouldn’t mind a simple meal, perhaps a pair of eggs on the eye; his fellow soldiers immediately seized the opportunity and provided him with “eggs on the eye” by putting a cock on his forehead.65

  IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS of “actually existing Socialism,” every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: “Learn, learn, and learn!” A classic joke from Socialism produces a nice subversive effect by using this motto in an unexpected context. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked what they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered “A wife”; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, “A mistress”; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered “Both, wife and mistress!” Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: “This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress …” “And what do you actually do?” “I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”66

  TWO VULGAR JOKES about testicles from Eastern Europe illustrate the fool-knave opposition perfectly. In the first one, a customer is sitting at a bar, drinking whisky; a monkey comes dancing along the counter, stops at his glass, washes his balls in it, and dances away. Badly shocked, the customer orders another glass of whisky; the monkey strolls along again and does the same. Furious, the customer asks the bartender: “Do you know why that monkey is washing his balls
in my whisky?” The bartender replies: “I have no idea—ask the gypsy, he knows everything!” The guest turns to the gypsy, who is wandering around the bar, amusing guests with his violin and songs, and asks him: “Do you know why that monkey is washing his balls in my whisky?” The gypsy answers calmly: “Yes, sure!” and starts to sing a sad melancholic song: “Why does that monkey wash his balls in my whisky, oh why …” The point, of course, is that gypsy musicians are supposed to know hundreds of songs and perform them at the customers’ request, so the gypsy has understood the customer’s question as a request for a song about a monkey washing his balls in whisky. This is the poetry of ideology at its purest.

  The second joke takes place in fourteenth-century Russia under Mongol occupation. A peasant and his wife were walking along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stopped at their side and told the peasant he would now proceed to rape his wife; he then added: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you must hold my testicles while I rape your wife, so that they will not get dirty!” Once the Mongol had done the deed and ridden away, the peasant started laughing and jumping with joy. His surprised wife asked: “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answered: “But I got him! His balls are covered with dust!” This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents: they thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura (the representatives of ordinary people), but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people. Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position? (Among today’s terms for softly smearing with dust the balls of those in power are “deconstruction” and “protection of individual freedoms.”) In a famous confrontation at the university of Salamanca in 1936, Miguel de Unamuno quipped at Franquists: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis” (“You will win, but you will not convince”). Is this all that today’s Left can say to triumphant global capitalism? Is the Left predestined to continue to play the role of those who, on the contrary, convince but fail (and are especially convincing in retroactively explaining the reasons for their own failure)? Our task is to discover how to make a step further—our thesis 11 should be: in our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power; the point is to cut them off.67

  TAKE THE OLD JOKE about the difference between Soviet-style bureaucratic Socialism and Yugoslav self-management Socialism: in Russia, members of the nomenklatura drive themselves in expensive limousines, while in Yugoslavia, ordinary people themselves ride in limousines through their representatives.68

  UNDOUBTEDLY THE GREATEST MASTERS of humor in cinema (as opposed to the Marx Brothers’ jokes) are the members of Monty Python. An episode from their Meaning of Life takes place in a couple’s apartment. Two men from the “live organ transplants” business ring the bell and demand the husband’s liver. The poor husband resists: they have the right to take his liver only in the event of his death; but the two men assure him that in any case he is not likely to survive the removal of his liver.

  The two men set to work, dragging bloody organs out of the victim’s viscera with cold indifference. The wife cannot stand the sight and leaves the room for the kitchen; one of the men follows her and demands her liver too. She refuses; however, a gentleman then steps out of the refrigerator singing about the billions of stars and planets, and their intelligent dispositions within the universe. After she realizes how small and insignificant her problem is compared to the universe, she gladly agrees to donate her liver.69

  THIS INHERENT REFERENCE to the Other on account of which “there is no Don Giovanni without Leporello” (Don Giovanni obviously rates the inscription of his conquests into Leporello’s register higher than the pleasure provided by the conquests themselves) is the theme of a low-class joke on a poor peasant who, after surviving a shipwreck, finds himself on a desert island with Cindy Crawford. After having sex with her, she asks him if he is fully satisfied; his answer is yes, but none the less he still has a small request to make his satisfaction complete—could she dress herself up as his best friend, put on trousers, and paint a mustache on her face? In response to her surprised reaction and suspicion that the poor peasant is a hidden pervert, he comforts her that this is not the point at all, as she will immediately see. So, after she fulfills his request, he approaches her, elbows her in the ribs and tells her, with the obscene smile of the male complicity: “You know what just happened to me? I just had sex with Cindy Crawford!”70

  AS DELEUZE EMPHASIZED, the stupid joke about a masochist asking a sadist to beat him up cruelly, and the sadist answering him with a malicious smile: “No, never …,” completely misses the point: the relationship between sadism and masochism is not complementary; that is to say, the sadist and the masochist definitely do not form an ideal couple; their relationship is definitely not a relationship in which each of the two partners gets from the other what he wants (in which the masochist’s pain is directly the sadist’s satisfaction, and vice versa).71

  IN ONE OF HIS LETTERS, Freud refers to the joke about the new husband who, asked by his friend how his wife looks, how beautiful she is, answers: “I personally don’t like her, but that’s a matter of taste.”72

  HITCHCOCK TELLS the joke that gave the name to the object called a McGuffin, which is actually a “strangers-on-a-train” joke. It also has a Yugoslav version with an alternate ending:

  “What is the package on the rack?”

  “It’s a McGuffin.”

  “What is it for?”

  “To kill the lions in the Highlands.”

  “But there are no lions in the Highlands.”

  Punchline A: “Well, then, that’s no McGuffin.”

  Punchline B: “You see, it works.”73

  THE HEGELIAN SUBJECT emerges precisely by way of the reflective, self-relating, reapplication of a logical operator, as in the worn-out joke about the cannibal who ate the last cannibal in the tribe.74

  ONE OF THE CONCLUSIONS to be drawn from this is that, in endeavoring to provide an answer to the question “Why were Jews specifically picked out to play the scapegoat role in anti-Semitic ideology?” we might easily succumb to the very trap of anti-Semitism, looking for some mysterious feature in them that, as it were, predestined them for that role: the fact that Jews who were chosen for the role of the “Jew” ultimately is contingent—as it is pointed out by the joke about anti-Semitism: “Jews and cyclists are responsible for all our troubles.—Why cyclists?—WHY JEWS?”75

  ITS UNDERLYING MECHANISM was elaborated by Michel Pêcheux apropos of jokes of the type: “Daddy was born in Manchester, Mummy in Bristol, and I in London; strange that the three of us should have met!”76

  SUCH AN UNDERSTANDING OF HEGEL inevitably runs counter to the accepted notion of “absolute knowledge” as a monster of conceptual totality devouring every contingency; this Hegelian commonplace simply shoots too fast, like the patrolling soldier in the joke from Jaruzelski’s Poland immediately after the military coup. At that time, military patrols had the right to shoot without warning at people walking on the streets after curfew (ten o’clock). One of the two soldiers on patrol sees somebody in a hurry at ten minutes to ten and immediately shoots him. When his colleague asks him why he shot when it was only ten to ten, he answers: “I knew the fellow—he lived far from here and in any case would not be able to reach his home in ten minutes, so to simplify matters, I shot him now.”77

  THE POINT IS, AS LACAN PUTS IT, that the emperor is naked only beneath his clothes, so if there is an unmasking gesture of psychoanalysis, it is closer to Alphonse Allais’s joke, quoted by Lacan: somebody points at a woman and utters a horrified cry, “Look at her—what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked!”78

  THERE IS A VERY HEGELIAN JOKE that illustrates perfectly the way truth arises from misrecognition—the way our path toward truth coincides with the truth itself. At the beginning of this century, a
Pole and a Jew were sitting in a train, facing each other. The Pole was shifting nervously, watching the Jew all the time; something was irritating him. Finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he exploded: “Tell me, how do you Jews succeed in extracting from people the last small coin and in this way accumulate all your wealth?” The Jew replied: “OK, I will tell you, but not for nothing; first, you give me five zloty [Polish money].” After receiving the required amount, the Jew began: “First, you take a dead fish; you cut off her head and put her entrails in a glass of water. Then, around midnight, when the moon is full, you must bury this glass in a churchyard …” “And,” the Pole interrupted him greedily, “if I do all this, will I also become rich?” “Not too quickly: replied the Jew; “This is not all you must do; but if you want to hear the rest, you must pay me another five zloty!” After receiving the additional money, the Jew continued his story; soon afterward, he again demanded more money, and so on, until finally the Pole exploded in fury: “You dirty rascal, do you really think I did not notice what you were aiming at? There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!” The Jew answered him calmly and with resignation: “Well, now you see how we, the Jews …”79

  VARIATION

  Let us recall here the joke about a Jew and a Pole in which the Jew extracts money from the Pole under the pretext of imparting to him the secret of how Jews succeed in extracting from people their very last penny. Weininger’s violent antifeminist outburst—“There is no feminine secret at all; behind the mask of the Enigma, there is simply nothing!”—remains at the level of the Pole’s fury, which wells up when he finally grasps how the Jew, by endlessly postponing the final revelation, was merely extracting more and more money from him. What Weininger fails to do is make a gesture that would correspond to the Jew’s answer to the Pole’s outburst: “Well, now you see how we, the Jews, extract money from people …”—that is, a gesture that would reinterpret, reinscribe, the failure as a success—something like “Look, this nothingness behind the mask is the very absolute negativity on account of which woman is the subject par excellence, not a limited object opposed to the force of subjectivity!”80