The Laughing Poet: Tell All the Truth But Tell It Screwy
By Barbara J. Petoskey

Humor and poetry may seem like Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito-style literary twins. Readers who were introduced to poetry in school via Poe’s somber-voweled death knells may assume there is some eternal link between broken lines and broken hearts. According to Margaret Atwood, “People think you can’t be a poet without being drunk. Women poets are expected to commit suicide. Someone once asked me when, not if, I would commit suicide.”

I find that funny. Actually, I find a lot of things funny, and I believe that makes me not only a better humorist but a better poet as well. Some mornings it also helps me get out of bed.

It’s really no surprise that I’ve published poems about nuclear war and about my cat’s fondness for shredding toilet paper. Poets and jokers draw many tools from the same box.

Both poetry and humor depend on the freshness that comes from off-beat associations and unexpected connections. In poems, they’re called metaphors, in humor, punchlines. In light verse, they may be both. A certain skewed vision helps the poet or humorist to see the revelation or belly laugh lurking beneath the surface.

Both poetry and humor depend on compression and pacing. Unnecessary or weak words can flatten a poem’s music or put a laugh to sleep. And not just word choice but also word placement. A clanging poem can be as insufferable as a stand-up comic who plods to the punchline or drags on after the laugh.

On a thematic level, both poetry and humor may spring from the initial question: Why? Or maybe: What the hell? Take it from stand-up linguist George Carlin. Okay, maybe some of his favorite words can’t be printed in polite magazines, but he spoke the truth when he said, “I see comedians as also being teachers, philosophers, and poets. Those things go with the role of jester.”

Humor can play an enlightening part in poetry, even if you’re not writing light verse. Prize-winning poet Alice Fulton believes, “All sorts of entrenched cultural positions can be undermined and tweaked by humor.” Fulton’s serious poems often make powerful use of puns or word play.

But why stop with stanzas? Humor can be an effective diversionary strategy in any type of writing. As George Bernard Shaw once explained it, “Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking.”

Wisecracks, satire, the “modest proposal.”

Are you mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Instead of going postal, the satirist can commit felonious hyperbole. One of my own favorite pieces lambastes electoral popularity polls under the guise of a corporate job evaluation. As a vituperative letter to the editor, my criticisms might have seen twenty-four hours of local ink and annoyed a few people—if they bothered to read it. Instead, my sugar-coated diatribe, “How Do You Hate Me So Far?,” appeared in a nationally distributed quarterly and was reprinted in Best Contemporary Women’s Humor. (Have you noticed, no one ever collects Favorite Vented Spleen?)

The jester’s tools serve many purposes. Ten hours after my mother accompanied my father to the hospital for a heart attack, she found herself headed to the same emergency room. Later when she was comfortably settled in cardiac intensive care, I warned her that after a ride in the front and a ride in the back, her next time in the ambulance she had to drive.

Sometimes we laugh because it hurts too much to cry.

So what does this prove? Here are three possible conclusions—equally viable—drawn from my verse “Crazy for Poetry”:

So I must be the Muse’s mouthpiece
or Cassandra’s daughter—
or else I simply don’t have both
my pencils in the water.    

This article appeared on-line during January-February 2000 on the website of Pantarbe.com and was reprinted in the October 2001 issue of Exchange (Canada).

Barbara J. Petoskey's poetry, humor, and other writings have appeared in publications and anthologies including Writer's Digest, The Writer, Cat Fancy, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Bride of Funnyside.  She is also a contributing editor for ByLine magazine.

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