Goliath was a Philistine giant who considered himself a laugh riot, and a part of his shtick was coming up with inventive ways to kill Jews. For instance, one time he tied the beards of five Hebrews together, dropped them in a sack, climbed a tree, and threw them from the highest branch. He called it The Fatal Hora. Another time he nailed banana peels to the soles of a half dozen Jews and paid a musician to play rapid harp music as he chased them about with a tent peg.
As well as being creative at murder, he also had a very big and hurtful mouth. He used it to make the Jews look bad. When Goliath stood on the hilltop near the Hebrew camp and called out to them mockingly— calling them Jewburgers, Jewlips, Jewy Jewballs and other anti-Semitic foods—the Jews pretended not to care. But they did care. Still, they figured it was better to endure insults than broken bones.
Goliath stood outside the camp for hours, acting like the life of the party—cracking jokes about how circumcised penises were like shrimpy mushrooms, better for making broth than satisfying the lust of a Jewess.
“I once dated a lady Jew,” riffed the Philistine giant. “And after having screwed her just so, she sang me one of her postcoital Jew melodies—a plaintive tune about the teeny-balled male of her species. A Jew makes love as though trepidatiously dipping his toe into cold bathwater, while a Philistine makes love as though hungrily eating watermelon after having screwed a Jewess.”
When he was done performing, he would issue his challenge. It was always the same: send over your best warrior so I can fight him one-on-one. In this way, Goliath wanted to make his battles into a kind of performance—a chance to pause and deliver zingers while issuing a Jew his licks.
“By this method,” said Goliath, “we might observe how a Jew fights as though he is gingerly dabbing underdone yolk off his chin, while a Philistine fights as though he is hungrily eating honeydew after having burned down a kosher butcher shop.”
Whenever Goliath made his threats, everyone pretended they couldn’t hear him. They made like they were too caught up sharpening something or trying to scrub an impossible stain off their battle kilt. It helped them get through the day.
There was on this particular occasion a young Hebrew in attendance named David. David was a shepherd who had shown up to bring his older brothers lunch. He watched the kibitzing giant whoop it up and hated the demoralizing effect it was having on the Hebrew army; but even more than that, he hated Goliath’s comedic material. He thought “Jews fight like this/Philistines fight like that” to be one of the lowest forms of comedy—only outdone by inventing cute names for pitching Jews from trees. David was offended by Goliath’s threats and violence, but he was even more offended by Goliath’s threats and violence to comedy.
Maybe he wasn’t as big and tough as Goliath, but David knew for certain that he was funnier. He had to be. Out of his seven brothers, he was not the wisest, nor was he the handsomest, the strongest, kindest, smartest, or even the cleanest. Comedy was what you got when all the really good qualities were already taken. And so, David knew that, by default, he had to be funny. What else was there left him?
David was the guy who placed inflated camel bladders on chairs for family members to unwittingly sit on—the guy who once set a mulberry bush on fire and hid behind it, pretending he was the voice of God.
“Repent,” he intoned to those who passed, “also hop on one foot and make duck sounds.”
While Goliath got his laughs by putting people down and murdering them in complicated, flashy ways, David had a different take on what comedy could be. He believed you could achieve a humorous effect by killing someone simply, too. The time was right, he believed, for a honed-down, deadpan kind of murder/comedy. He believed a simple stone-to-the-head killing could be a comedic statement as well as a political one—a challenge to the decadent pageantry of Philistine giant murder.
And so David decided that with a mere stone he would slay Goliath. Clean and economical. And funny— laugh-out-loud funny.
He was sure that if it was done right—if his timing was just so—killing Goliath could be a highly original goof. A little schmegeggy. A big schlub. The little one kills the big one. Bonk. Death. That’s comedy.
The manner in which I kill Goliath will cause the whole world to laugh, thought David. Even God Himself will laugh.
David wanted to please the Lord, and he believed a hardy chuckle would do Him good.
David’s love of laughter began when he was a child and he had tickled an older girl on the stomach until she had peed. At the time it had felt like a magic trick, like he had figured something out. He felt like the first person to have ever milked a goat—the shock! And the sound of her laughter—like something cracking inside her, bubbling up, coming to the top—no words, just something from the depths. It was a miracle. He remembered how everything became speeded up but the pee was very slow, the way it spread like a butterfly on the ground beneath her.
So making a joke was like tickling a girl but with invisible pinkies, which made it even better—more magical. And there could always be pee, too. It was always possible. When he slayed Goliath there could be women watching and these women could laugh. Some might laugh loudly, others quietly, and there might be a woman there who would pee. Just a few drops. But then also maybe a lot. Maybe there would be a beautiful woman there who would transform herself into a fountain to honor the wit of his murder. They might all pee as Goliath died. As he killed him and he died.
Of course it was not impossible that Goliath might kill him, but David did not want to think about that. He did not want to think of Goliath wrapping a vine of grapes around his penis when he was dead and pulling him around like a toy—because that was the kind of funny guy that Goliath was. David would be dead and as his soul was flying up to Heaven it would have to look down and see a thing like that. What a last thing to see! But he was not going to think about that. A slayer of giants had to be pure of intent when he did his slaying. Even a mite of doubt could foul the whole thing.
* * *
David lay in bed at night and planned it all out.
“Maybe if I strike him right in mid-insult—just after the words ‘and furthermore . . .’—or pop him just as he’s gulping from his goblet so the stone can bounce off his head and plop into his wine! If the Lord, in His infinite kindness, might grant Goliath’s dropping dead to be preceded by a plopping sound, I will have achieved a comedy of the highest order!”
David wondered what it was going to be like to be the greatest hero who ever lived. He wondered if it would give him sad eyes. He had once seen a hero who had them. With sad eyes, women would see him and think, “What sad eyes,” and then they would know that even though he kept up a brave and comical front, killing giants was not all fun, that it left a person with a certain unasked-for gravitas, that it forced you to know things that no one else could ever know and these things left you sadder. But also sexier.
When he is a funny, sad, sexy great hero they will bring him women. Sometimes two at a time. He will invite them into his chambers and sit on the edge of his bed while sipping wine. They will listen while seated cross-legged on the floor as he tells funny tales with reserved sadness and sad tales with impossible mirth.
David finally worked up the nerve to tell his brothers how he wanted to battle the giant. He did not tell them about the other stuff—with the laughing women and the eyes—but still, they were unsupportive.
“David,” they said, “if you do this idiotic thing we will no longer be your brothers. You can kiss all that good-bye.”
But David was fixated. He could only think of the laughter that awaited him.
For forty days Goliath stood on the hilltop and issued challenges.
“Send out your best man to fight me. If he wins, the Philistines shall be your slaves. We shall press your olives, pick your Jewberries, and listen attentively to your boring stories about God. But this will not happen. What will happen is this: I will kill your man and munch his toes like pecans. And with that little snack I will be making a broader gesture: eating the toes of all Jews everywhere—and by toes I mean spirit—but also toes. Can you see what I am getting at?”
They could see what he was getting at, and really imagine it, too: Goliath delicately twisting their toes off one at a time with index finger and thumb, popping them into his mouth—saving the pinkie toe for last.
To ease their spirits, the Jewish soldiers returned to one of their favorite subjects—the dream match: Samson versus Goliath.
“Are you kidding me? It would have been a bloodbath,” they said, getting all worked up and forgetting their troubles. “Samson would have used Goliath’s size against him. He’d have climbed him like a beanpole and ripped his head off with his bare hands.”
On this particular day David had again shown up with food for his brothers. It was an excuse to get in on the action.
“How can you let Goliath talk that way about the army of the Hebrew god?” David asked his brothers.
“You’re being loud,” they said. “He might hear you!”
David kept stirring it up, talking about how the Jews were number one and shouldn’t be taking that kind of flak. Eventually, David’s mouthing off got back to King Saul, who sent for him.
When David stood before the king, he told him how he wanted to battle Goliath and the king gave him his trademark sideways smirk. The smirk meant many, often contradictory, things. In this case it meant, “The kid’s got style,” and so, believing himself to be all for style, King Saul offered David his shield and armor to use in battle with the giant.
“I don’t need that stuff,” said David. “I have God on my side.” In truth, David was afraid the armor would make him look more imposing than he needed to be, and thus ruin the comedic staging of the whole little guy–big guy routine.
David produced his sling. It was just a leather strap.
“This is all I need,” said David. “This and God.”
“Tell you what,” King Saul said, having a good time. “You kill this gigantic showboating asshole and I’ll take good care of you.”
Having killed Goliath so many times in his mind, it already felt like a done deal. David had been living in the future, but now he was setting out into the past to preserve the present and ensure the chuckle-filled future to come—with all the rewards a king could bestow. David did this sort of half strut out the door, swinging the sling around like a pocket watch.
Some kid, thought the king.
David approached Goliath. How stupid, he thought, to be so big. It was asinine. Imbecilic.
As the giant cavorted about, David pulled out a satchel and poured its contents onto the ground. It was vomit. As the necessary technology to produce fake vomit had not yet been invented, bringing along a bag of the real stuff was the best David could do. He thought if he could just trick Goliath into looking at it and squealing in girlish horror, it would be a good, humorous start to the battle. David kept looking down at it, even pointing—anything to make the giant notice— but it was no use. Goliath was already on a tear, playing to the audience.
“This is who you send to do battle with me?” asked Goliath. “After I have murdered him, shall I change his diapers? You Jews slay me. It’s like I was telling the Jewess cheese monger I was tenderizing yesterday evening, ‘The army of King Saul is a sickly, honey cake– footed army whom you can always hear coming due to the mealy-nosed sniffling of their sinusitis.’ But this little fellow is too much! He looks like something that has dribbled into a Philistine’s chamber pot! Does he come with a side order of corn nibblets?”
Goliath laughed while slapping his shield carrier on the back, causing the old fellow’s shoulder to become dislodged. Looking at it all from up close, David saw that the laughter Goliath caused was not real laughter at all. Goliath was a bully who produced nervous laughter. Terrified laughter. David wanted to cause laughter that made the soul brighten.
“I will feed your body to the birds and dogs,” needled Goliath, interrupting David’s thoughts.
“I will feed your body to the birds and dogs,” bantered David. He then looked over at the Hebrew army to see if they were laughing at his rejoinder, but they just stared at their feet.
“I will feed your body to the birds and dogs,” Goliath asserted, this time underlining the word “your” with such force that David could smell his deadly breath from across the battle plain.
“You win,” quipped David, “but you still might want to chew on a mint leaf.”
“I shall chew on your still-beating heart,” parried Goliath.
“Do you kiss your brothers with that mouth?” asked David.
“Enough playing the dozens,” growled the giant. “Now we fight.”
David carefully placed a stone into the sling and swung it around. The two or three times he had practiced with the sling he had seen that whenever he twirled it, he could not help swirling his hips in a highly provocative manner, and so he tried to keep his belly dancing under control. He did not want to be handing Goliath material on a silver platter. Finally releasing, the plum-sized rock sailed through the air and hit the giant square in the center of his forehead. Goliath fell backward onto the ground. A few soldiers looked up from their feet, but they did not laugh. They seemed glad—glad and nervous—but they didn’t actually laugh. No one did.
What’s going on? thought David. Soon the laughs will start.
But there were no laughs. Not a snicker, a stifled snort or even a “Man, that’s funny.” Nothing. And right away, David knew that he had erred. His timing had somehow been off—not exquisite enough. Perhaps he had been overzealous in his delivery of the stone. Perhaps slings and stones just weren’t funny. Maybe he should have tricked the giant into walking off a cliff, or running at top speed into a temple wall. Why would he have thought that a little pisher killing a giant with a sling would be a powerful joke to make God laugh? How could he have gotten such an ignorant idea into his head? If he had only just slapped him over the head with a scourge handle!
When the Hebrew army saw that Goliath was really dead, they let out a cheer.
“Little David has destroyed the giant,” they cried.
They knew David’s feat was important, possibly even a miracle, but they did not laugh. David was nauseous.
“Go on and cut Goliath’s head off,” his brothers shouted, for that was the custom back then when one slaughtered a giant. But David’s heart wasn’t in it.
There will be no more jest-making, he thought. No more wine bibbery or hay making.
He just wanted to go home.
I will never trust another thing that comes from my head or heart, he thought. From now on I listen only to God. And with this vow, he set himself to the sloppy job of beheading the giant with halfhearted chops.
Once the head was severed, David hefted it up in his arms and, with great awkwardness, cradled it to his chest. It was almost as large as his entire upper torso. He positioned the face so that the eyes, still wide open, appeared to be looking up at him. It was in that moment, as he stared into Goliath’s eyes, that David was seized with a divine thought. A divine comedic thought. Placing his fingers on the dead giant’s lips, he moved them up and down.
“Hello,” David said, lowering his voice several octaves. “I am Goliath’s head. Has anyone seen my hands for I wish to scratch my ass. For that matter, has anyone seen my ass?”
A joker must joke, David surmised. He looked up into the crowd and out of the stunned silence, he thought he heard a giggle. David looked back down at Goliath’s head and went on with the show.
As promised, King Saul rewarded David for his bravery. He was to give David his daughter Michal’s hand in marriage.
“But first,” said the king, “you must bring me the foreskins of one hundred Philistines.”
“What does a person need with one hundred foreskins?” asked David.
“Let me worry about that,” answered the king.
“Because it’s not the most romantic way to start a marriage.”
The truth was that Saul had devised the impossible foreskin quest as a way of killing off the brave young Jew. After his performance with Goliath, David had become very popular among the people and Saul was jealous.
Just the same, David, now a full-on war machine fueled by the Lord, killed two hundred Philistines and brought King Saul their foreskins. Saul received the dripping, stinking bag with his trademark smirk; but this time it was turned downward, as though he were being held upside down by the ankles.
More than he wanted Michal’s hand in marriage, more than he wanted riches or fame, David yearned to make people laugh.
“Here’s a joke,” he announced. “A Canaanite, a Hittite, and an Amorite walk into a temple. The Canaanite, being a Canaanite, possesses a polluted soul and being in a house of worship causes him to fall to the ground and die. The Hittite, being a Hittite and having a proclivity for baring false witness, accuses the Amorite of murder. The Amorite thus slays the Hittite. He then says a prayer for both men. Years later the Amorite does not remember either of the men’s names.”
For David, laughter was the one big holy—that which awakened the soul to the divine and the true and in this case, what was divine and true was that Amorites had poor memories and Canaanites were the scum of the Earth. To be reminded of this was to slap one’s knee with good cheer.
After his whole performance with Goliath, David was no longer content to be funny through violence. There was nothing wrong with a little physical comedy— the whole little guy–big guy routine was a classic, but it was also pretty unreliable. David now wanted to be funny with words and, when the situation presented itself, ventriloquism.
The only problem was that now that he was a military leader, he just never seemed to have the right opportunities for making mirth.
On his wedding night David told Michal a joke.
“Here’s a joke: You know how old people always say how life goes by too fast? Well, people also say that when you are waiting in line, it is as though time hardly moves at all. So why don’t we make all the old people who are ready to die stand in line? Life will then pass so slowly that they might have the illusion of staving off death indefinitely.”
Michal did not respond. Not with words or with laughter. Several minutes later the newlyweds had dry, mechanical sex.
When David told Michal jokes she never laughed. The best he ever got was an “Oh, that’s cute.” Or a “You’re so weird.”
Daughter of the king or not, thought David, the girl has no sense of humor.
In short order David became unsatisfied and so in the evenings he played harp and tried to keep his eye on the prize. As the years wore on, he took for himself several more wives, none of whom “got” him or his jokes; but one made a delicious horehound-spiced camel cheese, and another played a shofar that sobered him down to his toes and so for David, that had to be enough.
David was becoming the most popular and successful military chief in the king’s army. He was clear-headed, confident, and able—so able, in fact, that as Saul started to get old he chose David, rather than his own son, to succeed him.
The passing of the crown was not a simple business, though. Saul could not help constantly trying to murder his would-be successor.
“The way your dad is always trying to kill me,” David complained to Michal, “it’s so undermining.”
It was only after trying to assassinate David for thirty days running—once by restringing his harp with poison vines—that Saul finally gave up and gave in to the whole we-love-David vibe. After all, if the Lord was with him, the Lord was with him, and Saul, like everyone else, needed to keep on the Lord’s good side. It just made good business sense.
David proved a good king, and what made him so good was how little being the king meant to him. Even being a good king wasn’t as important to David as being a funny king. And so he tried to make jokes to the people, and the people laughed, but they laughed out of fear. He could tell. They laughed the way people had laughed at Goliath’s jock jokes.
David dreamed of one day going out disguised among the citizenry to tell jokes and see if he was really funny, rather than just scary. It would be a pleasant way to pass the afternoon. He could find out how people felt about him in general.
“What do you think of King David?” he would ask an old man.
“He sure ain’t no King Saul,” the old man might answer.
But he never seemed to have the time. There was so much to do as a ruler and most of it was very unfunny business.
That’s what happens, he thought. Gone are the carefree days of slaying giants. As you get older you strip away the things you don’t have time for, and then you are left only with the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.
And in this way, the place called King David lived its life until one day, while meditating on his palace balcony, David’s heart made itself known to him. He saw a woman bathing on the roof of her house. She was naked, except for her sandals, which somehow only made her seem more naked. She was the nakedest, most beautiful person David had ever seen.
He said to himself, “One day I shall marry this naked sandaled woman who stirs my heart to life.” He had heard the story of how his father had met his mother, and that was how it had all started: His father had made a simple pledge to himself. It was from there that the courtship proceeded. David had always wanted to say this thing to himself, too, but he never had. When he was ten or so he used to look at girls while saying it under his breath for practice, just for fun, but then his life went by and he never got the chance to say it for real. And now here he was, saying it for real. The only thing was, the woman on the roof was already married to a soldier in David’s army, a Hittite named Uriah. David had missed his chance. Everything was too late.
The woman’s name was Bathsheba and after seeing her bathing, a strange thing happened. King David went to bed fully upraised, and when he woke up he was still upraised. He was to stay this way, crisp and yearning, for one hundred days.
At the end of the first day he thought, What a story to tell our grandchildren one day, but by the end of the week, he thought, Schmuck, what’s the matter with you? No matter what he did—long cold showers, ball leeches, imagining his mother-in-law shucking corn in the nude—his staff would not crumble.
“This attraction is supernatural,” he lied to himself, “and sanctioned by God.”
During those one hundred days, David kept mostly to himself, trying to figure it all out. The more he thought about it, the more he could not stop thinking about it. Was she aware how sexy wearing only sandals made her appear? Did it make her feel sexy? His thoughts fed off each other, each thought provoking more thoughts, and each thought making his hardee-har-har hardier. It was endless. He thought and thought and did so while masturbating with great vigor.
It’s okay to self-serve, he thought. It keeps me from hurting anyone. It allows one to build a perfect universe made of Bathsheba, and then enter it. Wishing cannot make something so, but wishing while fisting the pharoh comes close.
When David had to receive company he remained seated behind a table. If he had to go somewhere, he did so while walking hunched over, carrying a harp. No one asked any questions, which was one of the good things about being the king.
He didn’t know what it was about her. Maybe it was the way she bent over, her legs pressed so tightly together. Maybe it was the look on her face, the tip of her tongue stuck out, touching her nose in concentration, like washing her leg was a very intellectual undertaking. Maybe it was the way her mouth always seemed just about to blossom into a smile—in response to some joke, yet untold, that David would one day tell her. He was able to remember her face so well, too. There were some people who he’d meet over and over and was still never sure if he knew them or not. But her face was burned into him. When he closed his eyes there it was, like the sun.
In his mind he wore her sandals like a mask. He was convinced that smelling Bathsheba’s footwear would reveal some great, unimaginable truth—a filthy, sexy truth that would change his life forever, but in spite of his furious determination to manually self-know, there were still things about her that he could not know. Just the same, his desire to know drove him to obsession.
At night, he thought about Bathsheba’s sandals. He thought about her feet, too. The idea that Bathsheba had something as mundane—as common—as toes was enough to make him swoon. From the roof he would watch her do laundry and while looking at her face, he would think about her pinkie toes—so human, so tiny and vulnerable.
At night he dreamed her baby toe had come to life. Freed of the body, all by itself, it came to him. He had willed it to visit through the force of his desire.
In the dream, the baby toe’s name is Goldberg. Goldberg crawls in under the door as David is lying in bed.
“Am I catching you at a bad time?” Goldberg asks.
David recognizes him immediately.
“For Bathsheba’s baby toe it is never a bad time.”
He bends down onto the floor and scoops the little tot up in his hands. He squeezes and rubs him. He brings Goldberg up to his nose. He inhales. Goldberg giggles. He brings him closer, to the outside rim of his left nostril. Goldberg smells like the ocean. David pushes him into his nostril like a cork.
Suddenly King David was awake, asphyxiating.
He caught his breath and rolled over. He kissed a wife’s shoulder, trying to regain his footing in the world.
In the dream he possessed a love for the toe that was stronger than any he had ever felt for anyone. If offered, he would give up his kingdom to lick the morning dew from under its nail. Unfortunately, no one was making such an offer.
The day he appeared on her roof, he got there before she did. When she saw him, she did not drop her laundry. She just did this thing with her head where she turned it to the side and laughed. Like she was embarrassed. Like she had just been thinking about him. Like the whole world knew what she was thinking. It was a weird thing she did with her head. It was spasmodic, like them just being in the same world together, breathing the same air, was too sexy not to get the shakes.
“Are you here for Uriah?” she asked.
He knew Uriah would not be there. Uriah was away in battle. “It isn’t for Uriah that I come,” he said. Standing there talking with Bathsheba, David realized he had not been so exhilarated since his confrontation with Goliath.
He was about to say “Here’s a joke,” for he had planned out in advance many jokes to tell—to get things started—but things started without jokes, and they started very suddenly.
As they did it on the roof she kept her sandals on. He watched it, the left one, as he moved back and forth within her, and as he was just about to end it all, he grabbed her sandaled foot to his face and drew in a sharp breath. He could smell nothing.
Again, his heart had fooled him. But it was too late: David had made her pregnant.
What choice do I have now? thought David.
Uriah had to be removed from the picture. This David knew.
When David took Bathsheba for his wife, God was displeased. The prophet Nathan had told him, “Heads up: this thing you did with Bathsheba—God hates it. A lot.” It was the way David had gone about it—sending her husband Uriah to the front, to certain death, just to get him out of the way.
In the first weeks of his illegitimate baby’s life, David spent all of his day praying. He prayed so hard he felt like his head was going to explode. He prayed like he was a little kid pounding on a door screaming his head off. Then the pounding turned to scratching and the screaming turned to hyperventilating, and still he prayed, folded on the floor, his chin pressed into his chest. When the baby died he stopped praying. He didn’t even say kaddish, and when those around him asked why, David asked back: What is the point? He had prayed to change God’s mind, but now it was over and no amount of prayer could change that.
In David’s grief, he became backward-looking, spending a lot of time caught up in the old days, thinking about girls he had made laugh and giants he had slain. Bathsheba’s father had been there the day David had killed Goliath and he would tell Bathsheba about it. As a young girl, she never got tired of hearing the story. David and Bathsheba spent a lot of time talking about it, too. But after the baby died, the tone of these conversations changed.
“When your father told the story,” David asked, “did you think it was funny, a little?”
“Funny?” she asked. “Funny how?”
“Like a little guy bonking a big guy?”
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said.
“Maybe it was how he told it.”
Bathsheba ground her teeth and David continued.
“Did your father say that David slew the giant, or did he say that David and God slew the giant or did he just say that the giant was slain?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
David began to ask another question, but Bathsheba told him to stop dwelling. David responded by telling her that all of human history is dwelling and that without dwelling there is nothing and as David spoke, Bathsheba ground her teeth.
David had hoped that Bathsheba, unlike his other wives, might one day come to find him funny, but because of the rocky start to their marriage, there was never any room for jokes. He still hoped that one day, from out of their grief, there might grow a certain comedy and on some days, David believed that routines were already starting to take shape—routines that would eventually help them to speak through their sadness. One of these nascent routines was the drinking routine. In it, David and Bathsheba eat olives. While he chews each one carefully, she pops them by the fistful. David says she shouldn’t do that because she could choke and die and Bathsheba asks, So what? David says, Oh, nothing. Then there is the sound of chewing. Then she laughs. Then he laughs. Then she stops laughing. David continues to laugh. David continues still. And so on, until she tells him to shut up. David says, Why would you say something like that? He is not sure if he is breaking character. She says nothing. David says, Eh? And again, she tells the King of Israel to shut his royal hole. He says that he doesn’t like that, that someone might overhear her.
Eventually these routines would blossom into something quite hilarious.
David began to keep mostly to himself, spending a lot of time with his war souvenirs.
He still kept Goliath’s head on a shelf.
“You should think about getting rid of that thing,” said Bathsheba.
“It’s not the kind of thing you can get rid of,” said David.
“It stinks. I can’t even clean near it without gagging.”
Bathsheba came to know David very well and she used this knowledge to push his buttons.
“When you killed Goliath,” Bathsheba asked, “how much do you think God was helping? Did he use a pinkie or did he use a fist?”
“Hard to say. I really had my eye on his forehead. Right on the spot I hit. What the world saw as a single shot was really the product of years of great training.”
“I heard that Goliath in his prime was a whole other story,” she said. “By the time you guys tangoed he was fat from too much drink and obsessed with entertaining his troops with repartee.”
David nodded his head, as though considering what she was saying. In his mind, though, he was pitching her off a roof.
“I heard he really wasn’t that bad,” Bathsheba went on. “That he was mostly talk. That he did a lot of work with lame Philistine children.”
It was all about timing. If someone called you a name, said that you were a bad king, cared more about committing adultery than ruling, you could pause a beat. Pause two beats or even three. Pause an entire evening of beats. Even two days of beats. Then, after all your beats, show up at their door with an army and brain them with a stick. That is comedy, your face a grimace of satisfaction. But with your wife, all you have is what is in your mind.
“Because you know,” Bathsheba continued, breaking his train of thought, “you’re not just a little schmo when you have God on your side. When you stop and think about it, it was poor God-less Goliath who was at a disadvantage, no?”
Her body draped over your shoulders, slowly being lifted over your head, her sandaled feet kicking, and then over, off the roof and into sweet oblivion. These were not funny thoughts and David did not want to be thinking them, but there they were, as real and powerful as his memories, or his belief in God.
David did not know what to say.
“Here’s a joke,” he said, his mind a complete blank.
David began to see that ruling the nation was affecting his chops negatively, so he summoned his royal coterie before him so that he could have someone with whom to kibitz.
“God wants to make a universe,” he began. “He then makes a universe and the universe is everything, right? Everything that there can be. So where is God? Inside his own creation like a carpenter who climbs into the coffin he has made?”
Titters. A half swallow.
David began to see that he would never be able to be both a joke maker and a king. The problem was, he thought, that you are only given one life.
At first he thought a sidekick might help, some minor dignitary—an adviser with a humorous stutter— someone to play off of, but whenever he thought he had found someone, they would say the wrong thing, mess with his timing—start to showboat—and he’d end up having to beat them across the back with his scepter.
David was too out of touch with the concerns of the citizenry. He lived such a privileged and isolated existence that the things he thought were funny were actually mean and bizarre—or funny only to other kings, and he was at war with almost all of them, so that wasn’t good for much.
Pacing back and forth across the palace floor, he would ask, “What’s up with those guys you pay to wipe your ass?”
Besides, people just wanted to respect and fear a king, so he gave up telling jokes in favor of talking about jokes. David felt that his greatest comedic contributions might be made as a theoretician—a man who could impart his ideas about comedy to the next generation of jesters, clowns, merrymakers, tipplers, and want-wits. He also wanted to spend as much time away from his wives as possible.
“In the caveman days,” he would instruct, “there was much pain and violence. Man had to develop a way to make himself feel marginally better. ‘How can we release pleasure particles to better handle the nightmare of existence?’ the caveman wondered. He found that by breaking up his howls of agony, turning them into a series of ejaculatory barks—to make the ‘ahhh!’ into ‘ah-hah-ah-hah’—it eased the pain. You see, each laugh is composed of an ‘ah’ and a ‘hah.’ By going ‘ah’ and ‘hah’ they were able to lift the unrelenting pain of their dark, bestial days into something more recreational. It is only through the godly gift of humor that man endures the horror. What other faculty allows you to turn pain into triumph? Tears of sadness into tears of laughing too hard?”
One of King David’s greatest joys was having the melancholic brought before his throne. He would cure them with the gift of comedy. David would make jokes—but only for the purpose of academic example and instruction. That way, if there were no laughs, it did not punish his soul. Education became his safety net.
“Laughter is a medicine that tastes like candy,” he would start by saying. The melancholic would then erupt into hysterical, panic-stricken laughter. A guard would then poke him in the ribs. “Idiot!” the guard would whisper. “Wait for the jokes.”
“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, Jesse, 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?”