Shame and Pride

BUDDY HACKETT AND THE COMEDY OF ACCEPTANCE

Here’s a problem for you: You are a wise, all-powerful, gentle, good, and kind public health official charged with the responsibility of solving a broad range of social, cultural, and psychological problems for the citizens of this era. You want people to see and accept, rather than hide, defend, or attack; you want a population comfortable with self-knowledge. You decide that too many people suffer from emotional discomfort related to the general area of shame. You wish to decrease the tendency of people to be upset about the shape, odor, and the very nature of their bodies, to be embarrassed about issues related to the toilet, around matters of gender identity, sexual prowess, and sexual intimacy, and to be unduly sensitive over the small cluster of words relating to all of these functions and attributes. How do you approach this problem?

Should you call a White House Conference on Shame? Produce a list of books and articles on shame to be distributed by the Superintendent of Documents? Convince one of the cable television systems to produce a documentary mini-series on the ubiquity of embarrassment? Hire an evangelist to start a quasi-religious movement based on the toxicity of shame? Schedule a World Conference on the Reduction of the Pain of Shame?

Nope. All you have to do is invent Buddy Hackett.

Wherever I go to lecture about shame I carry a videotape of one or another Buddy Hackett show. In the professional conferences where we therapists congregate to trade ideas, the very thought of presenting material by a professional comedian always raises a few scholarly eyebrows. Hackett, I am informed, is “so vulgar.” “Why does he always use such dirty language?”

I asked him about that once. “War is dirty,” he said. “Hunger is dirty. Those other things are just words. The real question is why people get so upset about certain words.”

Let me start from the beginning. I am going to ask you to join me in a study of a man considered one of the great comedic artists of our time. We tend to dismiss comedians, as if anything that makes us laugh is not worthy of interest. If you study shame you start to take comics very seriously. If love is the balm that heals the pain of individuals, comedy is solace, consolation, and relief for entire tribes.

For us as individuals, each moment of emotional pain is caused by a specific interaction. In order to help one person, the empathic healer must understand something about the particular sequence of events that preceded the painful affective reaction. To relieve the pain of an entire culture, one must be deeply aware of the ways these singular moments of pain are grouped by that society into affect management scripts. It is only because shame is managed by the techniques I have described as the compass of shame, by scripts stored within the four major libraries described in the preceding chapters, that the comedian can affect so many people with a single joke.

Right now, at the time I am writing this book, Buddy Hackett is “king of the hill,” top banana, the kind of performer who fills night clubs at record fees. He is everywhere—appearing on late night interview programs, in cameo roles for major films, as the voice of a cartoon character in the Disney film The Little Mermaid, even as Santa Claus in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. A loyal following trades anecdotes about his antics with all the energy of collectors on the trail of precious objects. Often reviled because of the “obscene” language with which he peppers his shows, this performer inspires deep love in a legion of admirers spanning a wide range of ages.

“Look at these,” he said to me one evening. A packet of fan mail had been awaiting his arrival at the resort where we had met to discuss the relation between comedy and shame. Opening one at random, I learned that a recently divorced young lawyer had recovered her emotional balance by the simple expedient of watching nightly the very same Hackett videotape that I first used in my lectures. “There is so much love in you,” she wrote. “Your warmth and your willingness to be openly loving stand in stark contrast to the harsh world around us.” Yet always in the audience of my own lectures and courses is one or another detractor, who approaches me with gritted teeth and the face of contempt to say, “How dare you turn Hackett into a god! That man is disgusting and has nothing to teach us.”

There is no question about the fact that the polite and affectionate Buddy Hackett makes jokes about matters that are usually forbidden in “polite company.” He flies in face of social convention by discussing a wide range of subjects that are considered taboo in our culture. Although each individual joke and routine stems from material he has thought about and worked over for years, Hackett’s comedy depends on direct, personal interaction with that fraction of the audience which has chosen to sit in the first few rows of the theater. His is less the work of an actor reading lines prepared in the safety of a private space than it is the craft of an improvisational jazz artist who takes the risk of generating ideas in public.

In a recent night club show I saw him first compliment a 75-year-old woman on her considerable beauty and then speak the mind of the audience by saying, “Look at the jugs on that broad! Ain’t she got a great body?” Later that evening he discussed the universal male problem of unexpected erections, a host of embarrassing situations related to normal bowel and bladder function, the discomfort anybody might feel during a barium enema, and the alterations in sexual function following prostate surgery. He found a couple of women who were unable to use any “four-letter words” and made them recognize the innocence of such language.

Videotapes of Hackett performances focus a great deal of attention on the audience. Nobody looks angry, nobody looks disgusted, nobody looks distressed. Most people seem to exhibit three affects. Easily seen is the oscillation between rapt fascination and vivid displays of embarrassment, both punctuated by sustained bursts of hilarity. Nobody seems uncomfortable—they look for all the world like people having a good time. Why they are there and what they get out of being there are the twin subjects of this chapter.

Even though my own personal affection for the man and his work is a matter of record, it really isn’t important whether or not you and I think Hackett is funny, whether we think his work is artful or tasteless, whether we see him as vulgar or profound. Of the greatest importance for our study of shame and pride is the fact that millions of people go out of their way to watch his performances on television, pay to see his movies, and wait on line to attend his night club performances. It is his success that we must explain—the affection he inspires in a wide and still-growing audience. I am, of course, suggesting that the central theme in Hackett’s work is an awareness of the pain inherent in shame—especially the shame associated with the avoidance pole of the compass of shame—and the degree of relief from this pain offered by comedy. First, however, I must define comedy in some way that conforms to the understanding of affect presented so far.

THE NATURE AND ART OF COMEDY

Pleasant or unpleasant, most of the affect we encounter is the more-or-less-unexpected accompaniment of life—affect amplifying whatever else is happening. Normally, we do not attend school in order to experience affect; we do not go to work for the sake of affect. Even though our hunger may be made more urgent because affect told us so, we eat to satisfy the call of a drive. Sometimes our actions, thoughts, or experiences trigger one or another of the six negative affects, sometimes we are startled briefly, and often we meet up with the positive affects of interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. The affect is important, the affect produces urgency, the affect operates in all the ways we have discussed so far. Notwithstanding the significance of affect, always it is triggered because something else is happening. The script formed by an event, its triggered affect, and our response are what we recall as our emotional memory of that event.

Yet we come to learn that, just as food makes us feel better when we are hungry, sometimes it can make us feel better even when our distress stems from other sources. Equally well can the thrill of excitement (or the rapt attention required by a puzzling situation or any experience of laughter) dissipate a bad mood that has been caused by situations completely unrelated to whatever triggered this new excitement. Sequences of experience that end with a positive affect, occurring naturally throughout life, can be induced intentionally in order to improve the mood of the moment.

Every culture offers or sanctions a wide range of activities designed for no purpose other than to produce the remediation of unpleasant affect. In our examination of the attack other pole of the compass of shame we recognized that the discomfort of shame and distress can be reduced or even dissipated by the induction of excitement or anger. Here we are interested in the relation between negative affect and laughter.

We have defined the affect enjoyment–joy as that which is triggered by any decrease in stimulus density; a slow decrease produces the mild experience of pleasure and a slight smile, while a sudden decrease fosters the release of the affect program as laughter. Literally anything that causes a rapid reduction in whatever is going on in the central nervous system will cause laughter! All of the theories for humor devised prior to Tomkins’s affect theory depend on the content of whatever preceded the laughter.* This one explains why we laugh at moments that seem, on the whole, distinctly unpleasant.

In a family album I found a photograph that brought to mind such an experience. Taken during World War II, it shows me as a toddler being tossed from one to another of my father’s younger brothers, all of them dressed in uniform. Instantly and powerfully I recalled the scene. I was terrified when Uncle Marty picked me up and tossed me high in the air. Yet, despite my terror, I remember the guffaw I let out when I landed safely in the arms of Uncle Arnold. Each subsequent throw and catch produced the same sequence of fear and relief, each moment of relief accompanied by a similar burst of laughter. I suspect that they read my laughter as a sign that this was an altogether enjoyable activity. Trust me: There was nothing funny in the situation, which I found terrifying and still remember with distaste.

Earlier, I called attention to the fact that we are likely to laugh during horror movies when there is any sudden decrease in the degree of terror being induced. (Why else do we laugh when the protagonist bravely opens a closet, expecting to find whoever has butchered her family, and encounters a bunny rabbit calmly munching on a carrot?) Real laughter will occur whenever the conditions of rapid stimulus decrease have been met.

Although the comedy of life presents a myriad of situations that we find funny, the comedic arts are characterized by the intentional simulation of such happenstance. Choreographers often describe a similar process through which they integrate into a dance some sequence of movements made by ordinary people. Comedians, who are among the most astute observers in our culture, can make us laugh about nearly anything—as long as they satisfy Tomkins’s criteria for the induction of enjoyment–joy. What they notice, what they find interesting and worthy of comedic exaggeration, is always dependent on their own personal way of seeing the world around them. As I mentioned in the opening section of this book, some are artists of shame, while others paint comedic pictures while working from a palette of fear, disgust, dissmell, anger, or distress.

Let us imagine, for the moment, that all artists were born with equal skill and technical virtuosity. (The modern camera can allow nearly anyone to take pictures that are sharply focused and properly exposed.) The range between the triviality and greatness of an artistic product is a function of the subject chosen and the importance to us of the scripts in which it is embedded. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa achieves its mystical quality by virtue of the meaning we attribute to it—the way it fits into our own lives, the complexity of the scripts involved and the density of the affect magnified within them. The great artist chooses to immerse him- or herself in scripts that have great commonality and carry the highest degree of magnification, invoking our reaction to the deeply personal aspects of the scenes picked for expression. And since artists, like all of us, vary tremendously across the spectra of intelligence, skill, wisdom, courage, and depth, their productions will affect us in relation to all those factors.

Comedic artists differ from their creative peers only in the medium of expression chosen, in the vehicle through which they choose to analyze and compare scripts. The “Little Tramp” of Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Gleason’s innocently narcissistic Ralph Cramden, Lucille Ball’s artfully “stupid” housewife, Woody Allen’s embarrassed adolescent, and Emmett Kelly’s sad clown all allowed us to laugh about issues and memories contained in scripts of the highest affective magnification. Only mediocre entertainment is judged by the number of laughs produced per unit of time; great comedy is appreciated at a far deeper level, even though it makes us laugh.

Minor art produces momentary pleasure because the scripts in which it is embedded have a minor place in our library. Great art brings pleasure while also fostering change in internal scripts that carry with them the deepest and most powerful levels of affect. Minor art soothes or nettles slightly; great art wrenches us in ways that alter central scripts. “Psychotherapists,” said my own great therapist and teacher, Bob Pottash, “are minor artists in the only field where creativity requires two people. Our canvas is the ephemeral thing called a ‘session’; if we are really lucky and really good at what we do, our partner will be changed by our work and not remember that we did anything at all. At best they may recall it as a vaguely positive experience.” As I have indicated, this chapter represents my efforts to call attention to the kind of art and therapy offered by Buddy Hackett.

COMEDIC SCRIPTS

We might characterize any study of human endeavor as some form of script analysis. The mechanics of script formation explain what we do in our day-by-day attempts to manage experience. Although Tomkins has described many specific types of scripts, so far we have focused on those developed to manage and control affective experience. There are many others, all of which involve various types of affective magnification, but which serve a wide range of additional purposes.

Among these are scripts through which we handle loss or gain, those by which we manage to recreate and maintain the ambience of our childhood home throughout our adult lives, some which foster the development of addiction, and others that might lead us to fight and even die for our beliefs. Most of those described in the previous section on the compass of shame are properly considered affect remediation scripts because they are constructed to modulate or somehow handle the experience of shame affect.†

Comedy may be understood as a separate library of affect remediation scripts in which the unit of analysis is the particular kind of script called the joke, the purpose of which is to create laughter. In most jokes, the action takes place purely in the mind. A practical joke is neither practical nor impractical, but a script through which an operator forces the subject to perform a series of actions that must cause enough embarrassment that we may laugh at that person’s expense. The term derives from praxis, the Greek word for action or doing.

Like all scripts, a successful joke must follow certain rules. In general, the operator begins by giving the audience the minimal amount of information necessary for the mental construction of a scene. Then the scene is manipulated in such a way that it is transformed into one with a different cluster of affects. Usually this is accomplished by exaggeration, which stretches our sense of the adequacy of fit of the initial script. The resultant shift causes a rapid decrease in stimulus density, which triggers laughter.

Incidentally, this helps explain one of the peculiar phenomena associated with shame and pride: As Annibale Pocaterra said in 1592, praise makes us uncomfortable because it is couched in the same language as ridicule. Anything that is exaggerated, including the data from which our self-image is derived, is capable of being used in a joke. Discomfort with praise is directly proportional to our propensity to shame; it is a measure of our expectation that someone might make a joke at our expense.

It is a tribute to the art of the comedian that it takes more words to explain a joke than to make one. The condensation, amplification, magnification, and associative range embodied in all script formation make it one of the great wonders of neocortical function.

A famous example of this process is Henny Youngman’s “shortest joke in the English language.” In it, the comedian addresses his audience and says, “Take my wife. Please.” The opening statement, which prepares us for the usual litany of marital complaints, sets the scene. (“Take my wife, for instance. You know how she goes shopping? She writes out a list of what’s needed in the house . . .”) The second statement, “Please,” indicates that the operator meant the verb “take” not in its sense of to apprehend mentally, to comprehend, but in the alternate meaning of seize, grip, catch, or remove.

By shifting his command from comprehend to remove, Youngman alters the scripts conjured initially from those of marital discord within a comfortable style of bonding to those which involve enough acrimony that marital dissolution may be considered. The very fact that we are listening to a professional comedian ensures that we are not meant to “take him seriously” and actually remove his wife. The rapidity with which we drop our investment in the initial group of scripts, with all the affective magnification they may carry for us as individuals, is a competent trigger for laughter. Most people, when told this joke for the first time, actually “do a double take” and laugh again a few seconds later as they consider and then drop the scripts involved in the fantasy of “wife removal.”

A similar process is involved in our reaction to the pun. Here the substitution of a word sounding like the one expected, but actually quite different from it, produces a rapid oscillation between the scripts invoked by each. Thus, in the example cited by Freud in his book on jokes, a well-known wit said that he had driven tête-à-bête with a friend. We expected the phrase tête-à-tête, which implies intimacy and all the sequences of positive affect associated with it. But what we hear is that the supposedly intimate other is little more than a bête, a dumb beast worthy only of contempt. The shift from one set of scripts to another produces enough alteration in stimulus density to trigger mild laughter—again followed by “second thoughts” related to the matter contained in the scripts invoked. Any mental content that is dropped quickly is likely to trigger laughter, notwithstanding its content or the content of what follows next.

Mild laughter is one thing, but what about the belly laugh, or the phenomenon called “roaring with laughter,” or laughing until the density of the affect itself is so great that tears come to our eyes? Our recognition of the innate mechanisms involved helps us understand that where we see affect of high density the preexisting situation must have been characterized by stimuli of great intensity and/or duration. The lysis of chronic and enduring distress, shame, terror, or anger produces joy far exceeding that triggered by the removal of mild and comparatively recent negative affect. Great comedians have the ability to conjure scenes that involve scripts with the highest degree of affective magnification, to gauge correctly the length of time we are allowed to react on the basis of those scripts, and to remove us from them at the greatest speed.

The trigger to release is called the punch line because, no matter how gracefully it is delivered, the audience experiences it as swift and sudden, like a blow leveled by a boxer. When comedians themselves speak about their peers, it is to their ability to read the degree of immersion in a script best suited a particular audience and to know when to administer the punch line that they pay most attention; this is called timing. The importance of exaggeration as a major tool of script manipulation may be determined by any conversation with one or more comedians. Every possible embellishment, extravagance, or elaboration is tested for its utility in a joke. This is why they are often accused of “never having a straight conversation” and one of the reasons they are (by most reports) “difficult” companions.

When a comedian links one joke after another in some sort of sequence, each building on the emotions of the one before, this is called a routine. Even though the individual jokes contained within a routine are all scripts, the sequence itself is a higher-order script because each joke magnifies the affects contained in its predecessors, thus evolving a central theme. Audiences are rarely able to remember individual jokes from a successful routine because the effect of the whole progression has been to evoke matters of such an intensely personal nature that the triggering stimulus is of relatively little importance.

Many comedians have demonstrated their ability to “make a joke about anything,” even to the point where they will ask the audience to choose the topic. We can be made to laugh about any subject that can be incorporated in an affect script, about anything that can be amplified by affect. Naturally, this is easiest with subjects that can be linked to themes containing high-density affect. The affect management techniques characterized as the compass of shame offer some of the most popular such vehicles in our culture.

Drawn from the withdrawal pole of the compass are jokes about our moments of weakness, stupidity, incompetence. The attack self pole may in itself actually be considered a form of joke script, for it houses a library of methods through which we get people to like us by reducing our own self-esteem under conscious control. It is the way we tell jokes about ourselves. From the avoidance pole come jokes about narcissism, about the ways all of us try to make ourselves look better by exaggerating some of our personal characteristics or accomplishments. And the litany of hate jokes and racial slurs—remarks and comments that define the speaker as superior to the one being reduced—all of these use the attack other pole as the source of their material. In each script library are themes of love and abandonment, of victory and defeat, of sex and hunger, of wealth and poverty—all viewed in terms of shame and pride.

Such jokes are staples in the larder of comedy. Any student of the art could fill entire books with examples of each. Every time we laugh at one we reinforce the script from which it is drawn. And since most people tell jokes in order to decrease their own tension, the presence of a constant comedic theme is a telling sign of internal concern. Comedians live inside out, showing publicly what the audience must keep most private.

It will be clear from the foregoing that the comedians whose work we prize most are those who have elected to live at the greatest risk, to work in the realms of the most intense negative affect. These artists are, as I have suggested, like solo improvisational jazz musicians, who prosper in direct proportion not just to their skill and creativity, but also to the depth of character and feeling conveyed in their music.

BUDDY HACKETT

In a way, I wish the reader could have been there in the hotel room where I interviewed him. I don’t know who was more nervous at the beginning—the entertainer who has worked rooms all over the world or the psychiatrist who spends his life interviewing people. Yet for Buddy, even though I had sent him a draft of the introduction to this book and some of my earlier work in the area, there still was the chance that I was going to be like so many other interviewers who were unable to focus on anything other than his use of “dirty words.”

There is that other problem, of course, one faced by anybody in our culture. I am a psychiatrist. Maybe I was going to tell him something terrible about himself that he didn’t want to know. Then, too, he said, even though he had a measured IQ of 148, impressive by anybody’s standards, he’d gone no further than high school. Well read, much more scholarly than anyone in his audience might guess, he suffered from the same anticipation of embarrassment that all of us experience when confronted by someone with special training.

Me? Nearly all the people I interview are relative strangers, about whom I have no preexisting emotions. I had known and loved Buddy’s work for perhaps 30 years. My head was full of ideas, memories, and feelings all triggered by the scenes evoked in his routines. And this was a world-famous entertainer! Surely he is used to meeting people far more important and intelligent than I! Nervously, each anticipating embarrassment at the hands of the other, we broke the ice by talking about ourselves, by telling those safe stories one has tested on others.

We talked about our children, about the rigors of travel, about our experiences of marriage. Once or twice we got into areas so deeply personal that he asked me to turn off the tape recorder. (There are some things to be entrusted to a friend but not to a tape cassette that might someday escape into the public domain.) But what had been scheduled for one hour stretched into many. My assessment of him as a deeply loving man of extraordinary intelligence had turned out to be accurate; his hope for me, too, was validated.

Haltingly, I started to talk about his work in terms of shame. It seemed, I said, that he liked to expose the fact that most people are afraid of exposure. Buddy recalled a lecture he had attended in Los Angeles some years ago, fact and exaggeration swirling together:

“Are we talking the Johari Window here? One of the great tools of psychiatry. Picture a window cut in four. It’s about you. A psychological autopsy, almost. The first window is what I know about you and what you know about you, me being the rest of the world. The second piece of the window is what I know about you that you don’t know about you. The third part of the window is what you know about you that I don’t know about you, and the fourth part of the window is what we both don’t know about you. The point of adjustment is when that last window gets very small. That’s Johari. I think he was a Japanese psychiatrist.”

We discussed the implications of this concept—that knowledge is better than ignorance. He remembered Johari as having stressed the importance of the compartment representing what is unknown to both parties. Nevertheless, the Hackett style of comedy seems to concentrate on those who believe that they hold secrets when the information really is evident to all. There are lots of people who act as if the third part of the window were under their own control. I told him, “You seem to work in the area where people are hiding things from themselves more than from others. You expose things that people don’t want to know about themselves. And you do it in such a way that, instead of producing terrible embarrassment, they realize you are a loving person and they laugh.”

He responded, “Let me change a little about what you just said. They know about it, they know those things about themselves. They don’t want to admit to another person that they know about these things and that they are indeed guilty in the performance thereof or in the recognition of it. So they suppress that a little bit, because ‘It’s bad enough I know it, they shouldn’t know it.’ And I’m saying to you, ‘Yeah, it’s bad enough that I know it and you know it and we all know it. But we got to stop feeling bad about it because that’s the way it is.’ If you’re going to talk about things that are undignified, and you understand the indignity of death . . . once you’ve got death, what the hell is everything else?”

I realized, all at once, that we were talking on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Not only was his own mortality a matter of concern, but his network of friends had been threatened by illness and reduced by death. He paused here, in an apparent digression about what happens to us after we die. He pointed out that we no longer have any control when we are dead and that much of our attention to death rituals is an attempt to control what we would be better off ignoring anyway because we’re gone. I tried to return him to my subject: “So death is a transition for which one cannot prepare. When you compare dying to the moderate revelation . . .”

He interrupted: “Of pissing in your pants—huh!—Nothing.” I continued: “But shame seems to be an emotion that terrifies people. You take an attractive woman from the audience and, in effect, you say to her, ‘I know you think about penises, I know you think about erections.’ Everybody knows that everybody thinks about such things, but you’re the only person who says them aloud. That’s astonishing. There’s people who copy you, but you started it. You take the real, the fundamental, the basic things about human nature, and you say them out loud. When did you start to do that?”

“When I was a little bitty boy. Well, I remember this. Why I did it I don’t know.” He frowns here, searching the memories of his boyhood in Brooklyn for the clue that might let him place this moment more precisely. “We moved from 56th Street to 54th Street, and I got there when I was ten, on 54th Street. In order for this to have happened, I had to have been under ten—and it might have been as young as seven or eight, or even six. I remember sitting with my back against the building, with four or five boys, on the ground, on 16th Avenue between 56th and 57th Street, sitting in a circle. And a woman comes by and says, ‘What are you boys doing?’ ‘We’re telling dirty jokes,’ said. And she gave us a big lecture. That was okay. I’d heard lots of lectures from grown-ups. But as she gave the lecture, she got more and more involved in her lecture, and angry.” He paused here, for this had been on his mind nearly all his life. “After a while, I realized that I could smell something from her. And I guess it was fear.

“I thought about that many times. And I know that that grown-up—I could then make the distinction that some grown-ups are only old and not grown up at all—there was something wrong with her, something terribly wrong with her. Almost 60 years ago that happened, and I have thought about it a great deal. What could be so bad in the kind of jokes little boys tell each other? What concerns little boys? Things like shitting, and pissing, and penises.”

There is an odor associated with terror, I commented. Some observers have called it caproic, named for the way goats smell. We tossed around our ideas about why she might have been so afraid of words relating to excretion or genitality. “Yeah, I can see that it has something to do with her own shame. But I didn’t know anything about that at the time. All I knew is that something was terribly wrong with her. To me, the true shame could come if you hurt somebody. The people who are amoral, they don’t feel that pain. If you could start early enough making people learn that. . . . My emotion at that moment was that I am very different. And the minute, the times in my life I have tried to hide that difference, and be like everybody else, at that point I was unhappy and I was dysfunctional.”

I pressed a little: “So at eight, nine, ten you already saw the difference between a fake person and a real person.” “But I didn’t know that, I couldn’t have said it like that right then.” “So you felt strange.” “Yeah, I was the outsider. Growing up in my family I always felt wrong.”

Anybody who has studied the lives and work of comedians knows a great deal about what he means here. The factors that go into the making of a major talent are as complex as those producing any other form of success or greatness. There is no simple explanation for something that has so many levels of causation. Yet if you read their autobiographies and study the case reports written about people in the joke business, it appears that most, if not all, grew up in homes characterized by high and relatively constant levels of negative affect. The future comedian learns early the value of anything that might reduce the general level of tension. For Buddy Hackett, this affective environment seems to have produced a sense of estrangement, which itself (as we discussed in a earlier chapter) is a profound shame experience. Awkwardly, I asked what he could tell me about this:

“When did you decide that the difference was so great; when did you start doing comedy; when did you start telling jokes?”

“When I was a little bitty boy. My uncle came to see me, and I was four. And he says, ‘I can’t shake hands until you take your gloves off.’ I said, ‘What gloves?’ My mother said, ‘He wants you to wash your hands.’ So I washed one hand because I was only going to shake hands with one hand. And everyone thought that was hilarious—and I thought it was practical. See, I didn’t do it to be funny. I knew my hands were going to get dirty again anyway, so I just took a cloth and wiped that hand off and shook his hand. I thought if he’s so idiotic that it means any difference to him. . . . I humored him. Years later, he came to see me at the Bradford Hotel in Boston and stole the towels and they put it on my bill. When my mother died, he went to the apartment, being her brother, brought a second-hand dealer, and sold everything. Huh! Heh, heh! The great . . . he’s the guy told me to keep my hands clean!”

We talked a bit about his family. His father, an upholsterer, was an unpredictable parent: at times loving and intimate; at other times distant; occasionally ill-tempered and perhaps violent. Here, indeed, was evidence of the affective climate I had expected, one that he had learned to ameliorate by inducing laughter.

If you are a professional psychotherapist, you know the dilemma facing me at this point. The door to further exploration was open. Yet were I to probe more deeply, I would risk injuring my host by setting up the illusion of a therapeutic relationship with an entertainer who must, for professional reasons, live as a nomad. Wurmser once defined tact as the ability to understand the other person’s nearness to shame. I know of few actions so tactless and self-serving as the induction of intimacy that cannot be sustained. Prostitutes don’t kiss. Interviewers must keep a respectful distance. I shifted back to the purpose for which I had requested this interview.

“So hypocrisy, and chicanery, these things are all around us.” “Yeah, but I don’t judge it.” “What you do is you just expose it, you demonstrate it, you show it.” Somewhat testily, he replied: “I don’t know what I do with it. You’re giving me credit for being a lot smarter than I am, or deeper than I am, or something than I am. This is as natural to me as some guys throwing a baseball harder than another guy.”

We talked a little bit about his use of personal disclosure. Anyone who has watched one of his shows knows about his marriage to Sherry, about his children, about his love of skiing. Two things happen when an audience is privileged to learn such intimate details of a performer’s life. His willingness to expose what normally is kept private or secret propels us into a state of mutuality, trust, and openness. We are less likely to worry about our own secrets with such a man—and that, of course, is the major thrust of his art.

But the cost is that millions of people come to believe that they have a real, truly personal relationship with him. On several occasions, when I have referred to Hackett’s work in my own lectures, men have sought me out afterwards to tell me how they knew him in grade school, in high school, from the ski slope. Each of them quoted some highly specific interaction. I collected all of these on one sheet of paper and read them aloud during this interview. Nearly all turned out to be innocent fabrications through which the authors had attempted to make more real their profound emotional connection to this professional entertainer.

An interesting analogue of this process may be seen in the public response to actors we watch in romantic scenes on film. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, in our culture one is embarrassed to be seen naked unless the viewing other is held either by fascination or within the bonds of real intimacy. We tend to have a “special” feeling of intimacy with people we have seen unclothed, especially when we identify with the romantic partner with whom we saw him or her involved. It is for this reason that most professional entertainers are forced to live in far more privacy than they might like. They become prisoners of their success, of the way the characters they play become involved in our personal scripts.

Often the successful comedian is almost terrified of the public unless held under his control the way he has them in the theater. People must be kept at a distance. He recounted this story: “I’m backstage at the Sahara Hotel years ago, in my dressing room, and my son is with me. A woman comes in and she says, ‘I’m Mrs. So-and-So from Des Moines, Iowa.’ So I says, ‘Hello.’ She says, ‘Well, you act like you don’t know who I am.’ ‘Well, I don’t know who you are.’ ‘Well, I’m the woman where your son has dinner every Wednesday.’ I said, ‘He does?’ ‘He goes to the university there.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a son in Des Moines, Iowa. This is my son, right here.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘that’s not your son.’ It’s bad enough some people think they know you when they don’t. Some guy in Iowa owes me a lot of money because he’s getting fed regularly!” The comedian who does so much to foster intimacy by reducing shame lives at constant risk of personal invasion.

Again, we talked about the work itself.

“Relief is built into the way I think. Maybe it’ll help if I tell you what I think humor is. There are two kinds of pain. Physical and psychological. Any time I do something that releases you from that pain, I create laughter. The laughter is a feeling of relief, of release and relief. When you go ha ha ha ha, whatever’s hurting you in your head or in your knee, you don’t feel either one of those things. And that’s the whole story of laughter. Release from pain. And that’s the whole story of what I do. What’s the difference what method I use if my feeling underneath is for you not to be in pain?”

“And now, to be skillful enough to use taboo things and still make the people not get pain from me, ’cause ‘I’m not supposed to hear this,’ or ‘I don’t want to hear this, I’ve been preached against what he’s saying here,’ and then say it, and they say, ‘Well, wait a minute, that wasn’t so bad.’ So I’m allowed to think it the way I’ve been thinking it, and it’s okay for it to slip in and out of my mind just as easy as I can think ‘no cream, no sugar.’ I go by the principle that two bodies can’t occupy the same space at the same time. A joke is not a dirty joke. It’s either a joke or it’s dirty. It’s either funny or dirty. Hunger is dirty. Hunger is a real terror.”

Although most of us tell jokes from time to time, some people seem able to do little else; the pursuit of humor, for them, is a constant preoccupation. As a psychiatrist I have worked in therapy with a number of minor comedians, both amateur and professional. The more one is tied to telling jokes or being witty as a way of life, the greater the inner reservoir of tension about the area of shame. The witty person, the one who is constantly telling jokes, is often more interested in the laugh than in the underlying subject. Other people tell jokes that hover around some consistent motif—in therapy these are as useful as dreams in searching for areas of unconscious conflict.

Two basic themes emerged from this therapeutic work: The comedic talent, like so many other special gifts, seems to exist as an independent mental ability, much like the capacity to compose music or to sketch; it is not derivative of emotional illness. But the decision to make comedy a way of life is impelled in direct proportion to the amount of magnification produced by shame or the degree to which shame interferes with life. This latter observation fits well with the large number of studies that demonstrate the role of “depression” in the life of a comedian; one wishes the authors of those books and papers had access to this new language for affect.

As I mentioned earlier, the greatness of an artist is measured by the complexity and importance of the scripts involved in the artistic product. Hackett has spent his life trying to find the essential comedic center of an idea. “First of all, abundant material is so scarce. Most comedians only touch the edge. When Henny Youngman does the one-liner, like his ‘small room jokes,’ he takes a good idea but drops it too quickly.” He pauses for a moment and starts on his friend’s material: “‘The room was so small, I closed the door, the knob got in bed with me.’ Then he goes on and says: ‘The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to change your mind. I kept taking aspirin ’cause the guy in the next room had a headache.’ Each one is a new joke.”

“What I’m saying is, take any one of those jokes . . . that if you say, ‘I closed the door, the knob got in bed with me,’ then take it from there: ‘I looked at the knob. In the middle was a lock with a hole. It said ‘Segal.’ said, ‘What could be bad, a Jewish knob. Even though we don’t know each other.’ Okay. ‘The knob felt cold. What the hell, I was married.’ See, I’m peeling the onion. Start again with the other one: ‘You had to go out in the hall to change your mind. Locked myself out, didn’t have the key, didn’t know which room it was because I already changed my mind.’”

It isn’t enough to tell a joke, he says. The important thing is to see how deep it can go. Perhaps the most famous story associated with Buddy Hackett took place 30 years ago while he was playing golf with three friends. Hackett hit a ball into the woods, went after it, and disappeared from view. After what seemed an unbearable amount of time, just as the others were beginning to worry whether something had happened to him, Buddy ran from the woods onto the fairway, stark naked, yelling at the top of his voice, “Help! Help! Locusts are upon us!”

I asked, “But what’s different about you that, in an era when everybody else was too embarrassed to go naked in public, you decided to step forward?” “Peeling the onion. Searching for the specific. The joke never ends. That’s a joke, standing there naked in the woods. But why should it end there? If you take one more thin onion skin off, you do something else with it. Suddenly you say, them guys should know that I’m standing here naked in the woods. What am I going to say? ‘Come on, you want to see me naked in the woods?’ ‘Come on, hit the ball, willya?’ But ‘Help, Help!!!’ and they come running.”

Hackett has published one book of doggerel verse, and another on golf. I wondered whether he had written any serious fiction. He explained, “When you write, you have to leave a lot of stuff out. What I write is about my own personal experience; some things might hurt somebody’s feelings, so I’d rather not write anything.” Clearly, he has no wish to produce embarrassment for other than comedic reasons or in situations out of his immediate control.

Comedy, which careens so often close to the edge of shame, and which in the hands of some is a powerful vehicle for humiliation, can become one of the most profound weapons for the reduction of the pain associated with embarrassment. All of us who spend our lives doing psychotherapy have watched with pleasure when a patient learns to laugh gently about some once-hidden subject, something that once caused searing pain. There is a laughter of love, a laughter that shows the sudden pleasure of self accompanying healthy new self-recognition. Anybody who seeks consciously to reduce the pain of others is a healer, a therapist.

We joked about this, the comedian and the psychiatrist. “We do the same kind of work,” I said. “I just work smaller rooms.” “Yeah,” he responded. “But if you do a bad session, only one patient knows about it. And he’s gonna come back anyway. If I work a room with a thousand people, and I’m no good that night, then maybe two or three hundred come the next night, and maybe the management doesn’t ask me back again. Every single night I am on the line. But yeah, I do therapy. Anyone who sits through 90 minutes of my show is going to walk out of here feeling better, and maybe a little less worried about the things I talk about.”

Buddy and I were sipping drinks, trading anecdotes about our own marriages, children, friends. We had long ago finished our formal interview, the tape recorder turned off and returned to its case. Just as we made ready to part, he whirled around and said, “Wait a minute. You turn that thing back on.” He spoke directly into it with great intensity, recording something he had always wanted to say, another dimension of the humor responsible for his devoted following.

“If I have any kind of credo or feeling, it’s this. I was a poor kid, and I liked to read. I bought, two or three cents, I think, for a used magazine, and there was a story there called the Hawk, or The Hawk’s Nest. There was a man called the Hawk, and he lived in an aerie, a hawk’s nest. I don’t remember the story. But the description of the Hawk was, ‘Nobody ever came into his life that didn’t leave a little richer and a little wiser.’

“And right then that was my thought of power—not conquering countries, not owning audiences, not having. . . . Imagine someone meets you and leaves a little richer and a little wiser. . . . And underneath every motivating thing I do, if you could leave me a little richer and a little wiser, then I own a little piece of you and I own a little piece of this and a little piece of that, and then, you could be anywhere on this earth and say, ‘Oh, that’s a friend of mine.’ ’Cause you know, they don’t even remember your name anymore, but you did something to make their life a little bit better. And that’s, I think, my basic feeling when I’m working. There’s no malice, ‘Hey look what I can get away with!’ Wrong. Pay attention to me. What I’m doing here is not to get away with anything. What I’m doing here is to say, ‘It’s all right, take my hand.’”

THE RAVAGES OF SHAME

It would surprise no one were I to mention that (whether or not you enjoy his work) people like Buddy Hackett are rare. The tendency to increase the toxicity of shame is far more common than the wish to reduce it. Everywhere we see evidence that the attack other style of reaction to shame is ubiquitous—less a defense than a skill, an essential component of normal adult emotional paraphernalia. Hackett’s sensitivity to the ravages of shame and the scripts he has devised to counter them are part of an intensely personal script of his own. Among the reasons he is both popular to most and equally disagreeable to others is that there are many people whose “life work” seems to be a matter more of the magnification of shame than its diminishment.

We live in a society dominated by issues of pride and shame, in which the have-nots suffer indignity at the hands of the haves and look always for someone weaker or lesser on whom they can turn the tables. Whereas in Chapter 26 I derived a logic for the attack other quadrant of the compass of shame, little attention was paid to those who live as recipients of such emotional attack. It is accurate but not sufficient to say that true adult competence requires that we be able to handle each of the negative affects, for there are degrees and intensities of shame that far exceed anything for which the human system seems to have evolved.

But even to consider this sort of cultural anthropology, this method of exploring our current civilization, presents another problem. We suffer the risk of reductionism, of assigning to one affect far too much significance. If we are to understand the real nature of shame, the emotion at all levels of intensity, we must first examine what happens when any affect is pushed beyond reasonable limits. If we are to consider what it is like to exist in an atmosphere contaminated by shame, in a family or a subculture characterized by the constant magnification of shame-related troubles, we must first learn about the outer reaches of affect itself.

*There is a centuries-long tradition of books attempting to explain humor on the basis of content. J. C. Gregory (1924) provides a representative example of this genre, linking it to physiological relief produced by either specific biological triggers or learned mechanisms.

†See Tomkins (1987b) for the most complete list of affect related scripts.