Setting: The Hotel Arosa, in German Switzerland. Easter Skiing Season. It is dinner time. My family waits for me in the little anteroom just before the dining room. I am in a water closet on the first floor hall, having pulled up the plunger on the commode. This machine is infernal to an American because instead of having an activating handle on the front of the tank, it has a plastic disc on the top. The device seems to invite a downward pressing palm motion to work the toilet, but, actually, one must lift it. I have been frequently confused between pressing and pulling the disc top.Now, after once again pushing or pressing it falsely, I over-correct myself and pull it up sharply. I do so too violently, however, and break it off. To my consternation the disc top flies right out of my hand and caroms off one wall and the ceiling above. It bounces down directly into the toilet bowl, whose seat is still up. Before my startled eyes it disappears in the whorl of flushed water eddying out of the bowl.
In the ensuing silence that beats on my eardrums, I find myself staring incredulously at my handiwork….But who is to know whodunnit? Either more cowardly than embarrassed, or more audacious than either, I quickly leave the scene of the crime. The concatenation of events still boggles my mind: my wrong initial movement, my impatient recovery and over-reaction, my fascination and paralysis at the quick course of subsequent events, demonstrating the immutable old law of gravitation or the unearthly new principle of magnetism between plastic and descending water.
Now I am out in the hall once again, hurrying down its length to the short flight of stairs that will lead to the dining anteroom. Suddenly a uniformed man rounds from the top of that staircase, turning toward me on the landing. He is the hotel porter, who barely speaks English.
“Guten Abend,” he says, giving me a short two-finger salute from his cap.
As he passes me by, I acknowledge him in turn. I do not answer in German, in which I am competent at the amenities, but answer him directly in English. What I say, or sing out, is, “Nighty-night!”
After I descend the short flight of stairs, I stand at the doorway unable to open the door to the anteroom, convulsed with laughter. I am laughing at the wrong joke, but it does not matter. For now, all I am thinking of is his puzzlement as he proceeds down the hallway. Had he heard right? Or was what he heard an unfamiliar Amercanism, similar to but still exotically different from the formal English he can remember? The mental picture of his dilemma is wonderfully funny to me—perhaps hysterically so, for it effectively prevents me from seeing myself as the true subject of the anecdote.
A moment later on the other side of the door, where I sputter out the story to my family, I take the real measure of what has happened. My children in particular see the essential point—and richly appreciate it. Fleeing the highly connotative bathroom or W.C. where I had committed a wrong act, I was accosted by an official; I proceeded not so much to reduce him to boyhood, in using a quick infantilism, as to regress myself to instant childishness before authority. I had, in effect, sent myself to bed.
The many ingredients of humor involved in this anecdote are clear enough. The first is the general deflation of human importance or superiority, there in the threshold where a human being first comes to a sense of self-control and supremacy over his functions. Man is also defeated by machine. His higher mind fails him, the merely mechanical task of pushing or pulling having confused his faculties one more time. Then in extra complication—which I sometimes think is the quintessence of humor—his attempt to reassert himself is absolutely thwarted. Now he manifests, as it were, too much knowledge or strength; he breaks off the unholy device. At the snap of destruction he not only realizes his mistake, but, with the disc handle totally out of his grasp, he stands powerless before events. He is now a mere despairing witness to trajectory. There is no reason, next, why that handle should choose to go to the unerring target it found, and not to the side or the front, falling safely to the floor; but it homes in on the bowl, which was left fallibly open. Thus, the complete rout of human grace, to say nothing of control, is utter and decisive. One feels his ascendency as adult, traveler, solid burgher, and paying guest diminished to zero. The sudden explosion of comedy works toward the fullest annihilation. It not only brings us the intimate self-knowledge that we are as nothing but it chooses time and place with a quickness and unpredictability that are its most telling strokes.
And then out in the hall, secretly reduced if not destroyed within his own mind, the subject vainly tries to recover self-esteem as he walks down the plushly carpeted hallway of his alpine hotel to rejoin his family as patriarch and citizen of the world. But semi-officialdom arrives and appears as an opportune, welcome substitute for degradation. Synaptic junctures of the brain now work infinitely more swiftly than any hand movement might have availed before. And I gratefully cut the porter down to the smallest size—my own, then—in order to recover at all. In its nether-regions, humor is reflexively self-protective.
But later, with sufficiently elapsed time and perspective, there comes an expansionary dimension to comedy. I can replace the porter’s quandary, which was an objective enough source of humor, with a more exact view of my self-reduction. In our capacity to recognize the essential, yet deeper joke and, if possible, to enjoy it, comes the most explosive and grateful freedom of all—freedom from self. We may be liberated not only from a series of self-importances, but from all roles entirely—and even from the process of life-growth, an imposture which may be all at once reversed...and then transcended.
There, where a German consciousness of status required full-dress dinner attire even at a ski resort, the very place and atmosphere were ideal, setting a climate for the detonation of both antithetical and self-deflative humor. Economic and familial stereotypes were exploded away. Laughter functioned, initially, as protection from the truth but, ultimately, as embracement of it—and as personal liberation, which accounted for the greater exhilaration.
That all plumbing was still operating the next day, or had been repaired, goes without saying, not merely as a commentary on the efficient Swiss, but as the conclusive note of comedy. Nothing is that serious in the end—although, in a way, the most significant liberations and transcendencies might have occurred. All’s well that ends well in the labyrinthine and remorseless trivia of our lives.
In the ensuing silence that beats on my eardrums, I find myself staring incredulously at my handiwork….But who is to know whodunnit? Either more cowardly than embarrassed, or more audacious than either, I quickly leave the scene of the crime. The concatenation of events still boggles my mind: my wrong initial movement, my impatient recovery and over-reaction, my fascination and paralysis at the quick course of subsequent events, demonstrating the immutable old law of gravitation or the unearthly new principle of magnetism between plastic and descending water.
Now I am out in the hall once again, hurrying down its length to the short flight of stairs that will lead to the dining anteroom. Suddenly a uniformed man rounds from the top of that staircase, turning toward me on the landing. He is the hotel porter, who barely speaks English.
“Guten Abend,” he says, giving me a short two-finger salute from his cap.
As he passes me by, I acknowledge him in turn. I do not answer in German, in which I am competent at the amenities, but answer him directly in English. What I say, or sing out, is, “Nighty-night!”
After I descend the short flight of stairs, I stand at the doorway unable to open the door to the anteroom, convulsed with laughter. I am laughing at the wrong joke, but it does not matter. For now, all I am thinking of is his puzzlement as he proceeds down the hallway. Had he heard right? Or was what he heard an unfamiliar Amercanism, similar to but still exotically different from the formal English he can remember? The mental picture of his dilemma is wonderfully funny to me—perhaps hysterically so, for it effectively prevents me from seeing myself as the true subject of the anecdote.
A moment later on the other side of the door, where I sputter out the story to my family, I take the real measure of what has happened. My children in particular see the essential point—and richly appreciate it. Fleeing the highly connotative bathroom or W.C. where I had committed a wrong act, I was accosted by an official; I proceeded not so much to reduce him to boyhood, in using a quick infantilism, as to regress myself to instant childishness before authority. I had, in effect, sent myself to bed.
The many ingredients of humor involved in this anecdote are clear enough. The first is the general deflation of human importance or superiority, there in the threshold where a human being first comes to a sense of self-control and supremacy over his functions. Man is also defeated by machine. His higher mind fails him, the merely mechanical task of pushing or pulling having confused his faculties one more time. Then in extra complication—which I sometimes think is the quintessence of humor—his attempt to reassert himself is absolutely thwarted. Now he manifests, as it were, too much knowledge or strength; he breaks off the unholy device. At the snap of destruction he not only realizes his mistake, but, with the disc handle totally out of his grasp, he stands powerless before events. He is now a mere despairing witness to trajectory. There is no reason, next, why that handle should choose to go to the unerring target it found, and not to the side or the front, falling safely to the floor; but it homes in on the bowl, which was left fallibly open. Thus, the complete rout of human grace, to say nothing of control, is utter and decisive. One feels his ascendency as adult, traveler, solid burgher, and paying guest diminished to zero. The sudden explosion of comedy works toward the fullest annihilation. It not only brings us the intimate self-knowledge that we are as nothing but it chooses time and place with a quickness and unpredictability that are its most telling strokes.
And then out in the hall, secretly reduced if not destroyed within his own mind, the subject vainly tries to recover self-esteem as he walks down the plushly carpeted hallway of his alpine hotel to rejoin his family as patriarch and citizen of the world. But semi-officialdom arrives and appears as an opportune, welcome substitute for degradation. Synaptic junctures of the brain now work infinitely more swiftly than any hand movement might have availed before. And I gratefully cut the porter down to the smallest size—my own, then—in order to recover at all. In its nether-regions, humor is reflexively self-protective.
But later, with sufficiently elapsed time and perspective, there comes an expansionary dimension to comedy. I can replace the porter’s quandary, which was an objective enough source of humor, with a more exact view of my self-reduction. In our capacity to recognize the essential, yet deeper joke and, if possible, to enjoy it, comes the most explosive and grateful freedom of all—freedom from self. We may be liberated not only from a series of self-importances, but from all roles entirely—and even from the process of life-growth, an imposture which may be all at once reversed...and then transcended.
There, where a German consciousness of status required full-dress dinner attire even at a ski resort, the very place and atmosphere were ideal, setting a climate for the detonation of both antithetical and self-deflative humor. Economic and familial stereotypes were exploded away. Laughter functioned, initially, as protection from the truth but, ultimately, as embracement of it—and as personal liberation, which accounted for the greater exhilaration.
That all plumbing was still operating the next day, or had been repaired, goes without saying, not merely as a commentary on the efficient Swiss, but as the conclusive note of comedy. Nothing is that serious in the end—although, in a way, the most significant liberations and transcendencies might have occurred. All’s well that ends well in the labyrinthine and remorseless trivia of our lives.
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