Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

3. The Face That Launched a Thousand Jokes

3 The Face That Launched a Thousand Jokes Laura Kipnis A friend with a penchant for gnomic remarks once said, “Ugliness is the last frontier for socialism.” He could just as easily have said “for democracy.” I can’t now recall what prompted it (discussing some unfortunate mutual acquaintance ?), but this doomy pronouncement has perturbed me ever since, or at least whenever my gaze falls upon some particularly unsightly visage and involuntarily the ruthless machinery of aesthetic judgment springs into motion. If ugliness registers with such visceral immediacy despite knowing everything there is to know about the historical and cultural variability of such standards, despite full comprehension of the damage these judgments wreak, maybe the friend is right and there will always be limits to the reformability of the human psyche, with some inequities remaining forever intractable (no doubt even after the revolution ). What’s worse is that we who suffer by such judgments perform them so relentlessly nonetheless: when the guilty “U” word trips into consciousness, aren’t we less the willing emissaries of capricious cultural norms than their hapless vessels—harsh judge one moment, harshly judged ourselves the next? Perhaps not coincidentally, it was this same friend—self-described as no beauty, either—who gleefully related the most hilariously scurrilous Linda Tripp joke I heard during a banner year for scurrilous jokes, so many of them aimed, 55 fistlike, at Linda Tripp’s face. After all, we don’t choose our preoccupations. Or our faces. It was a hard face to ignore and a harder one to forget. For reasons that were clearly too subterranean to be ever sufficiently explained, Tripp (spurred on by the dubious Lucianne Goldberg) propelled herself headlong onto the national stage; the nation took one look and winced. It will be news to no one if I say that consensus was quickly reached in the unraveling saga of Monicagate that the descriptive “ugly” could be applied with impunity to this self-fashioned one-woman surveillance unit, and that it would be no-holds-barred in the cruel humor department . (“What’s the cure for an overdose of Viagra? Linda Tripp.”) Or perhaps more precisely, consensus was tacitly reached that the nation’s collective disgust with Tripp’s tenuous grasp of the concept of friendship would be expressed through the idiom of negative appearance assessments. An “I Hate Linda Tripp” Web page listed over forty separate looks jokes. True, many had the musty odor of Don Rickles playing the Desert Sands a couple of decades ago, like they’d been in comedy cold storage waiting for the right occasion to see daylight again. But other Tripp-inspired Web pages had the antic novelty that the revenge imperative often fuels. One reported the FBI’s confirmation that Tripp and Dallas Cowboy Troy Aikman are actually one and the same person, going on to describe Tripp’s news conference confirming the dark secret, at which she sobs, “I’m not a freak.” Then there were the talk-show monologues (Leno: “Linda Tripp told Monica Lewinsky in those taped conversations that she hasn’t had sex with anyone in seven years. That means that at some point in 1991 some guy got drunker than any man in history”); Saturday Night Live skits (a simpering Tripp-impersonation by the not exactly diminutive John Goodman); editorial cartoons in major newspapers (Tripp describing her television aspirations to pal Lucianne: “I could be . . . like this beautiful helpless older woman who is caught between these powerful politicians.” Lucianne : “Exactly! Attracting the soccer mom audience!”); and of course, all those droll water-cooler comedians for whom the name alone could usually garner a fast laugh, or at least a lot of eye rolling. After all, jokes are the royal road to the deepest recesses of a culture’s psyche: an end run around politesse and false rectitude, the psyche’s clever tactic for avoiding the censorship edicts emanating from both superego and society. Predictably , though, this often pretty hilarious Tripp-bashing produced no shortage of feminist consternation, with the more squeamish members of our sisterhood ritually flagellating themselves for guilty pleasure at the latest Trippism. The friend I regard as a feminist conscience confessed in deeply shame-ridden tones that LAURA KIPNIS 56 when she saw her first photo of Linda, she thought for sure it was a transvestite. Or as she put it, “That hair!” Yes, the hair...