Laughter in the Confessional

Americaa Review Beer continuedfrom previous page At the same time, though, the timing ofHecht's poems too often interferes with one's appreciation of her efforts. That is to say, she slips into a metrically lax style of composition that jars beside the relentless precision ofherjokes. Here are a few lines from "Family Life" (adying man asks for a slice ofcoffee cake; his son informs him solemnly, "Ma says it's for after"): Not exactly entertaining guests, but attempting to use them in a way they are intended to be used: to check them for reality, for in reality this is how her life is going. ... In reality, this is pretty slack writing, and examples like it recur with surprising frequency. Hecht's decision to open and punctuate the collection with a set of clotted and rhythmically haphazard sonnets only draws attention to her work's technical shortcomings. Hecht clearly has a capacious and sensitive mind, and the pleasures ofher volume lies primarily in the webs she spins from her minimal materials. But one has the sense that both formally and tonally, she is at times too quickly satisfied. Q. Why is there something rather than nothing ? A. Even if there was nothing, you'd still be complaining. (Sidney Morgenbesser) Joking is serious business, as Hecht realizes. Wittgenstein again: "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely ofjokes." (Though maybe not by Wittgenstein.) For her part, Hecht closes the book with a postscript, a disquisition on humor. Unlike some joke-besotted philosophers, she confines her postscript to· a few pages and keeps it relatively scientific. In the wake of Anne Carson, the gesture is not unfamiliar. We might still ask to what degree it offers illumination both to its subject and to the preceding collection. In short, the latter more than the former. The pith of the essay is located almost entirely in the final couple of pages. Up until that point, we get a breezy and occasionally diverting history of thinking on humor. Hecht appears to subscribe to the common view whereby the assorted thoughts of Plato, Schopenhauer, and Bergson on humor are better digested as isolated nuggets of intellectuality than confronted as positions against which one might develop a theory ofone's own. Hecht's writing rarely fails to engage, though I'd rather she didn't inform us that thejokes she makes up herself are funny. But Detailfrom cover her brand of intellectual history lite can't help but condescend occasionally to the benighted figures who bothered to articulate systematic reasons for their admittedly odd and occasionally undemocratic perspectives. In the end, as I understand it, Hecht finds the powerofjokes in the sudden shift ofperspectives that their punchlines enact. Along with this suddenness comes a kind of emotional parsimony; the ghostly characters inhabiting these minute scenarios exist solely to serve as foils. A more direct connection with power seems both apparent and significant for Hecht's purposes, though she doesn't mention it. That is, the primary power relationship in joke telling is not between us and the characters, but between audience and teller, a power relationship marked by the irresistible force of humor's suddenness. There's a reason, after all, that comedians, a generally brutal and imperfectly socialized lot, dream of "killing." Hecht's impulse to slow the joke down, to find resources in it for empathy and collective thought, is fundamentally an impulse to renounce the edgy distance between the one who tells thejoke and the one who hears. Wit in poetry has historically been a dark business. Jokes themselves, as Hecht begins to intimate heading toward the exit, trade in a kind of redemptive disappointment. Failure and frustration are the climate in which jokes thrive. But in their display of ingenuity and thorough transparency to the understanding , jokes provide in essence a therapy for the omnipotent fantasies that breed that frustration. No one is a failure who has friends, supposedly, and humor teaches us that anyone who's a failure has plenty of company. "The real world fails our expectations but frequently has pleasures greater than those we expected," Hecht sums up. Despite its own disappointments, Hecht's essay closes...