Cultivating the Sarcastic in You

How are ya'll doing out there? I'm still settling into life here in SoCal, where the weather is (for a change) a bit gray today. I was thinking about the line in the Billy Joel song "My Life" where he talks about the old friend who sold his house and moved to the West Coast, where "He gives them a stand-up routine in L.A." There are several reasons why, though in L.A., I don't think this would work for me, and the main one is that people don't seem to get my jokes. I had a few examples of this just this week at my temp job and one that happened not long before I left Kentucky, and that's enough to make me think that comedy is not my line, no matter how funny I might think I am. Strange, people used to laugh at my jokes, and I still think they're funny--but of course there's no accounting for taste.

I was in a Louisville coffeehouse in April looking at baked goods when the sight of scones triggered a memory of a vegan item I purchased one night in a Portland, Oregon, coffeehouse. I was recounting the story, which I thought was pretty humorous, to the barista, and he looked at me so blankly that I was waiting for the prop cane to come from stage left and pull me away from the counter. When I protested to the counterman that I thought it was funny, he told me he thought I was talking about the Portland area of Louisville. Oh, okay. I didn't realize there was a Portland in Louisville, but that explains the lack of response. Let's be generous and put that one down to a failure of specificity, but still.

I was looking at a list the other day that had what was apparently a typo, making it appear that the person's first name was "Brain." I found that hilarious even without anything else happening, but then I thought how much funnier it would be if the person's last name were "Trust." I said this to someone else and got almost an identical lack of response. Gosh, what are you waiting for, the punch line? Gracious, that was the punch line. Granted, it's not funny "ha-ha," but I would have thought it rated at least a smile. I didn't even get a smidgen of one. Cultural barrier? Too sarcastic?

It's true, my sense of sarcasm has sharpened over the last few years. A lot of people who knew me before that may have suspected me of an occasional incipient tendency toward sarcasm but probably didn't consider it a prominent feature of my repertoire, and it's true that I'm normally mild-mannered. But you have to change with the times if you're not going to become irrelevant, and dang it, if you don't feel sarcasm stealing upon you now and then, I don't know what's wrong with you. Some people are born sarcastic, some people achieve sarcasm, and some have sarcasm thrust upon 'em and find they have a little talent for it after all. It could happen to you.

The third example I'm going to tell you about didn't really start out as a joke but was just me telling a story. I'd been talking to someone on the phone and could hear someone in the background, rather inexpertly, playing "Für Elise" on the piano. It was kind of pleasant to hear music in the background, that was all, so when I got off the phone, I mentioned it to people sitting nearby. I said, "Someone was playing "Für Elise" on the piano in the background of that call, and it sounded like a child practicing his lesson." It was just sort of a nice thing that happened, a pleasant interlude that I thought I'd share, but once again--dead silence. Granted, it wasn't even a joke, but still--what is this, a funeral? Couldn't someone at least smile at the thought of a child on a Sunday afternoon in the summertime struggling through his piano practice? Now here's where I did get a little sarcastic, though it was more because I felt the need to explain myself than anything else. I leaned over to the person sitting next to me and said, a little louder than I needed to, "That's Beethoven." (No response.)

It's just a good thing I have no ambitions in that direction, is all I'm saying. Now if you were to say, "Well, Mary, why don't you tell us a funny story about how your cell phone charger disappeared from a zipped bag in your room sometime in between July 4 and July 7," I would probably look at you blankly, but see, there's a good reason for that: it's not funny. You might counter that a good comedian can find humor in almost anything, and I would tell you that I consider that an unsettled existential question, whether or not there's humor to be found in everything that happens. What I do find funny is that a cell phone charger that was obviously not mine showed up in a very odd place in my room later on, as if someone were trying to convince me that, oh, silly you with your police report, you just misplaced the goofy thing. Now I could make something out of that material, but once again, we're verging into the realm of sarcasm, and it seems that almost no one(?) appreciates a talent for it these days--so no Comedy Store for me. That's OK, I can always fall back on my Myth Studies degree. Plenty of others have.

Mayhem, Murder, and Magicians

Yesterday I finished Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a novel about dueling English magicians in the Napoleonic era. It took me more than two weeks to read it, which tells you something about the length of it (782 pages). It's wonderful when an engrossing story is also a lengthy one so that you can stick with it for a while . . . if your budget doesn't allow for vacations, isn't a good book a great alternative? Wasn't it Emily Dickinson who said, "There is no Frigate like a Book, to take us Lands away"? (Yes, it was--I just looked it up.)

If you saw the movie The Prestige (which was also a book), you have a little of the flavor of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though Clarke's book is comical, and The Prestige, in my memory of the film, is rather grim. Strange & Norrell is recommended by my local library for readers who enjoyed The Night Circus, which is how I came across it. Some reviewers have said it combines high fantasy with the drawing room humor of Jane Austen. Certainly the social contretemps endured by Clarke's characters seem more in keeping with the brightness of Austen's world than with the deadly earnestness of The Prestige, despite all the magic and references to Faerie.

Personally, though, I can't imagine any of Austen's people holding much truck with the spell-strewn, whimsical characters of Clarke's book, though I see what reviewers mean about the society humor. The book is funny as well as fantastical, and the humor is a nice balance to the dark twists the story takes. I don't think the book would be as effective without the sniping social climbers, jealous rivals, mystified government ministers, and long-suffering servants who inhabit its pages and counteract some of the eeriness. There are many good fantasy writers, but the ability to seamlessly combine wildly imaginative plotting, alternate worlds, wit, history, and satire is rare, I think.

I would compare the tone of the book to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, with its sense of menace and otherworldly mayhem, crossed with the quirkiness and dark humor of Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests, with some Neil Gaiman-style chaos, a la American Gods, thrown in. This description is not to detract at all from the author's originality and sheer imaginative brilliance, but it does give you an idea of the territory the novel occupies.

The genius of the story lies in the characterization of the magicians as just another species of "gentlemen scientists," men of standing who happen to have chosen the art of magic for their profession instead of law, the military, or the Church. They approach the most arcane and fantastical of tasks--walking through mirrors, bringing someone back from the dead, moving a city across the ocean to affect the course of a war--with the matter-of-factness of scholars; they study, hoard books, publish, curry favor, seek publicity, become arrogant, and jockey for position. Historical figures, including George III, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Byron, mingle easily with the book's characters, exhibiting none of the artificiality of "cameo" appearances. They are just a few more well-drawn personages in a large, sprawling, and lively cast.

In one of my favorite scenes, Strange, the bolder and more adventurous of the contending magicians, has feuded with Lord Byron, whom he encounters while traveling in Switzerland. The two men share the same publisher, who receives letters from both of them, each complaining about the other, on the same day. The publisher, Mr. Murray, decides that although it's too bad his clients don't jibe, it really isn't surprising, "since both men were famous for quarrelling: Strange with Norrell, and Byron with practically everybody." In a footnote, Clarke has Byron use Strange as the inspiration for the magician in his poem Manfred.

I don't know if Ms. Clarke intends ever to revisit these characters; the story's conclusion seems to leave the possibility open, since the end, though satisfying, doesn't tie all the loose threads up neatly. While this may have been simply a nod to complexity and a refusal to go with a predictable ending, it makes for an easy segue into a sequel if it ever comes to that. I wouldn't count on it, but I wouldn't rule it out either. The trickster spirit of the novel, of taking characters and readers places they didn't expect to go, is evident even in the closing sentences. I turned pages anxiously to see how it would turn out but was obstinately sad when it was all over.