A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

over the covers, and he says, what you done? so she says your teddy
bear spit at me so I bit its head off.
Johnnie Fuckerfaster, named that by his mom, was under the house
with a girl, and his mom didn’t know he was there with a girl. And
she calls, Johnnie, come here. And Johnnie says, I guess I’ll have to
go, even though they were in the middle of it, and she yells again,
Johnnie Fuckerfaster, and so he yells back: I’m fucking her as fast as
I can.
In another typical joke, the mother orders her daughter not to climb lamp posts, because the boys
only want to see the colour of her knickers. Next time the girl admits to climbing a lamp post, her
mother says: ‘I thought I told you not to do that.’ ‘It’s all right - I took my knickers off first.’
After a few pages, these jokes begin to produce an oddly claustrophobic effect; their outlook is so
uniformly negative. The adult is bothered by their illogicality; the father has an orgasm in his sleep
- which is just possible - but he then sleeps on when his daughter bites off the end of his penis. The
mother has named her son Johnnie Fuckerfaster, but he does not recognise his own name when she
calls him, and thinks she is giving him an order. It requires a major suspension of disbelief - and all
for the sake of a mildly ‘naughty’ conclusion:
A mother’s boy got married, and when he got in bed with his wife he
didn’t know what to do. So she said: Get on with it, and he said: Get on
with what? So she said: Well, do something dirty. So he shit the bed.
It is ‘naughty’ for a girl to let a boy see her knickers. Sex is dirty, like shitting the bed; conversely,
shitting the bed is funny because it is also forbidden. There are long, elaborate stories in which
children are misinformed about the meaning of words: father’s penis is a train, mother’s vagina is a
tunnel: (Hey Sis, come and look; Dad’s train’s got stuck in Mom’s tunnel...) Fuck means to go and
get washed, shit means food, bastard means vicar: (Hello bastard, mom’s just getting fucked before
she serves the shit.) Again, the whole point of the rigmarole is that the child should innocently
undermine the authority of his parents or the vicar or his schoolteacher. Other jokes make their
effect simply by being nauseating; a tramp eats a dead cat, or drinks the contents of a spittoon.
This, like shitting the bed, is ‘dirty’ and must therefore be funny. And the ‘dirty’ is forbidden, and
must be funny too.
These jokes enable us to reconstruct the peculiar mental world of the child, which most of us have
so conveniently forgotten: the world seen from a worm’s eye view. Adults have their own strange
ideas about what is ‘fun’ - religion, politics and sport. But every child knows better. They know
that ‘fun’ is doing those exciting things you are not supposed to do, all those things that adults call
‘naughty’. This is why most children have a streak of cruelty that makes them enjoy pulling wings
off flies or throwing lighted matches at the cat; here, on a small scale, they can become an
Alexander the Great, free to give way to the normally forbidden desire to cause pain. The child’s
world is almost entirely defined by the authority of adults, and by their secret desire to flout that
authority.
But have adults really outgrown these attitudes? A comedian only has to make a disparaging
remark about a well-known politician to bring loud laughter, even applause. It need not be a
particularly funny remark, provided it has a touch of malice - a sense of giving the two-finger salute
to authority. Humorists who make a virtue of anarchism - the Marx Brothers, Lennie Bruce, Mort