Zizek's Jokes (2 page)

This is how fantasmatic identification works: no one, not even God himself, is directly what he is; everybody needs an external, decentered point of identification.

THERE ARE THREE REASONS we can be sure that Jesus Christ came from a Jewish family: (1) He took over the profession of his father; (2) his mother thought her son was a god; (3) he couldn't imagine his parents had sexual relations.

HOW CAN WE BE SURE that Judas didn't really betray Jesus Christ? Whatever one thinks about the Jews, they know the value of the things they sell, so no Jew would have sold a god for mere 30 silver talents!

IN THE MID-1930S, a debate is raging in the Politburo of the Bolshevik : will there be money in communism or not? The Leftist Trotskytes claim there will be no money since money is only needed in societies with private ownership, while the Rightist partisans of Bukharin claim that of course there will be money in communism since every complex society needs money to regulate the exchange or products. When, finally, Comrade Stalin intervenes, he rejects both the Leftist and the Rightist deviations, claiming that the truth is a higher dialectical synthesis of the opposites. When other Politburo members ask him how this synthesis will look, Stalin calmly answers: “There will be money and there will not be money. Some will have money and others will not have it.”

THE CRUCIAL SHIFT in the “negation of negation” is thus an unexpected change of the very terrain—this change undermines the position of the subject, involving him in the action in a new and much more direct way. Here is a nice case of such a change: at a local Communist Party meeting in Moscow, Petrov is delivering an interminable report. When he notices an obviously bored man in the first row, he asks him: “Hey, you, do you know who this Bulianoff I was just talking about is?” “No idea who he is,” answers the man, and Petrov snaps back: “You see, if you were to come to the party meetings more often and listen more carefully, you would have known who Bulianoff is!” The man snaps back: “But do you, Petrov, know who Andreyev is?” Petrov replies: “No, I don't know any Andreyev.” The man calmly concludes: “If you were to attend the party meeting less often and listen more carefully to what is going on in your home, you would have known that Andreyev is the guy who is fucking your wife while you are delivering your boring speeches!”

A SIMILAR UNEXPECTED TURN toward vulgarity is enacted in the joke from the mid-1990s celebrating Bill Clinton's seductive capacity: Clinton and the pope die on the same day; however, owing to the confusion in the divine administration, Clinton ends up in heaven and the pope in hell. After a couple of days, the mistake is noticed and the two are ordered to exchange places; they briefly meet in front of the elevator that connects heaven and hell. Upon seeing Clinton on his way from heaven, the pope asks him: “Tell me, how is the Virgin Mary? I cannot wait to meet her!” Clinton replies with a smile: “Sorry, but she is no longer a virgin.”

THE MEANING OF A SCENE can change entirely with the shift in the subjective point, as in a classic Soviet joke in which Brezhnev dies and is taken to Hell; however, since he was a great leader, he is given the privilege to be taken on a tour and select his room there. The guide opens a door and Brezhnev sees Khruschev sitting on a sofa, passionately kissing and fondling Marilyn Monroe in his lap; he joyously exclaims: “I wouldn't mind being in this room!” The guide snaps back: “Don't be too eager, comrade! This is not the room in hell for Khruschev, but for Marilyn Monroe!”

A JOKE FROM THE EARLY 1960S nicely renders the paradox of the presupposed belief. After Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his visit to space, he was received by Nikita Khruschev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and told him confidentially: “You know, comrade, that up there in the sky, I saw heaven with God and angels—Christianity is right!” Khruschev whispers back to him: “I know, I know, but keep quiet, don't tell this to anyone!” Next week, Gagarin visited the Vatican and was received by the pope, to whom he confides: “You know, holy father, I was up there in the sky and I saw there is no God or angels …” “I know, I know,” interrupts the pope, “but keep quiet, don't tell this to anyone!”

ONE CAN EVEN DEVELOP into a Hegelian triad the lines from Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Its first negation would have been a radical reversal of the subjective position, as in the ghetto-rapper-version: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest motherfucker in the whole valley!” Then comes the negation of negation that changes the entire field by way of “deconstructing” the opposition of Good and Evil: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I know that Good and Evil are just metaphysical binary opposites!”

THE LOGIC OF THE HEGELIAN TRIAD can be perfectly rendered by the three versions of the relationship between sex and migraines. We begin with the classic scene: a man wants sex with his wife, and she replies: “Sorry, darling, I have a terrible migraine, I can't do it now!” This starting position is then negated/inverted with the rise of feminist liberation—it is the wife who now demands sex and the poor tired man who replies: “Sorry, darling, I have a terrible migraine …” In the concluding moment of the negation of negation that again inverts the entire logic, this time making the argument against into an argument for, the wife claims: “Darling, I have a terrible migraine, so let's have some sex to refresh me!” And one can even imagine a rather depressive moment of radical negativity between the second and the third versions: the husband and the wife both have migraines and agree to just have a quiet cup of tea.

AFTER ORPHEUS TURNS AROUND to cast a glance at Euridice and thus loses her, the Divinity consoles him—true, he has lost her as a flesh-and-blood person, but from now on, he will be able to discern her beautiful features everywhere, in the stars in the sky, in the glistening of the morning dew. Orpheus is quick to accept the narcissistic profit of this reversal: he becomes enraptured with the poetic glorification of Euridice that lies ahead of him; to put it succinctly, he no longer loves HER, what he loves is the vision of HIMSELF displaying his love for her.

This, of course, throws a new comic light on the eternal question of why Orpheus looked back and thus screwed things up. What we encounter here is simply the link between the death-drive and creative sublimation: Orpheus's backward gaze is a perverse act
stricto sensu;
he loses Euridice intentionally in order to regain her as the object of sublime poetic inspiration. (This idea was developed by Klaus Theweleit.) But should one not go even a step further? What if Euridice herself, aware of the impasse of her beloved Orpheus, intentionally provoked his turning around? What if her reasoning was something like: “I know he loves me; but he is potentially a great poet, this is his fate, and he cannot fulfill that promise by being happily married to me—so the only ethical thing for me to do is to sacrifice myself, to provoke him into turning around and losing me, so that he will be able to become the great poet he deserves to be”—and then she starts gently coughing or something similar to attract his attention.

TWO JEWISH FRIENDS pass a Catholic church on which a large poster addresses non-Catholics: “Come to us, accept Catholicism, and you instantly get $30,000 in cash!” While walking away, the two friends become engaged in a debate about whether the offer is meant seriously. A week later, the two friends meet again in front of the same church, and one of them confides to the other: “I still wonder if that offer is serious.” The other replies condescendingly: “Ah you Jews, all you think about is money!”

WHEN THE TURKISH COMMUNIST WRITER Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies evoked the proverb “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,” to which Istrati tersely replied: “All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where's this omelet of yours?”

We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, “OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where's the omelet you are promising us?”

IN ONE OF THE ANTI-SOVIET JOKES popular after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a fairy queen approaches a Czech and tells him that she is ready to grant him three wishes; the Czech immediately puts forward the first wish: “The Chinese army should occupy my country for a month and then withdraw!” After the fairy queen asks him for the other two wishes, he says: “The same once more! The Chinese should occupy us again and again!” When the bewildered queen asks him why he chose this weird wish, the Czech answers with a malicious grin: “Because each time the Chinese would occupy us, they would have to pass through the Soviet Union on their way here and back!”

The same often holds for “feminine masochism,” and especially for du Maurier stories with their heroines enjoying their painful passions: they follow the logic of displacement; that is, to interpret them properly, one should focus the attention on the third (male) subject who is targeted when a woman is repeatedly “occupied by the Chinese army.”

THERE ARE GOOD REASONS to accept that the Christian topic of immaculate conception is grounded in the mistranslation of the Hebrew
alma
(which simply means “young woman”) as “virgin”: “It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew” (Harris,
The End of Faith
). There are also good reasons to accept that the seventy “virgins” awaiting martyrs in the Muslim paradise resulted from a mistranslation: in using the word
hur
, transliterated as “houris,” the Koran relied here on the early Christian texts that used the Aramaic
hur
, meaning “white raisins,” a delicacy. Let us take a young martyr on a suicide mission because he took literally his leader's promise: “The gates of Paradise have opened for you. There are beautiful black-eyed virgins waiting for you on the banks of rivers of honey.” Imagine the look on his face “when, finding himself in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as a fistful of raisins.”

In a classic Bosnian joke, a guy visits his best friend and finds him playing tennis in a backyard court—Agassi, Sampras, and other world-class players are there waiting for a game with him. Surprised, the guy asks his friend: “But you were never much of a tennis player! How did you manage to improve your game so fast?” The friend answers: “You see that pond behind my house? There is a magic golden fish in it; if you tell her a wish, she immediately realizes it!” The friend goes to the pond, sees the fish, tells her that he wants his closet full of money, and runs home to check on it. When he approaches his closet, he sees honey dripping out from it everywhere. Furious, he runs back to his friend and tells him: “But I wanted money, not honey!” The friend calmly replies: “Oh, I forgot to tell you—the fish has impaired hearing and sometimes misunderstands the wish. Can't you see how bored I am running around and playing this stupid game? Do you think that I really asked for an outstanding tennis game?” Is there not a Kafkaesque twist to this story, exactly homologous to that of the poor Muslim warrior being offered a fistful of raisins?

THERE IS A NICELY VULGAR contemporary Bosnian joke about Beethoven's popular piano piece “Für Elise” (“For Elisa”), making fun of the “enlightened” West European teachers sent to civilize “primitive” Bosnians. In a high school class on music history, a female teacher says that they will not deal with Beethoven in a traditional way, learning the facts, but more creatively: every pupil will mention an idea or image and then name a Beethoven piece that fits it. First, a shy girl says: “A beautiful green meadow in front of a forest, with a deer drinking water from a stream … Pastoral Symphony!” A boy follows her: “Revolutionary war, heroism, freedom … Eroica!” Finally, a Bosnian boy says: “A big, thick, strong, erect cock.” “What is this for?,” asks the annoyed teacher. “For Elisa!”

The boy's remark obeys the logic of the phallic signifier “suturing” the series, not because it explicitly mentions the organ, but because it concludes the series by way of shift from metaphor to metonymy: while the first two pupils were providing metaphoric meaning (the Pastoral Symphony signifies/evokes a meadow with a stream, etc.), the erect cock mentioned by the Bosnian boy doesn't mean or evoke Elisa, it is to be used by her to satisfy her sexually. (The additional obscene implication, of course, is that the teacher herself is sexually starved, in need of a good lay that will stop her bothering her pupils with such stupid tasks.)

A TOUCH OF COMIC REVERSAL pertains to Café Photo in São Paolo: publicized as “entertainment with a special touch,” it is—so I was told—a meeting place for high-class prostitutes with their prospective clients. Although this fact is very well known by the public, the information is not officially published on their website—the official statement is that “it is a place to meet the best company for your evening.” Things really proceed there with a special touch: prostitutes themselves—mostly students of humanities—choose their customers. Men (prospective clients) enter, take a seat at a table, buy a drink, and wait, while being observed by women. If a woman finds one of them acceptable, she seats herself at his table, lets him buy her a drink, and starts a conversation on some intellectual topic, usually a theme on cultural life, sometimes even art theory. If she finds the man bright and attractive enough, she asks him if he would like to go to bed with her and tells him her price. This is prostitution with a feminist twist, if there ever was one—however, as is often the case, the feminist twist is paid for by a class limitation: both prostitutes and clients come from the upper or at least upper-middle class.