What Is Funny?

Joke (Voted Funniest in the United States, 2002)

A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.” The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

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One wonders many things about this man, including why he has bothered to wear a golf cap. Is he a regular cap wearer? How do we distinguish his golf cap from his tennis cap, for example? This reminds us of the famous psychological experiment in which several golf hats were put on the heads of non golfers and all agreed that they still looked stupid. But when the golf caps were put on the heads of naked women, people just became confused.

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A central issue in the joke is the funeral. For a man to golf at his wife’s funeral is not traditional.  But if we take the funeral to be symbolic of the death of capitalism, and the wife is equated with Anglo-Christian ideals, and the golf course is in fact a symbol for post-colonial racial identity politics, then we start to wonder why people think this joke is funny? It seems quite complicated for a silly joke.  Perhaps we are a lot smarter than we give ourselves credit for.

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Another point of interest is that the funeral procession is described as long. Why long?  Because the joke is pointing out the ways in which a long life is good, but a long funeral procession needlessly blocks traffic.  Thus, the moral of the joke can be seen as “Do unto others, but not always, particularly during rush hour.”

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As for the dead spouse, we can conclude with some confidence that she loved her husband very much, but was probably cheating on him with his friend, who from all subtext here, seems like one of those smart-asses you often find sleeping with other peoples’ wives.

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Though we should not be quick to jump to conclusions about the gender of the spouse. The man is gendered. The spouse is not. This sly bit of inter-textual sexuality in the joke is not lost on a clever reader, who sees this as a clear WINK at the hyper-heterosexual golf culture and its insistence that hitting little white balls with long shafts is not at least as homoerotic as  saying the word “subtext” ten times fast.

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There is here a question of numbers. The first sentence says “A man and a friend,” but in the next sentence it says “one of the guys.”  Was the friend one of the guys or are there other guys? If so, why aren’t they friends with the man? Later it seems it is one of the guys that stops his swing, but this is also the man as determined by the end of the joke.  The joke seems to be wrestling with the distinction between what is a guy and what is a man and how many of them are there and does there need to be? At what point does a man become a guy and is there any surgical procedure that can reverse this? Would it make a difference if we knew there was just one guy in the joke and rather than golfing, he was trying to teach himself to play the tuba? Would we like him less?  And what, then, would we make of the golf cap?

Tags: what is funny

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