Zizek's Jokes Read online

  THERE IS A WONDERFULLY VULGAR JEWISH JOKE about a Polish-Jewish wife, tired after a hard day’s work; when her husband comes home, also tired, but horny, he tells her: “I cannot make love to you now, but I need a release—can you suck me and swallow my sperm? That would help me a lot!” The wife replies: “I am too tired to do that now, darling—why don’t you just masturbate into a glass, and I will drink it in the morning!”

  Does this wife—contrary to the cliché about the holistic-intuitive reasoning of women as opposed to the masculine rational analysis—not provide an example of the ruthless feminine use of Understanding, of its power to separate what naturally belongs together?6

  RECALL THE ITALIAN EXPRESSION se non è vero, è ben trovato— “even if it is not true, it is well conceived.” In this sense, anecdotes about famous persons, even when invented, often characterize the core of their personality more appropriately than the enumeration of their real qualities—here also, “truth has the structure of a fiction,” as Lacan put it. There is a wonderfully obscene Serbo-Croat version of this expression that perfectly renders the protopsychotic rejection of the symbolic fiction: se non è vero, jebem ti mater! “Jebem ti mater” (pronounced “yebem ti mater,” meaning “I’ll fuck your mother”) is one of the most popular vulgar insults; the joke, of course, relies on the perfect correspondence, with the same accents and number of syllables, between e ben trovato and jebem ti mater. The meaning thus changes into the explosion of rage in the incestuous direction, attacking the other’s most intimate primordial object: “It better be true—if it is not true, I’ll fuck your mother!” These two versions thus clearly enact the two reactions to what literally turns out to be a lie: its furious rejection, or its “subl(im)ation” into a “higher” truth. In psychoanalytic terms, their difference is the one between foreclosure (Verwerfung) and symbolic transubstantiation.7

  WE ALL KNOW THE OLD JOKE referring to the enigma of who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays: “Not William Shakespeare, but someone else with the same name.” This is what Lacan means by the “decentered subject”; this is how a subject relates to the name that fixes its symbolic identity: John Smith is (always, by definition, in its very notion) not John Smith, but someone else with the same name. As Shakespeare’s Juliet knew, I am never “that name”—the John Smith who really thinks he is John Smith is a psychotic.8

  THIS LACK OR IMPERFECTION of the (big) Other is rendered in a wonderfully simple way in a joke about two friends who are playing a game where you have to hit a can with a ball. After repeated kicks, one of them says: “For the devil’s sake, I missed it!” His friend, a religious fanatic, comments: “How dare you talk like that; it’s blasphemy! May God strike you with lightning as punishment!” A moment later, lightning does strike, but it hits the religious guy who, shaken and barely alive, turns his gaze up and asks: “But why did you hit me, my Lord, and not the culprit?” A deep voice resonates from above: “For the devil’s sake, I missed!”9

  SUCH AN IMPOSSIBLE POINT OF VIEW is often mobilized in jokes. A contemporary Chinese sexual joke reports on a conversation between twin brothers who are still fetuses in their mother’s womb; one says to the other: “I love it when our father visits us, but why is he so rude at the end of each visit, spitting all over us?” The other replies: “True, our uncle is much nicer: he always comes with a nice hat made of rubber on his head, so that he doesn’t spit on us!”10

  IN AN OLD SLOVENE JOKE, a young schoolboy has to write a short composition with a title “There is only one mother!,” in which he is expected to illustrate, apropos a singular experience, the love that links him to his mother; here is what he writes: “One day I returned home earlier than expected, because the teacher was ill; I looked for my mother and found her naked in her bed with a man who was not my father. My mother angrily shouted at me: “What are you staring at like an idiot? Why don’t you run to the refrigerator and get us two cold beers!” I ran to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, looked into it, and shouted back to the bedroom: “There is only one, mother!”

  Is this not a supreme case of interpretation that just adds a punctuation mark that changes everything, as in the parody of the first words of Moby-Dick: “Call me, Ishmael!”? One can discern the same operation in Heidegger (the way he reads “Nothing is without reason (nihil est sine ratione),” by shifting the accent to “Nothing[ness] IS without reason”), or in the superego displacement of the prohibitive injunction of the symbolic law (from “Don’t kill!” to “Don’t!” … “Kill!”). However, one should risk a more detailed interpretation. The joke stages a Hamlet-like confrontation of the son with the enigma of mother’s excessive desire; in order to escape this deadlock, the mother as it were takes refuge in /the desire for/ an external partial object, the bottle of beer, destined to divert the son’s attention from the obscene Thing of her being caught naked in bed with a man—the message of this demand is: “You see, even if I am in bed with a man, my desire is for something else that you can bring me. I am not excluding you by getting completely caught in the circle of passion with this man!” The two bottles of beer /also/ stand for the elementary signifying dyad, like Lacan’s famous two restroom doors observed by two children from the train window in his “Instance of the letter in the unconscious”; from this perspective, the child’s repartee is to be read as rendering to the mother the elementary Lacanian lesson: “Sorry, mother, but there is ONLY ONE SIGNIFIER, for the man only, there is no binary signifier (for the woman), this signifier is ur-verdraengt, primordially repressed!” In short: you are caught naked, you are not covered by the signifier. And what of this is the fundamental message of monotheism? Not the reduction of the Other to the One, but, on the contrary, the acceptance of the fact that the binary signifier always-already lacks. This imbalance between the One and its “primordially repressed” counterpart is the radical difference, in contrast to the big cosmological couples (yin and yang, etc.) that can emerge only within the horizon of the undifferentiated One (tao, etc.). And are not even the attempts to introduce a balanced duality into the minor spheres of consummation, like the couple of small blue and red bags of artificial sweetener available everywhere in cafés, yet another desperate attempt to provide a symmetrical signifying couple for the sexual difference (blue “masculine” bags versus red “feminine” bags)? The point is not that sexual difference is the ultimate signified of all such couples, but rather that the proliferation of such couples displays an attempt to supplement the LACK of the founding binary signifying couple that would directly stand for sexual difference.11

  TO GRASP MORE CLOSELY this non-All, let us turn to a wonderful dialectical joke in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this One-coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk. (In a similar way, Eastern Europeans in 1990 did not only want democracy-without-communism, but also democracy-without-capitalism.) What we encounter here is the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature—the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin (people from Montenegro were stigmatized as lazy in the former Yugoslavia): why does a Montenegro guy, when going to sleep, put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty during the night. The point of this joke is that the absence itself has to be positively registered: it is not enough to have one full glass of water, since, if the Montenegrin will not be thirsty, he will simply ignore it—this negative fact itself has to be taken note of by the empty glass, that is, no-need-for water has to be materialized in the void of the empty glass. There is a political equivalent of these lines: in a joke from Socialist Poland, a customer enters a store and asks: “You probably don’t have butter, or do you?” The answer: “Sorry, but we are the store that
doesn’t have toilet paper; the one across the street is the one that doesn’t have butter!”12

  SIMILAR (BUT NOT THE SAME) is the legendary answer of a Hearst newspaper editor to Hearst’s inquiry why he doesn’t want to take a long-deserved holiday: “I am afraid that if I go, there will be chaos; everything will fall apart—but I am even more afraid to discover that, if I go, things will just go on as normal without me, a proof that I am not really needed!” A certain negative choice (no holiday, seeing a film again) is supported both by yes and no; however, what one should be attentive to is the asymmetry of the answers, and this asymmetry resorts clearly if we imagine the dialogue as a succession of two answers: first, the reaction is the obvious (negative) one (I didn’t like the film; I am afraid everything will fall apart if I take a holiday); then, when this reaction fails to produce the desired goal, the opposite (positive) reason is given (I liked the film; everything will be OK without me), which fails even more miserably. No wonder that one can reformulate the Hearst editor’s double answer as a dialogue along the lines of the Rabinovitch joke: “Why don’t you take a holiday, you deserved it!” “I don’t want to go, for two reasons. First, I am afraid that everything will fall apart here if I take a holiday.” “But you are totally wrong; you will see that things will just go on as normal when you’re not here!” “That is my second reason.”13

  AND HOW CAN WE NOT MENTION here another incident involving coffee from the popular cinema, this time from the English working-class drama Brassed Off? The hero accompanies home a pretty young woman who, at the entrance to her flat, tells him: “Would you like to come in for a coffee?” To his answer—“There is a problem—I don’t drink coffee”—she retorts with a smile: “No problem—I don’t have any.” The immense direct erotic power of her reply resides in how—through a double negation, again—she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex: when she first invites the guy in for a coffee and then admits she has no coffee, she does not cancel her invitation, she just makes it clear that the first invitation for a coffee was a stand-in (or pretext), indifferent in itself, for the invitation to sex. Along the same lines, one can imagine a dialogue between the United States and Europe in late 2002, when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared: the United States says to Europe: “Would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the WMD!”; Europe replies: “But we have no facilities to search for the WMD!”; Rumsfeld answers: “No problem; there are no WMD in Iraq.”14

  THERE IS A JOKE ABOUT COOKING that relies on the same logic: “Here is how anyone can make a good soup in one hour: prepare all the ingredients, cut the vegetables, etc., boil the water, put the ingredients into it, cook them at a simmer for half an hour, stirring occasionally; when, after three quarters of an hour, you discover that the soup is tasteless and unpalatable, throw it away, open up a good can of soup, and quickly warm it up in a microwave oven. This is how we humans make soup.”15

  THE GOD THAT WE GET HERE is rather like the one from the old Bolshevik joke about an able Communist propagandist who, after his death, finds himself in hell, where he quickly convinces the guards to let him leave and go to heaven instead. When the Devil notices his absence, he quickly pays a visit to God, demanding that he return to hell what belongs to the Devil. However, immediately after the Devil starts to address God: “My Lord …” God interrupts him: “First, I am not Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to a fictional being?—I don’t exist! And third, be short, otherwise I’ll miss my party cell meeting!”

  This is the God today’s radical Left needs: a God who wholly “became man”—a comrade among us, crucified together with two social outcasts—and who not only “doesn’t exist” but also himself knows this, accepting his erasure, entirely passing over into the love that binds members of the Holy Ghost (the party, the emancipatory collective).16

  THERE IS AN OLD JEWISH JOKE, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”17

  ULTIMATELY, THERE ARE ONLY TWO OPTIONS, two ways to account for the “magical trick” of the Hegelian synthesis, and they are structured like the two versions of the vulgar doctor’s joke of “first-the-bad-news-then-the-good-news.” The first one is that the good news is the bad news, just viewed from a different perspective (“The bad news is that we’ve discovered you have severe Alzheimer’s disease. The good news is the same: you have Alzheimer’s, so you will have forgotten the bad news by the time you get back home.”) There is, however, another version: the good news is good, but it concerns another subject (“The bad news is that you have terminal cancer and will die in a month. The good news is: you see that young, beautiful nurse over there? I’ve been trying to get her into bed for months; finally, yesterday, she said yes and we made love the whole night like crazy.”). The true Hegelian “synthesis” is the synthesis of these two options: the good news is the bad news itself—but in order for us to see that, we have to shift to a different agent (from the bird that dies to another one that replaces it; from the cancer-ridden patient to the happy doctor; from Christ as individual to the community of believers).18

  VARIATIONS

  What if the logic of the old medical joke about Alzheimer’s (“The bad news is we’ve discovered you have severe Alzheimer’s disease. The good news is you will have already forgotten the bad news by the time you get home”) also applies here, in the case of the post-traumatic loss of personality, so that, when the patient’s old personality is destroyed, the very measure of his suffering also disappears?19

  There is the ultimate good news/bad news doctor joke that reaches the dark limit of a joke; it starts with the good news, which, however, is so ominous that no further bad news is needed: “Doctor: First the good news: we definitely established that you are not a hypochondriac.” No need for a counterpoint here. (Another version: “Doctor: I have some good news and some bad news. Patient: What’s the good news? Doctor: The good news is that your name will be soon a household name all around the world—they are naming a disease after you!”) Is this a nondialectical short circuit? Or is it rather the proper dialectical beginning that immediately negates itself? Something like this joke happens at the beginning of Hegel’s logic, not a passage to the opposite, but the beginning’s immediate self-sabotage.

  THERE IS AN OLD JOKE ABOUT A HUSBAND who returns home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims: “Why have you come back early?” The husband furiously snaps back: “What are you doing in bed with another man?” The wife calmly replies: “I asked you first—don’t try to wiggle out of it by changing the subject!”20

  “POPULISM” IS THUS by definition a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon grounded in a refusal, even an implicit admission of impotence. We all know the old joke about a guy looking for his lost key under the street light; when asked where he lost it, he admits that it was in a dark corner. So why is he looking for it here, under the light? Because the visibility is much better here. There is always something of this trick in populism. It looks for the causes of troubles in the Jews, since they are more visible than complex social processes.21

  THE REASON I FIND BADIOU PROBLEMATIC is that, for me, something is wrong with the very notion that one can excessively “enforce” a truth: one is almost tempted to apply the logic of the joke quoted by Lacan: “My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancée.” A Truth is never enforced, because the moment fidelity to Truth f
unctions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-Event.22

  VARIATIONS

  It is a little bit like the proverbial joke “My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because if she is late, she is no longer my fiancée”: if you love God, you can do whatever you like, because when you do something evil, this is in itself proof that you do not really love God.23

  There is a story (apocryphal, maybe) about the Left-Keynesian economist John Galbraith: before a trip to the USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to his anti-Communist friend Sidney Hook: “Don’t worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets and return home claiming they have Socialism!” Hook answered him promptly: “But that’s what worries me—that you will return claiming the USSR is NOT socialist!” What worried Hook was the naive defense of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a Socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself; it just means we didn’t implement it properly. Do we not detect the same naivete in today’s market fundamentalists? When, during a recent TV debate in France, Guy Sorman claimed that democracy and capitalism necessarily go together, I couldn’t resist asking him the obvious question: “But what about China today?” He snapped back: “In China there is no capitalism!” For a fanatically procapitalist Sorman, if a country is nondemocratic, it simply means it is not truly capitalist but practices its disfigured version, in exactly the same way that for a democratic communist Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of communism.