My dark places: The roots of a ragged humor

The other morning, my wife was in the galley kitchen of our Bay Area condominium, preparing her daily fruit-and-vegetable energy blast. 

As I wandered in for my millionth coffee refill, I flinched. Her Breville juicer was pulverizing potatoes, apples, lemons and ginger with a sickening violence that, at least to me, sounded like an animal slaughter house or a serial killer’s bathtub.

“What do you think would happen if you put your head in there?” I asked.

I don’t remember actually saying that, mind you. The thought had merely crossed my mind, like an ominous figure skittering past your headlights at night, and then — poof! — it was out of my mouth, unfiltered and wholly ill-advised.

This happens a lot to me.

When I find a modicum of humor in these utterances, I will repeat them. 

Again and again.

During a trip to Boston last fall, if my wife criticized me for reasons I termed unjust, like eating too much or too late or too fast, I fired back. Perhaps because we’d guzzled so many Bloody Marys, my response was:

“Listen, I’ll snap your neck like a stalk of celery.”

That morning in the kitchen, juicer grinding, my wife responded to my darkness with a withering glance I’ve seen too many times before, one far more lethal than mere words.

A look not just to kill, but atomize me like a stalk of celery in her juicer.

My wife is a level-headed woman with a strong sense of imposed order in a chaotic world. "I'm a very appropriate person," she likes to say.

She loves flowers.

Unfortunately, she’s partnered with a Peter Pan who knows no boundaries, whose dark humor bleeds across all five lanes of the cultural freeway. 

When she feels compelled to make gentle corrections to my navigation — offering tips on my health or lack of common sense — she does it only to protect my safety. 

Yet I too often see her suggestions as nagging, which usually provokes an inappropriate and twisted response.

Still, she gives as good as she gets.

“Shush,” she’ll say, as though speaking to a child.

“Why can’t you be nice?”

Once, I’d excused some rank behavior by saying, “Listen, men are dogs.”

Her response was quick.

“No,” she said, “dogs are loyal.”

I compared us to pigs, but she still wasn’t having it.

“Pigs are smart,” my wife said.

When she took a contrarian stand on one political argument, I suggested that she stick her head into the toilet and give it a couple of flushes to bring her back to reason.

She challenged me to go first to show her how it’s done.

She was born in China and her mother insists that if I spoke better (or any) Mandarin, I’d cause a lot of trouble in the family. 

As it is, my wife refuses to translate to her parents half my questions or the things I say. Before we walk into parties, I’m even issued a list of acceptable cocktail conversation.

After the juicer fiasco, I tried to defend myself, perhaps explain the cultural roots of my uncouth behavior. 

Like some low-budget defense attorney, I presented evidence to legitimize my crime, in this case the lyrics to the Smith’s 1986 song “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” about a lad who feels remorse after being figuratively burned at the stake by his girl for his offensive ways.

My wife wasn’t having it.

She says my talk of violence offends her sense of feng shui, or well-being.

That morning in the kitchen, however, she sharpened her blade.

She gestured toward the blender.

“Go put your own head in there!” she said.

My big mouth has gotten me into trouble both at work and at home.

When I threatened a return to my home newspaper office after years working remotely, colleagues wagered how long it would would take for me to offend somebody, anybody.

The over-under was not years or months or even weeks, but days.

I’m not rough just around the edges;  I’m rough to the core. My humor does not translate across state lines, between the sexes or between generations.

So what’s up with this compulsion to shock, to hold centerstage, comedian-like, and test the limits of refined social discourse? 

My mutant seed is not genetic. My father was a teaser but also a gentleman. He explained my perverse outbursts by saying that I’d been dropped as an infant.

He was also the master of hypothetical questions, like my blender line.

Once, when as an adult I was teasing one of my two cats, he asked 'What if that cat was as big as you?"

My mother did have a saucy sense of humor. (I still recall her joke about the three little snakes.) But as I got older, she’d hang up the phone at some of my off-color jokes.

Between them, I’m a chemistry experiment bad.

My younger brother, Frank, once he got married and had children, quickly cast off his wild streak like an old suit of ill-fitting clothes.

Me, I didn’t have kids; I chose instead to remain one. 

But Frank accepts me, perhaps with a bit of sadness, like I was a close friend left behind a grade or two in elementary school.

In college, me and a red-headed kid from New York City spent years trying to out-shock one another. Like in the late 1970s, at the height of popularity for the Unknown Comic, we went to an exclusive disco and danced all night with paper bags over our heads.

I mean, who does this?

My humor took a murky dive in the 1980s when I fell in with a gang of depraved journalists. I’m almost afraid to repeat here any of the sick riffs we found so funny. 

But why would a bunch of drunk men chase a clown named Blinko through a casino? Why were missing people necessarily “buried in four states?” Why did “Glionna put the ass back in crass?”

Once, when I visited a reporter friend at his Florida newsroom, he introduced me as “the most disgusting man in America” and challenged me to live up to my reputation.

I made people laugh but I now see my actions as a stupid pet trick.

In California, I became just another shady person in a sunny place. Male colleagues laughed at my antics while their wives shuddered.

Then I teamed up with two female journalists who actually got me. They termed my dark persona “Dirty Uncle Travis.” One described me as “a puppy with poop in its fur — cute and gross at the same time.”

Why did I laugh at that? 

Why do I still laugh at that?

But here’s the thing: Mostly, my wife lets me be me.

I’m like a pet dog she takes for walks, allowed to run on a really long leash.

So I don’t have to change, even if I could.

She’s even starting to get my humor. When I say something particularly twisted, she’ll even laugh, and then immediately step aside to dodge God’s lightning bolt.

Early on, I taught her the phrase “Don’t blow smoke up my ass” and she has moved on from there. Somebody once asked her at a party, “Where do you get all this slang?”

Then he saw me across the room.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “You’re with him.”

Rather than an attempt to excuse who I am, this post is a shout-out to the woman who gives me the rope with which I gladly hang myself.

Because we both know this: 

Even if I tried to watch my words, to avoid that occasional withering stare that lets me know I have crossed that militarized line of no return, sooner or later, bigmouth will strike again.