Healing Laughter
Nearly a decade ago, when AIDS awareness was in its infancy, the disease was believed to be confined to the four Hs : homosexuals, hemophiliacs, Haitians and hypodermic needle users. It wasn’t long before two more Hs --homophobic humor--joined the misinformation show.
One of the first, big-time AIDS jokes, an attack on gays, was chronicled in a behavioral science journal by Alan Dundes, a UC Berkeley anthropology and folklore professor:
Q: Do you know what “gay” means?
A: “Got AIDS yet?”
Meanwhile, as increasing numbers of people died of and learned to live with the disease, a second type of AIDS humor emerged. It didn’t trash the gay lifestyle or turn patients into punch lines. With jokes on the effectiveness of AIDS diet plans and the do’s and don’ts of condom etiquette, this more positive humor was gentle and supportive.
In some cases, it helped AIDS patients and their families to focus on something other than fear and pain, to reconcile the irreconcilable and to reaffirm the human spirit.
In the last year, however, AIDS humor has taken a new, darker turn. By nature, observers say, it has always tended to be on the black side. But this recent crop of satire, jokes andcamp is wilder, funkier and far more frank than ever.
Some of it is so tasteless it might have been inspired by one of John Waters’ early films.
It offends many who claim that such material dishonors the dying and the dead. But the new breed of beyond-the-edge comedy is not coming from homophobes. It’s chiefly the work of young gay men, some of whom are gleefully living with AIDS.
Indeed, the creators of this over-the-top approach claim their work empowers those dealing with AIDS to fully accept the grim reality of the disease and then transcend it.
Consider:
* Diseased Pariah News (DPN), the San Francisco-based quarterly described by editor Wulf Thorne as “somewhere between Spy magazine and Good Housekeeping for the HIV set.” When the magazine began publishing late last year, its first 10 subscribers were offered an eventual bonus of paperweights containing the ashes of DPN co-founder Tom Shearer. He died last spring and is now affectionately known among staffers as “the deaditor.”
The magazine has a circulation of 2,500 and regularly features a nutrition column, “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” a “Meat Market” personals section and a comic strip starring “Capt. Condom.” Says Thorne, who is HIV-positive: “We think that if you’re going to croak sooner than you’d like, at least you can live while you’re alive.”
* The emergence of musical comedies such as “Heart String” and “AIDS: The Musical.” “Heart String,” which has played throughout the country and is scheduled to open at the Shrine Auditorium in February, features singer-dancers dressed as Trojan women performing the show’s safe-sex anthem, “Take a Trojan to Bed Tonight.”
The decidedly more outrageous “AIDS: The Musical” briefly played to sold-out audiences at a small theater in Santa Monica last summer. In the play, a hospitalized man hallucinates that he is on an AIDS game show. Dancers appear costumed as AIDS-related diseases: “Kaposi’s Sarcoma” and “The Fabulous Miss Thrush.”
* The appearances at local AIDS benefits of registered nurse Debbie Trent-Johnson, who plays a drag queen-style character named Tra-La-La. “Tra-La-La’s a blowzy, frowzy type who wears wigs, tight clothes and trashes it up all over town,” says Trent-Johnson, who is married and a mom.
On the job at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital’s Immune Suppressed Unit, she ditches the Tra-La-La costume but incorporates the character’s attitude in her bedside manner.
“The sense of dread and doom here is relentless, but this helps,” Trent-Johnson explains. “Some of my patients are very clear-eyed. I had this patient who said to me, ‘Debbie, they’re sending me get-well cards! Don’t they know I’ve got AIDS and I’m gonna die ?’
“We laugh about all kinds of things. Incontinence is really not very funny, but there are times when we find ourselves just laughing our heads off about it.
“We also have pet names and running gags for people here. There’s a doctor I call Cleopatra, because I think he’s the Queen of Denial. He can never admit his patients are dying. He always pushes for tests that dying people don’t need. When he does that, we just say, ‘Cleopatra’s on his barge again.’ ”
* Increasing lightheartedness in the reporting of AIDS-related matters by the gay press. In his “HIV Watch” column for the San Francisco-based Bay Area Reporter, Michael Botkin occasionally refers to people with AIDS as “dead meat specials.” The column also goes “obituary cruising.”
“I go through the papers and pick out the closeted AIDS obituaries,” says HIV-positive Botkin. “For instance, a man who dies of lymphoma who’s under the age of 50 or 60--it’s pretty obvious that’s somebody who died of AIDS.
“You can’t be serious about this. That’s not much fun. In this case, humor serves to give you some relief for a situation that’s too difficult to grapple with all the time.”
Not everyone agrees. Many people maintain that joking about death and disease is offensive and disrespectful. One critic is Larry Kramer, the celebrated playwright whose own works have contained AIDS humor. One New York reviewer called Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” the “saddest” play about AIDS and his farce “Just Say No” (about the Reagan Administration’s lack of response to the epidemic) the “funniest” play about AIDS.
“I love (the editors at Diseased Pariah News) and I love them for doing it, but I don’t see it touching a nerve that people are responding to at all,” says Kramer, who is HIV-positive. “I find it heartbreaking to read because I know that the people who are putting it out are dying. It’s hard for anybody to create AIDS humor, sick or healthy. AIDS is terribly hard to write about for anyone. . . . It’s too heavy. It’s too painful.
“I want to write more humor, but I just can’t do it. . . . All I do is think of all the people who have died and I say this does not honor them by poking fun at them or satirizing them. It’s the hardest thing to do.”
The difficulty level hasn’t stopped the staff at The Advocate, however.
In the view of Richard Rouilard, who edits the nation’s largest magazine for gays and lesbians, both the lighter and serious sides of the AIDS movement merit coverage. For instance, when The Advocate reported on Diseased Pariah News, DPN co-founder Shearer was photographed “trussed up like a Hoover vacuum cleaner.”
This more relaxed approach toward AIDS is a signal that “the gay community has finally gotten its sensibilities back,” Rouilard insists. “The dark ages of the epidemic are clearly not over. But the dark ages for the gay personality are beginning to be over.
“What’s coming back is a revival of that brilliant, gay sense of humor, which has kept us surviving in the most untoward situations on the planet. We developed camp. Camp humor is gay humor. It’s not nervous, desperate laughter. It’s the fundamental laughter of our community, the ability to look at the world around us and see how silly it is. And when you’re close to death, it looks even sillier.”
Perhaps because the new, increasingly irreverent brand of AIDS humor has been circulated chiefly within the gay community, its practitioners say they have received little or no flack.
DPN’s Thorne reports he’s still waiting for a backlash to appear and “wouldn’t mind some well-written hate mail.” He suspects those who are offended by AIDS humor are more concerned for themselves than for those with the disease.
“It reminds them of their own mortality. To laugh in the face of death and debilitating disease is to reject everything that people have been ingrained with,” he says.
The Rev. Doug Adams, a college professor, expert on humor and author of “Humor in the American Pulpit,” agrees. “The humorless people are in major forms of denial about the fact that they’re dying, too. Humor makes things real. It’s identification. When you and I laugh at a joke we’re really saying, ‘Yes. That’s true. This is my story.’ Humor is about solidarity with humanity.”
That communion is also therapeutic, says Wendell Jones, co-creator of “AIDS: The Musical.” Though some people who didn’t see the show told him that its title ridiculed people with AIDS, he says that those who attended the show felt uplifted.
Jones remembers meeting one audience member:
“He stopped me on the street. He was very young, very thin and had very clear Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. He cried. We hugged each other and talked about the show. He said he hadn’t had a good time like that in a really long time. I think that when you have humor and weirdness, it sort of liberates people.”
Liberation may come slowly, though, suggests Judy Carter, a comic who taught a workshop on stand-up comedy for anyone--patients, relatives, care-givers--dealing with the disease. “AIDS is a very difficult thing to joke about,” she says, recalling the three-month workshop offered last year through AIDS Project Los Angeles.
“The first three weeks, nobody wanted to talk about it. (But) one woman, whose husband died during the workshop, told me she would have killed herself if she didn’t have the release that the humor gave her.”
The 11 participants who completed the workshop performed their routines for paying audiences at comedy clubs in Encino and Pasadena. They were videotaped, delivering such lines as “The hard part about having AIDS is having people coming over to your house and going, ‘Ooooh, oooh, what a beautiful television set!’ ”
Some of those videotapes have been played at recent funerals of workshop participants. The videos were warmly received because they allowed those present to laugh with the deceased, Carter says. “They’re suddenly bigger than a person with AIDS. They’re a person.”
Why does AIDS humor seem to be on the increase? Why is even the city of Los Angeles seeing enough value in it to subsidize it?
(The Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department recently awarded a $3,500 grant to writer Rondo Mieczkowski, to create humorous stories about dealing with AIDS and to read those stories at bookstores and HIV support group meetings.)
“I think the human condition is inherently hilarious,” says Mieczkowski. “When people find out that I’m HIV-positive and they go, ‘Well, what are you going to do,’ I say, ‘Well, be glamorous.’ . . . People say ‘How can you laugh at people who have AIDS?’ . . . I’m not laughing at people who have AIDS. I’m laughing at my own life.”
Some observers attribute the increase in non-homophobic AIDS humor to the fact that a growing number of people believe laughter is healing. Others note that people may be more willing to joke because many AIDS patients are now living far longer than was expected.
“The emergence of the drug AZT in 1985 was a turning point. Before that you were seen as being dead in 18 months, if that long,” says HIV Watch columnist Botkin. “People who were friends of HIVers didn’t feel like making jokes about it. Now that the prospects of living or living longer are much better, it’s easier for people with HIV and their friends to see the humor in the situation.”
The upswing may also be a response to continuing homophobic humor, says Richard Jennings, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Los Angeles.
In 1989, GLAAD, along with other gay rights organizations, got Warner Bros. Records to include information on AIDS transmission with recordings by comedian Sam Kinison. The records contained AIDS jokes that the organization considered to be anti-gay and inaccurate on how AIDS is spread.
Jennings says the material violated a guideline that can help determine whether comedic material is offensive to homosexuals: “Is it making fun of homophobia or is it making fun of gays and lesbians?”
Jennings acknowledges that gays and lesbians may take greater liberties in joking about AIDS while the same jokes told by heterosexuals could be considered unacceptable.
“There are certain things an oppressed group can say about itself, whereas if the same terms come from the outside, it’s continuing the oppression,” he contends.
When it’s done sensitively, Jennings has applauded AIDS humor created by heterosexuals. He sent a congratulatory note to “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau last year when Andy Lippincott, a character in the strip, died of AIDS after a 10-month struggle.
According to Lee Salem, editorial director of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Doonesbury, reaction was strong: “The positive ranged from private individuals to AmFAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research). The negative response was pretty much by private individuals, generally in two groups. One group thought the subject should not be on the comic pages at all. The second group misconstrued the strips and thought Garry was making fun of the disease. Of course, that was not the case.”
Is it possible to laugh in the face of death and disease without offending people?
The Rev. Doug Adams, who often tells the favorite jokes of the departed when he preaches at their funerals, thinks he’s found a way to satisfy most of the critics. He points out that it’s important to cry and to laugh when dealing with death and life-threatening issues.
“The crying is the recognition that a person is dying or dead. Let’s not pretend. The person is dead. It’s a way of saying yes, that’s true,” says Adams, who teaches Christianity and the arts at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion. “The laughing is a way of saying that’s not the whole story. That’s not the end. It’s not the final word.
“The bottom line is this. If you and I can’t laugh about a subject, we stop talking about it, because we can’t sustain solemnity on any subject for very long. If it’s solemn, it’s just not real.”
Editorial library researcher Peter Johnson contributed to this article.
