Then there's the one about the prisoners who were so familiar with the jokes told in the penitentiary that all they needed to do was call out the number of a particular knee-slapper to keep themselves in stitches. Offering a demonstration for a visitor, the warden called out 61-37-4. The prisoners howled and guffawed. "Now you try one," invited the warden. The visitor called out 53, then 89 and finally 2. No laughter, not a chuckle. The warden shrugged: "I guess it depends on how you tell it."
But seriously, folks: What about James Watt? Is it simply a matter of a fellow with poor comic delivery? That most recent remark, the one about the new coal-leasing review commission consisting of "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." It nearly got Watt ousted a few weeks ago. It might yet. Why? Surely the substance of his remark is not taboo. In the right hands, with the right tone, a joke about the overexacting demands of affirmative action could result in genuine, harmless hilarity. But not with Watt. When he tells a joke, the prisoners start to riot.
In part this is due to Watt's choice of language—the word cripple in this instance, which has the sound of a flat slap in the face. Yet a few days after Watt's remark, in a bizarre protest demonstration in his defense, a man on crutches supported the usage, citing other contexts where "cripple" is benign. True enough. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz forced himself out of the Ford Administration by telling a cruel and tasteless joke about "coloreds"; yet Dick Gregory could title his autobiography Nigger, and Flip Wilson won love and fortune by creating self-mocking black stereotypes. Context seems all, or much at any rate. One might imagine the comedy team of Butz and Watt barnstorming America hearing nary a titter in places where Amos 'n' Andy brought down the house.
Something more seems to lie behind Watt's spectacular comic failures, however. Something connected to Watt as a character and to the audience (i.e., the citizenry) he haplessly addresses. His employer, after all, addresses the same audience quite successfully, except for the time he decided to endear himself to a group of professional women: "If it weren't for women, us men would be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs." Usually he does better. Unlike Watt, the President generally prefers humor to comedy, humor being the warmer and more companionable exercise. Comedy cuts off human feeling, humor thrives on it, especially on self-deprecation. "I know your organization was founded by six Washington newspaperwomen in 1919," the President told the Washington Press Club in 1981. Pausing like Jack Benny, he added: "It seems like only yesterday." Yet he uses comedy too. Once in New York he delivered a fine line at a ceremony involving the Westway highway project, apologizing to the crowd that James Watt would have been present had he not been on assignment strip mining the Rose Garden.