An Interview with Denise Duhamel (Essay)

By Denise Duhamel

Ever since Mark Twain’s humorous monologues, literature and stand up comedy have been intertwined. Stand-up comedy (unlike theatrical comedy which relies on several characters and a slap stick plot) is dependent upon the voice or persona of the deliverer. In the 2005 film The Aristocrats, 100 comedians all tell a version of the same joke. Halfway into the movie, Penn of Penn and Teller tries to explain how the joke changes through each rendition by saying, "It's not so much the song as the singer." In this way, stand-up is particularly fitted to poetry—one voice intimately dispensing quirky information. I have been using elements of comedy in my work for some time: heightening punch lines with line breaks; incorporating word play, misunderstandings, and surprise. A comic’s monologue and poet's comic poem both begin with a narrative, then a punch line. Once the punch is established, comics and poets can move on to the “tags,” which are simply more jokes (or images) based on the same premise or set up. In the poem “Embarazzar,” the tags are all the different advertisements American companies get wrong through translation. In “Noah and Joan,” the tags are the embellishments of Noah and Joan of Arc's married life together. Both poems end with a “callback,” what comedians describe as a word or phrase that harken to an earlier punch line. “Embarazzar,” brings back the idea of the Parker Pen in a metaphor for unprotected sex and the possible unwanted pregnancy. In “Noah and Joan,” the animals of Noah's Arc come back in a simile referring to the children Noah and John might have had. The “callback” brings a comic's routine full circle. This, of course, is the equivalent to closure in poetic terms. Both poems take shots at American culture--Americans don't know history (in “Noah and Joan”) and get translations wrong (in “Embarazzar”); that way, both could be considered satire. In a recent interview, poet Peter Johnson refers to poet Stephen Dobyns who said in an interview that he writes at a desk with a statue of a dwarf dressed as a jester bent over in an mocking laugh to remind himself that he's practicing a deception against the reader and himself. Jonathan Swift compares satire to a mirror in which everyone sees everyone else's face but not his own, which is why everyone is laughing so hard. But Peter Johnson takes issue with Swift, saying, "I disagree. In the perfect satire we should see our own reflections; and the best satirists are those who realize they possess the traits they satirize. Satire doesn't work when we sense the presence of a smug author looking down at his sniveling creations. That's no fun; no complexity there at all." In both these poems, I hope it is clear that the speaker is complicit in the errors of the poems. Although, in “Noah and John,” she begins to make fun of Americans who think Noah and Joan of Arc were married, she goes on to say, "It's not such an awful mistake..." and uses this mish-mash of history to make a poem. In ”Embarazzar,” she compares her husband to Frank Purdue in the badly translated slogan and herself to the chicken. In The Aristocrats, Gilbert Gottfried is filmed at Friar's Club roast of Hugh Hefner that takes place shortly after 9/11. He tries to make a joke about a plane crashing into the Empire State Building, but doesn't get a laugh, not even a pity laugh. Then someone from the audience calls out "too soon!" and he launches into the familiar Aristocrat joke. This scene reminds me of Steve Allen's great quote: "Tragedy plus time equals comedy." I've always been comforted by that quote, that someday someone is going to make us laugh, a therapeutic laugh, no matter what the circumstance. Charles Harper Webb, a very humorous poet himself, says in his introduction to his anthology Stand Up Poetry: "Ours is an age in which Aristotle's ranking of tragedy as superior to comedy becomes more and more suspect. Like other contemporary artists, Stand Up Poets use humor as a device ideally suited to capture the absurdities, enormities, and pathos of modern life." (delivered by Denise Duhamel at AWP, Austin, TX, March 2006)