The Difference Between a Joke and a Lie
(I wrote this essay several years ago for my improv blog, The House That Del Built. Given our current President’s difficulty with this concept, I thought it was worth a revisit.)
One day about a decade ago, I found myself driving my two daughters (then two years old and six months old), back from my in-laws in the semi-rural suburban outpost an hour south of Chicago. The road back north was a highway with not much to stop for between their house and ours, and the second leg of the journey passed through some neighborhoods that weren’t the safest for someone who didn’t know their way around. That’s why I panicked when my newly potty-trained two-year-old suddenly shrieked, halfway into the drive, “I have to pee!”
“I have to pee!” she yelled again louder and more insistently. My first thought was to just give her a diaper and let her do her thing back there, but firstly that wouldn’t be very good from a potty-training perspective, and secondly the only diapers I had were tiny infant ones that would work on her more like a light panty liner than a truly absorbent pair of disposable underwear. I had to pull over. But it was miles to the next rest area, and, pre-smart phone, I didn’t know the neighborhood well enough to navigate my way to a safe and clean restroom.
So I kept driving, begging her to wait, until I could find somewhere suitable to take her. Driving and panicking I raced down the highway, my daughter yelling all the way, “I have to pee! I have to peeeee!!!”
Finally I saw a Barnes & Noble sign in the distance. I swerved into the highway exit and pulled up to the parking lot and into a spot. I got out and went to unbuckle her from her car seat. As I started to do so, she looked up at me, smiling. “I was just joking,” she said. I looked at her aghast. My first thought was that she’d already peed her pants and was trying to cover for herself. But no — she was dry.
“What do you mean you were joking?” I asked.
“I don’t have to pee,” she said.
“Then why did you tell me you did? Why did you keep saying it when you knew I would have to pull off the road and find you a place to pee?” I said, more and more irritated by the second.
“It was a joke,” she said, more dubiously than before.
I recognized this as something parenting and education experts call a “teachable moment,” and so I responded with this explanation: “There’s a difference between a joke that’s not true and a lie, honey. When you keep saying a joke that’s not true until it hurts someone, it’s not a joke anymore; it’s just a lie. Do you understand?” She seemed to, as well as a two-year-old can. I think at the very least she understood she’d taken whatever it was she was doing too far. We got back on the road.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was reading the introduction to Kevin Young’s book The Grey Album. He spoke at length about the power of stories. In his community growing up, he explained, if someone seemed to stretch the truth, rather than telling them they were “lying,” you’d say they were “storying.” That lying and storytelling are connected is something we all know but maybe don’t often think about. The idea that a joke can sometimes simply be a lie where no one gets hurt isn’t one I generally use as a primary definition of the term, but it seemed applicable at the time, and it rang true as I said it to my daughter. But not because jokes are “untruthful,” exactly. You see, in my daughter’s case, and in the case with any great story, the power lies (no pun intended) in the fact that the story or the joke could be true — that it’s touching on something real about the human condition and the context in which it is told, the person to whom it could happen. A two-year old who’s just been potty trained is perhaps the most likely person to have the sudden need to relieve their bowels in a speeding car on the highway. It might not have been the truth of that actual moment, but it was a truth of that kind of moment — maybe the most visceral truth of that kind of moment, maybe “truer” than the reality that she did not, in fact, have to pee. The fact that she caused me stress and anxiety and put her family in a potentially dangerous but at the very least highly inconvenient situation was an unintended consequence of her attempt to test the boundary between reality and imagination.
I stand by my position that when she allowed me to actually act on her “joke” — to physically pull the car off the highway, to park it in the lot, to get out and open the back door — it turned into something that was no longer fun or funny (but then again, maybe it was hilarious to her), but that’s a complicated and nuanced distinction to explain to a child who is just learning how to make sense of the world around her and how to express her experiences in language. For example: Why is a metaphor not a lie? A child might ask. How is describing something by using some other thing that it is not any less false than claiming you have to pee when you don’t? The easy answer is that we’ve all agreed on the conventions of metaphors, and, unless we’re an abnormally concrete person, know when one is being employed. And the same can be said for jokes, or comedy more broadly. We know when something is a “joke” because we’ve learned from experience the parameters of “joking.”
That a joke that isn’t in the strictest sense “true” is, in a deeper sense, the Truth is something with which most comedians (myself included) are familiar, and most of us do strive to tell a version of the truth in our comedy. And my admonition to my daughter that day makes me think about a particular way of considering the “truth in comedy” that was absent in that moment. There’s the obvious point about the need for the thing to ring true on stage, of course, but we might for a moment think of the truth in comedy specifically as a balance struck — between truth on the one hand, with its connection to sensory experience and objectivity, and comedy, on the other, with its pushing of the boundaries of that very objectivity that is at the heart of experience. The truth in comedy, in this context, is that core of believability that tethers the absurd to the earth.
When you come out as a character in an improv scene, for example, you calibrate this balance subconsciously (and the better you get at it, the more instantaneous, subconscious, and accurate your calculation). Based on just the first few moments — the way I walked out onto the stage, the first thing out of my mouth, the way I reacted to the other character — what is the reality of my character? What details could I add that might be surprising but still feel true? What detail might seem “funny,” but would stretch my character’s reality too far and make the audience feel “lied to” rather than “joked with.” All improvisers have experienced the reaction to that line we’ve forced on our character that sounded so funny in our heads but falls flat because the audience just doesn’t buy it. Or the detail we impose on the scenario that even a skilled, supportive scene partner can’t buy, and suddenly we’re both struggling to maintain the reality and therefore the comedic center of the scene. Maybe we, like my daughter, aren’t being malicious in that moment, but rather, are subconsciously testing the boundaries of the joke, how much “lie” the truth can bear. Maybe this metaphor might help heighten our sensitivity to when we’ve crossed the line into forcing our scene partner or the audience to pull over into a Barnes & Noble parking lot. The joke, having been transformed into a lie, has taken everyone off track.
Of course the answer is not that one simply stops pushing those limits. After all, teetering on the edge between the possible and the absurd is what makes comedy (and especially improvisation) so surprising and pleasurable. It’s about increasing that internal calibration system so that you can walk the edge with more and more grace, not about staying farther from it in the first place. After years and years of performing I certainly still get it wrong a lot. And by “wrong” I mean not that there was one particular “right” move that I missed, but that my assumptions about how true my move would ring were off, for that audience, in that moment.
Moments that test our understanding of the edge between jokes and truth, on stage and in life, are a reminder of the razor’s edge between reality and imagination, between truth and lie, upon which comedy, and humanity, rests. My hope is that my daughter learned something that day about that edge and how to walk it to bring joy and truth into the world, rather than pain and lies.
