Nobody Expects The Cream Cheese

Because They’re Too Busy Laughing At Funerals

Maria, Wesley, And The Wallpaper

Maria and Wesley met to study British Literature in the campus coffee shop, a high-ceilinged atrium filled with black wire chairs and flooded with the white noise of quiet conversations.

“Who’s next?” asked Wesley.

Maria flipped the page of her Norton anthology. “Ooh,” she said. “Oscar Wilde.”

Wesley set his cup next to Maria’s open textbook. “That guy was kinda off the wall. The whole thing about art being useless and important at the same time doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I fink schat woof wartof la oint,” responded Maria. She was eating a bagel.

“What?”

Maria swallowed and wiped the cream cheese off her mouth. “I think that was part of the point.”

“You mean he wasn’t trying to make sense?”

“Wilde doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who cares much whether he makes sense or not. Consistency isn’t really his thing.”

Instead of offering an intelligent response, Wesley shouted in alarm. A large student carrying a large stack of textbooks had tried to wedge his way between two small tables, and in the process succeeded at knocking over Wesley’s large coffee cup. Caffeine cascaded across the opened Norton anthology and drizzled through the wire holes of the table into Maria’s floral computer bag below.

After shouting at nobody in particular, Wesley righted the cup and jumped up to grab napkins from the front counter. On his way there, he also tried shouting at the offending student, who paid no attention and vanished into a hallway. He returned to the table and tossed half of the napkins to Maria, who had also jumped out of her seat and was frantically pulling items out of her computer bag.

Wesley sponged the stains out of Wilde’s biography as best he could, steaming with enough force to drag a tugboat up the Mississippi. His parents had taught him to always look for the best in people, but at the moment, Wesley saw about as many redeeming qualities in the large student as in a large fruit fly. He scrubbed harder at the textbook to distract himself from the several unsavory remarks that his mind was concocting, and as he did so, he noticed that Maria had underlined a sentence in the book. He stopped scrubbing to read it: “‘Either this wallpaper goes,’ said Oscar Wilde on his deathbed, ‘or I do.’”

Maria waved a bedraggled paperback in her right hand. “It’s ruined,” she said. “I can’t believe that guy!” (The book, though she didn’t announce the title at that moment, was Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut.)

And Wesley began to laugh.

The Benefits Of Corporal Punishment

“Really?” Maria asked. “You think this is funny?”

Wesley paused, face blank with surprise. Then a corner of his mouth twitched upward and he was laughing again, harder this time.

Maria’s brow furrowed as she stared at Wesley, unsure whether to smack him or laugh along. “What? What’s so funny about getting coffee all over my book?”

“I’m sorry,” Wesley gasped. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at Oscar Wilde.”

“He’s not here,” Maria said, eyes narrowed.

“I know, but you underlined this sentence here — ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do.’ It took me a couple seconds, but when I got it, it was just hilarious.” He bobbed his head in a silent chuckle. “It’s so morbid.”

Maria rested her head on her hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head slowly. “Okay, Wesley, I think we need to teach you about appropriate social expression. You don’t tell jokes at funerals, you don’t sell home insurance at a house fire, and you don’t laugh at pithy last words when your friend’s books are being destroyed!”

At this, Wesley broke out laughing again. This time, Maria reached across the table and slapped him.

The Problem Of Insufficient Suicides

Wesley calmed down, adjusting his face into a halfway-apologetic grimace. “I’m sorry,” he said, and began assiduously separating stuck-together pages of the anthology.

There was an awkward silence.

Maria opened her mouth to say that at least her computer was okay and did you think the anthology was salvageable — and then Wesley interrupted.

“But Vonnegut did,” he said, with the tone of a seven-year old explaining how the mashed potatoes ended up on the wall.

“Did what?”

“Laughed at inappropriate times.”

Maria, whose jeans were now probably permanently stained, felt more sarcastic than usual, not necessarily in a good-natured sort of way. “Did you know him?”

Wesley made a face. “No, but I’ve read him. Like that book there.” He pointed at the copy of Cat’s Cradle Maria had set on the table. “The guy makes us laugh at mass suicide, for crying out loud.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t like him.”

“You don’t like him? At all?”

“No, not really.”

“You don’t think he has any good points?”

“If he does, they’re buried underground, next to the corpses of meaning and purpose and value.”

“Ouch,” said Wesley. “Harsh.”

“But true,” said Maria. “That book is basically a hymn to suicide.”

“Not really,” Wesley protested. “It’s funny! He’s not expecting anyone to go out and commit suicide because they read his book.”

“I think that’s part of the problem.”

Wesley cocked his head. “What — that no one commits suicide after reading his book? You think that’s a bad thing?”

Eureka

Maria sighed. “No,” she said. “The problem is that he’s funny about the wrong things.” Maria dropped her bag next to her chair and leaned her elbow onto the table. “Look, humor isn’t the problem. But humor has to be directed well to be good. There’s a reason we don’t laugh at funerals. It’s not just because it would make people upset; it’s because it’s actually inappropriate. It is unfitting — ” she emphasized each syllable of the word — “to laugh at the death of a human being. But Vonnegut wants us to laugh at deaths all over the place, and at a whole bunch of other awful stuff, too. How is that a good thing?”

“But if it’s truly funny, then it can’t be wrong to laugh at it, right?” asked Wesley. “And if it’s not truly funny, somehow, then how could he make us laugh?”

“It’s only funny if you live in a world where there’s no such thing as truth or meaning or purpose. If nothing matters, then you can laugh at everything.”

“Hm,” said Wesley. “I see your point.” He stuck his tongue in his cheek and stared at the ceiling. When he spoke next, he spoke slowly, as though he were handwriting each word. “We laugh at things that are ridiculous. But to Vonnegut, the whole world is ridiculous. So he laughs at everything.”

“Right.” Maria nodded.

Wesley stuck his finger in the air. “And that’s why you got so upset at me when I laughed at the coffee spill! You felt that I was treating something as ridiculous that to you was very important.”

Maria raised her eyebrows and nodded in exaggerated amazement. “Hm,” said Wesley. Maria widened her eyes. She kept nodding.

In Which Corpses Slip Out Of Coffins

“But isn’t it?” asked Wesley.

Now Maria was puzzled. “Isn’t what?”

“Isn’t everything ridiculous? No, listen. Can’t everything be ridiculous if you look at it from the right angle? All Vonnegut did was find the right perspective to laugh from.”

“It was the wrong perspective, though.”

“What do you mean, the wrong perspective? He made you laugh, didn’t he?”

Maria cocked her head warily. “Sometimes,” she said, stretching the first sound and sliding swiftly through the rest of the word.

“I knew it!” Wesley cried. “So he found the right perspective to make you laugh.”

“But it’s the wrong perspective as far as reality is concerned. Vonnegut’s an author. He can make whatever rules for his world that he wants to. But in the real world, there are some things you just shouldn’t laugh at.”

“Like funerals.”

“Right.”

“So have you seen those Candid Camera videos where they make random people help carry coffins when the dead guy keeps falling out?”

Maria thought for a moment. “I think so, yeah.”

“And did those videos make you laugh?”

Maria nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“So why do you do that if you’re not supposed to laugh at it?”

“Well….” Maria shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s different, somehow.”

“How different?”

“I don’t know,” Maria protested. “It just is. There’s something about it that I can’t put into words.”

“Hm,” said Wesley. “Interesting. Anyway, you don’t think it’s wrong to laugh at something like that, even if it’s from the wrong perspective.”

“No. I mean, the way they set up those pranks is actually ridiculous. It’s not wrong to laugh at ridiculous things. That’s just humility.”

They sat and thought, two college students at a table dripping coffee, while in the world spinning around them other college students impersonated professors, professors dripped peanut butter on student essays, parents misspelled their children’s names on Christmas letters, and third-world dictators overinflated their currency.

Across the café, a table burst out laughing.

Gravity Is Still A Force, After All

“I’ve got it,” said Maria. “Maybe not everything is ridiculous, but everyone is ridiculous.”

“Huh?” asked Wesley.

“So I said there are some things that aren’t funny. Like death. Death isn’t funny. But dead people are funny, or at least they can be. People are funny: pretty much every person has done something ridiculous, something we can laugh at. That’s part of why Pope called us ‘the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.’ But some things are not funny. Like death, or prostitution, or AIDS. Maybe some author can set these things up in funny configurations, or maybe some dying people or prostitutes are funny. But the things themselves aren’t. If we laugh at those things and treat them like a joke, we lose something important about reality.”

Wesley nodded silently, tongue pressed reflectively against his front teeth.

“And that’s what I think Vonnegut is doing in Cat’s Cradle. He wants us to think that life is ridiculous. Well, lots of things inside of life are ridiculous, but life itself isn’t.”

Wesley leaned back in his chair. “You may be on to something.”

Maria grinned. “What can I say? I’m brilliant.”

“Yeah, well, takes one to know one.”

“Righ — wait, what? That doesn’t even make sense!”

“That’s what you think,” said Wesley, leaning further back in his chair.

Maria was about to respond, but gasped instead. Wesley’s chair had heeded the call of gravity and returned to the floor from whence it came, bringing Wesley with it. On his way down, Wesley’s head hammered into the back of the person sitting behind him, pushing her into her table and knocking over her coffee cup in the process. With this objective accomplished, his skull bounced twice on the back of the woman’s chair before colliding heavily with the tiled floor below. The woman shrieked and dropped her cell phone face down into the coffee. Wesley groaned.

Shocked, Maria jumped up to help, pushing off with both hands on the table. In her haste, however, she planted one hand firmly in the center of her coffee-drenched bagel. It stuck. Her palm separated from the bagel with a sticky thwack, thickly coated in cream cheese and dripping with caffeine. Maria stood incredulous, staring at her hand, at Wesley, at the infuriated freshman whose Facetiming boyfriend had just been baptized by Starbucks.

And she began to laugh.