I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (7 page)

VINCENT VAN GOGH

A flaw in the human character
is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.

E. B. WHITE

Marshall McLuhan said similarly, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” And earlier, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote,
“The most important thing about Spacecraft Earth—an instruction book didn't come with it.”

 

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.
I only owe it to the horse's good nature
that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

O
ne of the vexing problems facing American leaders after the Japanese surrender in 1945 was what to do with Emperor Hirohito and his family. After lengthy—and apparently heated—discussions at the White House, it was decided that the emperor would not be tried for war crimes. But what exactly should be done with him and the rest of the Imperial Household? The details were left in the hands of General Douglas MacArthur, who was given free rein to make such decisions. MacArthur believed that a key to Japan's future was the proper education of the emperor's twelve-year-old son, Crown Prince Akihito.

MacArthur did something that would never happen today—he arranged for a virtually unknown American teacher to take the young prince under her wing. The tutor was Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Philadelphia widow with no children and no obvious credentials for the job. The forty-three-year-old Quaker woman had never visited Japan, spoke no Japanese, and came only with a strong recommendation from the American Friends Service Committee.

The tutor quickly won the trust of her young charge—even playing Mo
nopoly with him during study breaks—and went on to play a pivotal role in his life. When she left Japan four years later, her pupil had flourished. He was fluent in English, was proficient in French and German, and showed a keen interest in Western ideas about individual freedom. In 1959, when Akihito became the first crown prince in Japanese history to marry a commoner, the only Westerner to attend the wedding was his beloved Mrs. Vining. On every birthday until she died in 1999—at age ninety-seven—she received a bouquet of flowers from her former pupil, delivered by limousine from the Japanese Embassy. When Emperor Hirohito died in 1989, Akihito ascended to the throne, a position he occupies to this day.

What does all this have to do with the chapter you're reading? Well, as it turns out, the Japanese emperor and I have something in common—we both learned something special from Mrs. Vining. In her 1960 book
Return to Japan,
she wrote:

In the first part of this passage, Vining correctly points out that the English word
humor
derives from a Latin word that means “fluid, moisture.” That root word is
umor
, which somewhere along the line added the letter
h
and gave us words like
humor
and
humidity
. The word originally conveyed the sense of “bodily fluids,” as in the ancient concept of
bodily humors
. In ancient Greece, physicians believed that the precise composition of four bodily fluids—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—determined a person's temperament.

In the second part of the passage, Vining gracefully moves from the literal to the metaphorical realm by suggesting that the juice of humor can help to make life fresh and flavorful. When I first came upon her observation, I recalled something that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., recommended in his 1891 book
Over the Teacups
:

 

Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons,
and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

 

If music baths can be cleansing, it can also be argued that periodic humor baths are a good way to wash away some of the grime of life. Over the years, this beneficial aspect of humor has been well recognized, and many have expressed the view metaphorically:

 

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

STEVE ALLEN

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

MEL BROOKS

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

ARNOLD H. GLASGOW

Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.

PEGGY NOONAN

What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.

YIDDISH PROVERB

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

MARK TWAIN

Many people have come to believe that humor—especially if it provokes hearty laughter—isn't simply a life enhancer but is also a life preserver, and maybe even a life prolonger. The most famous exponent of this view is undoubtedly Norman Cousins, the long-time
Saturday Review
editor and legendary peace activist. In the 1970s, Cousins was diagnosed with a painful and life-threatening illness. In his 1979 book
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient,
he described how he stumbled upon a letter that a consulting physician had written to his doctor. After reading the words “I'm afraid we're going to lose Norman,” Cousins figured he had nothing to lose and began to take more control over his own treatment. He began viewing Marx Brothers' movies and
Candid Camera
videos, discovering that “ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect that would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

While continuing to work closely with his physicians, Cousins checked himself out of the hospital and into a nearby hotel, saying it was a place where he could “laugh twice as hard at half the price.” He slowly began to improve—greatly surprising his doctors—and he began to view laughter as sedentary aerobic exercise. All of this was occurring at the height of a worldwide running craze, and Cousins described the medical benefits of humor in a timely metaphor:

 

Laughter is internal jogging.

 

Anatomy of an Illness
became an extremely influential book, stimulating intense interest in the mind–body connection and extensive research on the role of humor in medical treatment. Cousins, with no formal medical training, even went on to become an adjunct professor at UCLA's school of medicine. In 1990, he died at age seventy-five, twenty-one years after the publication of his classic book.

In addition to the medical benefits, wit and humor are also believed to be great philosophical aides in our journey through life. Mark Van Doren wrote:

 

Wit is the only wall
Between us and the dark.

 

According to comic genius Victor Borge, there are also important interpersonal benefits:

 

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

 

And J. B. Priestley even extended the benefits to the larger society:

 

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself—with a smile.

 

On the basis of everything said so far, one might easily conclude that humor is a good thing. And while that is true, it is also true that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. In history's best argument for moderation in the arena of wit, William Hazlitt wrote:

 

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

 

This is a lovely reminder that wit should be dished out in the correct portions. Too little seasoning, and the food is insipid; too much, and it becomes inedible. Noël Coward also employed a culinary metaphor to make the same point:

 

Wit is like caviar—it should be served in small portions,
and not spread about like marmalade.

 

Recalling Mark Twain's earlier remark, it is well accepted that wit can be a weapon, and a dangerous one as well. But when a weapon backfires, it leaves the intended victim unharmed, and it damages—sometimes seriously—the one wielding the weapon. The English writer and historian Geoffrey Bocca described the phenomenon this way:

 

Wit is a treacherous dart.
It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible
to stab oneself in one's own back.

 

History is filled with examples of people whose failed attempts at wit have come back to haunt them. The most dramatic example in recent years was the “nappy-headed hoes” remark that shock jock Don Imus made about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in the spring of 2007. Despite his numerous apologies and his excuse that he was “a good man who had done a bad thing,” Imus was fired by both CBS and MSNBC within a week.

Like Norman Cousins, who preferred the Marx Brothers and
Candid Camera
videos, I also have my favorites when a humor bath is required. I'm especially fond of stand-up comedians, who often build entire portions of their routines around a metaphor and then milk the routine until the laughs stop. A perfect example is this riff from Jerry Seinfeld:

 

Why is commitment such a big problem for a man?
I think that for some reason when a man is driving down
that freeway of love, the woman he's with is like an exit.
But he doesn't want to get off there. He wants to keep driving.
And the woman is like, “Look, gas, food, lodging, that's our exit,
that's everything we need to be happy. Get off here, now!”
But the man is focusing on the sign underneath that says,
“Next exit 27 miles,” and he thinks, “I can make it.”
Sometimes he can, sometimes he can't.
Sometimes, the car ends up on the side of the road,
hood up and smoke pouring out of the engine.
He's sitting on the curb all alone,
“I guess I didn't realize how many miles I was racking up.”

 

One of the great pleasures of life is the unexpected appearance of something genuinely funny or particularly witty. A while back, I got one of
those forwarded e-mails that have become so popular in recent years. I generally delete them almost automatically, but this one was titled “Men are like computers,” so I figured I'd take a look. I'm glad I did, as it went on to read:

In the rest of the chapter, you'll find a wide variety of additional quotations on a wide variety of subjects. As you peruse these many examples of wit and humor, keep in mind the words of Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller: “Laughter is the Vaseline that makes the ideas penetrate better.”

 

I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

A bikini is like a barbed-wire fence.
It protects the property without disturbing the view.

JOEY ADAMS

Aaron Levenstein, longtime professor at Baruch College, is also well known for a bikini metaphor: “Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”

 

I don't like nature. It's big plants eating little plants,
small fish being eaten by big fish, big animals eating each other.
It's like an enormous restaurant.

WOODY ALLEN

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title—
expensive to support, hard to understand,
and therefore a supreme social challenge.

CLEVELAND AMORY

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

W. H. AUDEN

Auden had a heavily wrinkled face that he accepted with good humor. But it was the subject of many fascinating observations by others. Lord David Cecil said of Auden's face, “Were a fly to attempt to walk across it, it would break its leg.” And after the artist David Hockney did a drawing of Auden, he said, “I kept thinking, if his face was that wrinkled, what did his balls look like?”

 

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

RUSSELL BAKER

Personification
, a type of metaphorical thinking, attributes human quali
ties—like hatred or revenge—to animals, plants, ideas and concepts, and even inanimate objects. It's an integral part of humor, as Baker demonstrates in this quip about man versus machine.

 

Dogs need to sniff the ground;
It's how they keep abreast of current events.
The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds
of late-breaking news items, which, if they are especially urgent,
are often continued in the next yard.

DAVE BARRY

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.

JAMES BEARD

MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken.

LEWIS BLACK

Reading someone else's newspaper
is like sleeping with someone else's wife.