Have you heard this story? Well, it seems that Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton expired on the same day and the trio appeared at the Pearly Gates. There sat St. Peter at a desk with a large book on it.
“Al,” St. Peter said, “what have you learned from your life on earth?”
“I learned,” Gore said, “that I won an election and lost it, but instead of being consumed by bitterness, I devoted my life to the health of the planet for the sake of my children and grandchildren and down the line.”
Peter considered for a moment and then said, “All right, Al. You can come on in,” and the doors swung open.
Peter turned to Bill Clinton and asked the same question.
“St. Peter, I learned profound lessons,” he said. “I learned that succumbing to my instincts, particularly the baser ones, hurt those I loved and those who placed their trust in me. I learned it was better to focus on others’ needs than my own.”
Peter considered for a moment and then said. “Bill, please enter.”
“And now, Hillary,” St. Peter said, “what have you learned?”
“You’re in my chair,” she said.
I laughed when I first heard this. And when I tell it, others do too.
If, as the saying goes, laughter is the best medicine, then the news businesses need a hefty dose of humor.
We need more jokes in these anxious and often joyless times, as newsrooms are shadowed by layoffs, buyouts, sliding circulation and ad revenues and desperate attempts to snare a younger generation and find a profitable path for journalism on the World Wide Web.
“Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to bear,” Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, writes in “The Wisdom of the Ego.”
The Joke as Story
Therapy aside, jokes also contain important lessons about storytelling, a craft I believe remains one of journalism’s great hopes.
Jokes compact the elements of storytelling into bite-sized mini-narratives. They are not just funny. For writers and editors, they are models that can help teach storytelling.
Consider this comparison between a comedian and a reporter, one drawn by Adina Gewirtz when she was a journalism graduate student at the University of Maryland.
Here’s a joke, as a storyteller might tell it:
The doctor at the Army base had a young corporal as his assistant to keep track of the paperwork. The young man was curious about the doctor’s affairs. He was always asking questions and one morning said, “In civilian life were many of your cases accidents?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor replied.
“How come you don’t know?” the corporal asked.
“Soldier,” the doctor said. “I was an obstetrician.”
And here’s how a journalist might tell it:
An Army doctor informed his young assistant that he did not know whether his cases in civilian life had been accidents because he had been an obstetrician, police said yesterday.
“The Comedy of Life,” an essay by The Oregonian‘s top narrative editor, Jack Hart, introduces Gewirtz’s two approaches and does a side-by-side comparison. (For more insights about good writing from a man who has edited several Pulitzer-winning stories, see Hart’s “A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to Words That Work,” which does one of the best jobs of demystifying the writing process I’ve seen.)
Storyteller versus Journalist
One’s funny. One isn’t.
The information is the same. The only real difference is the form.
One is a story. The second is a summary.
Storytellers prepare the reader. Main characters and setting are established. The doctor at the Army base had a young corporal as his assistant to keep track of the paperwork.
Storytellers provide background. The young man was curious about the doctor’s affairs. He was always asking questions.
Storytellers rely on scenes (an action or series of interconnected actions taking place in a single setting in a finite period of time). And one morning, the corporal said, “In civilian life were many of your cases accidents?” “I don’t know,” the doctor replied.
The storyteller creates suspense, engaging the reader by using conflict that pits characters against one another. “How come you don’t know?” the corporal asked.
The storyteller builds to a climax and clear resolution, the literary equivalent of a joke’s punchline. “Soldier,” the doctor said. “I was an obstetrician.”
The same exercise could be applied to the joke that launched this piece.
But do we really want to replace, “You’re in my chair,” with a journalistic version?
Appearing at the pearly gates today, Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton informed St. Peter that he was ‘in her chair,’ according to a heavenly source, who spoke on anonymity because he feared a hellish retribution.
In “Team of Rivals,” a study of Abraham Lincoln and the three political opponents who became stalwarts of his Presidency, Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses on the vital role humor and storytelling played in Lincoln’s melancholy personality.
“He laughed,” Kearns Goodwin writes, “so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the ‘joyous, universal evergreen of life.’ His stories were intended ‘to whistle off sadness.’ “
Lincoln understood, Kearns Goodwin writes, what modern psychiatrists have come to believe about humor, that it is “probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting” to sadness.
“Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” she quotes from Harvard psychiatrist Vaillant’s book. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
All we need are a few good jokes.
Step right up and show us what you’ve got.
