It’s been said that when truth comes down from the mountain and enters the marketplace, it often wears a mask. Some say that it’s out of modesty, but it’s really to protect people from its delusion-destroying power. After all, no one can gaze directly at the truth and survive.

The truth often wears the antic mask of a clown, trickster, or joke-telling comedian. It’s an ingenious disguise, for few suspect that even the silliest of jokes can plumb the depths of human existence and offer precious gems of insight.

When we laugh, it’s because we intuit such profundities, but cannot consciously articulate what we are perceiving. It’s just as well, for if we really saw to the depths of the cosmic belly laugh, such powerful insights would cause us to plotz. Actually, we sometimes do explode from laughter, but we invariably manage to reconstitute ourselves, like a science fiction super-villain whose pieces strangely reunite, after he has been blown to smithereens.

The joke that follows is a case in point of wisdom arising, like a divine afflatus, from the deepest bowels of human existence. So as not to have this preface become too “long winded,” we shall proceed directly to the joke:

The Dr. Epstein Joke

Dr. Epstein was a renowned physician who earned his undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees in his home town and then left for Manhattan, where he quickly rose to the top of his field.   Soon he was invited to deliver a significant paper, at a conference, coincidentally held in his home town. He walked on stage and placed his papers on the lectern, but they slid off onto the floor. As he bent over to retrieve them, at precisely the wrong instant, he inadvertently farted.

The microphone amplified his mistake resoundingly through the room and reverberated it down the hall! He was quite embarrassed but somehow regained his composure just enough to deliver his paper. He ignored the resounding applause and raced out the stage door, never to be seen in his home town again.

Decades later, when his elderly mother was ill, he returned to visit her. He reserved a hotel room under the name of Levy and arrived under cover of darkness.   The desk clerk asked him, “Is this your first visit to our city, Mr. Levy?”   Dr. Epstein replied, “Well, young man, no, it isn’t. I grew up here and  received my education here, but then I moved away.”   Why haven’t you visited?” asked the desk clerk.   Actually, I did visit once, many years ago, but an embarrassing thing  happened and since then I’ve been too ashamed to return.”

The clerk consoled him. “Sir, while I don’t have your life experience, one thing I have learned is that often what seems embarrassing to me isn’t even remembered by others. I bet that’s true of your incident too.”   Dr. Epstein replied, ” I doubt that’s the case with my incident.”

“Was it a long time ago?”

“Yes, son, many years.”

The clerk asked, “Was it before or after the Epstein Fart?”

(A friend of mine e-mailed me the joke. I’d like to attribute it to somebody, but cannot determine the identity of its author. That is usually the case with jokes.)

Life’s Incongruities

What can we make of the Dr. Epstein’s fart? It’s been observed that humor derives from the perception of incongruity. For example, comedy teams often have motley pairs of clowns, such as Laurel and Hardy, Lucy and Desi, Felix and Oscar (the Odd Couple), and the cast of Seinfeld. We intuit, from such incongruous couplings, that any attempt to bring the world together into a harmonious unity is utterly hopeless. Rather than leading to despair, the perception of such hopelessness comes as a great relief.

Comic incongruity takes many other forms. For example, Henny Youngman said “I miss my wives cooking… as frequently as possible.” That line is funny because Youngman has shifted from feeling of tender affection to the often dyspeptic realities of marriage. The two sides of marriage create an incongruous picture. Another example is a short essay, by Woody Allen, called “If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists.” The image of the painters Van Gogh and Gauguin drilling teeth is quite incongruous. The perception that life contains elements, as disparate as impressionists and dentists, foils our efforts to bring the world together into any sort of intelligible unity. When we realize this, we let go and laugh. In any case, there is not a single joke or comic situation that is not founded on an incongruity.

Anatomy of a Joke

The Dr. Epstein joke points to a fundamental incongruity lying at the core of the human condition. On the one hand, we are beings who can reason, create great works of literature, art, music and philosophy. We are capable of selfless acts of heroism and can dedicate our lives to serving a high ideal. We are capable of communing with the divine, of ascending to great spiritual heights.

But, on the other hand, we are fleshly beings. We eat, sleep and defecate. Furthermore, even the best of us has his faults and foibles. One of the profoundest sources of our limits is in the area of knowledge. Even the most intelligent people are involved, as we all are, in that game of blind-man’s bluff we call life. Indeed, our finitude manifests itself in 1001 ways, not least of which is our mortality. If all that wasn’t sufficient to instill in us a modicum of humility, the Dr. Epstein joke reminds us that we might — at the most inauspicious moment — break wind. As Blaise Pascal felicitously stated it:

“What a chimera man really is! What an extraordinary monster, what a chaos, what a contradictory thing, what a marvelous oddity! Judge of all things. Helpless earth-worm; protector of truth, cesspool of ignorance and error: glory and scum of the universe. Who will untangle this knot?”
(Pensees. (1999). New York: Oxford University Press.)

The unfortunate Dr. Epstein embodies this incongruity. We learn from the joke that he is not just any physician, he is a renowned physician. In that sense, he is a person of importance, one whom people respect and admire. No doubt, he has valiantly devoted his life to fighting disease and coming to the aid of the infirm. Ah, but to the mind of the comedian, that is only half the picture. Something essential has been left out. Our gaze must descend to this renowned individual’s feet of clay. Dr. Epstein might have slipped on a banana peel, got a pie in the face or suffered some other indignity, as is the custom in comedy. Instead, it was an accidental fart that reminds us of the other dimension of his being.

Whether we realize it or not, in laughing at Dr. Epstein, we are really laughing at ourselves. The joke resonates with an essential truth: each of us is, like Dr. Epstein, an incongruous being. For to be human is to be incongruous. We are neither god nor animal, but an mélange of both! That is, as Pascal pointed out, the odd thing about us.

Suffering from inner-conflict, we spend our days seeking to reconcile disparate interests. For example, secular ambitions and spiritual longings might be competing for our attention. Or we struggle to reconcile our desire for security with our lust for adventure. We might feel lonely and seek the company of other people, but also seek to free of them. We seek balances of all sorts, but such balances are fragile, for they are founded upon irresolvable contradictions.

The moment that proceeds laughter is when we perceive the hopelessness of resolving the many incongruities that constitute our life. Rather than despairing, we feel liberated, for there is a great relief in realizing that a puzzle cannot be solved and thus abandoning a futile effort.

The Fruits of Youthful Dreams

The Dr. Epstein joke reveals yet another incongruity. Kierkegaard, writing ironically about how adulthood realizes the dreams of youth, pointed out that in Jonathan Swift’ youth he idealistically dreamed of building an asylum to care for the insane. He got to have it built. But, going mad himself, Swift became an inhabitant of that very asylum. The Epstein joke reveals another dark irony involving aspirations. We can imagine Dr. Epstein as a young man, setting off for college, hoping that one day he would become his hometown’s favorite son. Instead, he has become eternally memorialized, not for his medical achievements, but for his fart.

Dr. Epstein’s unhappy fate symbolizes the contradiction at the heart of all human striving: we wish to gain the world’s acclaim, but, as the poem by John Burns states, “the best laid plans, of mice and men, often go astray.” The joke also suggests that the world is inhabited by idiots, indifferent to true achievement. Indeed, the world is resentful of excellence and seeks to embarrass anyone accomplishing anything of merit. Dr. Epstein’s fate expresses the galling incongruity here between youthful dreams and adult realities.

We laugh because we, too, wish to become a success and are anxious about whether or not our efforts will bear fruit. Worldly success is predicated, though, on the opinions of other people. Alas, their opinions are often foolish and always fickle. We laugh at the hapless Dr. Epstein for we intuit the ultimate hollowness of fame. We are really laughing at ourselves, in that regard. At such moments of lucidity, we are liberated from the tiring effort to have people think well of us.

Why, then, Do We Laugh?

The despairing existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, said that to be a human being is to be involved with a futile project. We are, after all, finite beings longing to be infinite, mortal being longing to be gods. Contradictions of this sort are not resolvable. It would seem, then, that we are doomed to a life of frustrated aspirations and misery. It all seems rather tragic. How is it, then, that we able to laugh our plight?

The moment that proceeds laughter is a moment of…

Would you like to read the rest of this insightful

essay? Then download a copy of of Mysteries in

Broad Daylight!

Hot off the virtual presses, after four years of intense research and writing! Dr. Mark Dillof has essentially written a detective manual, for those seeking clues to the most perplexing enigmas of everyday life. He initially planned to sell it at seminars, for $75, but a friend recommended making it available to a much larger audience of readers, by offering it as an e-book, for only $9.95. Read more about this amazing new book, at: www.deepestmysteries.com

Or you can…

Download for Amazon Kindle

Download for Barnes & Noble Nook

Mysteries in Broad Daylight contains:

Powerful essays — like the one you’ve been reading, designed to help you decipher the meaning of everyday life, who you are and what it’s all about.
Exciting dialogues — they will entertain you, but also make you think deeply about life.
Exercises and questions designed to teach you the art of uncovering the deep meaning of everything — from the foods we eat to our conflicts at the workplace, from our problems on the golf course to life’s ultimate riddles.
And much, much more!

Mark Dillof’s new book will awaken you to the mysteries of everyday life. Indeed, it’s likely to expand your consciousness 100fold, illuminate your world and blow your mind!

How much is a life-changing insight worth to you? $1000? $10,000? Priceless? Mysteries in Broad Daylight is overflowing with life-changing insights and all for only $9.99!

Read more about this amazing new book at www.deepestmysteries.com

Mysteries in Broad Daylight will soon be available in paperback, for $19.99.

If self-knowledge were an easy thing, Socrates would not have spent his entire life pursuing it. And yet, most people believe that they know themselves and understand their motives. While it is true, as people say, that we need a lot more transparency in government, few people are even transparent to themselves. Rather than being rational and self-determined, they are driven like a log in a sea of emotional longings, symbolic interests, dogmatic beliefs and vague ideas. To hide from the unsettling suspicion that they are not the autonomous beings that they imagine themselves to be, they fabricate various explanations and justifications for their actions.

For example, were you to ask the average golfer why he spends time hitting a little ball, with a stick, into a whole, he might explain that it’s good exercise or that it’s relaxing or that it provides a chance to socialize with his buddies. Those might certainly may be his ostensible motives. The truth of the matter is that 99.9% of golfers are completely unaware of their real attraction for the game. (For an insightful analysis, read: “Golf in the Kingdom,” by Michael Murphy — Penguin Books, 1972.)

Friedrich Nietzsche offers a much darker example of the effort to mask hidden motives. He discusses a murderer who also steals, simply to have a rational motive to offer to himself and to other people, for why he murders. After all, murder for murder’s sake is beyond the pale of reason and sanity. But murdering, as part of a theft, seems to make some sense. I.E., it involves the profit motive. Perhaps, Nietzsche had in mind Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, from his novel “Crime and Punishment.”

In any case, we often construct a motive for ourselves, when we do not really know our real motives or our real motives appear too dark or too insane to be acceptable. Some years ago, a comedian captured the often absurd claim that we are the willful source of our actions. Upon tripping on the floor and landing flat on his back, he exclaimed: “I meant to do that!”

The Balloon Hoax

This brings us to a recent news story about six-year-old Falcon Heene, the balloon boy, of Fort Collins Colorado. Falcon had supposedly accidentally gone up in his father Richard Heene’s balloon/basket. For hours America and the world was transfixed as police helicopters sought to rescue the boy, as he supposedly traveled across Colorado. When the balloon finally landed, everyone was surprised to discover that Falcon was not in the basket tied to the balloon. They then learned that he was hiding in the attic of his parent’s house. There was a collective sigh of relief.

Ah, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The police soon deduced that the father, Richard Heene, a reality TV star, had created this whole drama. His motive? He was hoping that the publicity would allow him to launch a reality TV show, about his family.

What sort of person is Richard Heene? A narcissist? A sociopath? He would appear to be a bit of both. After all, for the sake of his acting career, he caused police, emergency squads, and military personnel to devote a great deal of time and money to what was a mere fabrication. Ultimately, the taxpayers would have had to foot the bill. Furthermore, for the sake of his career, he involves the other members of his family in a falsehood to the authorities. What sort of father raises his children to believe that marketing oneself is all important, that it trumps honesty and concern for the common weal?

As is often the case with narcissistic sociopaths, Mr. Heene didn’t expect to get caught in his lies, and when he did, he simply denied it. Furthermore, this effort to bend reality is really a sign of the times. Daniel Henninger, in an article, from the Wall Street Journal, entitled “We Are All Balloon Boys Now,” contends that the incident is a sign of our times. Fakery is everywhere, particularly in politics, but American citizens are finally catching on.

We began by stating that people are often driven by longings of which they themselves are unaware. There’s no denying that Richard Heene desperately craves fame, and that he would sell his soul to the devil if he could star in his own reality TV show, for that would confirm that everything really was about him. That might appear to be a sufficient motive to explain his boy-in-the-balloon charade. All the same, the narrative that Mr. Heene created is worth examining, as one would examine any story, myth, or fairy tale. For there is, as we shall see, a mythic truth underlying his fabrication.

Icarus 2009

What, then, can we say about Richard Heene’s tale of a young boy adrift in a balloon, at the mercy of the winds? The boy in the balloon story represents Richard Heene’s own childish self, which has lost all connection to concrete reality. I.E., Richard is as self-inflated as a helium balloon, floating through life, with his head in the clouds, adrift from reality.

Thus, the inner drama was not really about his actual son, Falcon. In the mind of Richard Heene, his balloon boy story was, symbolically, about whether or not he, Richard Heene, would land safely or, like Icarus, go crashing down to earth. To land safely would have meant no longer being self-inflated, but developing into a “down-to-earth” adult.

Alas, the protagonists of such self-created Icarus dramas inevitably end up crashing. Rock stars do it through deadly drug abuse. Financiers, like Barnard Madoff, do it by overextending themselves and then going bankrupt. Richard Heene’s way of crashing was not nearly so disastrous. He might serve time in jail and his wife might too, for he dragged her in as an accomplice. He will also have to pay back the money that the police, the military, and other search crews spent on this wild-goose-chase. Certainly, the general public views him with a good deal of contempt, as the vile and reprehensible publicity-whore that he is. In Icarus dramas of this sort, the protagonist arranges his own punishment and this is no exception.

In any case, Richard Heene has, indeed, been motivated to get his own reality TV show, but underlying that desire has been an unconscious wish to stage, for the world to see, his descent to earth from the heavens of vainglorious dreams. The world now sees that he has come down to earth, but ironically not as he intended. Mr. Heene didn’t intend to crash land in jail.

The Icarus myth might also offer us a clue as to the public’s fascination with this story. It is not just with little Falcon and his dysfunctional family. It’s really been about what will happen when, symbolically speaking, the bubble of delusion begins to deflate. Will we gently glide to earth? Or will we come crashing down? Some, who have witnessed the balloon-boy drama, have pictured themselves adrift — in a symbolic sense — in that high-flying balloon/basket. They are concerned that their dreams will burst like a bubble and that they will come crashing down one day. For others, the balloon story has evoked a disturbing image of America dangerously adrift. In regard to the latter, the crash will come both economically and politically. It’s only a question of how disastrous it will be.

October 2009

The Deeper Meaning of Dr. Epstein’s Fart

The Dr. Epstein Joke

Life’s Incongruities

Anatomy of a Joke

The Fruits of Youthful Dreams

Why, then, Do We Laugh?

Would you like to read the rest of this insightful

essay? Then download a copy of of Mysteries in

Broad Daylight!

Broad Daylight!

Mysteries in Broad Daylight contains:

The Hidden Motives Behind the Balloon Boy Hoax

The Balloon Hoax

Icarus 2009