As I mentioned before, my favorite painting is one that hangs in our living room directly over the etagere that I bought in Toronto 36 years ago. That etagere is home to all the most interesting and emblematic curios and artifacts that I and we have collected over the last seventy years. To be fair, some of them were really collected by my mother during her travels across Latin America as well, but they have been with me as favorites for well over fifty years at this point. They range from pre-Colombian pumice antiquities to Inuit soapstone statues, a woven ratan box with a medicinal kit from an Orinoco tribe, and a set of brass conquistador slipper stirrups that were part of Cortez’s entourage assembly. Everything on that etagere is unique and that’s why my favorite painting hangs above it. That painting is by the Argentine artist, Rikelme, and it’s called “Solo en la Immensidad” (Alone in the Vastness). It is a pointilistic oil painting of a lone tree on the pampas of Patagonia and for various reasons, it has always spoken to me. I understand that the sentiment of being alone in the world is a very mixed message that sounds both somewhat depressing and yet somewhat narcissistic, but it really isn’t if you think about it in the right way. The painting depicts a lone tree on the pampas and while some may see loneliness, there is also the music of great strength. That’s the strength to provide its own ecosystem. I imagine that tree as giving shade to man and animals in the noonday sun. I see it as being a habitat for birds and small animals on whom insects and all manner of microbes depend and that then give nourishment and sustenance to the tree and the grasslands that surround it. If you think more expansively than just the lone tree on the otherwise barren plain, there is so more to appreciate about that tree.
I write quite regularly about my lovely wife, Kim, not to curry favor with her or to impress others with my magnanimous and courtly ways, but to express a deep-seated feeling I have about her and our life together. Why is it that marriage is such a rich territory in modern life for jokes and denigration? This is a genuinely interesting cultural and psychological question. The humor around marriage is one of the oldest and most persistent comic traditions in Western culture. It appears in ancient Rome, in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, in music hall comedy, and runs unbroken to the present day. That persistence suggests it is tapping into something real and deep. The most fundamental engine of comedy is the gap between expectation and reality. Marriage is one of the most expectation-laden institutions in human life. It is entered into, at least in the modern romantic era, with extraordinary hopes of lifelong companionship, romantic fulfillment, deep mutual understanding, shared purpose, sexual satisfaction, and emotional security. The lived reality of any long-term domestic partnership inevitably involves snoring, financial stress, farting under the covers, different thermostat preferences, accumulated grievances, the negotiation of whose family to visit at holidays, and the quiet erosion of mystery that comes from sharing a bathroom with someone for twenty, thirty, forty and fifty years. That gap between the wedding day and the Tuesday morning fifteen years later is genuinely comic in structure. The joke writes itself because the setup, all that romantic expectation, is so extravagant and the punchline (ordinary human friction) is so universal.
Freud’s theory of humor holds that jokes are a socially acceptable channel for aggression and hostility that cannot be expressed directly. Marriage jokes function as exactly this kind of safety valve. Spouses accumulate genuine frustrations with each other… irritations, disappointments, unmet needs, power struggles that cannot be expressed directly without serious relational consequences. Joking about the nagging wife or the checked-out husband or the sexless marriage allows the expression of real tension in a form that is deniable. It’s just a joke is the universal escape hatch. The joke allows the speaker to say something true that they cannot say straight and allows the audience, who recognizes the truth, to laugh in relieved recognition rather than uncomfortable acknowledgment. A striking proportion of traditional marriage humor uses the language of captivity, imprisonment, and loss of freedom. Ball and chain. Trapped. The old ball-and-chain. Before I die — I mean, before I got married. This reflects something real about the psychological experience of permanent commitment. The moment of marriage is simultaneously the moment of closing off alternatives… other partners, other lives, other possible selves. Even in a genuinely happy marriage, the foreclosing of optionality is a real psychological event. Humans are loss-averse. We grieve roads not taken even when we are happy on the road we chose. The captivity joke is a way of acknowledging this loss while remaining within the marriage. It says: I notice what I gave up, I am aware of the constraint, but I am still here. The joke is a small act of psychological sovereignty within a committed relationship. I particularly like what my partner Bruce said at one of his milestone anniversary parties (25th as I recall)….he toasted to the crowd, “to fifteen of the best years of my life….”
Traditional marriage humor is heavily gendered in ways that reflect historical power structures. The henpecked husband joke, the dominant form of marriage humor for much of the 20th century, depicts a man controlled, criticized, and domestically imprisoned by his wife. This was funny partly because it inverted the actual power structure. In a society where men legally and economically dominated marriage for many years, the fantasy of female domestic dominance was safely comic precisely because it was counterfactual in the ways that mattered most. The shrewish wife joke operates similarly, the nagging, critical, sexually withholding wife is a comic figure whose humor depends on the audience recognizing a type. The ball-and-chain joke directed at the husband-to-be is a ritual of masculine solidarity — other men acknowledging that he is about to cross a threshold from which there is no return, framing marriage as a loss of masculine freedom and fellowship. These gendered forms of marriage humor are now considerably less dominant as gender roles have shifted. They feel dated in a way they did not in 1965, but they persist because the underlying dynamics they reference have not entirely disappeared.
Marriage humor is among the most universally shared of human experiences. Virtually every adult in most cultures either is married, has been married, grew up in a household with a marriage, or has observed marriages closely. This universality creates a shared reference point that almost no other institution provides. When a comedian makes a marriage joke, they are addressing a room where the overwhelming majority of people have direct personal experience with the material. That shared reference creates the recognition, the “yes, exactly” response that makes comedy land. The laugh is partly at the joke and partly at the relief of hearing a private experience made public and named. Take my wife….please! And who doesn’t appreciate a good mother-in-law joke?
Marriage humor might have been expected to fade as marriages became more egalitarian, divorce became more accessible, and alternative relationship structures became more accepted. It has not faded, it has adapted. Modern marriage humor tends to be more symmetric with both spouses being the butt of the jokes rather than just one, and more focused on the universal frictions of cohabitation and shared life than on gendered power dynamics. But the fundamental comic territory remains the same: the gap between romantic expectation and domestic reality, the loss of freedom, the comedy of complete intimacy, and the relief of naming privately experienced friction in public. As long as humans form permanent pair bonds with extravagant expectations, marriage will be funny. Not because marriage is bad, but because the aspiration is so high and the material so human.
And then there is my marriage to Kim. There is very little comedy there because the gap between expectations and reality is meaningful, but the opposite of the gap that drives comedy. It’s so much better than I ever expected. So, in the next few months Kim and I are taking three breaks away from each other. I am on a five day motorcycle ride without her while she rehearses her show. I am on a trip east to see my oldest son and go to my 50th business school reunion, while she is putting on her show. And she is going to her 50th high school reunion in Wabash to put on another show while I am entertaining my granddaughters here on the hilltop. So, I will be flying solo, solo en el immensidad, and I am none too happy about it…after all, the show must go on…no joke.