OBSCENITY OF THE DAY

A joke two ways.

Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

I am new to Substack, but already feel at home. I can publish what I want, when I want, and communicate directly with you, my readers.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; Politics midweek, Culture or Bonus Obscenities on the weekend.

Below, a small essay about two version of the same joke.

Sometimes a key conceptual difference is best explained by two different versions of the same joke. I knew for years a classic vulgar joke about an American who seduces a Japanese lady during a business trip to Tokyo; they end up in bed, and during their passionate love-making, the woman repeatedly shouts two words in Japanese that the American doesn’t understand but presumes they express her full pleasure. The next day he goes to play golf with his business partners and after he hits the ball, his partners shout the same words as the lady the previous night. Perplexed, he asks them what these words mean, and they explain it to him: “Wrong hole!”

Recently I was told another version: after he hits the ball on the golf course, all his partners applaud passionately because he put the ball into a hole with the first strike. He wants to join their celebration and repeats loudly the two words he heard during the love-making, presuming they express pleasure and satisfaction, but his partners’ faces consternate in surprise. He asks one of them what was wrong, and gets the answer: “Are you making fun of us? Why are you shouting ‘Wrong hole!’ when you put the ball into the right hole?” The vulgarity of the joke notwithstanding, the difference between its two versions is worth a closer look. In both cases, the first act is a double failure: not only with regard to what went on (he penetrates the wrong hole of the lady) but also a misunderstanding (the American misreads the woman’s cries as praise); the misunderstanding is clarified in the second act, but in the opposite direction. In the first version, the American’s golf partners repeat the same words because, as with the Japanese lady, he missed the proper hole; in the second version, he himself repeats the two words he doesn’t understand because this time he did hit the right hole, and he thinks he is joining the celebration of his success. You do the wrong thing (miss the proper hole), and the words are used (by the partners) in its right meaning; you do the right thing (ball in the hole), and you use the words in the wrong meaning.

As in hardcore movies, the penetrated woman is presumed to enjoy it ecstatically even if the male partner put it into a wrong hole – and in some sense, since “there is no sexual relationship,” sexual encounter is always a failed one, the hole is always a wrong one, the man misreads his act as a triumph. If the man repeats the act of filling a hole in a non-sexual context (like playing golf), there are two options. If you miss the hole again, the big Other (embodied here in your partners on the golf course) will repeat the women’s words, and you will finally get the message that your “triumph” was a painful fiasco. If you hit the right hole, you appear an even greater idiot because, unknowingly, you declare it a failure, and the big Other is offended…The key feature here is that this joke works only when the first act is sexual and the second is asexual (playing golf). Let’s try to reimagine it in the opposite order: I play golf with my partners, I miss the hole and I hear them shouting two words that I don’t understand; the same evening, I make love with a Japanese woman and hear her shouting the same two words which I don’t understand, so I ask her what they mean… but wouldn’t it be more logical to ask already my partners on the golf course than to raise the question in the middle of (what was for me at least) a passionate intercourse?

So the joke works because (due to a vulgar association of the two holes to be filled in) in sex the hole is always in some way missed and the communication misunderstood, while in asexual life (overdetermined by sexual innuendos) I may hit the right hole or not, but the misunderstanding persists. We can speculate that this is the general structure of our lives as sexed beings: sex remains a mess, and the only way to introduce a little bit of order into this mess is through engaging in non-sexual activities which, although they remain overshadowed by sex, allow us to escape the vortex of sex. My reading is thus that the second version of the joke is the right one: I hit the right hole, but my mistake (shouting “Wrong hole!”) is also right at the level of sexuality because there is no sexual relationship - I am right without knowing it, of course, and the big Other which corrects my misunderstanding is wrong.