Humor takes many shapes. If it bends, says Woody Allen, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not. We were students enrolled in English Literature. One day a farmer stopped by, soliciting orders for his fine clover honey. Our fellow student Ann ordered a gallon. The man delivered it the next day, in a plastic container. She paid the man and he left. Ann picked up the container. The container slipped out of her hands, fell to the floor, broke open, and soaked the carpet with grade A yellow honey.
You could have heard Ann wail from a block away. “Don’t fret too much about it,” we consoled her. “Let it go. Think Shakespeare: parting is such sweet sorrow.” We did not really laugh at Ann. But inside we all thought it hilariously funny. Now that is schadenfreude, joie mauvaise, there is no English word for the nasty joy of snickering at your neighbor’s more or less harmless mishaps.
It is always fun when such things happen to someone else. But the night I brought the giant pizza home, lifting it out of the car holding the carton with both hands, and the pizza-juice soaked bottom gave way, dropping the precious pie — sausage, anchovies, mushrooms, bacon, olives and all — on the garage floor, that was tragic, not funny. Yet my children found it necessary to roll on the floor laughing.
Just a week ago or so I had a little mishap that laid me open to schadenfreude. I was going to paint a shelf black. I decided to use a spray can, not my familiar brush technique. I shook the can thirty-one times as directed, then aimed at the shelf, I thought, and hit the trigger. A burst of black paint hit my chin and I instantly morphed into a vaudeville blackface. I was alone at the time and thus had to force myself to laugh at myself. Ridi pagliaccio came to mind. But I shouldn’t make light of Leonvavallo’s gripping opera. As Woody Allen would say, it breaks.