Aristocrats

The Aristocrats (Movie Review)

By John Taylor; 2007 June 14

Few were in a better position to appreciate the Master than Juliet Thompson, who, aside from being an enthusiastic Baha'i was also a fairly prominent portrait painter at the time. Here is the advice He gave her, as recorded in her diary:

"Now I want to give you some instructions. The time you devote to your art is your own; you are free to use it as you wish. But when you enter the meetings, I want you to concentrate upon spiritual things. Read the prayers, the Tablets, sing hymns, give the proofs. I want you to give strong, logical proofs. ... Never let anyone speak of another unkindly in your presence. Should anyone do so, stop them. Tell them it is against the commands of Baha'u'llah; that He has commanded: 'Love one another.' Never speak an unkind word, yourself, against anyone. If you see something wrong, let your silence be your only comment. ... Be firm and steadfast. Do not waste your time with light people."

Here is a phrase, paradoxical as it may be, that we could well make into a catch phrase, "let your silence be your only comment." Also "light people," and avoiding them, is a kicker. I guess light people are easily blown around by the winds of gossip, and no matter what you do if you spend time with them, you are going to be sucked into the gossip mill too.

Anyway, in a lighter moment lately I rented the DVD "The Aristocrats," which is entirely devoted to an in-joke used and abused for decades among professional comedians. Time was, a comedian had to watch what he or she said, less so now, of course. Anyway, when relaxing off-stage they would often let off steam from all that self-censorship and tell this joke, designed as it is to cross every known barrier, cross every line imaginable. Every comedian puts his own special imprimatur on this joke. It is about a talent agent who is introduced to this family act. They bring everything into their act, violence, cannibalism, pornography, incest, scatology, bestiality, you name it, all designed to break to pieces every known social stricture. The only common feature is the punch line. After hearing it all, the talent agent says (inexplicably). "That is terrible. What do you call yourselves?" Answer: "The Aristocrats." The imagination these artists use in spicing up this joke is amazing. They bring in every imaginable bodily fluid, every obscene act that two or more family members can do to one another, all are fodder. Do not get me wrong, I am not recommending this movie. I would never recommend such a disgusting, repulsive joke to anybody. Anyway, a mime mimes the joke, a magician plays out the entire joke using playing cards, and on and on.

So I would not be me if I did not get into the act too. Tada, inspired by the Baha'i teachings about gossip, here are some Baha'i versions of the joke.

The Baha'i Aristocrats, Version One

A guy goes into a talent agent's office and says, "I have got this wonderful family act. You have got to hear about it." So the agent says, "Okay, tell me the details."
"Silence is my only comment."
"Well, what do you call yourselves?"
"The Baha'i Aristocrats."

Version Two

This guy and his family burst into the agent's living room at home and he says, "Have I got the family act for you!" Then, before the agent can say a word the family get down and dirty right there before him. He has never seen anything like it in his life. Every horrible offense against nature, every bodily fluid, puss, excrement, vomit, burst out from them; it fills the living room and explodes the house into fragments. That was when they started to really get disgusting. The continent is soon sloshing in this yellowish, putrid liquid when suddenly it begins to collapse in on itself and nuclear fission is achieved. The earth explodes into smithereens and the two fellows find themselves plummeting through space at near light speed. The talent agent turns to the guy and says,
"Very impressive, but I was wondering one thing. What do you call yourselves?"
"The Covenant-Breaking Aristocrats."

Version Three

This talent agent bursts into the main meeting room of the Universal House of Justice and starts loudly complaining about this Baha'i family act that does nothing but stand up on stage and backbite one another. Every conceivable bit of slander, calumny, badmouthing, gossip, they stop at nothing. They cut each other down verbally until everybody in the audience starts mumbling, "Are these people typical Baha'is? Is that what Baha'is do, or what?" You have got to stop this, the man pleads. The House begins the consultation by asking: "What do they call themselves?" "The Aristocrats," is the man's reply. After much deliberation the House tells him, "You are right. This has to stop. There is no aristocracy in the Baha'i Faith."

The whole idea of the Aristocrat joke is that it feels good once in a while, after disciplining everything we say in restrictive social situations, to just let go and cross every possible line, let loose all inhibitions. Baha'is can do that, in moderation, can't we?

In Mahmud's Diary entry for Thursday, September 26, 1912, he describes how when the Master was about to leave Denver, Colorado, he gave the believers some advice:

"I hope that you will be under the protection of God, will succeed in rendering service to humanity and will always be a source of happiness to every heart. The best person is he who wins all hearts and is not the cause of grief to anyone. The worst of souls is he who causes hearts to be agitated and who becomes the cause of sadness. Always endeavor to make people happy and their hearts joyful so that you may become the cause of guidance to mankind. Proclaim the Word of God and diffuse the divine fragrances."

This advice shows forth another facet of the Aristocrats joke. No matter how offensive the process of telling this joke may be, no matter how disgusting in detail, if a comedian who says it gets a laugh, she is fulfilling the criterion the Master gives here. She is winning hearts, bringing joy to hearts; even if she only gets a smile, she is still making us forget our grief and troubles, if only for a moment.

Now I ask you, is it even possible to do what He says here, to be a "source of happiness to every heart"? Is not that the same as what Paul aimed for, "to be all things to all men?" That means that a spiritual person adapts to the frame of mind of whoever he or she meets, and if that person's frame of mind is permanently "light," or inclined to gossip and abuse, we have no choice but to seek happier climes.

But the funny thing about a joke is that it can easily be taken in the wrong spirit. This is the Murphy theory of humor. If it can offend, it will. If a joke has an ethnic twinge, it can and will offend a person of that ethnicity, if they hear it. Plus, a joke depends completely upon who is telling it. If I am Scottish, I can tell jokes about Scotts that would be offensive if told by a non-Scott. Jokes are perishable, like fruit and veggies. A joke that gets a laugh at one time will fall dead in the water five minutes later. Humor is heavily time and context dependent. If you doubt, try watching an older comedy film, say fifty years old. A drama of that vintage is still just as dramatic but you will find that many, if not most of the jokes are simply incomprehensible today. This is why it is impossible for the likes of me on the Internet to do much humor. The audience is far too varied. I may bring joy to some hearts, but to others my attempts at humor will bring sadness. There is no getting around it.

This is why, and I am speaking here particularly to Anon, the person who objected to a recent essay's aside about a certain scholar, I think we need to be especially indulgent to bloggers. Practice the Alcoholic's Anonymous motto: "Take what you like and leave the rest." The reason alcoholics need to say that so often is that alcohol removes inhibitions and creates an atmosphere of abuse. Boozers, and the families of booze abusers (like mine), get into the habit of never taking things in the spirit in which they are offered. Everything is a challenge, a chip on a shoulder. A Baha'i must therefore make a special effort to do the reverse, to create a loving atmosphere of kindly indulgence.

True, we have to be strong in not permitting one line to be crossed, that is, cruel comments about others, backbiting. These we do not allow to pass in our presence, as the Master advises Juliet Thompson in the first quote. But at the same time we have to avoid "agitating hearts," as He advises in the second quote. This is often impossible to do, in which case we have no choice but avoid those too "light" to be tied down by basic rules.

A Baha'i must offer people, especially other believers, what has been called by literary critics the willing suspension of disbelief. If you do not do that you could never sit down and watch a movie or read a novel. You would say, "This is all lies. It is false." So if you offer that courtesy to a dead DVD or an inanimate book, why is it hard to do it to a living human being endowed with feelings?

You may say, "You have to watch what you say on the Internet. It can come back to you. It may do harm." I am not disagreeing with that. But what saying, said by anyone, cannot come back? What act of any sort cannot do harm? Nothing. No, not even the Revelation of God. (Hence the principle that if religion harms, trash it) We all live in the hope that our good will outweigh the bad we do, and that is especially true of humor. All I am saying is that any joke, taken in the wrong spirit, can be taken in the wrong spirit and made to come back to sender in the wrong way. This includes the Central Figures. Consider this:

"Baha'u'llah often made humorous remarks to Mirza Ja'far and he usually responded wittily. One day He said to him jokingly, 'Jinab-i-Mujtahid (your excellency, the Mujtahid) do you wish me to reveal to you some of your bad qualities?' Mirza Ja'far's prompt reply was, `No thank you.' His response, full of wit and humour, delighted the heart of Baha'u'llah." (Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Baha'u'llah, vol. 4, p. 245)

Actually, with the wit of the staircase, he might have responded, "No, I have found that I do rather too good a job of that myself." But anyway, a literal-minded person, void of affability, might object that Baha'u'llah was proposing to verbally abuse Ja'far. Similarly, such a humorless person might object to the following banter of Shoghi Effendi to his wife, saying, "Hey, I thought Baha'is are not supposed to tell lies!"

"Inside his family, with those he was familiar with, he liked to tease. I was often the victim and knowing that anything he said I was likely to believe he took advantage of this and enjoyed fooling me. For instance, I remember during the war coming into his room and finding him looking very solemn, his eyes round with concern. This alone attracted my attention and I became anxious. He then said something terrible had happened. I, of course, became even more anxious and asked what had happened. With a deeply concerned expression he solemnly informed me Churchill had died. As this was the most dangerous period of the war I became very excited and upset over this news and asked him what would happen to the Allies now, with their great leader dead, etc. etc. Shoghi Effendi stood my distress as long as he could and then burst out laughing! He played such tricks on me very often, as he found me an ideal subject - but gradually my gullibility wore off and after twenty years he said it was getting very difficult to fool me. Sometimes, feebly, I would try to play this game with him, but I could never act it out as well as he could and almost never succeeded in catching him." (Ruhiyyih Khanum, The Priceless Pearl, p. 128)

Let me tell you this, I used to joke around in my family in just this manner, but when I became a Baha'i I started to feel guilty about it. A Baha'i is not supposed to tell an untruth under any circumstances, I told myself, so I had better cut back. Okay, admittedly, I probably took it to an extreme that would have shocked the Guardian. As the ghost of his father told Hamlet,

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine."

So it is probably just as well that I had been under the moderating influence of the Faith for a few years when I came across this passage in Ruhiyyih Khanum's book for the first time. After reading it for the first time I felt a bit less guilty about my practical joking, but fortunately I never brought the level back up to where it had been before.

Anyway, all this is by way of prologue to a continuing problem in our Baha'i family. When the time comes for our prayers and reading before retiring at night, there is always a struggle. Tommy, 7 years old, is especially reluctant, and each, including the better half, have their own way of resisting. Sometimes it is mumbling, sometimes slurring, sometimes fumbling, but there is always a conflict of some kind. To say that we ever attain a prayerful attitude would be, well, it would top the whoppers the Guardian told Ruhiyyih Khanum. If I filmed what goes on and edited it all together I could easily make up a line crossing, barrier breaking family performance that would fit well into anybody's Baha'i Aristocrats joke.

I had tried everything, lecturing, cajoling, severity, tolerance, indulgence, kindness, and nothing had any effect. Finally I had an inspiration. Why not try humor? It hit me that Silvie, who especially loves jokes, would do almost anything to hear a good joke. So I picked up this book that she had borrowed from St. Paul's Anglican Church library, which is located right by the place their piano lessons take place, called "An Encyclopedia of Humor; Thousands of humorous stories, jokes, anecdotes and one-liners, up-to-date and categorized for easy use," by Lowell D. Streiker, and I offered the kids a reward.

For every prayer or reading that you say right, with feeling, I said, I will read one joke out of this book. To my surprise, they took the bait. I read four jokes that night, one for each of their prayers and readings, which were, relatively speaking, perfect. They were delighted with that reward, and now I do that regularly. Not every night do I read four jokes, some only two, some none, but still there is a noticeable improvement.

Their favorite joke from this book, written for a Christian readership, is about some kids who get a hamster called "Danny." They do not clean the cage or feed it, so the mother tells them she is going to give Danny away to another home. They take the loss of their pet with surprising calm, until the mother realizes that they thought she had said "Daddy." Isn't it always the way? The father gets to be the butt of the jokes. Needless to say, I was deeply offended at their uproarious laughter. Then I told the Master's reminiscence of how the prisoners of Akka, after a day of the most horrible suffering and deprivation, would end each day by sitting around and having everybody tell a funny thing that happened to them that day. They would all laugh uproariously, and that release is probably why they survived that horrible life for so long. We tried to do the same, each tell something funny about our day, and that too has helped alleviate our chronic resistance to duty.

What I would like to do is read some Baha'i jokes as a reward and relief at this evening time. I have heard a few Baha'i jokes but not enough to fill a book, especially not one of the girth and weight of this Christian "Encyclopedia of Humor." Such a volume would be nice to have at bedtime. Do any readers know of a good Baha'i joke that they would like to share?