The Weekly Screed (#707)

I was Charlie
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Considering the travesty at Charlie Hebdo this month, you might think that the worst thing that could happen to a satirist is writing (or drawing) stuff that gets him killed. This ain’t necessarily so.

Whether they’re going for laughs or not, lots of people get killed for writing stuff. Thomas More, decapitated in London. Madame Roland, guillotined in Paris. Fritz Gerlich, executed at Dachau. Daniel Pearl murdered in Pakistan. James Foley and Steven Sotloff, beheaded on YouTube. Dozens of rank-and-file journalists bite the dust every year just for filing straight, factual, unfunny news copy.

For a satirist, the real crusher isn’t death. It’s when people just don’t get it.

The irony of Charlie Hebdo is that the editors and cartoonists got killed because their murderers actually got the joke, and didn’t like it. Charlie Hebdo’s satire was so obvious that even a literal thinker could follow along.

I know the feeling. I wrote my first spoof in fourth grade, about my teacher, Mrs. Ducklow. I handed it in proudly, certain that she’d be dazzled by my suavity and rapier wit. So, when Mrs. Ducklow hied me grimly into the hall, I had no idea what was up. Father Mulligan — the jolliest Irishman in town — was waiting there, doing his best to look stern. The two grownups loomed over me. They explained that making light of established authority was “disrespectful.” Worse, when attempted by a parochial-school popinjay like me, satire was an actual sin.

Luckily for me, I knew my catechism. It didn’t contain one word about satire. Humor might piss off Jesus, but it requires no Act of Contrition.

After I had recovered from the inquisition in the hallway, I grasped vaguely that my mistake was not that I had mocked authority but that I had mocked it weakly. Through trial and error, I gradually learned that satire is a cruelly difficult discipline. It has to work on two, or three different levels. It should make some people laugh out loud, while others knit their brows in puzzlement, and everybody else? Well, they didn’t even realize they were in the presence of a gag.

My first successful adventure in satire was nothing I wrote. It was more like a stroke of guerrilla theater, from out of the blue. One summer, my sister Peg and I were evacuated to a 4-H summer camp near Wisconsin Dells. The camp featured thrills like canoeing, near-drowning, hiking, lanyard-braiding, saluting the flag at dawn, mosquitoes, horseflies and three-hole outhouses. I actually don’t recall any of that “fun,” because I went astray on the first day and lost track of the agenda.

It all started when the counselers handed everyone a rawhide necklace attached to a blank wooden square. They told us all to etch our first name onto this plaque — which we were supposed to wear at all times. If we did, the counselors lied, we’d all get to know each other and make lifelong friends.

Back at St. Mary’s School, my name hadn’t made me many friends. Everyone knew it but mostly they called me other — less friendly — names. “Shitass” and “peckerface” were both popular. This history left me a little jaded about the value of first-name promiscuity.

As I gazed at my empty nametag, I found myself toying with a deviant notion. I had stumbled into a sort of identity void where nobody but Peg (whose cabin was on the other side of camp) knew me. I was nobody. I could be anybody.

So, when I put “Charlie” on my name tag, no one challenged it. There was no one who knew otherwise. I became Charlie. Charlie became me.

And Charlie turned out to be a whole different kid. At St. Mary’s, I was meek, mild, outcast and downtrodden. Charlie, on the other hand, was this brazen, outgoing. mischievous hepcat and — here’s the weird part — he was musical.

OK, I can’t sing. Never could, never will. I’m like Theodore Roethke’s serpent. But Charlie? He knew a lot of dumb, mildly vulgar kid songs. By slightly re-writing the lyrics and inserting the names of fellow campers, he tapped a demand I couldn’t understand. He was making fun of kids — and myself (Charlie couldn’t sing, either) — and they loved it. By Day 2, Charlie was not only rendering snatches of off-key doggerel for anyone who requested a tune, he was getting paid for it. In nickels, dimes and quarters, Charlie was making more money in an hour than I made in a half-day of mowing Grandpa Schaller’s endless lawn.

On the third day, Peg realized that this idiot minstrel everyone was giggling about was her brother. She accosted me and insisted that I desist being Charlie, lest she die of embarrassment. I told her, hey, we’re all strangers here. And Charlie has no sister! Peg was safe if she just avoided me. At this, she got a little angrier, told me I was ruining 4-H Camp for her and stomped off in a huff. She didn’t get it.

I had achieved satire.

Here I was ridiculing people and getting paid for it. I was making a mockery of woodcraft and leatherwork and all that other campy crap. Even worse, I was lampooning the sacred concept of friendship through nametags.

I did make friends, but these were mainly the kids who got the gag. They liked both of us, me and Charlie. Better yet, I made no enemies — except for Peg,

Of course, my truce with literal thinkers didn’t last. I read Twain. I read Swift and moved on to Mencken. My loyalties shifted from Superman and Scrooge McDuck to Groucho Marx and Alfred E. Newman. I began to dip my pen in acid. Enemies materialized. By high school, I was getting into lots bigger trouble than I ever would have imagined that day in the hallway with Father Mulligan.

Nor would I have expected a massacre in Paris 55 years later to remind me of those days at the Dells when I whimsically morphed into a jester named Charlie. But, as the late, lamented jesters of Hebdo so terribly demonstrated on the 7th of January, once you’ve etched “Charlie” onto your nametag, there’s no turning back.

You’re Roethke’s serpent and you’ve got sing, “… like Anything!”