Lewd, Crude...and Funny?

Here we go again! Joan Rivers compared her living arrangements with her daughter to the women held captive in a Cleveland basement. Uproar. Apology demanded, but Rivers isn’t caving. “I’m a comedienne,” she says.

This kind of joke should not be a complete surprise to those who know her work. Most of her TV appearances are mild dilutions of her stage shows. The material is pretty crude.

But this is her product. This is what she serves, and with the statement, “I’m a comedieene,” she has hit the ball firmly back to our side of the court. If she were to offer an apology, what would it accomplish? Would it change her shtick?  I think we know the answer.

You place an order in a Chinese restaurant. The waiter may not speak much English, but usually he knows when to say, “Spicy!” So if you order that dish, it’s too late to complain. Maybe you think a restaurant serving that kin d of food should stop serving the dish in question or even go out of business. It won’t, because there are enough people who like “spicy.”

Sometimes, the chef puts too much spice in that dish, even for those of us who may like his cooking. But if we frequent the place, we’ll probably suck it up and return on another day.

In the sport of boxing, the competitors are often warned about low blows, in which punches are thrown to the crotch. Most of the time, it’s an accident, but sometimes, it’s deliberate. In such a case, the referee can deduct a point from the offender’s score, and the victim gets a full five minutes to recover (which victims rarely take). And then the match continues. Those things don’t usually end a boxer’s career.

Many psychologists – and lay people – have tried to analyze humor. We’ve heard “Tragedy plus time equals funny,” or, courtesy of Woody Allen, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.” The shrinks will tell you that surprise is necessary to humor, but the surprise is not complete: there has to be something in our soul that knew the punch line all along; the joke simply brings it to consciousness. If it’s a total surprise, well, it’s not funny, it’s simply shock. But some of us develop a taste for it, or at least expect it.

In Joan’s case, “I’m a comedienne” is an honest response to her critics. In the Chinese restaurant, if Chef Wong overdoes it with the MSG and a diner complains, is he going to change what’s on the menu? Probably not, especially if he knows the tables are still filled each night.

Are we going to deduct a point from Joan and let the match continue? Joan is leaving that decision up to us, which seems entirely appropriate to me.

Approaching the Bench

I had always been able to dodge this bullet. The summons to jury duty would come, and I’d call in to find out if I had to report. For years, I had been able to obtain an excuse, or I simply wasn’t needed, but this time I knew my number was up.

The military draft is a thing of the past, but jury duty, which is one of the last vestiges of an American call to service, is still with us. It has been softened to the point where the least amount of hardship earns you an excuse: pre-paid family plane tickets to a vacation spot are often enough. So the jury pools have to be large in order to allow prosecution and defense in criminal cases, or plaintiff and defendant in civil cases, to seat an acceptable jury.

The selection process is arduous, with the judge and the attorneys for both sides questioning each candidate to determine suitability. Our pool in my part of California included top tech executives and talented medical professionals as well as common laborers and stay-at-home moms.

This “voir dire,” as it is called always turns up the drama in people’s lives. Our case was one involving driving under the influence. A surprising number of people had very strong views on even the least amount of alcohol consumption. A fair number had a child, a sibling or a close friend injured or killed by drunken drivers. Others had family members in law enforcement, which the defense usually hates. Those who had significant prior jury experience are also undesirable to the lawyers, though you would think experience would make “professional jurors” good choices. Each side gets a certain number of peremptory challenges – they can bounce you off the jury for no stated reason. Finally, there are those who have hearing problems, those who can’t understand English, those who insist that they can’t be fair -- and those who are faking these things to get excused. But once I was seated, the lawyers kept me, telling me after the trial that since I am a former journalist, they thought I would be fair. I responded that it’s only because jury duty pays almost as much as journalism (LOL).

How does a DUI case even merit a jury trial to start with? Ours was somewhat complicated. Police officers got a call about a car being improperly parked on a residential street in a local city. The caller suggested that the car might be a traffic obstruction. Responding officers found a young man sitting in the driver’s seat. He was obviously drunk – a later breath test showed his blood-alcohol level to be 0.26 – more than three times the legal limit for driving. He actually admitted to the officer that he had driven there from a party and that he had been in the process of driving home to a nearby city. Apparently, he had decided he couldn’t make it and called his mother to come get him. But the cops arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence.

The legal problem for the prosecution was that nobody actually witnessed this young man driving the car. His admission of having done so wasn’t good enough for conviction. According to the legal instruction given to the jury, there had to be additional pieces of evidence – in this case, circumstantial -- to prove that he had driven the car. The vehicle was badly parked, but not egregiously so. It had front-end damage, but the young man’s mother testified she had driven into a loading-dock railing where she works a week or so earlier (the family couldn’t afford – or didn’t believe in – body work). Their version of events was that the young man had walked to his parked car from the party site – though he couldn’t seem to tell anyone the address of the house where the party had taken place, hosted by his friend Scott.

The legal deck is stacked in the defendant’s favor, perhaps properly so. Juries have to accept an alternate explanation of events, if it’s reasonable. In fact, the defense doesn’t have to put on a case at all. It’s up to the prosecution to prove its own version beyond a reasonable doubt, in a manner which makes alternate explanations implausible.

This jury leaned overwhelmingly toward not guilty. I voted that way reluctantly, believing that the young man had indeed driven the car, but deciding the evidence beyond his admission wasn’t quite there. The prosecutor, a young woman, tried her best to connect the dots – there just weren’t enough dots. The defense attorney, also a young woman, portrayed her client as a kid who had done the right thing. He had decided he was too drunk to drive and called for help.

The final vote was 11 to 1 for not guilty. But a unanimous result is required for a verdict in a criminal matter. One of the women on the panel -- a newly minted graphic designer and mother of three – would not be shaken from her vote for conviction, even when one of the other jurors got particularly hostile toward her during deliberations. Since there was no hope of full agreement, the judge declared a mistrial. He wasn't happy with us.

I too was upset with the “score,” but I reminded myself later that this isn’t a football game or a boxing match. An individual’s livelihood is also at stake. Apparently, the 25-year-old defendant had had a fight with his girlfriend over the mysterious Scott, who hosted the party. The young man was upset about the love triangle and took to drinking vodka. I believe that he got in his car and drove away, but determined that he was so drunk he couldn’t continue, and pulled over on a residential street to call his family. Had a passerby not felt the parked car was a traffic hazard and called the police, the defendant might have slept in his car all night and nobody would have been the wiser.

I felt kind of sorry for him. I think it was actually fortunate that he over-imbibed to the point where his blood-alcohol reading was 0.26 a full five hours after the party Had he consumed just a little less, he might have felt confident enough to continue driving, and possibly cause an accident. Before we judge him too harshly, are there very many of us who drink socially, who have never tried to drive a car when perhaps we shouldn’t have, even only once?

The wheels of justice grind VERY slowly. There is no concession to the dramatic timing we might see in movies or on TV. It’s tedious. Our judge tried to lighten things up with stories about British common law, San Francisco history, college campuses, etc., but his gravelly voice was soporific. The young prosecutor had charts, graphs, exhibits and a PowerPoint presentation, but just couldn’t put her case over the line, and I felt kind of sorry for her, too, it being her first one. I told her I was grateful it wasn’t a double-murder; she would have needed four moving vans to introduce all her stuff. Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, or I would have been slapped with a writ or something. 

The defendant in our case might not have gotten off completely Scott-free, so to speak, as the prosecution can decide to retry, but that seems unlikely here.

Many believe that military service makes a better American citizen. Following my experience, I think jury service, at least once, does the same. Perhaps going against the negative grain left by the O.J. Simpson trial (officially 20 years old this year), I believe that court cases open to the public should be televised or available by live stream. The court system is something about which most of us labor under a woeful level of ignorance.

This is a long read, so if you’ve gotten this far, I thank you for your service, and my gavel is coming down to declare this post closed.

Hard Sell

Today I walked a couple of miles down to the local ice cream/candy shop. Covering the distance isn’t good enough – I always need a pleasurable destination. Anyway, they have a new offering: Chocolate Coma (double Dutch ice ream, fudge, shaved dark chocolate and cocoa nuts). Hang on a minute: Chocolate COMA? Really? Couldn’t they have stopped at paralysis or something?

So you thought you lived in a liberated country that had pulled up its Puritan roots. Think again. Apparently, the association with depravity and hellfire (Decadence or Devil’s Food) isn’t working anymore to discourage us from chocolate. Now it’s severe physical disability or death (yes, I have seen Chocolate Suicide Cake).

But actually, these designations attract us, not scare us away. If it sends us to the hospital, the grave, and maybe eternal damnation, it must be pleasurable, right? Or intended to be. What’s the most common word you find in porn film titles? Do you think maybe it’s “sin," or variations thereof? I am not an expert in this area, of course, but I think it’s a safe bet.

Does pleasure always have to come with a correspondent unpleasant price? You would think so. And the higher the price, it naturally follows that the greater is the pleasure. So we pay the price, even if the experience threatens to leave us comatose. We were raised that way.

You’ve got to give the related industries credit for trying. How many studies have there been telling us that chocolate is good for you, or that you will live longer by drinking more red wine? But are these any match for about 15-plus centuries of Western-culture guilt trips, most of which now seem to be related to food? You be the judge.

At my current consumption rate, I should live for quite a while yet. But I think I know where I’m going in the end. Oops.