[In the following essay, Diot analyzes the role of humor in Jong's writings.]

In How To Save Your Own Life, a character called Kurt Hammer is thus described by the female narrator and heroine Isadora Wing—Jong's alter ego and fantasmatic persona—in the book:

Kurt Hammer has honed his underground reputation on tattered copies of his reputed-to-be pornographic novels, smuggled in through customs in the days where sex was considered unfit for print. Now that sex was everywhere in print, his royalties were fading….

She meets him in LA, she is thirty-three and he is eighty-seven, but still full of pep and punch. Isadora calls him "her literary godfather"—or sugar daddy? Friendship, affection and mutual admiration characterize their relationship: but Fear of Flying is not Tropic of Cancer, How To Save Your Own Life is not Tropic of Capricorn, nor is Parachutes and Kisses The Rosy Crucifixion. And yet, Jong doubtlessly attempted to write a female version of those erotic autobiographies; she tried her hand at what Miller-Hammer calls "the metaphysics of Sex", filled with delirious hysterical humor and satire. She created a woman's fantasmatic journey into sex, a marvelous "whoroscope"—Jong's own coined phrase for this Tropic of Virgo, or is it Virago? She is still an exception in the literary world: in a time of so-called women's liberation, one has still to meet the great figure of literary comedy that might reach the epic, grotesque and homeric heights of Miller's Cosmic Comedy or "cosmodemonic" trip around the tropics of Sexus, Nexus and the like. Jong's trilogy, not counting Fanny, is evidence of her vast talent as a pastiche writer; with Miller-Hammer in her rearview mirror—the rearview mirror of Isadora's Mercedes convertible whose license (so much so …) plate spells QUIM…. The modern broomstick of the contemporary witch/bitch embarking on her journey into the womb and the natural cavities of the female body. Riding her QUIM/QUILL, she performs her outrageous investigations into female sexuality and male idiosyncrasies and shortcomings. Her trilogy is also a marvellous empire on which the pun never sets. But Jong is not Miller. Her immense culture and gift for parody may give the illusion that her sense of comedy, her recreation of the topsy-turvy world appears like a female Rabelaisian carnival of sex and a celebration of the "cheerful body", to use Mikhail Bakhtin's words. Or is she the female schlemiel disguised as the scandalous Jewish Princess of Central Park West and Columbia? Or is she the modern embodiment of some feminine "chutzpah", the impertinent, aggressive and insolent mischievous counterpart of the schlemiel? Or would she be just the modern form of the hysterical nymphomaniac, super-woman of the best-selling type? Fraud or freak?

Jong is not Miller, nor Rabelais, nor Joyce, although she evinces reminiscences from her English lit. courses and can imitate some of the tricks, but not the greatness and vastness of vision of the creator of "chaosmos". Nobody is perfect. My contention is that she is notwithstanding the one female author that comes nearest to being one of those stars of comedy. She fails, partly, but she stands unique in the great jungle of comedy. Why so? The obvious answer is, and the feminists will not deny it—the sociocultural conditions of literary creation. It seems needless to develop this point here, since Mohadev Apte has pointed out the causes and circumstances of this situation in a remarkable chapter of his recent book Humor and Laughter [1985]: sexual inequality in the production of humor is responsible for the rarity of women comedians in literature and elsewhere. However, we are now witnessing a slow but undeniable progress in the liberation of women vis à vis the taboos of our judeo-christian society and its puritanical dictates. So: is it a question of time and patience? Will there eventually be a complete equality of the sexes in front of humor as in the rest of life? Or is it a question of psycho-physiology as some would have it? Should it be that humor, and the sense of it, be located in the left rather than in the right lobe of the brain, if, according to some, women are right-lobe oriented and men left-lobe dominated? This precious racist and sexist theory has its supporters in the scientific circles—vicious circles seems more adequate. An open question which it is not for me to settle at this point. What I am concerned with here is another viewpoint: that of communication. When a woman is gifted with a sense of humor and adds to it the creative talent of the satirist and humorist, like Jong, and when she is sufficiently liberated to practice self-debunking and self-disparaging humor, even sick humor; when she is bold enough to make fun of everything including death, sex, motherhood and the Virgin Mary, sickness and impotence—what next? What responses does she get from 1) her female audience 2) her male audience 3) her androgynous and/or homosexual audience—not to mention dogs and children, academics and literary critics and specialists of Humor International Incorporated. The following quotation, from Tropic of Capricorn will illustrate this point marvellously:

Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt(…). She was always trotting in at meal times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.(…) Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus.(…) She could break down the most "personal" hard-on in the world. Break it down with laughter. There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.(…) The female seldom laughs, but when she does it's volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar.

This direct testimony metaphorically emphasizes the connection between sex and power, humor and impotence. Laughter is incompatible with erotic performances, a well-known physiological phenomenon, which is also attested by some aesthetic theories of modes. But if we go further in the examination of the connection between sex and power, we find that, according to Miller and males in general, humor in a woman creates sexual impotence in her male partner; and this, even when the woman is laughing, not at the man, nor of the man, but just laughing, the male experiences a great deal of tension and of subsequent frustration: he feels humiliated, reduced to the function of object, castrated. Woman is the castrating bitch again—QED. Next: sexual power and sexual domination mean control of the social and cultural scene, not to mention the political one. But it also spells the control of procreation and the creative process. The creative powers of the male are annihilated by the laughing female; Superman shrinks to the diminutive proportion of homunculus or infant. The superman of sex loses both his identity and existence, as male subject and as male organ. In Parachutes and Kisses, the scene with the Nobel Laureate is an example of Jong's satirical perception of a woman's power when she appropriates language—and the language and discourse of sex, a field usually reserved to men. In this hilarious scene, Isadora, the heroine and narrator, makes fun of her sexual partner during the love scene. She assumes the function of the voyeur—of herself and her partner, right in the middle of the development of the sexual act, including preliminaries and post coital communication. Isadora/Erica plays the part of the exhibitionist and rapist at the same time as she enjoys her female role. As she is unable to physically rape the man, she reduces him to impotence, symbolically, by turning him into an object: sex object and target of her sati(y)re. She grades her lovers, so to speak, by keeping an exact amount of how many orgasms she can have with them—not how many they can have with her. She plays the game of the multiple orgasm herself, with zest and elegance, and loses c(o)unt of them in the process; and she also evaluates, not just the quantity, but also the quality of her ecstatic moments, without losing (her) head nor control of the situation. A virtuoso performance, which elicits from the Nobel Laureate genuine admiration:

When intellectuals copulate without love, they still must think of intellectual things to say afterward. And the Laureate was a great summerupper. 'That was a most satisfactory ejaculation', he would say, to our heroine's utter astonishment. Or on an occasion when she gave him a great blow job, he complimented her by saying, 'What a memorable arpeggio—or shall I say cadenza?' 'Why not just call it a blow job?' Isadora asked, irreverently. 'A blow job by another name is still a blow job'. Gower looked at her as if she were the crudest of vulgarians, raised his bushy eyebrows, pulled his white beard, and said: 'You certainly are an amazing woman, a woman of warmth and nuance'. Let us just say I'm a good lay'. Isadora said, 'and leave it at that'. And that, in fact, was where they left it for all time.

One word at this point about the use of the so-called 'obscene' language used by Jong and her heroine: four-letter words and the rest. There is another transgression of a taboo: that of propriety. Naming a cat a cat seems all right for a man, and a male writer: Miller always refers to women by the four-letter word and alternative to 'quim'! Feminists were enraged and protested violently, but the aggressive and disparaging vocabulary used by Miller, Mailer and others remains as part and parcel of their specific stylistic originality and flavor. It's no use trying to bowdlerise the English language, but why not turn it to our advantage and take up the glove men have dropped? says Jong, very logically and humorously. Violence and brutality and the pejorative description and evaluation of the female human being as 'bodily function' and genitals are involved in the use of obscenities; they seem normal under a man's pen. This metaphorically depicts his 'active' part, in the sexual act. Even though it may hide the anguish supposedly caused by the 'vagina dentata' ambushed in the ogress's cave. To exorcise their fright, males use obscene words as the participants in the Greek phallic processions of the ancient 'comoi' used to throw filth at the effigy of 'the Evil King', symbol of Death and Sterility. Then, when a woman appropriates this language, and discourse, what happens? The communication situation and process are different according to the sex of the woman's audience. Just like when Blacks refer to themselves as 'niggers' Jews as 'kikes' and Italians as 'wops', so does the self-disparaging pejoration of one's own self turn into a humorous operation: the symbolic destruction of one's own self-image as reviled by the enemy, but by using the enemy's weapon, thus stating one's superiority and symbolic control of the situation, and by so doing, reversing it. The power of words is thus transferred on to the pharmakos, and the oppressor's violence is also reversed and suffering becomes pleasure; a mixture of triumph and anguish over one's own predicament and inferiority, but at the same time an ambiguous feeling of enjoyment of this state: a kind of sado-masochistic pleasure. When Jong uses this sexual language defying taboos and propriety, an attitude which is traditionally forbidden to women, she certainly enjoys liberating her own aggressive pulses, at the expense of her own sex and kin, but at the same time, it seems to me that she rids language of its potential malignancy and hostility, its destructive quality by using it against herself, and her sisters, exactly as in the case of anti-semitic jokes told by Jews: it deflates the nasty balloons, and assumes the function of an exorcism of the evil and black magic contained in the 'rat-killing ritual' which satire is.

When Jong dares voice her body's desire and pleasure, she performs a most scandalous operation in terms of moral and aesthetic taboos: the desacralization of the so-called "mystery of the Eternal feminine" (Alas, poor Goethe …). Moreover, she distorts the whole narrative and offers a caricature of the real, that is, of her sexual experience. In How To Save Your Own Life, she depicts the various sexual idiosyncrasies of Isadora's lovers:

An expert and diligent lover, Roland makes love like a robot programmed by Alex Comfort….

He returns dutifully and kisses me very wetly (as he has ever since I ran off with a man whose kisses were wetter than his). He presses his pelvis against mine with consummate technique. I feel he is using craft, The Craft of Fucking or The Well-Tempered Penis by Bennett Wing….

Jeffrey belched after eating me as if I were a mug of beer. I couldn't bring myself to touch him for another six months….

As a witness of the scenes, and an actress in them, she assumes the necessary aesthetic detachment and distanciation, if not actual physical distance. If one analyzes Jong's humor in those instances from the functional point of view, it appears that the female humorist assumes the function of both object and subject of the carnival ritual: the elimination of the scapegoat in which the sacrificial victim is Woman, as sexual partner of Man, ridiculed and caricatured, made fun of as comic butt in the drama. The ritual is being performed in terms of satire: where both Man as male, and Woman as female are symbolically destroyed after a comic reduction. Yet, at the same time and simultaneously, the woman as humorist and puller of the strings, acts as King of Chaos, and directs the whole show. Then, the female audience laughs at the male victim, the poor pharmakos, emblem of authority, domination, exploitation and so forth—from the female standpoint. The male audience may appreciate the game, but only within the limits of their sense of humor.

But the operation is also pure humor, as defined by Freud: a ritual of self-debunking in which the humorist as schlemiel recreates and enjoys the representation of her own failures, limitations, ridicules and shortcomings—as woman, as lover, as human being, but especially as emblem of womanhood and femininity. Her body becomes the scapegoat of the ritual, and women immediately identify themselves to the victim, they laugh at themselves as objects, but rejoice at the brilliant control of the situation evinced by the subject. This temporary fit of madness and delirium, and symbolic suicide which humor is, achieves its aim: by providing both pleasure and therapy to the female audience. They purge themselves of their schizophrenia by rehearsing and exhibiting it by proxy. A very profitable deal, indeed. But how about the male audience? They laugh heartily with no hang-ups, all right. They enjoy liberating their aggressiveness at women, at the symbolic image of the neurotic, helpless and schizophrenic creature—an image which so admirably fits with their own aeon-old prejudices. MCPs, all of them, as Isadora would say. Men's pleasure is that of satire, their laughter and the catharsis it entails are different in nature from those experienced by women in the same game. But it is a perilous one: just as it is always risky for minorities, whether they be ethnic, sexual or other, to practice this kind of self-disparaging humor. In the lesbian scene of How To Save Your Own Life, Isadora dons the mask of the male—the butch—and tries to perform well with her female partner, Rosanna, the frigid millionaire heiress. She undergoes the agony and anxiety of the male lover trying desperately to bring his/her partner to orgasm. The narrative of the repeated failures, various grotesque devices called to assistance by Isadora, sexual aids of the most unheard-of nature—cucumbers, Coke bottles and so forth, are worth the trip. It is a kind of conjugated fiasco, whose sight and minute description is thoroughly enjoyed by both male and female members of the audience. The scene can be read as an ironic metaphor: that of the humorist as some bi-sexual 'ubermensch', who plays upon the fantasies and fantasms of both male and female readers. She resorts to such tricks as are exploited by porn-film makers: lesbian scenes are favorites, and even a serious writer, like Anais Nin, cannot resist the temptation to narrate the visit that she and Miller, our old friend Miller, made to a Paris bordello to watch two prostitutes making love, on order and for a few dollars, with the help of various sorts of dildos to the great joy of Miller, and utter puzzlement of poor humorless Anais. And this leads us to another remark about Jong's humorous techniques: she practices a carnivalisation of both male and female sexual fantasms and recreates the fantasmatic scenarios which men and women alike nourish in their erotic dreams and actual sexual games, in order to reach orgasm. What happens here is a transfer of roles: by identifying with the narrator, Isadora the butch, we assume her part and our imagination follows hers to play the impossible bi-sexual lovemaking scene which suddenly becomes real and possible: our desire receives immediate symbolical gratification. It could lead to a great oneiric recreation of the absolute act of love, where the self enjoys both its feminine and masculine half: what Diane Di Prima magnificently achieved, in her lyrical poem Loba, the wolf-goddess. But Jong goes one step further, it seems to me: she appropriates the dream and the impossible reconciliation of opposites and feigns to ignore the anxiety-producing otherness in the sexual relation: by pretending she is the one and the other, she suppresses the existential anguish involved, and, thanks to the momentary 'suspension of disbelief', an enormous amount of energy finds itself released and it bursts into an immense cosmic-erotic explosion of orgasm-like laughter. Anima and animus are reduced to the comic diminutive form of homunculus and homuncula, or muliercula, Don Giovanni and Donna Elvira, Quixote and Sancha, ad lib….

Superwoman Jong the humorist has turned her sexual energies and formidable vitality as a woman into power: by controlling her anxiety as a female and by assuming the power of her male half, she has proved capable of turning them into the absolute power of making both men and women laugh at their libido. Creating, causing, arousing laughter is her way of bringing them to pleasure—a pleasure whose nature is so close to sexual pleasure. By mastering the taboos of sex, by exhibiting her own sexual drives, desires and perversions, in a totally unabashed manner, she has risen to the stature of the Nietzschean ubermensch of humor: beyond good and evil, beyond male and female, she has conquered absolute power and will-power. Humor is definitely connected to this notion of power: sexual power as acknowledged and exercised, freely and without shame or guilt. The only source of anguish that remains is death—non-existence. But then, both sexes are equally helpless: and there lies the real equality of sexes.

Maybe Jong has not made a giant's leap but just a small step towards this total liberation of woman regarding humor. Yet, female humor will no longer exist as such after her if women exercise their power as human beings and as producers of comedy. They will regain power through creation and recreation, but, alack poor Miller!—once they have gotten rid of procreation; which means simply the end of the human species: if humor is at this cost, who said it was a problem?

Rolande Diot, "Sexus, Nexus and Taboos Versus Female Humor: The Case of Erica Jong," in Revue Française D'Études Américaines, No. 30, November, 1986, pp. 491-99.