SOURCE: Tanner, Stephen L. “Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest and the Varieties of American Humor.” Thalia 13, nos. 1-2 (1993): 3-10.

[In the following essay, Tanner correlates the humor of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to certain distinctive patterns in the tradition of American humor, focusing on parallels between nineteenth-century frontier humor and the urban technological society of mid-twentieth-century America.]

Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) has enjoyed remarkable success. It is a widely acclaimed and popular-selling novel; a dramatic version starring Kirk Douglas appeared on Broadway and has been revived on college campuses; and a 1975 film version starring Jack Nicholson was a box-office success and received six Academy Awards. It has frequently been used as a text in a variety of disciplines: literature, psychology, sociology, history, medicine, and law. It is of special interest to students of humor not only because of its comedy but also because its principal theme is the therapeutic nature of laughter. When the brassy Randle Patrick McMurphy breezes into the mental hospital, the first thing he notices is the absence of laughter: “I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”¹ Prompted by this absence of laughter and the plight of its victims, McMurphy becomes an unlikely savior disseminating a gospel of laughter. In a climactic scene on a fishing boat off the Oregon coast, the narrator, himself one of the mental patients, describes the liberating effects of laughter from a sort of cosmic perspective.

It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them—and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself, and I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave.

(212)

The cosmic dimension of this scene—the novel's epiphany—epitomizes Kesey's playfully-conveyed theme of salvation through laughter.

In addition to asserting the therapeutic possibilities of laughter and harrowingly demonstrating the indispensability of humor for combating the negative aspects of an increasingly urban and technologized society, the novel reasserts the vitality of certain distinctive patterns in American humor, particularly those of nineteenth-century frontier humor. It is not only a demonstration of these varieties of American humor but also a celebration of them. The novel brings patterns of frontier humor to bear on the urban, technological society of mid-twentieth-century America. These patterns provide within the novel a release from a constricting society similar to the release provided by the frontier itself during the nineteenth century. The humor of Cuckoo's Nest is both an example of and a tribute to a distinctive and persistent rural, vernacular, demotic tradition in American humor. Part of the book's popularity results from our enduring affection for the unsophisticated, unpretentious, but self-reliant folk humor which evolved along America's shifting western boundaries.

Some confusion about Kesey as a humorist resulted from his role as a counterculture hero and drug guru during California's psychedelic revolution in the early sixties. He was labeled a “black humorist,” a term which enjoyed considerable currency in the sixties but has faded from the critical lexicon because it was difficult to define, indiscriminately applied, and eventually mistaken for a racial term. In the late sixties, trying to make sense of black humor as a concept, Hamlin Hill identified its tone as “belligerent, pugnacious, nihilistic.” As humor moves into the black zone, he observed, it heads for the irrational and valueless, not seeking the sympathetic alliance of the audience but deliberately insulting and alienating it. He quoted Lennie Bruce as defining the creed: “Everything is rotten—mother is rotten, God is rotten, the flag is rotten.”²

Five years earlier, the year after Cuckoo's Nest appeared, Hill had characterized modern American humor as Janus-faced. One face looks upon the native strain rooted in the preceding century, which affirms the values of “common sense, self-reliance, and a kind of predictability in the world.” The protagonist of this variety of humor “faces an external reality with gusto and exuberance,” said Hill. “Even when he launches forth into his version of fantasy, the tall tale, he is based solidly upon the exaggeration of actual reality, not upon nightmare, hysteria, or delusion.”³ Hill labeled the other strain the dementia praecox school. The anti-hero of this humor is neurotically concerned with an inner space of nightmare and delusion where unreliability and irrationality abound. Clearly Hill had in mind the trend in modern urban humor to dramatize a sense of inadequacy, impotence, and defeat before the complexities and destructive potential of our century. Its protagonists are repressed, squeamish, and hypersensitive. Their individuality and self-confidence have been compromised by life in a depersonalizing mass society. Thus, in Hill's view, modern American humor “releases itself in both the hearty guffaw and the neurotic giggle; it reacts to both the bang and the whimper.”⁴

Hill's essays are helpful in clarifying Kesey's relation to the varieties of American humor. Although the principal subject matter of Cuckoo's Nest is dementia praecox and its narrator begins his story in a nightmarish state of neurotic fantasy and delusion, the novel is clearly founded upon the values of self-reliance and common-sense harmony with nature. Its victory is that of sanity over insanity, strength over neurotic victimization, and nature over misguided technology. McMurphy's initial exchanges with Harding are confrontations between “the hearty guffaw and the neurotic giggle.” McMurphy is the bang, Harding the whimper. Ultimately, of course, McMurphy's brash, earthy, noncerebral humor vanquishes Harding's cynical, intellectual, and timid attempts at wit.

Similarly, although Kesey used techniques associated with so-called black comedy, particularly during the period following Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion when he turned from writing to escapades with the Merry Pranksters, he never espoused the attitudes underlying that kind of humor. He gained notoriety within the California counterculture, but his roots were in rural Oregon and a family heritage of frontier values and vernacular stories. He has never strayed far from those roots. His fellow drug guru, Timothy Leary, who had no particular affinity for such roots, acknowledged this a few years ago when he said of Kesey: “I have always seen him as very Protestant and quite moralistic, and quite American in a puritanical way. And basically untrustworthy, since he is always going to end up with a Bible in his hand, sooner or later.”⁵ Mark Twain once said, “Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years.”⁶Cuckoo's Nest has met that thirty-year criterion, and its humor is largely Twain's variety in source, method, and purpose. It is the kind of humor that E. B. White described as playing, “like an active child, close to the big fire which is Truth. And sometimes the reader feels the heat.”⁷ In the last sentence of the novel's first chapter, a natural place of emphasis, the narrator makes this claim for his story: “But it is the truth even if it didn't happen” (13). This functions as a sort of thesis sentence for what follows and indicates how fundamentally different Kesey's aims were from those of black humor. Kesey drew upon a native tradition of humor that uses craziness and good-natured lying in the cause of sanity and truth.

Recognizing the pitfalls of delineating sources and influences in humor, I want to demonstrate the links between Cuckoo's Nest and what, for convenience, I call frontier humor. By this term I mean the indigenous, largely vernacular traditions of humor whose development during the nineteenth century has been described by scholars such as Rourke, De Voto, Blair, Hill, Inge, Cox, and Lynn. The critical literature generated by the novel has identified some of the similarities between Cuckoo's Nest and frontier humor, but more extensive and specific parallels can be found than has hitherto been the case.

To begin with, McMurphy is a Westerner, a product and anachronistic afterimage of the frontier. He has lived all around Oregon and in Texas and Oklahoma (186). In the frontier spirit of freedom and movement he has wandered restlessly, “logging, gambling, running carnival wheels, traveling light-footed and fast, keeping on the move …” (84). His hand is like “a road map of his travels up and down the West” (27). Kesey himself came from a family of “restless and stubborn west-walkers” (a phrase from Sometimes a Great Notion). They were not pioneers or visionaries but just a simple clan looking for new opportunities. He once described his father, whom he greatly admired, as “a kind of big, rebellious cowboy who never did fit in. …”⁸

Kesey draws upon popular culture to link McMurphy with the most familiar hero of the frontier—the cowboy. He smokes Marlboro cigarettes and is described as “the cowboy out of the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare” (172). He has a “drawling cowboy actor's voice” (232). Before his first meeting with Harding, he says, “this hospital ain't big enough for the two of us. … Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he's a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset” (24). He has a “cowboy bluster” and a “TV-cowboy stoicism” (62, 73). He sings cowboy songs in the latrine and has Wild Bill Hickok's “dead-man's hand” tattooed on his shoulder (83, 77). Just before he assaults Big Nurse he hitches up his shorts “like they were horsehide chaps, and pushe[s] his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson” (267). Harding refers to McMurphy with an allusion to the Lone Ranger: “I'd like to stand there at the window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask ‘Who wawz that 'er masked man?’” (258).

In similar ways, McMurphy is identified with other frontier types like the logger and gambler. As part of a filmscript writing course he took at the University of Oregon, Kesey prepared an outline for a TV series to be called “Legends,” a treatment of American folk heroes. He was fascinated by such figures as Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Pecos Bill. McMurphy is a product of that tradition, with its bragging, exaggeration, and humorous treatment of violence. When McMurphy fights the captain of the rental boat and then the two cheerfully sit down to drink beer together, we are witnessing a familiar pattern in frontier humor. When McMurphy and Harding square off to brag about which is the crazier (frequency of voting for Eisenhower being the principal measure), we are witnessing a fresh twist to the ring-tailed roarer confrontations of old-Southwest humor.

Kesey told me he didn't see the film version of the novel because he was disgusted with the casting of Jack Nicholson as McMurphy. He referred to Nicholson as a “wimp.” I'm sure he considered him too urban, too lacking in the Western vernacular strengths that inspired his conception of McMurphy. His own pencil drawing of McMurphy suggests rugged physical strength.⁹ When asked whom he would have cast for the role, he said Gene Hackman would have been a better choice.

Americans have always loved the rustic or apparently simple character who appears naive but is really bright and clever. A current version is the TV detective Columbo. The type appeared early in American humor in the form of country hicks outsmarting city slickers, bumpkins getting the better of greenhorns. It is part of an anti-intellectual current in American humor. Drawing from a rural oral-tale tradition represented in his family particularly by his maternal grandmother, Kesey composed Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear,¹⁰ a backwoods animal fable similar to those told by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus. It is a story of the clever little guy who defeats the wielder of unjust power. Arthur Maddox, a musician with roots in rural Missouri, composed music to accompany the narration, and Kesey has performed it with symphony orchestras across the country. It is a tribute to his grandmother and to the oral-tale tradition she perpetuated. Kesey seems to share Joel Chandler Harris's opinion that the oral “literature of the common people,” “pungent and racy anecdote, smelling of the soil,” embodied “the humor that is characteristic of the American mind—that seems, indeed, to be its most natural and inevitable product. …”¹¹

McMurphy, of course, is a vernacular hero from that tradition, and the bully he combats is not simply Big Nurse, but also the technological “Combine” she represents. Harding explicitly identifies this aspect of McMurphy when he acknowledges his intelligence: “an illiterate clod, perhaps, certainly a backwoods braggart with no more sensitivity than a goose, but basically intelligent nevertheless” (56). Elsewhere, he cautions the patients to avoid being misled by McMurphy's “back-woodsy ways; he's a very sharp operator, level-headed as they come” (224). Kesey himself was a diamond-in-the-rough when he arrived at Stanford from rural Oregon, but his new friends soon discovered a brilliant mind behind the down-home, college-jock exterior.

Other parallels with frontier humor are many. The novel employs homely but vivid similes, such as “shakin' like a dog shittin' peach pits” (122). McMurphy wrenches language in a way reminiscent of characters in Huck Finn and the Southwestern humor which inspired Twain. For instance, when Harding mentions “Freud, Jung, and Maxwell Jones,” McMurphy replies: “I'm not talking about Fred Yoong and Maxwell Jones” (56). McMurphy often communicates in anecdotes. Their frontier-humor flavor is illustrated by the one about a rough practical joke which backfires. A man at a rodeo is tricked into riding a bull blindfolded and backwards, and he wins (139). This bears a family resemblance to Twain's anecdote of the genuine Mexican plug in Roughing It. Similarly in the tradition of Twain, McMurphy nearly outdoes Huck Finn with his creative lying to the service-station attendants in order to protect his friends. He even receives a discount similar to the way Huck received money with his lie to the slave hunters in Huckleberry Finn (200-201). The novel's humor is at times scatological and often earthy and exaggerated, as in the description of Candy reeling in a salmon, “with the crank of the reel fluttering her breast at such a speed the nipples just a red blur” (211). Like a good deal of frontier humor, the novel involves masculine resistance to feminine order and control. “We are victims of a matriarchy here,” complains Harding (59). Even the novel's narrative method, one of its most important aspects, can be linked with frontier humor. It is an original and rather bizarre adaptation of the frame technique often used in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the hallucinating narrator allows for the elements of tall tale and exaggeration so characteristic of the native variety of American humor.

Another important inspiration in the conception of McMurphy are the genially pictured rascals, subversives, and con men so endemic to American humor. Blair and Hill observe that “a procession of comic men and women whose life work combined imaginative lying with cynical cheating has been one of the most persistent groups that our humor has portrayed” (43). As new frontiers opened, imaginative scoundrels, in language that raised homely colloquialisms to high art, perpetrated new scams. Everyone is familiar with Twain's king and duke. Several entire books are devoted to the American con man, tracing the type from the Yankee peddler to The Music Man. Kesey had a special affinity for this brassy, fast-talking sort of personality. Beginning with his theater activities in college and continuing through the Merry Prankster years up to the present, he has availed himself of every opportunity to play this role.

McMurphy's glib pitchman quality is conveyed by auctioneer and particularly carnival imagery. On first impression he reminds the narrator of “a car salesman or a stock auctioneer—or one of those pitchmen you see on a sideshow stage, out in front of his flapping banners …” (17). He is likened to an “auctioneer spinning jokes to loosen up a crowd before the bidding starts” (22). Three other times we are reminded of his “rollicking auctioneer voice” and his “auctioneer bellow” (72, 199, 268). Bromden refers to him as “a seasoned con” and “a carnival artist” (220). Harding calls him “a good old red, white, and blue hundred-per-cent American con man” (223). McMurphy himself explains that “the secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it. I learned that when I worked a season on a skillo wheel in a carnival” (74). He talks Dr. Spivey into suggesting a carnival in group meeting (97). He draws eyes to himself “like a sideshow barker” (233), and, as his example takes effect on his fellow patients, they are infected with the same quality. When Bromden returns from a stint in the “Disturbed” ward for resisting the aides, the faces of the other patients light up “as if they were looking into the glare of a sideshow platform,” and Harding does an imitation of a sideshow barker (243).

But as one reflects on the carnival motif, it becomes increasingly interesting and complex. In this world of con or be conned, McMurphy is not always in control. Big Nurse is also a sort of technological-age con artist, and when her schemes are in the ascendancy, she is described as “a tarot-card reader in a glass arcade case” (171) or “one of those arcade gypsies that scratch out fortunes for a penny” (268). And the patients, including McMurphy, are described as “arcade puppets” (33) or “shooting-gallery target[s]” (49). The carnival motif persists but is shaded from the vitally human barker toward the mechanized, toward humanoid machines that manipulate people and forecast the future. Harding, describing shock treatment to McMurphy, compares it to a carnival: “it's as if the jolt sets off a wild carnival wheel of images, emotions, memories. These wheels, you've seen them; the barker takes your bet and pushes a button. Chang!” (164). McMurphy, of course, has not only seen those wheels, but has operated them, and therefore Harding's words stun and bewilder him. When he realizes he has been committed and is liable to shock treatment, he is transformed from con man to mark: “Why, those slippery bastards have conned me, snowed me into holding their bag. If that don't beat all, conned ol' R. P. McMurphy” (166). Later, when he is wheeled back from a lobotomy, Scanlon refers to him as “that crummy sideshow fake lying there on the Gurney” (270). So during the course of the story, McMurphy (and to some extent the other principal patients) function as con men, marks, and sideshow freaks. The novel's poignancy, of course, results from McMurphy's ultimate breaking of the con-or-be-conned cycle by sacrificing himself for others.

Cartoons are another variety of humor that plays a role in the novel. Like the cowboy motif, they are part of popular culture. One of Kesey's characteristic achievements is his use of popular culture (Westerns, horror films, comic books, popular music, etc.) for artistic purposes. And like the cowboy motif, cartoons are related to certain patterns of frontier humor. Bugs Bunny is the quintessential American con man. Tom and Jerry, Popeye, and others are lively unsophisticated versions of the little guy versus the bully. America's native forms of humor, with their demotic appeal, naturally provided many themes, characters, and situations for comic strips and animated cartoons. Cuckoo's Nest makes strategic allusions to the cartoon genre. Harding speaks of their “Walt Disney world” (61). When McMurphy reads, it is “a book of cartoons” (151). As in cartoons, characters swell up large when they are angry or feeling strong and shrink when they are embarrassed or frightened. An hallucinating narrator permits such description; that's part of the brilliance of Kesey's narrative strategy. For example, Pete's hand, as Popeye's might, swells into an iron ball when he resists the orderlies, and when he socks one of them against the wall, the wall cracks in the man's shape (52). This is a cartoon cliché, and much of the novel's violence is of this cartoon variety. But as with the carnival motif, the cartoon imagery has its dark side. The patients are “like cartoon men” (37) in a negative sense. “Their voices are forced and too quick on the comeback to be real talk—more like cartoon comedy speech” (36). Theirs is “a cartoon world where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys” (34).

What conclusions can be drawn from Kesey's use of these varieties of humor and particularly the parallels with frontier humor? I suggest first of all that he used the patterns of frontier humor not simply for comic effect but because he wished to assert the values embedded within them against a constricting and depersonalizing urban mass society. There is a nostalgic and celebratory quality in their use combined with a conviction that such values are not merely relics of a vanished frontier. His second novel, less comic and more ambitious, glorifies these values even more forcefully, a fact that disturbed his radical counterculture friends, whose attitude toward frontier values was ambivalent. Though Kesey went on to immerse himself in the attitudes and behavior of urban radical culture, Norman Mailer was correct in observing in the late eighties that “Kesey has stayed close to his roots and was probably absolutely right to do it.”¹² My second conclusion is that Kesey skillfully used varieties of American humor in order to offer a subtle and moving examination of institutionalized victimization and of the hardy human strength and unpretentious self-sacrifice that can alleviate it. The cartoon motif is likewise implicated in Kesey's sympathetic treatment of what the novel calls the culls of the Combine. On the whole, the novel demonstrates the enduring vitality and remarkable adaptability of frontier humor.

Notes

1. Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 65. Further references will be included in the text between parentheses.

2. Hamlin Hill, “Black Humor: Its Causes and Cure,” Colorado Quarterly 17 (1968): 59.

3. Hamlin Hill, “Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh,” College English 25 (1963): 171.

4. Hill, “Modern American Humor,” 176.

5. Quoted in Peter O. Whitmer and Bruce Van Wyngarden. Aquarius Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 11.

6. Quoted in E. B. White and Katherine S. White, eds., A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941), p. xxii.

7. Quoted in White, p. xviii.

8. Ken Kesey, “Excerpts Recorded from an Informal Address by Mr. Kesey to the Parents at Crystal Springs School in Hillsborough, California, Presented under the Auspices of the Chrysalis West Foundation,” Genesis West 3. 1-2 (1965): 40.

9. Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 10.

10. See Ken Kesey, Demon Box (New York: Viking Press, 1986).

11. Quoted in Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford Press, 1978), p. 29.

12. Quoted in Whitmer, p. 63.