SOURCE: "Moral Incongruity and Humor: The 'Good Bad' Poetry of Ogden Nash," in Studies In American Humor, Vol. 7, 1989, pp. 94-103.

[In the excerpt below, Crandell examines the relationship between humor and art in Nash's poetry.]

For some readers, the term "humorous poetry" is an oxymoron. "Poetry" denotes something serious, while "humorous," by definition, means just the opposite. Equating "serious" with "good" and "humorous" with "bad," the same individuals use "humorous" in a pejorative sense to distinguish writing that has some of the formal characteristics of poetry, rhyme and meter for example, but which lacks the seriousness of lyric, narrative or dramatic verse. Likewise, the terms vers de société and "light verse" have sometimes been used synonymously with "humorous poetry" to denote a type of writing lacking both seriousness and significant aesthetic value.

This line of argument has even been carried to the point of dissociating humor and art. Immanuel Kant, for example, commenting on the "humorous manner," perceives a qualitative difference between humor and art such that the creative act of humor "belongs rather to pleasant than to beautiful art, because the object of the latter must always show proper worth in itself, and hence requires a certain seriousness in the presentation, as taste does in the act of judging" [Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard, 1892]. Similarly, Christopher Wilson argues that "art and humour have comparable form but differ in the significance of their raw materials," art, unlike humor, being "constructed from serious stuff" [Jokes: Form, Content, Use, and Function, 1979].

Even among writers of "light verse" the serious/humorous characterization is a important one, significant enough, in fact, that American humorist and poet Ogden Nash made the distinction between serious and humorous poetry the basis of his art. Nash confesses that he gave up hope of becoming a "serious" poet after the fashion of Browning, Swinburne or Tennyson, and so "began to poke a little bit of fun at [himself], … accentuating the ludicrous side of [what], at first had been attempts at serious poetry" [Ogden Nash, in an interview in Conversations, edited by Roy Newquist, 1967]. Early in his career, Nash decided "that it would be better to be 'a good bad poet than a bad good poet."

Nash's self-depreciating remarks may be seen as a defensive strategy similar to that employed by professional comedians studied by Seymour and Rhonda Fisher: "The comic defends himself against the accusation of badness by systematically proving that what is good and bad exists only in the eye of the beholder" [Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors, 1981]. The comic asserts his own goodness by convincing "people that good and bad, like all classificatory schemes, are relative and that they may, in fact, blend meaninglessly to each other."

Although Nash uses the term "good-bad poet" jokingly and disparagingly, it characterizes two distinctive features of his work. The "good-bad" distinction serves equally well to describe 1) Nash's divided persona, the poet-fool, who, as we shall see, may be "good" or "bad" depending upon the perspective from which he is viewed, and 2) Nash's concern with problems of morality. An examination of these two characteristic features of Nash's work ultimately reveals that, in Nash's view, moral and aesthetic categories alike are relative….

In the guise of the poet-fool, Nash, following the pattern of historical and literary antecedents, is both truth-teller and buffoon. As soothsayer, Nash imparts a kind of folk wisdom, or "horse-sense" to use Walter Blair's term [Native American Humor, 1937], as when Nash's speaker reminds parents, "Many an infant that screams like a calliope / Could be soothed with a little attention to its diope." In a society in which royal courts have given way to democratic institutions, the poet-fool in Nash's twentieth-century, American society is an ordinary figure, but one with a special talent for expressing proverbial wisdom. The basis for the truth told by Nash's poet-fool is Nash's observation of people, his habit of "noting human traits and characteristics you might see in an elevator, at the dinner table, at a party or a bridge game" [Nash, in Conversations]. Like the professional comedian, Nash is someone who "prowls around looking for new patterns and new insights about how people behave" [Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever]. Many of Nash's poems begin with an observation, for example: "The camel has a single hump; / The dromedary two." From that starting point, Nash proceeds in a manner that again mirrors the method of some professional comedians who then "come up with a twist that highlights the relativity or absurdity of that perspective," as in "The Camel":

The camel has a single hump,
The dromedary two,
Or else the other way around,
I'm never sure are you.

Many of Nash's poems about animals follow the same pattern; the poet-fool presents us with one perspective of the animal and then comments upon that view. One example, "The Turtle," serves not only to show this pattern, but also to illustrate Nash's economical expression, and his dexterous manipulation of sound to compliment the sense of the poem:

The turtle lives twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex;
I think it clever of the turtle
In such as fix to be so fertile.

Notice how slowly, like a turtle, the reader voices the first line, slowed by the series of nine phonological stops (/t/, twice each in "turtle" and "twixt"; /p/, /t/, and /d, all in "plated"; and /d/ and /k/ in "decks"). The difficulty the reader experiences is perhaps not unlike that of the turtle trying to be fertile.

In making observations about animals, Nash's poet-fool often reveals a truth about himself, usually a foible or moral weakness characteristic of human nature in general. The spectator watching the camel reveals his ignorance. The observer of the turtle, we may speculate, imagines copulating turtles, while the person who defines the cow displays a delightful naivete: "The cow is of the bovine ilk; / One end is moo, the other, milk."

As Nash himself confesses and as these poems illustrate, Nash is primarily concerned with "human nature, particularly the relationships between men and women, the relationships of humans to the world in which they live and their attempts to cope with it." In defining "The Perfect Husband," for example, Nash observes: "He tells you when you've got on too much lipstick, / And helps you with your girdle when your hips stick." Similarly, the poet-fool offers advice to parents about how to care for "The Baby": "A bit of talcum / Is always walcum."

At the same time that Nash's poet-fool expresses sage advice, the ludicrous form of his maxims belittles and ridicules the speaker. In particular, the phonological incongruity of rhymes such as "calliope/diope" and "talcum/walcum" give the impression of an undereducated buffoon. Pretentiousness, suggested for example by the classification "bovine ilk" in "The Cow," is comically deflated by the speaker's innocent definition that follows it. The expression of wisdom, the incongruous sound effects, the comic deflation, all serve to endear the poet-fool to his audience.

In the endearing figure of the poet-fool, Nash found the mask from behind which he could express himself. In an interview with Roy Newquist [in Conversations, 1967], Nash comments on the persona he discovered: "In the verse I have a sort of disguise I can assume so that I'm not so vulnerable….. Therefore I was able to hide behind this mask, keeping people from knowing whether I'm ignorant or just fooling around." Having discovered this mask ("mask" comes from the Arabic maskhara, meaning clown, or buffoonery), Nash proceeded to speak. The voice that emerges from behind the mask is that of an ironic moralist, exposing the absurdity of moral distinctions, and blurring the supposedly clear lines demarcating good and evil…

The poet-fool occupies an "objective" position, detached "from any moral conflict," and thus is able to comment, truthfully and objectively, on the relativity of "good" and "bad." From this standpoint, the poet-fool typically exposes the relativity of moral values by holding up two incongruous images representing the extremes on a moral continuum and viewing them, as it were, from its objective "point of indifference," or punctum indifferens. In "It Must Be the Milk," for example, Nash observes "how much infants resemble people who have had too much to drink" by comparing the way that infants and intoxicated people walk:

The similarity of toddlers and inebriates might be dismissed as coincidental if the speaker did not expose to view other likenesses which also serve to erode the distinction between pure and impure:

Another kinship with topers is also by infants exhibited,
Which is that they are completely uninhibited,
And they can't talk straight.
Any more than they can walk straight;

In these images, the incongruous and humorous pairing of "tots and sots" serves to blur the moral distinction between innocence and sullied experience. By suggesting a likeness between the infant and the drunk, Nash means to point out that good and evil are relative terms that depending on one's moral perspective can be applied to the same behavior, just as uncoordinated walking may be perceived as reprehensible and adorable: "in inebriates it's called staggerin' but in infants it's called toddling." Likewise, talking characterized by "awful" pronunciation and "flawful" grammar may be perceived from morally opposite perspectives: "in adults, it's drunken and maudlin and deplorable, / But in infants it's tunnin' and adorable."

Nash's pattern of observation exhibited here is similar to the creative act that Arthur Koestler terms "bisociation," that is, "the perceiving of a situation or idea … in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference" [The Act of Creation, 1964]. Here the idea, walking, is "bisociated" with the two frames of reference—the child and the drunk. As Koestler also remarks, "It is the clash of the two mutually incompatible codes, or associative contexts, which explodes the tension," and so results in a comic effect.

As we have seen in "It Must Be the Milk," Nash typically pairs two incongruous elements to blur the distinction between opposites, especially objects representing moral extremes. In a similar fashion, Nash pairs candy and liquor, in "Reflection on Ice-Breaking," to comment on the relative appropriateness of types of courtship behavior:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

Incongruous as candy and liquor may be, Nash nevertheless compels us to see both objects as means to an end. Ice-breaking is Nash's euphemism for seduction, and liquor is the more efficient of the two means to that end. In pairing candy and liquor, Nash contrasts a deliberate, manipulative and speedy means of coercion with a romantic, socially acceptable method of wooing. But by reminding his audience that both liquor and candy ultimately have the same end, and by suggesting that love can be bought, with either a drink or a box of candy, Nash calls conventional notions of acceptability into question.

The pattern of pairing incongruous ideas in "It Must Be the Milk," and "Reflection on Ice-Breaking" is duplicated in "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man." In this poem, Nash demonstrates how action and inaction are relative terms with respect to sinful behavior. In another variation on the theme of moral relativity, Nash points out the absurdity of distinctions between activity and passivity when both have sinful consequences. Nash begins by identifying two kinds of sin:

In this example, the idea of sin is perceived in incompatible frames of reference, "doing something you ortant," and its opposite, "not having done something you shuddha," or more simply: doing and not doing. The incongruous pairing of action and inaction has the intended effect of show ing the absurdity of human behavior and its consequenc es. Ironically, intentional sinful actions are fun, hence "good" from the speaker's perspective, while unintentional sinful actions are not fun, hence "bad": "Sins of commission … must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be committing them," but

In exposing the absurdity of a world in which sinners who commit sins are rewarded by having fun, Nash's persona may be said to satisfy, vicariously, the audience's desire to voice or act out anarchistic impulses, as when Nash's speaker advises that sins of commission are preferable to sins of omission: "If some kind of sin you must be pursuing, / Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing." Similarly in "Reflection on Ice-Breaking," Nash's poet-fool speaks for lovers whose principal motivation is the immediate gratification of physical desire. In another poem, "Epistle to the Olympians," Nash writes from the perspective of a child-adult to give voice to the child's objections to the seemingly arbitrary rules of conduct that govern the behavior of adults in disciplining children. In a pattern familiar to the reader, Nash pairs incongruous ideas, showing how, from the moral perspective of parents, "big" and "little" are relative terms.

When one mood you are in,
My bigness is a sin:
"Oh what a thing to do
For a great big girl like you!"
But then another time
Smallness is my crime;
"Stop doing whatever you're at;
You're far too little for that!"

In the vicarious, anarchistic role of wish-fulfiller, the poet-fool paradoxically serves as a stabilizing force in an otherwise unstable world. By defining the boundaries of what is proper, "Oh what a thing to do / For a great big girl like you!" and "Stop doing whatever you're at; / You're far too little for that!" the poet fool thus has "the effect of encouraging the stability of a system by preventing it from consistently going too far in any one extreme direction" [Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever]. Nash's "Epistle to the Olympians," even illustrates how the poet may call for a modification to the seemingly arbitrary moral code (defined by the extremes of bigness and smallness) that governs proper behavior:

Kind parents, be so kind
As to kindly make up your mind
And whisper in accents mild
The proper size for a child.

In the school of American letters, Ogden Nash is the class-clown. As the eccentric who dares to say what his "classmates" are afraid, unwilling or incapable of saying, he is an object of admiration and a source of delight. But as the deviant one who defies authority and mocks convention, he is the "bad boy" and an object of ridicule.

In assessing Nash's place in literature, we could note how closely his work matches a standard definition of humor such as C. Hugh Holman's [in A Handbook to Literature, 4th edition, 1980]: "Humor implies a sympathetic recognition of human values and deals with the foibles and incongruities of human nature, good-naturedly exhibited," or we could observe the degree to which his work confirms the work of scholars in the social sciences studying humor. The first approach fails to take into account almost thirty years of research into the nature of humor and laughter. Among social scientists and increasingly among literary critics, the move is "away from universal theories based on a single and too-simple definition of what all humor is, toward well-focused questions about aspects of humor" [Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature, 1989]. The latter approach, it seems, offers greater potential for understanding the complexity and multifarious nature of humor, including humorous poetry.

In the present examination, we have seen how Nash's humorous work is characterized by concerns with "good" and "bad." The persona through which Nash speaks is a divided figure who like historical and literary poet-fools combines "good" (expressing folk wisdom) and "bad" (subverting the regular rules of rhyme and meter) in a single figure, the poet-fool. Likewise, Nash's typical method of presentation often focuses on problems of "good" and "bad." From a point of indifference, poised objectively between "good" and "bad," the poet-fool then pairs incongruous objects for the purpose of exposing the relativity of moral distinctions. In these two characteristic aspects of Nash's humor, we can observe other parallels to points established by recent humor research and summarized by Paul Lewis.

Lewis points out, first of all, that "humorous experiences originate in the perception of an incongruity: a pairing of ideas, images or events that are not ordinarily joined and do not seem to make sense together." The starting point for many of Nash's humorous poems, as we have seen, is an incongruous pairing of objects or ideas: infant/drunk, candy/liquor, activity/inactivity, bigness/smallness.

Secondly, Lewis points out that "in most cases humor appreciation is based on a two-stage process of first perceiving an incongruity and then resolving it." In the poetry of Ogden Nash, resolution is achieved by means of the single concept through which each incongruous element is perceived. While readers may at first be perplexed by the incongruity of a drunk and an infant, the confusion is resolved by noting how much alike they are when they walk.

Third, "humor is a playful, not a serious, response to the incongruous." The incongruities that Nash points out to us are neither frightening, nor so complex that we are unable to solve the riddle of the poem. The poet-fool's playful antics, the deliberate mocking of poetry's rules of meter and rhyme, for example, remind the reader that the commonsensical wisdom of the speaker is offered in fun.

Fourth, Lewis remarks that "the perception of an incongruity is subjective, relying as it does on the state of the perceiver's knowledge, expectations, values and norms." As Lewis' comments suggest, the appreciation of Nash's humor depends upon a set of shared values between speaker and audience. Nash's great popularity for nearly four decades from the early 1930s to the early 1970s suggests that large audiences identified with the values expressed by Nash's persona. The explanation may be that the value shared, that which allows the audience to perceive the incongruity as humorous, is often the fact of being human. Nash's "The Hippopotamus" illustrates how the perception of incongruity may be subjective depending upon one's perspective:

Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim
I wonder how we look to him.
Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.

Finally, Lewis writes that "because the presentation of a particular image or idea as a fitting subject for humor is based on value judgments, the creation and use of humor is an exercise of power: a force in controlling our responses to unexpected and dangerous happenings, a way of shaping the responses and attitudes of others." As we have already seen, Nash repeatedly exposes the relativity of values by blurring the supposedly clear lines demarcating good and bad, an action that has consequences both morally and aesthetically. By defining the limits of acceptable behavior, the poet-fool exerts a powerful influence in defining both a standard of morality and a criterion of art.