Warren Zevon and Philosophy: Beyond Reptile Wisdom

I

Laughing at Shadows

1

The Incongruous Humor of the Excitable Boy

ERIC V.D. LUFT

On a cloudy weekend in late November 2005, my wife and I unexpectedly spent an extra day in London because British Airways had screwed up our return flight from Berlin to New York. Making ad hoc plans for this additional time, we decided to find out whether Lee Ho Fook, the Chinese restaurant which Warren Zevon mentioned in Werewolves of London, was real.

It was! Just over on Gerrard Street, it was not far from our hotel in Piccadilly. We walked there and found it cheerful, spacious, and not highly decorated, except for posters of Zevon plastered all over. We had an overpriced but fairly decent dinner. It seemed to us that they traded more on Zevon’s name than on the quality of their food.

We were struck above all by incongruity. The brightness of Lee Ho Fook contrasted with the usual darkness of Zevon’s songs. That he should sing of an ordinary Chinese restaurant in lyrics about murderous monsters of European folklore presents a bizarre juxtaposition of the benign and the deadly.

Dirty Life and Times

This sort of weirdness is normal for Zevon. Just as Kurt Vonnegut found humor in the firebombing of Dresden, so Zevon finds it in bizarre and often nasty situations. He makes us smile at what should disgust us. We might laugh at the rapist and murderer who builds a cage out of his victim’s bones, or at little old ladies getting mutilated, but this is uncomfortable laughter. Yet his apparently sympathetic view of predators is mitigated by his ironic and often implicit condemnation of their behavior. The laughter he sparks is sarcastic and wickedly human, but not cynical or contemptuous.

Zevon’s humor is based on normalizing the abnormal, or contrasting the ordinary with the extraordinary. There is significant precedent in Western culture for such contrast, especially in the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire did it in poetry; Francisco Goya and Théodore Gericault in painting; Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker in literature; Baron Cuvier in comparative anatomy; and Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy. Like them, Zevon shows an almost Victorian fascination with juxtaposition between the common and the uncommon. This juxtaposition can either blur or sharpen the line between the two.

Not only Zevon’s lyrics, but also his visual presentation gives us a jolt. One side of the record sleeve of the Excitable Boy vinyl LP has the lyrics to all the songs on the album. The other side has no words, but just a life-size photo of a plateful of delicious vegetables, perfectly cooked, and presented in a very appetizing way—with a Smith and Wesson revolver laid across them. Talk about incongruity!

Does Zevon’s incongruity express pessimism? Resignation? Cynicism? Self-pity? None of the above? All of the above? Something else? Nothing? We can at least say that it expresses itself, that it is what it is, and that we can just take it at face value, laugh at it, and let it go. But we could also push it toward a greater depth of meaning. His lyrics seem to encourage this, and such scrutiny could reveal hidden facts about ourselves that we might prefer not to know. He seems to relish this result, not just because he wants us to feel something nasty, but because he seems to want us to become more aware of ourselves and our dirty little secrets.

Reconsider Me

Mark Roche puts it succinctly: In comedy we laugh at contradictory positions; we don’t take them as the final truth (p. 427). Sometimes these contradictions are resolved, sometimes not. Sometimes the resolution is funnier than the contradiction, but usually not. That’s because a contradiction typically shakes our sense of comfort and its resolution seldom restores that sense completely. Despite any resolution, we remember the contradiction and how it shook us. Yet in general, contradictions scream to be resolved. Zevon often deliberately disappoints us in this regard, refusing to resolve his contradictions, which makes his incongruous comedy not less funny, but more poignant. Zevon’s incongruity seems more powerful when there is no resolution. It is certainly more savage.

Philosophers of humor discuss incongruity and resolution. A clear case in point is Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, where incongruity is apparent between Frederic’s duty to his loving friends and his duty to fight piracy—and this incongruity is funny. Later, this conflict is resolved, as his true birthday is revealed and one of these duties evaporates—and this resolution is funny too. But in Zevon’s lyrics there is much incongruity and little resolution. Even though they remain funny in the absence of resolution, they also remain eerie, dark, absurd, even surreal, precisely because their content is not resolved. Of course, Roland didn’t say a word; he was headless. Zevon gives no explanation.

There are dozens of types of philosophical theories of humor. One of these types is focused on incongruities, disconnects, contradictions, and paradoxes. Oddly enough, it’s called incongruity theory. Most of it fits Zevon’s output pretty well. Some of it even tries to reduce all humor to incongruity, but that position is difficult to maintain.

Critics of the incongruity theory of humor point out that not all incongruous juxtapositions are funny. But, we may note with amusement, some of these authors seem to have no sense of humor of their own. Just because the philosophy of humor is usually not funny does not mean that it can’t be fun. Analysis often kills the spirit of whatever is being analyzed, but only if we take analysis too seriously. We can take it semi-seriously and remain true to ourselves as intelligent humans. If we readers have a sense of humor, we can sometimes find laughable, or even hilarious, passages that authors didn’t intend to be so. This doesn’t mean that these authors are ridiculous or don’t know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t even mean that we’re laughing at them. It only means that we see something in their writings that they didn’t. This is perfectly normal. Readers are always finding things that authors didn’t intend. Some authors are too serious. Most readers aren’t.

Looking for the Next Best Thing

Robert Latta discounts incongruity as source of comedy. He says instead that humor proceeds in three stages, describing the transitions from stage to stage as cognitive shifts. First, we are unrelaxed, then we are even more unrelaxed, then, finally, we laugh and relax. Comic situations disturb us. Our heightened unrelaxation triggers laughter, which brings, or returns, us to a state of relative relaxation, a more comfortable feeling. Nevertheless, unrelaxation may be our natural or default state. Latta hints that, perhaps, no one is ever totally relaxed (p. 37). There is no full catharsis.

Latta’s theory of cognitive shifts, which he calls Theory L, offers a physiological or behavioral explanation of why we laugh. He claims that incongruities are not funny in themselves, but only in how we physically react to them. Thus, Theory L is a response-side theory, as opposed to a stimulus-side theory, which traces the source of humor to the situation itself. The general difference between response-side and stimulus-side theories is expressed by asking whether our feelings come from our brains acting on things or from things acting on our brains. If the former, then, as Hamlet says, There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so (II.ii.259). But if the latter, then we are just knocked about at the mercy of a probably hostile world of external forces beyond our control.

All philosophical theories of humor can be classified as either response-side or stimulus-side. Incongruity theory is a species of stimulus-side theory. That is, if we have a sense of humor, incongruous things make us laugh. We can’t help it. We may stifle a chuckle, but the reaction itself is just a reflex. We do not decide, even subconsciously, whether or not some state of affairs is funny. It just hits us. We can only decide what to do with our reaction: let it all hang out, hide it, be embarrassed by it, worry about it, or whatever.

Steven Gimbel traces two thousand years of debate between response-side and stimulus-side theorists. Unlike arguments about behaviorism, the difference between the two does not come down to a role for free will in response-side theory versus no role for free will in stimulus-side theory. Rather, both response-side and stimulus-side theories acknowledge that laughter is involuntary, a reaction beyond our control, unless we’re faking it.

Although this reaction is automatic, we are not robots. We react to the stimulus with our emotions, bringing all of our previous experience to the reaction. At this point, the line between stimulus-side and response-side theories becomes gray and blurry. The stimulus may be funny in itself, but it is not actually funny until we respond to it, recognize it as funny, and either laugh at it or deliberately stifle our laughter. As with many of Zevon’s lyrics, this debate itself is an incongruity without resolution. Neither side is hard and fast. Neither is likely to win the battle against the other. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Something Bad Happened to a Clown

Even though John Morreall may well be the main proponent of modern incongruity theory, he doesn’t fully accept it, although he is more friendly to it than most theorists. He traces it back to Aristotle, who wrote in the Poetics that misfortune, ugliness, or distortion can all incite laughter if they are not too painful, malicious, or harmful. The incongruity apparent in such situations lies between what is expected or hoped for and what is actually seen or experienced. The transition from one pole of this incongruity to the other must be funny if the whole incongruity is going to make us laugh. Aristotle’s translator and commentator, Samuel Henry Butcher (1850–1910), emphasizes the blending of contrasted feelings. The pleasure of the ludicrous … arises from the shock of surprise at a painless incongruity (p. 376).

Morreall admits two problems with incongruity theory. First, we sometimes laugh at things which are not incongruous. Ticklish people laugh when tickled, but there is no incongruity in that. Second, incongruity theory does not cover all cases. Finding a cougar in your bathtub is incongruous, but it won’t make you laugh (p. 130). On the other hand, if the cougar is a middle-aged, sexually predatory woman instead of a mountain lion, the incongruity could be highly amusing.

If not all humorous situations are incongruous, and if incongruity theory does not, therefore, cover all cases, then what are some possible alternatives? On the theoretical side, Charles Gruner agrees with Latta’s claim that incongruity alone is not sufficient to cause laughter, cannot be relied upon to cause laughter, and may indeed cause any of the whole range of emotions, including disgust, indifference, or hatred. But, on the more practical side, we recognize a general hierarchy of humor, with puns and slapstick at the bottom and paradox, satire, and sarcasm at the top. High-end humor tends to be more incongruous than low-end humor. Puns and slapstick are low forms of humor because of their lack of subtlety. Paradox, satire, and sarcasm are high forms of humor because they require a certain level of sophistication to get the joke—not just to tell it, but also to frame it.

Zevon’s lyrics have been favorably compared with those of Randy Newman, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, and others, but his sense of humor is more macabre, and hence more incongruous, than that of any of these other songwriters. His paradoxes are poignant, satirical, and sarcastic. He seldom uses puns. Even though many of his scenarios contain slapsticky elements, that is not their main point. His slapstick points beyond itself, usually toward something nasty, and almost always toward something incongruous.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

We all have a lot to do, and little time to do it, alive or dead. There’s no time to sleep. We can worry about sleeping after we’re dead. In the meantime, life is full of peaks and valleys of pleasure and pain. Zevon wants to experience it all, sometimes simultaneously. We learn in Ain’t That Pretty at All that he would rather suffer than feel nothing. He makes a similar point in Hostage-O, where he prefers being bound, gagged, dragged, chained, maimed, and treated like a dog to being lonely. So, he maximizes his experiences, often in contradictory ways. He wants to visit the Louvre, not to see the artworks, which may leave him unimpressed, but to bang his head against the wall. He implies that banging his head against an exotic wall in Paris would be more thrilling than banging it against a mundane wall in Los Angeles.

What does he mean by musing over what to do in Denver once he’s dead? Probably not the idea that Herodotus attributed to Solon: Call no man happy until he’s dead. Solon’s quip was about fortune, or good luck, and its transience—or transigence—but Zevon’s lyrics are about misfortune, or bad luck, and its apparent permanence or intransigence. All sorts of things can kill you, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing what you do, even after you’re dead. We’re back to Roland again. The impossibility. The lack of explanation. Van Owen felt it—the hard way. Is this realistic? Supernatural? Well, it’s probably at least psychologically real. As a metaphor, Roland’s revenge on Van Owen—and, by extension, on the CIA, for which Van Owen worked as an agent—reflects the persistence of rebellion against oppression, no matter how many rebels are killed in the process.

Heartache Spoken Here

If Zevon’s humor isn’t absurd, it’s certainly the first cousin of the absurd. His juxtapositions make us wince. Even worse, they make us re-examine ourselves, often to our own detriment. Are we the schlemiels and schlemazels that he portrays in songs like Poor, Poor Pitiful Me? How would we behave if we found ourselves in the tempting situations he describes? Would we be ashamed or proud of ourselves later? His refusal to talk about the sadomasochistic encounter that may or may not have happened at the Hyatt House suggests that he has not yet escaped from the Waring blender. The effect that his failed sexual relationships have had on him is permanent. Isn’t that true for all of us? That’s why Poor, Poor Pitiful Me hits home, even if we are not self-pitying fools.

Zevon presents the stereotype of the sad clown as a juxtaposition between bright fantasy and ugly reality. Even in his self-pitying songs, he does not whine, but deprecates himself. His expectations are low. He wants a woman with low self-esteem. In Dirty Life and Times, we see that only such a woman can give him any kind of solace. Perhaps that’s because of his own low self-esteem. Like a real schlemazel, he can’t get a break. The waitress he thinks he seduces in Lawyers, Guns, and Money turns out to be a Russian agent seducing him. He loses more than he risks in Havana. He can’t even commit suicide properly in Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, laying his head on railroad tracks that are no longer in service.

Worrier King

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, the king laments in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II (III.i.31). But a king’s worries should be because of and on behalf of his subjects and his kingdom, not because of his own neuroses. He should be the king who worries, not the king of worries. Zevon hints that subjects ought not to obey such a maladjusted, self-absorbed king.

Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse is reminiscent of Tom Lehrer’s We Will All Go Together When We Go or Blue Öyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper. Here, Zevon mentions the inevitability and universality of death, suggesting that there is still plenty of room in Hell for everyone. But he juxtaposes these morbid thoughts with the idea of having a good time in Hell, partying at the Earth’s core. Death is a festival. Zevon invites us to welcome the event and join in the fun, as if it were the debut of a fancy rich girl into high society. There will be excitement all night, and the night will be infinitely long. We will not only witness, but also participate, in the twilight of the gods of Valhalla. Also in attendance will be Shiva the Destroyer, the third member of the Hindu trinity, who oversees the necessary function of death and destruction so that there can be further life and creation.

The stark contrast between two lifestyles presented in Detox Mansion provides insight into Zevon’s apparent obsession with death. Both lead to death, but different kinds of death. As we approach death, we may feel either rapid burnout or slow plodding. Everything leads to our last breath, whether in the wide world or at the secluded farm, whether we shoot up dangerous substances or just rake leaves.

Gorilla, You’re a Desperado

Zevon’s frequent primate metaphor shows the implicit incongruity between simians and humans. Often the simian comes out on top, but even when it doesn’t, the human has some significant foibles exposed. At first, Leave My Monkey Alone seems like a simple plea for humans to quit messing around with nature, but further reflection reveals it as a condemnation of colonial wars and imperialistic attitudes.

Gorilla, You’re a Desperado and Excitable Boy both satirize the same social phenomenon: self-indulgent parents and apathetic society letting miscreants run wild. Living with no accountability, like the gorilla or the wanton boy, is ultimately shallow, pointless, and unfulfilling. The escaped gorilla luxuriating in the high life is just as much a prisoner as the man he left behind in his old cage at the zoo. The spoiled boy does not go to prison for rape and murder, but only to a hospital for the criminally insane. When, after ten years, he is cured and released, his family, friends, and other enablers are still only amused by his bizarre, sociopathic antics.

What would resolution mean in these cases? Would the gorilla meekly return to his cage? Would he be happier there? Would the man in the cage drive away to better times in his BMW? Would the criminal be locked up for good? Would society then respond to him with howls of execration, as Albert Camus’s antihero Meursault desires at the end of The Stranger in order to counter the benign indifference of the universe? Probably none of these resolutions, or any others, would work. Zevon achieves greater pathos by leaving his incongruities unresolved.

My Shit’s Fucked Up

Alexander Kozintsev counsels us to avoid being inoffensive. By this, he is not suggesting that we should go out of our way to be offensive. Rather, he’s only saying that offending people is often funnier than not offending them. Offensive people can be funny if they’re not mean. Offended people can be funny if they’re not permanently harmed. This dynamic of offensive banter has been a mainstay of comedy since ancient times, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to the Three Stooges to Jack Benny to Don Rickles to Zevon and beyond.

Pie in the face might offend the recipient, but no one else. It’s naturally funny, an example not only of slapstick, but of incongruity. Gruner writes, Custard pie in the face of an elaborately tuxedoed stuffed shirt might be a hilarious incongruity. But would a lovely, smiling child sitting unscathed in the ruins of her demolished hut in Vietnam? Such an incongruity would hardly elicit laughter (p. 7). Nevertheless, Zevon could probably pull it off. He had a knack for illuminating the darkness, for mollifying the horrific.

In a chapter aptly titled Incongruity, Degradation, and Self-Parody, Kozintsev cites the same passage in Aristotle’s Poetics that Butcher does, but uses Aristotle’s example of laughable ugliness to segue into the superiority theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes claims that laughter is essentially egotistical. We feel good when we put other people down. Tragedy is when something bad happens to me; comedy is when something bad happens to you. When superior, or wannabe superior, people imitate or ridicule inferior people, or those whom they consider inferior, they chortle vaingloriously because they believe themselves nobler, smarter, and more beautiful than the butts of their jokes (p. 2). Zevon is not so mean. Rather, in some of his more introspective songs, he identifies with inferior people. Cruelty has no part in Zevon’s worldview.

Well, maybe that’s not quite true. Sometimes it seems that Zevon is either cruel to himself, expecting someone to be cruel to him, or perhaps even asking someone to be cruel to him, as in Hostage-O—and we still don’t know what happened at the Hyatt House. But all of these instances are presented without malevolence. In I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, he coyly suggests that he might shoot himself for acting stupid. In Accidentally Like a Martyr, he doesn’t seem to mind the hurt getting worse or the heart getting harder. Then there’s his constant smirking threat in Ain’t That Pretty at All to run headlong into a wall. Would he ever really do such a thing? Of course not! But the comic threat perfectly expresses his state of mind.

Ain’t That Pretty at All

Zevon was a true rock’n’roller. He did not write or record mere novelty songs, such as Dr. Demento might play on his radio show. Nor was he a witty parodist like Weird Al Yankovic. Rather, his dark lyrics, set to original tunes, were more akin to the poetry of Dorothy Parker or the satire of Tom Lehrer. He sought to wake us up, not to entertain us with silliness. He expressed his jaded cynicism in provocative oxymorons.

Zevon saw it all, heard it all, and what he saw and heard wasn’t pretty. He took a little vacation, and on vacations we’re supposed to relax, be happy, be frivolous, rejuvenate ourselves, ready ourselves for our eventual return to the real world. But he spent his vacation getting a root canal. The pain didn’t bother him—or if it did, it didn’t discourage him. He would rather be alert than anesthetized. He knew that many people enjoying silly pastimes deceive themselves into thinking that they feel happy, when in fact they feel nothing, or at least nothing worthwhile.

Right now, as I write this, I’m sitting at a picnic table on the south shore of Oneida Lake in upstate New York. It’s a gorgeous day. All around me are people having a good time: fishing, kayaking, wading, skipping stones, chatting, staring at their phones, listening to music, playing music—and not a single unhappy face in the bunch.

But what dark secrets might any of them hold? Would Zevon’s lyrics make them cringe, see more of themselves than they want to see, or reveal what they prefer to hide? If so, then Zevon was a success.

2

Red Noses and Squirting Roses

SHALON VAN TINE

In 2002, Warren Zevon revealed on The Late Show that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, which had spread throughout his body. When David Letterman asked how he took the bad news, Zevon responded dryly, Well, it means you better get your dry cleaning done on special.

Taken aback by Zevon’s response, Letterman commented that he doubted he would be able to make jokes had he received such disheartening news, to which Zevon retorted, I know you could. When Letterman asked Zevon if his cancer diagnosis gave him any insight into life and death, he simply advised everyone to enjoy every sandwich (Letterman, Episode #1895). Zevon died less than a year later.

Throughout his career, Zevon was known for his quirky, dark sense of humor. Beginning as a session musician and jingle writer, Zevon struggled to make it as a solo artist, despite his undeniable musical talent. Always a bit out of place among the mellow sounds of his fellow singer-songwriters, he is mainly remembered for his kitschy one-hit number that gets trotted out every Halloween, Werewolves of London, sometimes referred to as the thinking man’s ‘Monster Mash’.

His music often dealt with themes not suited to radio: rape, murder, drugs, alcoholism, crime. As his friend and frequent collaborator Jackson Browne put it, Zevon wrote song noir (Nothing’s Bad Luck, p. 257). But Zevon’s uniqueness stemmed from his preference for dealing with the macabre through humor. He grappled with questions that philosophers have tried to solve since ancient times: Why do we laugh? What’s the function of humor? What role does comedy play in our lives?

Philosophers have proposed various theories to answer these questions. One of the oldest gags in vaudeville acts (and later in cartoons) involves a man slipping on a banana peel and falling down while the audience erupts in laughter. This classic joke illustrates what’s called superiority theory, which emphasizes how humor involves laughing at others’ misfortunes (the German concept of Schadenfreude captures this same idea). Relief theory, on the other hand, proposes that we laugh to release nervous tension. Whereas the former suggests that humor is a kind of social phenomenon, the latter maintains that it’s psychological. Prominent among more recent views on the comic is incongruity theory, according to which humor stems from a reaction to the absurd. When our perceptions are challenged by something unexpected, we find the situation funny. For instance, when a stand-up comedian gets to the joke’s punchline and it doesn’t fall within the range of our expectations for a normal telling of events, we laugh. Essentially, incongruity theory argues that humor is a natural response to the irrational.

Zevon’s music exemplifies these three models of humor, but it also demonstrates the way humor is highly dependent on historical context. In other words, what we find funny is directly connected to the historical period in which we live. Zevon’s most famous songs were written predominantly during the 1970s and 1980s, the last couple of decades of the Cold War era. During this time, many popular comedy forms shifted to a darker tone that reflected broader societal problems.

Comedy has always provided artists with a way to address social and political issues, but in the crisis-ridden 1970s, artists reacted to trying times with a darker, more jaded sense of humor. In this decade, American culture shifted sharply, as multiple economic crises occurred, the entertainment industry became increasingly corporatized, and the public lost faith in trusted institutions. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that artists responded with sardonic detachment. The magazine National Lampoon and the television show Saturday Night Live, for instance, got their start in this era, when it seemed as if the only reasonable defense against the compounding problems was to laugh at them. In this way, Zevon’s ironic tunes were in sync with troubled times.

The One about Grandpa Pissing His Pants

Plato was one of the first philosophers to explore the nature of humor. In his Philebus, Socrates tells Protarchus that comedy always involves a mixture of pleasure and pain (47d). When people deviate from how they should act in public, usually due to ignorance about proper behavior in certain social settings, the ridiculousness of the situation prompts us to laugh. Jokes about immigrants that were commonplace in the United States during the nineteenth century, for instance, made fun of their accents or customs that seemed unusual to native-born Americans. Such jokes rested on the notion that immigrants were ignorant about appropriate ways of acting and talking, so how they acted and talked seemed silly and thus ripe for parody. This joke structure depends on a power dynamic where those who are the butt of the joke are deemed inferior in some way, while those laughing