since there is nothing in its mechanical construction that hinders it from regaining its balance. Whether anything about it is "good" or "bad" depends entirely on the moral perspective in which it is regarded.
(Willeford 115)

Like the roly-poly that is neither good nor bad, 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.¹⁰ 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:

Yet when you see your little dumpling set sail across the nursery floor,
Can you conscientiously deny the resemblance to somebody who is leaving a tavern after having tried to leave it
a dozen times and each time turned back for just one more?
Each step achieved
Is simply too good to be believed;
Foot somehow manages to stay put;
Arms wildly semaphore,
Wild eyes seem to ask, Whatever did we get in such a dilemma for?
(Nash 89)

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;
                                                                                (Nash 89)

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" (Nash 89). 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

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it’s stunnin’ and adorable" (Nash 89).

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."¹¹ 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 (Koestler 35).

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
(Nash 3)

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:

One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
                                                                                                 (Nash 69)

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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 showing the absurdity of human behavior and its consequences. 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

You didn’t get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forgot to pay a bill;
You didn’t slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let’s all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of the things you haven’t done."
(Nash 89)

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" (Nash 69). 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!"
(Nash 95)

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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" (Fisher 193). 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.
                                 (Nash 95)

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: "Humor implies a sympathetic recognition of human values and deals with the foibles and incongruities of human nature, good-naturedly exhibited,"¹² 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."¹³ 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

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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" (Lewis 8). 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" (Lewis 9). 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" (Lewis 11). 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" (Lewis 11). 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.
                                            (Nash 157)

Finally, Lewis writes that "because the presentation of a particular

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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" (Lewis 13). 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.

Auburn University

Notes

   ¹lmmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1892), Part I, Div. 1, 54, in John Morreall, ed., The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (Albany, N.Y.: State U of New York P, 1987) 50.
   ²Christopher P. Wilson, Jokes: Form, Content, Use and Function (London: Academic P, 1979) 3 1.
   ³Ogden Nash, interview, Conversations, ed. Roy Newquist (Np.: Rand, 1967) 262-63. Subsequent references to this edition supply pages numbers in parentheses.
   ⁴G. P. Hunt, "Poet Laureate of the Colts," Life, 13 December 1968: 3.
   ⁵Seymour and Rhonda L. Fisher, Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns. And Actors (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981),70. Hereafter quotations refer to this edition.
   ⁶Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, [1936]), 76. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.
   ⁷Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1937; San Francisco: Chandler, 1960), 163.
   ⁸Ogden Nash, I Wouldn’t Have Missed It: Selected Poems of Ogden Nash, eds. Linell Smith and Isabel Eberstadt (Boston: Little, 1975), 5. Hereafter page numbers refer to this edition.
   ⁹William Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience ([Chicago]: Northwestern UP, 1969), 115. All citations refer to this edition.
   ¹⁰Coventry Patmore, Principle in Art Religia Poetae and Other Essays (1889; London: Duckworth, 1913) 11.
   ¹¹Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964) 35. Subsequent references are from this edition.
   ¹²C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 4th ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1980), 467.
   ¹³Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 1989), 2. Hereafter quotations refer to this edition.

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