Humor in Robert Fanning's The Seed Thieves

by Victoria Bosch Murray

According to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, "one [theory of comedy] asserts that laughter is provoked by a sense of superiority …, the other that it is produced by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, the incongruous, some abrupt dissociation of events and expectations" (223). Robert Fanning's poem, The Messiah Complex (full text below), operates according to both theories. The poem, eleven unrhymed (for the most part) quatrains, describes the speaker's reaction to watching a Jerry Springer-ish television talk show, where the guests are three men who claim that they are the Messiah. The speaker assesses the merits of each, before deciding "no way is this guy / the one," as though the question is under serious consideration.

The humor in the poem works by way of the distance between what is expected and what is presented. The title suggests a serious topic: the casual reader understands it as a reference to the psychological condition of thinking one is the messiah, but also the problem of the god-like delusions of the psychotic. The first two words of the poem— "Holy shit"— disabuse the reader of any notion of seriousness. The earthy, scatological exclamation pairs the popular swear with the word holy, an unambiguously religious word; a word that means sacred. The expression, which is common enough, derives its power from incongruity, the holy juxtaposed with the profane — there's nothing holy about shit — and we laugh. There's incongruity; there's the unexpected; there's subverting the spiritual, the intellectual, the proper. All of it.

The poem does this in a number of places: the first guest is "Jesus Christ," in and of itself funny, surprising, unexpected. Why, isn't JC the son of God? The drop, or the distance between the expected and the actual, continues as we find out that this Jesus Christ's name is "Rodney Schlenker," a name that tickles, perhaps because it sounds like schmuck, shmo, and other vulgar Yiddish words of derision. Rodney is an "investment banker." Of course, the New Testament Jesus was a carpenter, a humble, honest, practical profession, the antithesis of the investment banker. The speaker is convinced that this guy is "the one, / you know, the Savior, the new and improved," which makes the savior, at least this version, sound like a detergent or a computer program. The "you know" emphasizes the speaker's lack of intelligence and clarity, two attributes often linked. It's as though he's pleading with the reader to "get it." The speaker is feeling, he says, "pretty damn Roman, sitting here with my remote," which compounds the humor. Not only does the slang damn make us laugh in this context of the guy who saves us from damnation, but the fact that he's feeling Roman suggests that somehow being Roman is synonymous with godliness, an assertion compounded by the incongruity of a Roman with a remote, the quintessential modern invention. The remote suggests passivity, masturbatory inattention, and distance. And this is the speaker, the arbiter of which JC is the real JC.

The speaker continues: he says "after the ads it starts getting goofy," as if it weren't goofy enough already. The second guest is "totally the one: toga, thong sandals, beard, long locks, / the whole shebang." Again, humor derives from incongruity: the speaker vets the veracity of a 21st century messiah based on the sartorial and grooming choices of a 1st century man. And, of course, that 1st century man is as viewed through the lens of sentimental and reductive drawings of a bearded, sandaled, toga-wearing guy who looks a lot like he played guitar in a rock band, circa 1970. The poem works as a series of incongruities — all funny in the juxtaposition — one piled upon the other. In the end, the speaker decides that the last guy (who reminds him, jarringly, of "Charles Manson," the megalomaniacal mass-murderer) can't be "the one" because, he says, "Jesus wouldn't wear those glasses." Not only is this the last line, but the partial rhyme with the penultimate line, "call me Doubting Thomas," conveys a cinched certainty, a sense of closure; a sense, of course, that is problematic. The speaker is serious, even if we know that the poet is not, at least about which of the guests is the real Jesus.

What is Fanning doing with all this humor? When the speaker says that the second "Jesus" is "Way more of a Jesus /than Willem Dafoe," he's alluding to the star of the controversial movie, The Last Temptation of Christ. The movie explores the humanity of Jesus rather than his divinity, which set off noise from those who objected to a nuanced portrayal of the Messiah. According to Roger Ebert, who gave the movie his highest rating, "there is more than one way to consider the story of Christ—why else are there four Gospels? …[T]his film is likely to inspire more serious thought on the nature of Jesus than any other ever made." In other words, sometimes in the midst of hubbub, we miss that which is important. Or, in the case of The Messiah Complex, with all the humor, we might miss the serious point. Or, I might say, that the humor disarms us as the author makes a serious point. Of all the actors who have played Jesus, Fanning chose one whose movie explores an alternate view of God-made-man, one that challenges the cliché of Jesus, the mock-up crated by religionists and advertisers.

At the same time, poetry does more than one thing at a time, it's no accident that the Willem Dafoe's Jesus is a celluloid Jesus. Even as it undermines the cliché, it is also a commercial creation, much like the Jerry-Springer Christs on morning talk television. Not only is it funny — that distance-thing again — but it is also an ironic distance between the creation and the cliché, the distance between our serious questions about God and the commercial representation of God. Fanning dismantles our cultural reliance on television as a source of knowledge, but not just television, although it stands in for our armchair-certainty, the assurance we have that we can make assertions and judgments about anything and everything, including questions of faith. How can we know anything from a safe uninvolved distance? How can we know anything remotely? It's as if Fanning is asking, what can we know? Really?

If Fanning had begun this poem as a meditation on Existentialism, or on the problem of faith, or as an exploration into the question of how we know what we think we know, we might have been bored, or at least, armed. The humor disarms the reader by way of misdirection, beginning with the Batman-esque expletive exclamation. In Sartre's "Existentialism," he writes about a "madwoman" with hallucinations. He asks, "What proof did she really have that it was God? … And if I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell, or from the subconscious, or a pathological condition? … If a voice addresses me, it is always for me to decide that this is an angel's voice." The Existential problem is how we know what we say we know. As the speaker of "Messiah Complex" makes judgments about which of these talk-show messiahs is the real one, a move that is reminiscent of that old television show, "To Tell The Truth": will the real JC please stand up?, we realize that the problem is ours. Like Sartre's madwoman, we can't really know. Ultimately, we make decision based on idiosyncratic and frivolous details, such as the glasses worn by the savior, an anachronism that produces laughter, laughter that disarms, but we don't realize that we are just like the speaker of the poem, and so we feel superior to him as we laugh. The first definition of humor from the Princeton referenced above says that humor works by way of superiority. In Fanning's poem, the joke is on us, the reader: we feel superior to the speaker, the guy who's sitting home on a weekday morning judging messiahs from his Barcalounger, remote in hand. And yet, when we decide who is crazy and who is sane, where that thin line between psychosis and faith lies (if, indeed, there is a line at all), which manifestation of a supreme being we accept, and which we will relegate to the fringe, we're making similar idiosyncratic decisions. Fanning's poem implicates us all. Yes, really.