How To Write Hilarious Humor: An Analysis of Professional Comedians' (and Comediennes') Techniques to Tickle the Funny Bone

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Chapter 5: Juvenalian Satire

Another arrow in the humorist’s quiver is Juvenalian satire. Such satire is mild, as opposed to harsh or bitter Horatian satire. Historically, Juvenalian satire’s intent was corrective, aiming at diagnosing an annoying or offensive defect in the personality or an annoying habit that, once brought to the offender’s attention, might be fairly easily remedied, as by repressing the annoying personality trait or suppressing the offensive conduct. On the other hand, Horatian satire’s purpose was to identify obnoxious characteristics or behavior that required more serious or prolonged attention, such as social ostracism.

In “Go Ahead, Open This Bag,” using the Juvenalian approach, Radner exposes her father’s--or a caricature of her father’s--vanity concerning his manliness. Despite--or, perhaps, because of--his age, the narrator’s father, a “seventy-eight-year-old man,” is loathe to ask for assistance from either younger individuals or members of the opposite sex, especially in the performing of so simple a task as opening a bag of peanuts that flight attendants have distributed to the passengers aboard an airplane trip from Miami to Las Vegas.

Until now, Radner has presented her chapters’ set-up situations in short expository paragraphs. In this chapter, she introduces the setup through a series of humorous exchanges of dialogue between father and daughter. The father has flown from his hometown to visit the narrator, and after exchanging “the two-minute father-daughter hug” they’ve “perfected through the years,” the narrator asks her father what he means by his cryptic greeting, “I thought I could do it. Turned out I was mistaken.” Her question sets up the exchange of dialogue in which the reader sees the father’s pride concerning his manliness, which has remained intact despite his advanced age. It is this pride, or vanity, that is subjected to the mild attack of Juvenalian satire throughout the remainder of the chapter.

Unable to open the bag of peanuts the flight attendant has provided, he first blames the bag, rather than himself, for his inability to open the package, suggesting that the bag might have been somehow defective:

“Didn’t the bag have a perforation on one side? Usually, if you look carefully, there’s a perforation."

“I checked. There was no perforation. Possibly, it was a defective bag. I don’t know, I didn’t check other people’s.”

When his daughter asks, “Why didn’t you ask for help?,” the father’s vanity surfaces through his responses:

“I’m a seventy-eight-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. What do you want me to say to the thirty-two-year-old, one-hundred-and-fifteen pound female flight attendant? ‘Will you open this bag of peanuts for me?’ Why don’t I just put on a dress and be done with it?”

“How about the person sitting next to you?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked. She was an eighty-year-old ninety-pounder.”

“And she opened the bag with no problems?”

“She struggled. She finally stabbed it with a fork over Denver.”

The reference to “Denver” is a non-sequitur; the context in which it appears--the stabbing of a bag, as if it were a murder victim who is wounded during a struggle--is both surprising and ridiculous, earning a laugh from the reader.

The next exchange of dialogue further reveals the father’s pride--and his wounded dignity:

“Why didn’t you stab it once you saw there was a way in?”

“Because I shouldn’t have to. I’ve raised a daughter, I’ve been a lawyer. Last year, when the last full-service island closed downtown, I even learned how to pump my own gas. I should be able to open a bag of nuts.”

It is absurd for a man of such accomplishments--a father, a lawyer, and a man who has managed to adapt to changes in technology--to feel that his manhood and his dignity are threatened by his difficulty in performing such a mundane task as opening a bag of peanuts, but, of course, many times, people’s sense of self-worth is threatened by just such ludicrous situations, so, once again, Radner taps a universal experience among her readers, the humorous way in which she depicts a fictionalized version of such an experience lessening the embarrassment and the humiliation that such situations may have caused them by deflecting it onto a surrogate, or stand-in, for them, by showing them how ridiculous both the situation itself and the father’s reactions to it are.

Conclusion

In this chapter, Radner has, once again, selected an everyday situation--an airplane flight--and familiar psychological and social states of affairs--a man’s anxiety about the effects of aging upon his masculinity and his sense of dignity as a man and his refusal to accept the help of others--to set up her comedy. In the process, using mild Juvenalian satire, she criticizes the foolishness of the behavior (the father’s refusal to seek or accept the assistance of others) that results from these anxieties. Her techniques also include humorous dialogue, through which she discloses the story’s conflict while characterizing both her narrator and her narrator’s father; comedic repetition through which a series of jokes are included, all concerning the same topic and situation; and personification that comprises a logical non-sequitur(the bag is characterized as if it is a person).