It’s Sunday and I’m waiting to meet Baldesar Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier, before I have to face another long week of work. I haven’t told him exactly what the problem is, but he’s agreed to time travel from the 16th century to the present because I purchased a used Penguin Classic edition of his monumental work on the essential virtues of someone who, in 21st century terms, makes his living by sucking up to the rich. Hey–even a guy who died in 1528 or 29, depending on who you believe–could use a little walking-around money from a royalty check.
Baldesar Castiglione
Baldesar, or “Balls” as his friends call him, doesn’t know it but my career hangs by a thread. Playful, light-hearted sarcasm has been my calling card since I first directed it at Frosty, the barber in the first chair at the Bothwell Hotel in Sedalia MO, at the tender age of 9 when he said, after putting the finishing touches on my haircut, “You look sharp now!” To which I replied “Unlike you,” earning myself a stern lecture from my dad when I got home on the perils of being a smart aleck. Lately my playful badinage has begun to wear thin on my colleagues and there is a movement afoot to throw me out of the firm, which is why I’m spending a lot of time in the file room hiding from the executive committee.
“Balls,” I say once he’s arrived, “I don’t get it. Anybody who hears me riffing has got to know that I’m only joshing.”
“You have studied the British philosopher J.L. Austin in college, I believe?” he says in a polished manner he picked up working for Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
“Yeah–so?”
“Did he not say that sometimes, in some circumstances, it is considered vulgar to pretend to be vulgar?”
J.L. Austin
He’s got me dead to rights on that one. Sort of like the time I lost a bar bet to a Jewish guy on who conceived immaculately, the Blessed Virgin Mary or her mother. “Well, yeah, I understand that. But still–isn’t there room in the oh-so-serious world of business for innocent, light-hearted gibes and ripostes?”
He gives me a skeptical look. “You work in Boston, no?”
“No, I work in Boston yes. The home of the bean and the cod. Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots . . .”
“. . . and Cabots speak only to God.” He finishes the century-old toast for me, perhaps to demonstrate that he knows the rules of engagement I ought to be living by better than me. “You should know that the topics which one is permitted to jest about are very limited.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I say. “Sports and politics, right?”
“That is correct. When the Red Sox they do poorly, you can be sarcastic about them. When they do well, you offer up praise to them. When a politician takes a payoff from a real estate developer, you make a joke about the Red Sox.”
“Seems awfully limited if you ask me.”
“I didn’t. But you get to rotate the teams. Boston is still a four-sport town.”
Original Tea Party: “Hold it–that’s a case of lapsang souchong!”
“How about local history, like the Tea Party?” I ask.
“The antic act of civil disobedience that struck back at government monopolies?”
“The same.”
“Ix-nay on the e-Tay arty-Pay,” he says. He was known as quite a scholar of pig Latin in his time.
“So, the politically incorrect is off limits, too?”
“On the nosey.”
“Well, then, as the Prefect asked you, be good enough to teach us how we are to make use of pleasantries, and explain the skill that goes with all this amusing talk to arouse laughter and merriment in a polite and appropriate way, for this is very important to the courtier.”
Keats, after first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
He gives me a look of wild surmise, like Cortez’s men on first seeing the Pacific as described by Keats in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” “You have read The Book of the Courtier?” he asks, obviously gratified to know that his work has influenced me.
“Read it? Are you kidding? I got the 12-audiotape version and listen to it in my sleep!”
“Then you know The Rules,” he said. “Right?”
“Well, I’m getting older and I can’t retain information as well as I used to.”
“Allow me to refresh your memory,” he says, recalling the little lawyer in the Thurber cartoon–the one I have in my office–who introduces a kangaroo into evidence.
“One must consider with great care the reservations and limits to sarcasm,” he began, “and also who is being stung. You don’t make fun of poor unfortunate creatures, do you?”
“No, but I call ’em as I see them,” I said. “Of the many noblemen of nature who I step over each morning, many are sleeping off strong drink that I myself would like to overimbibe in. But I have to go to work while they entertain naive travelers with their tales of personal woe, how they only need $5 to get a bus ticket to Worcester, if you give them your name and address, they’ll send you a check as soon as you get there.”
“Okay, well, perhaps it is possible to be too sentimental about some of those who stumble in life’s race.”
“What else?”
“The courtier should also guard against mocking those who are universally favored and loved by all and who are powerful.”
“Uh, I think you’re pulling your punches.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose I find a funny picture of the Pope on the internet. Are you saying I can’t make some crack about it? I’m trying to humanize the papacy for Christ’s . . . er, Pete’s sake.”
He looks quickly over his shoulder and, seeing no one who could have heard me except for the 90 or so sets of eyeballs reading this post around the world, shushes me with a force that recalls the Great Hurricane of 1938. Or ’35, I forget which.
“Well, who can I make fun of, in your narrow, cramped little corral of sarcasm?” I ask.
“It is allowable to hold up to derision and laugh at the vices of those who are neither so wretched as to excite compassion, nor so wicked as to deserve greater punishment than verbal abuse, nor so exalted that they can do you harm if they take offense.”
“Well of all the pusillanimous pablum,” I say. “You’re taking away my Mad Magazine and giving me a copy of Highlights for Children.”
He chuckles involuntarily. “I just love Goofus and Gallant!”
I groan inwardly, and outwardly too–I can’t contain myself. “Ok, so much for substance. How about style?”
“Well,” he says, re-assuming the tone of long-forgotten authority. “There are three kinds of pleasantries: first, a long amusing narrative.”
“That’s not my style.”
“I know,” he replies. “I have seen you roll your eyes when your friend Geoff . . .”
“He’s not my friend. He’s a friend of a friend’s wife.”
“Begins one of his long amusing tales of his children.”
“. . . and when we went back, we’d forgotten Courtney’s library card!”
“Good Lord,” I moan. “He is not funny! He just commandeers everyone’s attention with his stentorian voice, and won’t shut up!”
“And, I have seen you make a quick thrust with a single cutting remark to upset his flow.”
“That’s right,” I say. “I’m a counterpuncher–not that it does much good with that windbag.”
“Well then, you should try the third method of acceptable sarcasm.”
“Which is what?”
“It is called ‘practical jokes,’ which includes story-telling, brief comments, and also a certain amount of action.”
I consider this for a moment. “So, the next time Geoffie-boy gets going I can interrupt him with a practical joke?”
“Yes.”
“What would you recommend?”
“The traditional favorite of the light-hearted Florentines is the snakes in the Pringle’s Potato Chip canister.”