Roy Blount - Camels Are Easy, Comedys Hard

To my two favorite teachers:

Ann Lewis and Vereen Bell

It do not say, around the needle. Nor over the needle.

And it do not say a snake. Nor any small creeping thing.

IT SAY A CAMEL!

Through the needles eye.

Now you say to me, Preacher, how could that be?

FROM A RADIO SERMON

WHAT WE NEED IS affirmative action for silly people. Theyre everywhere, they vote (evidently). Uplift them. The trouble is, many of them have already been to, say, Yale. The other night I spoke with just such a one. He was a conservative, he told me, and the great achievement of his generation (people in their twenties) was to have realized that everything is bullshit.

Well, you havent achieved much then, I told him, because everything isnt.

What isnt? he demanded.

Im sitting here in my kitchen now, still trying to think where to begin. On the refrigerator is a photograph of my kids. They are in their twenties. They dont believe everything is bullshit.

How about that. My children dont believe everything is bullshit. I wouldnt mind that for an epitaph:

MOONLOVE CHAKHA CHAKHA

(19412020)

His children dont believe everything is bullshit.

I dont think they do. (Moonlove Chakha Chakha is the name I want to be buried under, as a reward for denying myself all mysticism here on earth.) At any rate you cant help but realize that everything isnt bullshit when you bring little children into this world. Because you have to convince them that everything isnt bullshit. Because if you dont, they will just lie there on the floor kicking and hollering NO! And the case you make had better not be purely materialistic, or they wont ever call or write you once they have their own money.

But this person the other night wasnt the right age for that argument. Next to my kids picture on the refrigerator is one of me on a camel.

Camels, I could have told this absolutist. Not even camel dung is bullshit. I take it you know how bullshit goes down. Whereas camel evacuation, I have observed, is like the bottom just dropped out of a bag of marbles.

But that would have been too easy. What is there to cling to, nowadays? What is there about which it can be said, You can take that to the bank? If there were any such thing today, of course, you would not want to entrust it to todays banks. The reason so many young people profess to be conservative today is not that there is so much to conserve, but that there is nothing reliable enough to rebel against.

Ill tell you what kind of book I believe in: one that makes people say, at first sight, what the first person who ever saw a camel must have said: What in the world is that? And then, after a while, Yet it seems to fit together some way.

This book incorporates warthogs, a nose-eating hyena, hippos, a tiger, piranhas, goaway birds, threatened ferrets, a rescued greyhound, sled dogs, bugs, literary lions, a rubber chicken, an agonized sloth, a stricken father gazelle, an envisioned bear, a minuscule weasel, fugitive raccoons (A coon can make the walking rough), a dauntless marmoset, a man-wrestling deer, more than one serpent and a self-declared fox.

And yet I wouldnt call it naturalism. It is part travel writing (Dierks, Arkansas; Kampala, Uganda; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Esperanza, Peru), part short story, part reminiscence, part sportswriting, part book review, part abortive serial novel about gigantic earthworms, part essay, part famous-persons-I-have-known, part political outcry, part crossword puzzle (you can work part of this book), part neoBiblical playlet, part cartoon criticism and part verse (may I say that reviewers sometimes use the term doggerel too loosely?).

Of the sixty-four pieces in this book, sixty-one first appeared (many in different form) in twenty-eight different publications. The longest (down the Amazon) is about ten thousand words, the shortest (in which jelly speaks), twenty-three. Most are hot off the griddle, but a few have been acquiring patina for ten to twenty-one years.

That much is easy.

Fitting it all together is hard. And that is something this book is bound to leave to the eye, and other parts, of just such a person as, by definition, yourself: the reader. You being so damn coherent.

If you want to read these pieces in your own peculiar order, or even just to flip through them picking out the vital new concepts for the Nineties (aerobic guilt, flaggot jokes, the debt/date ratio, etc., etc.), its up to you. Comedy calls for a happy endinggetting married, gaining paradise, something. But there can be no guarantees.

Have you ever considered writing something serious? people ask me. Many is the time I have thought to myself, Well, maybe Ill make this one tragic (loosely speaking). Heaven knows it wouldnt be hard. But then I say, Nahh.

Eeeeurghgrglglgblglglglghgblegh.

THATS NOT IT. ITS richer, more crowded in there. More bs, maybebs and gs and ls on top of one another.

The cry of a camel being cinched up.

For four days it awoke me at dawn. I was on a camel safari in central Kenya, just east of where, scientists tend to believe, human life began. Though Kenya still has vast open spaces and more elephants than automobiles, it is not, by general agreement, what it used to be. Depending on your point of view, paradise began to go downhill when human life began, when the British took over, when independence was won, when Americans saw Out of Africa. To the areas camels, creation went out of joint when the idea arose that the camel was a beast of burden.

That idea dates back to time immemorial, and yet camels are freshly outraged each time someone starts loading them up. Every camel seems to be thirty centuries old and yet to be confronting its role in life for the first time at that moment. So many things are done to a camel behind its head. What in blazes is going on back there?

Eeeurngh glablalalableaghlleh.

The perfect protest. The noise I want to make when I get out of bed or sit down to work. But I dont have the chops.

A camels long, not-quite-droopy lips are usually loosely pursed, except when they move old-yokelishly side to side in cud chewing and when they curl and gape enormously for a teeth-baring, tongue-baring eeeoounhgblagl A camels dark, heavy-lidded eyes, with luxuriant, dark, sand-resistant lashes, make it a highly aloof (its head, of course, may be eight feet above the ground) yet strangely come-hither animal. I am thankful that you have all seen at least pictures of a camel, because if you hadnt you wouldnt believe me when I say that a camel looks a little like a giraffe, a little like a dinosaur, a little (when folded up) like a grasshopper or frog, a little like an ostrich, a little like a horse and a little like a librarian.

I highly recommend a camel safari. Fifteen of us travelersAmerican, English, French, Canadian and apologetically South African, ranging from late teens to retiredspent five days covering twenty-three miles with one white hunter, Julian McKeand; his top Masai assistant, Barsula Lemaidok; twenty-four spear-carrying, red-wrapper-wearing, trinkets-in-their-earlobes Masai warriors, who had their hair in long braids dyed with red ocher and who protected us from the elephants that charged us and the bandits that might have; two Meru cooks; and forty camels. For four of the days we rode camels or walked with them over red dust and chunks of volcanic rock in near-desert country northeast of Isiolo, part of what used to be called the Northern Frontier District of Kenya (four hours from Nairobi). We saw warthogs and the greater kudu. We ate delicious stews and tarts and even a cheese souffl cooked in a tin-box Dutch oven on open fires. We slept on camp beds under mosquito netting. The Masai set up shower and loo tents for us every evening. And let me tell you something else about camels.