Paronomasia

 continued from here

 Paronomasia 

Dramatis Personae: Axel and Nils Sundstrøm, Bel Monk, and Uncle Albert, wrapped up in a wool scarf and his full-length overcoat though its 40°F warmer inside Corner Coffee than outside on Division Street. And me.

Setting: Corner Coffee at the intersection of Division and Market. The smell of coffee, milk, and wet wool. Muted gabble. E.g.,

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
1845-1903

Nils: Blah, blah, blah. Politics. Blah. Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake. Now Arizona politics.
     Until he stops to take a swallow of his, and I push in as he raises mug to mouth. Wait until it touches his lips, and I’ll be too late: “What do Lutherans find funny?” I say. “What do they laugh at?”
     “Not much,” Bel says. “Mostly they twitter. Or they bark.”
     Nils is putting his mug down, but Axel says, “Wait!” the older brother.
     And Bel goes on: “They’re nervous, or they’re angry.” Nils has put his coffee down and has both hands around his mug. But Axel says again, “Wait!” “Because they’re caught off guard and they don’t know what to say,” Bel twitters nervously, demonstrating. “Or they can’t believe what they’re hearing,” — an angry bark. (Big dog!)
     Nils: “I . . . ,” but Uncle Albert doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care: “You are still thinking about your de Maupassant story,” he says to me. “It’s ruin, as I said before. And requital.”
     Taking his wool-gloved hands from his lap and putting them on the table: “No one likes being laughed at, so they retaliate. Stand-up comics. They imagine that the audience is laughing with them, but as soon as they sense someone is not, someone becomes a heckler; and the comic will set out immediately to turn the laughter so it is directed at him.
     “Varajou’s brother-in-law and sister laugh at nothing, they are too serious — not only self-serious, too serious altogether. Or, they laugh aloud at nothing. Still, they are sniffing, snorting at Varajou’s improvidence and yobbery. Why shouldn’t he snort and sniff back? Except his snort and sniff will break out — not when he sees that he’s mistaken the mayor’s wife for a bawd and her daughters for chippies, but when he gets what that means for his self-righteous brother-in-law, who depends on the mayor, what it means for his smug sister, who depends on her husband — then he will  break out in raucous har-de-har-har-har that he upsets their pinched, prudish, grasping apple-cart?

     “Think about it.”

 

Nils gets up, “Head,” he coughs.

     Axel says, “It’s not just Lutherans, it’s the Presbyterians, too, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Norwegians, the Finns, and the Latts. Bel is right. Most laughter is nervous chirp, angry bark, or confused coughed — or menacing, the witch’s cackle, the villain’s bwahaha. It is almost anything but delighted. It may be the only pure laughter not of children is at puns. We groan but without bitterness or cynically; we’re not nervous or angry, or lost. We laugh at puns, but it is never laughter truly at but we’re laughing with thepunster. Poor guy. He can’t help it.”

 

“‘Bawd’?” I say to Uncle Albert. “‘Chippies’?”
     Axel because he can’t help it, turning also to Uncle Albert: “What do you think it was, the bawd rate?”
                                                                       12.12.22