"Live It Again" (1958) and "Of Laughter and the Love of Friends" (1975/1954)

Little Will with a rubber band Shot his sister out of hand Shot her with a joyful shout In the eye and put it out.

Two stories that seem to belong together. One is mostly unknown. The other is mostly forgotten. Each is about a practical joker who gets his just deserts. “Live It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair to say of the unpublished “Live It Again,” which should be held to a different standard. “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” reads as if Lafferty remembered the earlier failed story and really wanted to make the gimmick work: the insufferable practical joker who is made to pay. It is as if he began with Carl Crump and ended with John Ginpole. Both are about as loathsome as any characters in his work. It is hard to imagine the quiet and unassuming R. A. Lafferty having any love for their humor.

“Live It Again” starts on New Year’s morning, when the hungover Harry Henshaw finds newspapers on his doorstep dated a year earlier. He calls his friend Carl Crump, who has, in fact, planted the newspapers, and Carl plays dumb. He says the old date is today’s date, then pushes the gag further by trying to collect on a bowl-game bet Harry already lost and paid the previous year. Between calls, Carl recounts to his wife Margaret the long history of damage he has done to Harry: getting him fired by framing him as a leak, writing to his suppliers that he was an alcoholic, an act that later drove Harry to drink, and once convincing Harry that Margaret was coming to shoot him. Margaret, we learn, left Harry for Carl years earlier, and she knows she chose the wrong man. She listens to all this with flat responses:

“And when he came to work for me I only paid him slave wages. And I still had my spy inside Hockheimer's office. Boy, that was rich.” “Yes, for you it worked out richly.” “It's time to put the needle in him again. A joke isn't any good until you milk it.”

Then the trick backfires. Margaret has just finished writing Carl a note saying that she is leaving him and going back to Harry, and she has dated it January 1, 1961. It is the date Carl has spent all morning insisting is correct. He cannot argue that the note is old. The trap closes:

“Why, that's it there! Just finished writing it! Look at it. You can tell by looking at it that it's a year old. Look, you've even dated it, January 1, 1961.” “That is today, Carl. Only a little while ago I heard you tell Harry that was the date.” “Where are you going, Margaret? Are you going out?” “The note tells you, Carl. I'm going back to Harry.”

So she walks out, and Carl is left phoning Harry to warn him that she is coming. There is not much here, but it was an idea Lafferty apparently wanted to get right: the practical joker undone.

In 1975, Lafferty gave the practical joke conte cruel another try, this time with an ironic title taken from a Belloc poem. He tells us about John Ginpole, who is the leading practical joker in Perryville, married to Gale Geier Ginpole. She is an outsized, gaudy, good-humored woman with no sense of humor and three imposing brothers: Sheldrake the doctor, Culpepper the undertaker, and Gazebo the sheriff and coroner. Unlike Carl Crump, Ginpole is indiscriminate. He plays bruising jokes on everyone, causing a run on the local bank that ruins it, sending his brother-in-law, the doctor, on fake house calls, reporting fake corpses to the undertaker, and tipping off the sheriff to imaginary crimes. But his cruelest jokes are reserved for Gale, and they make for some of the meanest writing in Lafferty.

Three times he leaves a letter under a red flag on their bulletin board. The first says that he has left her for another woman, when he is really in the kitchen making a sandwich. The contrast between her devastation and his boorish delight shows his loathsome nature:

“Hey, Gale, where's the horseradish?” John Ginpole asked as he came in from the kitchen. Gale twisted on the floor like the gaudy, broken, tenth-of-a-ton butterfly that she was. John was holding a sandwich the size of a football and was pouring barbecue sauce into its depths. “John, you're here. You didn't go away with Ramona!” Gale gasped in well-voiced amazement. “Wow! Wow! Wowzer! Wow! Wow!” John Ginpole exploded with laughter. “You fell for it! You fell for it! It worked!”

The second note says that he is about to shoot himself upstairs, while he is using a cap pistol. The third announces that he is a leper bound for the Carville leprosarium, when he is merely hiding in the house. Each time, the dumb but sweet Gale is devastated. Each time Ginpole rolls on the floor, roaring with delight. Enough becomes enough. After the suicide prank, Gale goes to her brothers, and they agree on a plan. It is an old “grisly classic” that their family has carried out five times over the past 180 years. After the leprosy prank, Gale runs to Sheldrake’s house. The doctor injects Ginpole with a knockout drug and signs a death certificate. The coroner confirms it. The sheriff quashes any investigation. The undertaker skips the embalming. Ginpole wakes in a coffin underground, hearing Gale’s voice through a two-way radio her brothers have rigged. She tells him everything. He takes it to be the greatest joke he has ever seen, the sixth Geier joke. Then he dies laughing:

“The only joke in your life, Gale, the Geier Joke, and it's better than a dozen ordinary jokes,” John was rolling around in glee in his coffin. “Wow, how good can you get? Wow, wow, wowser, wow, wow!” “Be careful, John dear,” Gale whispered. “Your hernia will be out again if you laugh too hard.” . . . “Wow, wow, wow, this is the funniest ever! If I had my choice on how to die I'd have picked this: dying laughing at the best joke I ever met in my life.” And he died laughing.

Of course, these stories are not about humor but about human cruelty, a theme that Lafferty often handles well. Here, though, there is simply too much unpleasantness. One reason they fail is that both are small domestic dramas, and, frankly, Lafferty does not handle marriage well on a small scale. When he succeeds, as he does in In a Green Tree, he succeeds on a huge scale, with dozens of characters, so that he can dip in and out of the handful of intimate moments he wants to capture and let the larger shape of his vast imagined human community reveal itself. Lafferty will probably always be thought of as a story writer, but at almost every stage of his career, he had one foot in a drama with hundreds of characters each: Argo, Coscuin, Green Tree. Only in the last ten years or so have people begun to grasp how he held those universes in mind while also spinning the local ambients of his short fiction.

Live It Again Notes.pdf

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Laughter and the Love of Friends Notes.pdf

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