Harvey Kurtzman unglued my reality.
The great cartoonist and key first editor of Mad Magazine
introduced one simple little word into the magazine in May 1954, one that made absolutely
no sense. It resonated, and Kurtzman’s brilliant successor as Mad editor, Al
Feldstein, kept the gag running.
When we were kids we made a daily pilgrimage after school to
the Duckwall’s five-and-dime store a third of a mile from our house, hoping to
find a new Captain America comic book, or another gruesome, Joe Orlando-edited House of Mystery, or the new issue of
Mad Magazine. Somewhere down the line, in one gloriously silly, juvenile number
or other, my reading eyes skidded to a halt at the word “potrzebie.”
Here’s the buildup: there are many faultlines in my
thinking. All early childhood memories are intense and fragmented, but mine
seem particularly adrift, though, contextless and overwhelmingly associated
with a sheer, staggering, fearful thrill of perceiving color, taste, smell,
sound, and all, extending even to synesthesia. I couldn’t distance myself, everything
was too loud, far too real. I could barely stand the sheer vividnesss of other
people.
We all need context, a structure of perception that
underlies judgement and choice. Fortunately, I had a world of books to comfort
me. Here were super-real experiences that could be controlled, set at arms’
length, put down and pondered.
Another ready-made reality filter was the dull, Caucasian
Christianity I inherited unquestioningly. Edged with shadows of Scandinavian
gloom, girded with the magical power of repression, my Midwest Lutheranism
contained a unified conception of the cosmos on every level, neatly anchored by
profoundly powerful and somewhat grumpy allfather. Even after I lost faith,
that context slotted me into reality, gave me a standpoint to work from. I
found a way to contain my terror of being randomly buffeted about by my senses
and the thoughts and feelings they stirred.
By the mid-‘70s, though, we had all given up on church. I
was still working my way through the local library, quite literally. (I nailed
the children’s’ library in about a year and a half. My mother had to sign off
on me checking out insane armloads from the adult side after that.) By now I
was thoroughly aware of the nature of the universe and my place in it. It just
wasn’t especially thrilling. I could function, and did, grayly, senses turned
down.
Then I hit “potrzebie.” It wasn’t even being used as a punchline!
Like many a mental hotfoot, it was slipped in casually. No matter how anxious I
was to make sense of it, I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure of much, but I did know my
vocabulary words. This was not among them. Our house dictionaries, and those of
the local library, provided not a clue. I am sure I had read “Jabberwocky” by
that time, but somehow the concept of the non-sequitir still escaped me. Now it
hit me between the eyes like a ballpeen hammer, a one-word, Borscht Belt Zen
koan that exploded my mind.
I short-circuited. I laughed hysterically. Here was a
gratuitous, fabricated formation of letters, could mean anything, could mean
nothing, thrown onto the page without let or hinder, heedless of the laws of
usage. It not only ignored the needs of the reader, it mocked them.
[Backstory: “Potrzebie” is a Polish word meaning “a need.”
Harvey Kurtzman ran across it in a list of instructions in multiple languages
that came with a bottle of aspirin. He cut it out, copied it, and started pasting
it into the backgrounds of random Mad stories. It caught on, along with other
classic Mad neologisms as furshlugginer, veeblefetzer, ecch, blecch, hoohah, fladdap,
and shtoink. A satiric Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures persists in
those pages to this day.]
And it invited you to mock along. It denied meaning. My tiny
little mind didn’t know this yet, but Kurtzman was dipping into the same well
of absurdity as the Surrealists. The waves of Eurosilliness ran through Lear,
Carroll, Jarry, Joyce, and Ionesco, and quickly migrated into lower-brow
artists such as Benchley, Perelman, Spike Milligan, Ernie Kovacs, Bob and Ray, and
of course Mad.
“Potrzebie” gave me the power to step outside the dull,
orderly system of consensual reality. Meanings were arbitrary, and, at base,
silly and funny. And all my mental constructs went from stone to Jell-O. I was
connected to unmediated experience again, without the terror of being
overwhelmed by it. Life was laughable, was enjoyable. And I started creating. I
didn’t know it, but I was doomed to a life of comedy.
This newly provisional reality could be tested for validity
with the Sword of Potrzebie. Any given person, organization, creed, plan,
system, was permeable, subject to the erosion of humorous query, skepticism,
mockery, lampoon, and parody. The simple addition of the tiny word “potrzebie”
into any magnificent but false landscape would explode it, set it aflame, bring
it crashing down.
Not that this approach doesn’t have its dangers. Humor
strips away superfluities. Like many young comics, I couldn’t tell the
difference between myself and my act. I single-mindedly tore everything apart, including
people, looking for material. To deny the meaning of everything is an untenable
place from which to live – I tried it and it didn’t work.
I stopped staying up ‘til 3 in the morning at smoky bars
telling dick jokes. I found a God I could live with, and writing. I have a
family that puts up with me. My friends are the best in the world – they are
funny, and don’t take too much seriously, but are absolutely solid, reliable,
and honest, unencumbered by the phoney-baloney bullshit that passes for workaday
relationships in this dodgy world, among the normatives, the control group.
I have very little money and a wheelbarrow-full of peace of
mind. I owe it all to potrzebie.
