Here’s a holiday (of sorts) that I’d never heard of until this afternoon: Red Nose Day. It’s today! May 21! Or really tonight, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. (EST) on NBC. According to NBC’s website, this “fun-raising special” (!) will “help twelve charity organizations lift children and young people out of poverty in the U.S. and in some of the poorest communities in the world.” Seth Meyers, David Duchovny, and Jane Krakowski will host. If you’d like to see a promotional video in which William Shatner quotes Dickens and Tom Arnold makes a cocaine joke, click here.
Red Nose Day was created in the U.K. thirty years ago by Richard Curtis, the screenwriter for Four Weddings and a Funeral (and the author of a memorable D. H. Lawrence parody). The telethon has raised over a billion dollars for charity organizations. This is all to the good, of course. Yet I don’t feel particularly inclined to celebrate this “semi-holiday” (Wikipedia’s description) or to revel in this “monumental night of comedy, music, and celebrities.” I like my red noses to suggest something more ambiguous, something less hi-def.
Earlier today, before I happened upon news of the telethon, I was reading some of Stephen Dunn’s poetry. Dunn is the keynote speaker at this year’s Bear River Writers’ Conference, which I help (in a very small way) to organize. Back in 1998, at the University of Washington, I saw Dunn read from Riffs & Reciprocities, a collection of “prose pairs.” Paging through that book today, I stopped at “Frivolity/Seriousness,” which begins like this:
Two cannibals were eating a clown, and one said to the other, “Does this taste funny to you?” I said this as I was passing the corn, and a familiar contagion began. Someone else said his high school student wrote that she had “no self of steam.” And because we were all teachers this was followed by “We all had something up our selves” and “Because I was an incredibly large feminist, I agreed with everything she said”—some of our sad pleasures.
The sad pleasures multiply and grow stranger, as Dunn leaves those clown-eating cannibals for a squirrel-eating crow. “Frivolity” and “Seriousness” are both included—how could they not be?—in Seriously Funny, one of the better poetry anthologies published in the past decade.
Dunn’s 2011 collection Here and Now contains the poem “If a Clown.” (The poem originally appeared in The New Yorker; I discussed it briefly in this space in 2009.) In the poem, a clown, with “red, bulbous nose,” needs a ride to a child’s birthday party; his car has broken down. The speaker’s friend, after a bit of hesitation, finally agrees to provide the ride. The poem concludes:
Most of the guests had gone
when my friend and the clown drove up,
and the family was angry. But the clown
twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird
and gave it to the kid, who smiled,
letting it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid,
the birthday boy, what from then on
would be your relationship with disappointment?
With joy? Whom would you blame or extol?
If this poem is recited tonight by any of our country’s “favorite comedians, musicians, and Hollywood stars,” I’ll give Red Nose Day a million dollars. No joke.