Joker, Joker, Deuce by Paul Beatty
**Overview of "Joker, Joker, Deuce" by Paul Beatty**
"Joker, Joker, Deuce" is a collection of nineteen poems by Paul Beatty, showcasing his background as a performance poet. The poems are characterized by sharp wit, humor, and a distinctive rhythm, all hallmarks of performance poetry. Beatty employs innovative techniques, such as omitting capitalization and standard punctuation, to create a casual yet impactful style. His work critiques both traditional and popular culture, often using satire to point out the absurdities within cultural clichés and the commercialization of art. One notable poem, "Verbal Mugging," explores themes of cultural identity and self-mockery, highlighting Beatty's disdain for inauthenticity and his quest for genuine expression. The collection's tone ranges from playful to critical, addressing serious social issues while maintaining an engaging voice. Beatty’s exploration of race, identity, and the complexities of cultural representation invites readers to reflect on deeper societal themes, making "Joker, Joker, Deuce" a significant contribution to contemporary poetry.
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Subject Terms
Joker, Joker, Deuce by Paul Beatty
First published: 1994
Type of work: Poetry
The Poems
Paul Beatty started his literary career as a performance poet, dazzling live audiences and readers alike. It is unsurprising, then, that each of the nineteen poems in Joker, Joker, Deuce showcases the extraordinary wit and verbal agility that often characterize the genre of performance poetry. Among other techniques, performance poetry often displays outrageous humor and compelling rhythm in an assault on traditional cultural attitudes. Many of Beatty’s poems do assail traditional culture, but they prove to be equally critical of the popular culture they seem to represent.
The poem titled “Verbal Mugging,” which begins “this is a performance piece . . . ,” is representative in several ways of the volume and of performance poetry generally. As he usually does, Beatty omits capitalization and standard punctuation (“ancestors ive never even known”), as well as the final g in gerunds and gerundives (“lookin for vibrations”). His poetry also embodies multiple meanings, as in the title “Verbal Mugging.” “Mugging” can be either a strong-arm robbery or the act of clowning before a camera. Beatty’s poems are so full of surprise and stunning shifts of meaning that listeners and readers may well feel verbally “mugged,” though this poem’s lyricism keeps one from feeling attacked outright. The poem’s main focus, though, is on the other sense of “mugging”—cultural posturing.
Beatty is unquestionably an angry young black man (thirty-two years old at the time of publication), poking fun at “North American Whitey.” He is also, however, savagely satirical about what he sees as ethnic cultural poses. “. . . i illustrate my words/ with some cheesy rip-off diana ross and four tops hand gestures.” The performer in the poem, relating the history of African Americans, progresses from slow solemnity to “a southern drawl,” then to “wallowing in the muddled dirt wrongs/ done to someone else . . . as i regale you with clichés and tales of ancestors ive never even known.” The poet, then, dislikes maudlin posturing in anyone, even himself. The self-mockery in “Verbal Mugging” is another trait representative of Beatty’s poems. In the end, he seeks genuineness, “lookin for vibrations that don’t stop with time.” This final line is about seeking a sense of rapport that is not confined to a few minutes’ performance.
Beatty clearly finds cultural clichés to be personally limiting and burdensome. He deplores fakery and commercialism, preferring genuine feeling and thought. In one of the longest poems in Joker, Joker, Deuce, “About the Author” (a title drawn from dust-jacket blurbs in books), he skewers the use of once-inspiring artistic works—such as the Beatles’ Revolution 9—in support of consumerism:
but everybody’s talkin’ about a revolution
“Pre-spike” alludes to a time before African American film director Spike Lee began to advertise Nike athletic shoes. Later in the poem, Beatty attacks the unreflective glorification of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
this is mlk
Elsewhere in “About the Author,” the narrator pokes fun at his own simplistic perception of racial injustice:
we used to come home on college vacations
The merciless satire displayed in these poems reaches its ultimate expression with the shortest piece in the book, “Why That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Never Worked with Black People.” The poem itself, shorter than the title, reads in its entirety:
who’s on first?
Joker, Joker, Deuce does not end on an optimistic note. The last poem, “Stall Me Out” (meaning to exclude one from the situation), has the narrator insulting and dismissing a poet: “no rhythm/ . . . constantly depressed clumsy no money/ . . . take your weak ass poems/ and go back to los angeles.”
Critical Context
Paul Beatty, though known as a performance poet, has also won a solid reputation in the academic community. Early reviews of Joker, Joker, Deuce, however, routinely labeled him a poet of the hip-hop generation. He bristles at that term, once calling the “generation” concept “a marketing niche passing itself off as identity. . . . They sell a dream and a version of inclusion to powerless and voiceless people.”
Beatty lives on the edge of, and in deep distrust of, the avant-garde, especially when it refuses to laugh at itself. He cites Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) as an author who is solemnly revered but who herself indulged in lively raillery against the snobbery she sometimes encountered among her fellow African Americans. In the same vein, the cover of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006), edited by Beatty, was illustrated with a watermelon rind positioned to resemble a smile. For this bit of satire, he paid a price in cancellations of interviews and denunciation by some other African American writers.
On the other hand, some critics have suggested that Beatty’s explorations do not go far enough. Ishmael Reed noted that Beatty has been hailed as “the new Ralph Ellison,” because both writers railed at some of the same targets. In some works by Beatty, however, Reed has found the images to be hackneyed, thanks in part to the television culture that Beatty simultaneously celebrates and satirizes. “Paul Beatty has the talent and needs to explore new territory,” said Reed. “He could heed Chester Himes’s advice, ’to think the unthinkable.’”
Beatty’s poetic genre, performance, is often considered a recent phenomenon, but it dates from oral traditions predating written literature. Satire dates at least from the time of Aristophanes (c. 450 b.c.e.-c. 385 b.c.e.). Bitter as it may sound and ambivalent as its spirit may be, satire implies a hope that some ideal could one day be realized. Perhaps for Beatty that ideal is “vibrations that don’t stop with time.” In any case, he calls satire an effective force for social balance in all ages, “because nothing ever changes.” Paradoxically, this viewpoint, deeply rooted in history, makes him highly contemporary.
Bibliography
Amber, Jeannine. “Poetry Revival.” Essence 25, no. 5 (September, 1994). Beatty is the one a cappella poet among the artists Amber discusses in the context of café performance poetry. She emphasizes their multimedia collaborations and their vast difference from the “lofty verses” of William Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Daniels, Karu F. “Paul Beatty Talks to BV About His Latest Book, Hokum.” AOL Black Voices. January 5, 2006. Discussion of the humor anthology Hokum and its controversial “watermelon” cover gives Beatty the opportunity to expand on his theories of humor, satire, and the inherently limiting nature of contemporary ideas about race and culture.
Hoagland, Tony. “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.” The American Poetry Review, March/April, 2003. Hoagland celebrates poets of the past such as Juvenal, François Villon, and Jonathan Swift, for whom clearing the air of falsehood and sentiment was “a source of creative energy and pride.” He cites Beatty’s Joker, Joker, Deuce as a modern example of poetry in this vein.
Peterson, V. R. “Word Star: Paul Beatty Writing to His Own Groove.” Essence 27, no. 4 (August, 1996). Peterson—one of the reviewers who refer to Beatty as “the premier bard of hip-hop”—discusses the outrageously plotted novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), in which Beatty satirizes racial stereotypes.
Reed, Ishmael. “Hoodwinked: Paul Beatty’s Urban Nihilists.” Village Voice, April/May, 2000. Reed enthusiastically praises Beatty’s talent and courage, comparing him with great African American authors such as Chester Himes, John O. Killens, and John A. Williams. Reed also warns about the pitfalls of “urban nihilism” in Beatty’s work and offers suggestions for Beatty’s ongoing literary development.