The Wit's Guide to Humiliation

Or, reckless angles

Does this medieval doodle from the Coutumes de Toulouse manuscript (1295-97) depict someone throwing eggs or rocks? Hard to say, even harder to deflect.

Humbled and humiliated derive from the same root, and perhaps from the same cause. Which derivation you choose is up to you. If you are humbled, you might be grateful to be shown the light. If you are humiliated, well, you’ll show them.

“I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others.”
— Lorrie Moore

We live in an age of maximal humiliation and minimal shame — Dancing With the Stars has been running for 31 seasons — so it’s important to distinguish between the two. If you feel shame, you know you’ve fallen short. But who ever thinks that?

“You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.”
— P.J. O’Rourke

If you’re being humiliated, someone else is deliberately trying to make you feel ridiculous and inferior. And then, more often than not, you get angry. And then you get even. 

“I got up, set my hat at a reckless angle and walked out, telling him that I would send him a check, which I never did. I went away feeling the pathos of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, after visiting a racist doctor in the essay “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience”

Mortification is deadly, but not in the way that it sounds. The number of people who have died of humiliation is far outnumbered by those who have been killed to avenge it. After Versailles, the Germans really had their noses rubbed in it. And there was that White House Correspondents’ Dinner where the president at the time savagely mocked the man who became his successor. Of course, it’s the benefit of hindsight that makes these moments stand out. There’s also what writer Wayne Koestenbaum calls The Rosa Parks Principle, in which “years of humiliation lead to epoch-making revolt.”

“People must not be humiliated, that is the main thing.”
— Anton Chekhov

“Why do we need to think well of ourselves?” asked Vivian Gornick in a 2021 Harper’s essay on humiliation. “Why is it not enough to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, given freedom of speech and movement? Why do we also have to think well of ourselves?” Well, if you remove those squishy feelings of self worth from the top of Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, you get Maslow’s Isosceles Trapezoid of Needs: Not as catchy.

“I refuse to endure months of expensive humiliation only to be told at the end of it that at the age of four I was in love with my rocking-horse.”
— Noel Coward on psychoanalysis

In some countries, they observe National Humiliation Day. Be sure to cancel all your engagements to wallow in the wounded pride of your ancestors! If you must maintain your share of a national humiliation over many centuries, you should be eligible for a generous tax rebate.  

“There is nothing so humiliating as to see idiots succeed in undertakings in which we fail.”
— Gustave Flaubert

The two most useful views of humiliation come from Great Wits G.K. Chesterton and Quentin Crisp. Chesterton observed that a man running after his hat may feel humiliated, and “when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic — eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing — such as making love.”

And Crisp noted that you need to deliver your message with wit because there are only two kinds of information: “what we already know, which is boring, and what we do not, which is humiliating.” 

So if we are true to ourselves or if we are learning, we may be humiliated. Seems like it might be worth it? 

“The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.”
— George Orwell

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Every paid subscriber, illustrated!

August’s Riposte Card — a bundle of which will be sent to every one of my 36 paid subscribers next week — is brilliant. The cartoonist Eugenia Viti has done a wonderful riff on Jerome K. Jerome’s timeless observation that people generally prefer the grumbly.

Now, is it true that Ms. Viti set out to draw each of my 36 beloved Riposte Carders? Well, maybe? But aren’t there 54 heads in the above illustration? Could she possibly have known who the next 18 subscribers will be? Well, she is very good.

Eugenia is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of Be Pregnant: An Illustrated Companion for Moms-to-Be. More about her next week!

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“The one thing to do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and that's an experience of incalculable value.”
— T.S. Eliot 

We survived humiliation, as did the poet whose name is an anagram of toilets. What will we make it through next week?

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That was issue No. 213 of Get Wit Quick, your weekly slice of humiliation cake, the down-menu cousin of humble pie. Of course I know it’s actually Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but I had to call it a pyramid to land the joke. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is worth a wallow. Keep your chin up and your ❤️  tapped.