I am in Oxford, Mississippi, to address the Yoknapatawpha Society. It is the middle of July, boiling, inescapably the South. My host, who like several of the top Faulknerians at the conference seems to know every last utterance of the great man, is taking me out to a catfish dinner. I have assumed that he is a Southerner.

He is talking to me about my book on standup comedy; he wonders why I did not go deeper into the history of Jewish humor, starting in the Bible. I am happy to concede my historical limits, though his estimation of the humor of the Old Testament is higher than mine. Then, somehow, perhaps as another question about what I omitted, the comedian Don Rickles comes up. My host has never gotten over something Rickles once said to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. I cannot, here, reproduce exactly what he quotes Rickles as saying, except for the last four words. Something like this: "Johnny, you're a big man on television. You've got the big ratings. What's your competition? A nature show on PBS—'The Zebras are Dead!'"

By the time my host gets to the title of the nominal documentary, I know what he is about to say. I almost recite the words, "The Zebras are Dead," on top of his. I hold back to allow him his sudden glory. But I still have the urge to demonstrate my clairvoyance. So I bring this out: "I can tell you the moment, give or take a year, that you saw that: 1966."

"No," he replies to my chagrin, placing the memory, against the timeline of his romantic or connubial life, at a much later date. But I know that Rickles had to have spoken the memorable words around 1966, because I had experienced, at the time, watching the show, a thoroughly convulsed reaction to them myself; and when, a few days later, I went to my friend's house to work on our satirical junior high magazine, which lasted from around 1964 to around 1966, I plagiarized the phrase, imposing it upon a humor piece who knows how. And my friends, hearing it, also fell into an astonished hysteria.

Rickles made his first Tonight Show appearance in 1965. He had to have uttered these words around 1966. My host—I work this out in his presence—must have caught the show on a "Best of Carson" rerun. I am disappointed not to have mystified him by announcing with almost magical precision when he had seen a minute fragment of comedy that he had believed to be his own eccentric memory, part of his own peculiar sensibility, for a third of a century.

It finally reaches consciousness that my host is Jewish.

Most of the time, I do not register at a glance who is Jewish and who is not. I hardly know that I am a Jew, and when it comes to me, it appears as just another bothersome oddity, like the sound of my voice. When I heard the most famous canard of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that Jews drink the blood of gentile children for Passover, my first thought was that, at last, I was in possession of a historical truth, for I had never quaffed gentile blood on any holiday. My second thought, however, was that even in this egregious case, I couldn't be sure, because nobody ever tells me anything.

And yet—Don Rickles knows everybody's ethnicity at once, it's the essence of his act, and I respond to Rickles. Furthermore, I seem to think that I glimpse (it's just that attenuated) something in Rickles. I can't begin to plumb what it is that I recognize. My family never passed through Rickles's New York; we are repressed, law-abiding, mainly conformist, a different kind of Jew altogether. There are, so far as I can tell, no vulgar, angry, loud-mouthed relatives. We aren't exceptionally funny. My name is pronounced Lyman, and once the wife of the headmaster of my Harvard dorm, Mrs. F. Skiddy Von Stade, wondered if I was a "Boston Lyman." It is just possible that she was serious.

Yet "The Zebras are Dead" immediately called to me, interpellated me, with a kind of rudeness that seemed mysteriously identifying. The humor, of course, like all adult humor, inclines two ways. You might be predisposed to think that the single purpose of the joke is aggression; the ostensible point is the insult to Carson, whose show not only is at an hour (this is 1966) when only PBS is competitive, but airs so late that PBS is competing with its least enticing offerings. The "deadness" of the zebras signals that PBS is not even countering with its most attractive nature shows; and conceivably the antagonism to Carson comes out clandestinely in the word itself. Yet the phrase also bows in the direction of Freud's childish humor: the pleasure is necessarily but not sufficiently based on our sense of the silliness of zebras and the word "zebra." (There is a diminished humorous effect if the dead animal is a bird or lion.) For the four words to sound funny to you, your brain has to be spun into an oscillation between "zebra" and "dead" that keeps you from presuming where you'll land, on the reprehensible side of a taboo or in innocent nonsense. Tom Stoppard got the same effect from his Shakespearean title, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

In his great play, Stoppard makes us inhabit the reality that though we may walk fore or aft, our ship sails in the direction of our death. But to put that as a joke is a form of naughtiness that is entirely atemporal, or regressive. I'll acknowledge death, but only at an outing to the zoo. I'll contemplate dying, but only by infantilizing. If that's the essence of Jewish humor, or of Rickles himself, puerile assassin, I can recognize it, or it can recognize me.

Don Rickles began his Spritzing career just after the Second World War, but he was too rough for the nation until the late 1950s, when Frank Sinatra took him up, and then passed him along to Dean Martin; it was on the Dean Martin Show "roasts" that Rickles (the only performer on those tribute-insult shows who can still be watched without grimacing) became a primetime figure. The Rat Pack had Joey Bishop along for Jewish laughs, but when they showed up at Rickles's performances in Los Angeles or Las Vegas, Rickles could not shy away from jokes about Bishop's feminine subservience to the macho Italian crowd. The Rat Pack wanted to come off as gangster gentility, aristocratic sluggers, but they loved Rickles because he had no refinement at all. He allowed them, because it was entirely verbal, to brawl.

Then Johnny Carson took up Rickles, and something much greater happened. I have written elsewhere about the Tonight Show chiasmus: the hick, though in New York, is the host; the New Yorker in New York is the guest. The New Yorker, on the couch, is suburbanized in the city, but by a Midwesterner (Paar, Carson, Cavett, Letterman) who could not stay away from New York verbal assault. Out would come Rickles, and the band would play bullfight music, though it was unclear who was to become the matador, who the bull. Carson would, for the sake of the joke, go Midwestern bland, and Rickles would tear him up phrase by phrase. But every so often, Carson would turn the tables, scoring off Rickles, and Rickles would laugh his hard, dirty laugh (his rictus stretching outward so hard it turned his head distinctly pear-shaped), which either signified ecstasy or pain. One night, Carson insisted that Rickles actually play the host and Carson the guest. They circled the desk. Rickles, in Johnny's seat, began, "So, Johnny," and Carson was instantly all over him: "'So, Johnny'! A brilliant start! That's quite an opener! 'So, Johnny'! They pay you millions a year for lines like that."

I loved those upheavals. I was identifying with Johnny Carson, descendant, so I heard, of Kit Carson, scout.

As a kid, my favorite Red Sox ballplayer was Carl Yastrzemski; I began a scrapbook of clippings when he was still in the minors. It must have been in the winter of 1967-1968 that I saw him on TV on a variety show—he had been American League Most Valuable Player in 1967, which used to mean that you could wind up in a comedy skit. In my memory, the cast consists of Yastrzemski, a black athlete, and Rickles. Rickles, between two stiffs, is allowed to run amok. He says something funny. Yastrzemski claps his hands and says, "beautiful!" Rickles turns to the audience, goes bug-eyed, and yells: "Where does it say the Polish kid says, 'beautiful'?" Yastrzemski doubles over in laughter.

I had noticed, of course, that the black athlete was black, but it never occurred to me that Yastrzemski was Polish. If you had asked me, I suppose I would have guessed Russian. All I can remember thinking about his background was the paradox that a Boston player came from Long Island.

I identified with Yastrzemski as a ballplayer in Boston—I was a Boston Limon—just as I identified with Carson and his couch from the couch of my suburban den. There was nothing except talent that dictated that they should be themselves where they were as opposed to me, where I was. Yet I can reverse face and goblet on these Gestalt tableaux and see Rickles in the foreground and Carson and Yastrzemski in the background; Carson and Yastrzemski are the planets and Rickles is the star; Yastrzemski and Carson are ornaments on the string of my memories of Rickles. If this is possible, it is either a trick of retrospect or a new development.

It struck me once as worth pronouncing that growing up was the great humiliation. I did not mean growing old; I meant reaching adulthood. And I did not mean that there was anything particularly discreditable about what in particular I was; I meant that it was a humiliation not to be everything. Adulthood seemed to me the shutting down of every potential but one or, at most, a few. How could you face your parents?

I felt this humiliation acutely, but it was near-sighted to universalize it. When in history was it possible to imagine that one might become a WASP talk show host or a Polish baseball player indifferently? On the other hand was Don Rickles, insisting that everybody was one thing only: a Nebraskan, a Polish kid, a Jew. The pull of Don Rickles is the attraction of shutting down possibilities, so you can be sure that you will always be what you always have been. The attraction is comic, which is to say that it is both to perpetual infancy and perpetual rottenness. "Whatever became of the moment," asks Rosencrantz of Guildenstern, "when we first knew about death?" Shouldn't we remember the trauma? The last word of the silliest sentence is "dead."