He Was Wearing a Hat!

A little boy and his grandmother were taking a walk along the rocky seashore when a huge wave appeared seemingly out of nowhere and swept the child out to sea. The horrified grandmother fell to her knees and looking up at the sky pleaded, “God, please return my beloved grandson. Please I beg you. Send him back safely.” And suddenly and out of seemingly nowhere another huge wave washed in and deposited the little boy on the sand at his grandmother’s feet. She picked him up, looked him over, and, looking back up at the sky, said, “He was wearing a hat!”

I have laughed at that joke for almost twenty years, and I was wondering on my walk today what draws me to it. (To help me fall asleep I sometimes read a joke book!) I think the humor in the above joke derives from the incongruity of the grandmother’s response to the child’s return: she expresses not gratitude as one would expect but plaint: the child who has been returned should be the same child as the one who had been taken: he had been wearing a hat! The joke seems premised on the propensity of human beings to be never completely satisfied with their lot and to always find something about which to complain: what they have is never enough. (Admittedly, there are too many who have not enough and this is the shame of government and greed!) The book of Bamidbar in the Hebrew bible recounts a series of events in which the Israelites having been freed from onerous slavery in Egypt and having journeyed in the wilderness headed toward the Promised Land, time and again bemoan their condition and complain to Moses and Aaron about the hardships the people suffer: they have not enough water, food, shelter, safety, etc. Moses castigates the people, “For you have rejected the Lord who is among you, by whining before God and saying, “Oh why did we ever leave Egypt!” In a startling rebuke to the complaints God tells Moses—who is also exasperated with the grumbles,—to tell the people, “The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you.” The people seem never satisfied with what they have but would rather complain about what they do not have than accept the reality of their current situation. Ironically, in Bamidbar Moses and God, too, complain. Moses grumbles to God that the task of leading the people is too much for him and Moses bitterly wonders why God had assigned him that responsibility? And then God has whined, “How long will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the sings that I have performed in their midst.” God even threatens to destroy the people and start anew. Fortunately, Moses talks God out of the planned destruction. 

In the joke, the grandmother complains that God has not done enough: her grandchild was returned but when he was swept away he was wearing a hat but he was returned without it. Where is his hat?? This world portrayed here is one in which God is not good enough. Or else in this world God is inscrutable: else what rationale can be offered why the child was returned without a hat! Or perhaps grandmother is mistaken, and it is chance and not God that returns her grandchild. The loss of the hat is merely fortuitous.

The presence of complaint implies a complainer, and that complainer portrays him themselves as somehow oppressed and victimized. Complaints posit a world that oppresses and resists desire. Complaints posit a world more powerful that any individual, and over which the individual has little control. Complaints maintain the person in stasis: when I complain I regret my present state rather than work to change it. I bemoan conditions and engage in nostalgic reverie of a long-past Eden. “He was wearing a hat!”

            But perhaps there is another level to the joke’s appeal for me. Because what appears at first to be complaint could be understood as an act of defiance. The grandmother’s insistence that he was wearing a hat suggests that God has send back an unacceptably incomplete child and she demands that God return the same child earlier taken, hat and all!