The Least Merry Prankster

Robert Stone, Great American Humorist

Jan 11, 2026

I was thinking of Robert Stone just three days before he died, on January 10th of 2015, when a roomful of cartoonists were murdered at the offices of Charlie Hebdo by Islamic fanatics. I remembered what he’d said, during a Q&A after a reading, in answer to my own question about the importance of humor in his work: “Humor is… reasonableness,” he said. “Reasonableness in the face of the ghastly serious people who have dominated the twentieth century.” And, it’s already becoming clear, the twenty-first.

Robert Stone was one of the Merry Pranksters, that band of literati and academics who discovered LSD like a superpower in the early 60s and went forth in motley to proselytize. In Tom Wolfe’s account, at least, it sounds as if Stone was a wet-blanket voice of reason in that gang, the guy saying, Well I don’t know, maybe not, it’s already kind of late. Unlike the flamboyant, charismatic Ken Kesey, who quite writing after his second novel and became sort of a carnival barker for psychedelia, Stone, struggled ingloriously with drugs and alcohol and quietly continued to write some of the best novels of his time. He had many virtues as a novelist — he was a realist in an era of experimentalists, a political novelist in a culture that had turned its gaze inward, and a self-described “athlete of perception” who elegantly compressed layers of ambiguous implication in ever detail, gesture, or line of dialogue—but the one I come to praise on this tenth anniversary of his death is one of the least remarked-upon: his humor.

Stone always had a reputation as a rather dour writer, preoccupied with war and anger, addiction and despair—all things dark and manly. In his memoir Prime Green, he remembered the owner of a restaurant where he briefly waited tables complaining that “I imparted some kind of strange atmosphere to people’s dinner, a fateful tension or pessimism about dinner and life. It was the kind of thing hateful tin-eared people say about my novels.” But he was, I contend, one of the great American comic novelists. I suspect this talent is so often overlooked because he deployed his capacity for hilarity so judiciously—perhaps once in a hundred pages, and always at moments of maximum tension—instead of slathering it indiscriminately all over everything from funerals to parking tickets, as alleged “humorists” do.

That Stone only shows his humor in rare, brilliant flashes, and always against a background of deep darkness, only makes them glint out the more fiercely, like the highlights in a La Tour. He really only comes out of the closet as a wiseass par excellence when the shit truly hits the fan. At the climax of his first novel, the depressingly prescient A Hall of Mirrors, during a stadium rally sponsored by a right-wing radio station, a character called Farley the Sailor, a con-artist-turned-soup-kitchen-evangelist, delivers an invocation that begins as a barely coded speech about race and finally abandons all but the flimsiest pretext of “code,” culminating in a crazed, glossolaliac racist ecstasy: “Protect and arm us before the black forces of blackness who daily blacken our clear path with their black menace.” And this is only a prelude to the oration that the stoned protagonist, Reinhardt, a failed-clarinetist-turned-demagogue, delivers before the crowd, a rhapsodic parody of right-wing rhetoric^[1]:

“When your American soldier fighting today drops a napalm bomb on a cluster of gibbering chinks, it’s a bomb with a heart. In the heart of that bomb, mysteriously but truly present, is a fat old lady on her way to see the world’s fair. This lady is as innocent as she is fat and motherly. This lady is our nation’s strength. This lady’s innocence if fully unleashed could defoliate every forest in the torrid zone. This lady is a whip to niggers! This lady is chinkbane! Conjure with this lady and mestizos, zambos, Croats and all other such persons simply disappear. Confronted with her, Australian abos turn to the wall and die. Latins choke on their arrogant smirks. Nips disembowel themselves, the teeming brains of gypsies turn to gum. This lady is Columbia my friends. Every time she tells her little daughter that Jesus drank carbonated grape juice — then, somewhere in the world a Jew raises quivering gray fingers to his weasely throat and falls dead.”

Later, after all control has been lost and the place has erupted into a race riot, Farley is heard impotently screeching over the PA: “From the bowels of Christ I implore you, consider that you are mistaken!”

As in Hall of Mirrors, it isn’t until the climax of Stone’s later novel Damascus Gate, some 450 pages in, with a holy war breaking out in Jerusalem, that he really cuts loose: amid the chaos of tear gas and flying bullets, an Arab interpreter invents a rumor that Salman Rushdie has come to gloat over the destruction of the Islamic holy places; a right-wing archeologist babbles, “I’m a researcher with a valid visa and we’ve been brutalized and murdered!”; and our protagonist translates the phrase “itbah al-Yahud” (“kill the Jew”) for a fellow journalist as the name of a traditional folk tune—“like ‘The Wearing of the Green,” he explains.

That this kind of fiendish satiric inspiration could be coupled with such restraint came as a revelation to me back when I was a cartoonist, when humor was less a technique than a reflex for me, my default reaction to any outrage, humiliation, or disaster; it later served as an instructive model when I became a writer myself. It’s easy for callow young people to indulge in black humor, joking about horrors from dead babies to the Holocaust, because they only understand them intellectually; once you learn from experience that death is real and coming for you and everyone you love, that the bad guys win and get away with everything, such humor is harder-earned.

This is a rarefied vintage of humor, I realize — appreciable, maybe, only by the same sorts of connoisseurs who crack up at passages in Cormac McCarthy, or get why Kafka couldn’t get through reading the ending of The Trial out loud for laughing. “I’d like to write more comic stuff,” Stone told the Paris Review. “I mean, there’s always some humor in all the awfulness I write about, but sometimes I think of writing — well, I don’t know that I could write a purely humorous book that wouldn’t have some sort of ghastliness in it. It would have to be a weird kind of humor.” Writers who use this sort of humor incessantly, make a career of it, get branded as “black humorists.” But to a certain kind of eye — the kind that can see in the dark — what most people perceive as “black” is the whole visible spectrum. The sort of person who can make a comic setpiece out of a race riot isn’t callous or cynical but one who’s long since mourned his fellow man’s bigotry and cruelty, moved through the stages of grief to acceptance. “There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke,” Stone said: “how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition.”

Stone honed his flair for the blackly comic — as well as the craft of writing fiction — working at one of the lesser New York tabloids in the 60s, where he authored such sublime headlines as “SKYDIVER DEVOURED BY STARVING BIRDS.” He was unable to repress his puerile pride in this inspiration in retelling the story in Prime Green:

“And lickety split there it was and you could hear the clacking beaks and the echoing screams of the doomed sportsman, his features ripped warm and bleeding, his fingers clawed from the harness by the hunger-crazed kites and corbies, not four and twenty but thousands! All this about the horrified upturned faces of the watching crowd!”

A man with a taste for absurdity will never go hungry. The world and times in which he lived kept Stone’s lugubrious worldview well-supplied with material. His novels ranged over settings and situations as rich with comedic potential as wartime Vietnam, post-Manson California, and revolutionary Central America. You almost have to cover your eyes as you read the scene in A Flag for Sunrise where a drunken American anthropologist, lecturing at a Central American cultural institute, puts aside his prepared text and instead explicates for the benefit of the audience the famous old American aphorism: “Mickey Mouse will see you dead.” In Damascus Gate Stone describes a street riot: “there ensued the melancholy penitential drama ‘Tear Gas in the Rain,’ familiar to any all-weather student of the twentieth century’s hopes and dreams.” I’m reminded of something telling that Michael Herr wrote about Stanley Kubrick, another artist who was often labeled (and dismissed) as dark, bleak, cold and misanthropic: “He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.” “Hipster” being used here in its original, 40s-50s sense of an existentialist wiseguy, one who Knows What’s Up, not the contemporary one denoting a consumer demographic. In other words we shouldn’t forget that Stone’s books, whatever else they may be, are always comedies.

Stone’s first novel was called A Hall or Mirrors, and a recurring image throughout his corpus is of fighting one’s own reflection: “You don’t want to set around here fighting mirrors,” a friend tells the scarred heroine of that book. In “The Wine-Dark Sea,” a story in his last collection Fun With Problems, he describes a cardinal attacking its own image in a house’s windows:

”…a tireless challenger kept appearing in them, matching him cry for cry, dealing him hurtful thumps. The bird’s every sally was checked by this relentless enemy. But the love-driven red bird had heart. For days, from misty dawn until the dissolving of the light, it had been fighting itself.”

I think of these lines almost every day at my own house, where a cardinal battles himself daily in the sideview mirror of my car, all the while shitting and shitting down the passenger door. Stone is often cited as an author who saw the world as war, war as a metaphor for life, but in this image we see the dark existential joke on us all: dumb male aggression squandered against itself, in an endless, unwinnable battle against nothing at all. At the end of A Flag for Sunrise its delirious hero, adrift on a life raft, imagines a joke in which one shark shows up to a feeding frenzy and asks another one what’s on offer. “Just us,” is the answer.

Stone’s novels and stories generally commence with characters at the ends of their ropes; it’s only at the end of a rope, for Stone, that the story really begins. But even though his protagonists are typically bitter, empty, desperate men, they’re also always funny — never moreso than in extremis. Reinhardt, the central character of A Hall of Mirrors, a cynic and a drunk, wakens from a blackout to discover slips of paper with phone numbers in his pocket: “There was even a Mabel. […] ‘You are a champ,’ Reinhardt told himself. ‘You are really some kind of a champ.’” Eliot, hero of the story “Helping” (also a cynic and a drunk), amiably taunts a child-beater who’s called to harass Eliot’s wife, a lawyer in child custody court:

“‘Now that I have you on the phone,’ Elliot said, ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Promise you won’t get mad? […] Do you keep a journal?’ Elliot asked the man on the phone. ‘What’s your hat size?’”

I suppose this jolly nihilism is symptomatic, in his characters, of an absence of hope, spiritual deadness, a refusal to take life or oneself seriously anymore. One of his characters thinks of such men: “Whatever made them the way they were made them allergic to light, so they lived their lives outside it, laughing down holes.” (Cf. popular German humorist F. Nietzsche’s one-liner: “A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.”) But it is this same quality, for me, that makes it impossible to abandon all sympathy for those characters, that makes them worth reading about: a joke is still a twitch of life, a spark of some dying inner light — regret, self-mockery, ironic rue. It’s hard to wholeheartedly dislike someone who’s funny. And it’s why I’ve never quite been able to bring myself to love certain writers, from Richard Yates to Joan Didion, who are universally agreed to be great, but are humorless. Humor in an author’s hands is not only reasonableness but generosity of heart, toward his characters and his world.

Stone described himself as feeling alone among American novelists of his generation in his preoccupation with the religious. “I take seriously questions that the culture has largely obviated,” he said. “In a sense, I’m a theologian. And so far as I know I’m the only one.” Is it a stretch to suggest it may be no coincidence that he was also so funny? Flannery O’Connor, another of the greatest and darkest American humorists, was also a hardass about faith. The religious are often humorless—dogmatic, censorious, cruel (it was deeply religious men who murdered all those cartoonists in Paris for drawing mean pictures of their imaginary friend)—but humor can also be a temporary, penny-ante sort of redemption: redeeming the world just a little bit, for just a moment, at least for some of us. True, laughter can be a kind of damnation, condemning this world and its people for being as violent and stupid and meaningless as they undeniably are, but it’s also, sometimes, a form of forgiveness, forgiving the world for being what it is, and people for what they are. A kind of grace. In Damascus Gate, his novel of the Middle East, a place where every joke is always, unavoidably, at someone else’s expense, Stone’s protagonist raises a toast: “Someday, somewhere, somehow—everything will be funny for everyone.” It’s a comedian’s vision of Paradise.