Minorities Are Funny

COCKSURE by Mordecai Richler. 250 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

In Stick Your Neck Out, Mordecai Richler's 1963 satirical novel, an Eskimo conquers the demi-world of Canadian intellectuals and literally loses his head on a quiz show that plays for keeps. Cocksure trades in the same buffoonery of annihilation and, like its predecessor, scores easily on some already heavily dented targets: big business, the communications industry, pop culture, organized morality, modern education, sex.

Richler's basic weapon is the mace of reductio ad absurdum, which he wields with skill and ferocity. A publisher compiles a book that documents little acts of kindness shown by the Nazis toward Jews, and holds a benefit dinner for wives and children of deceased concentration-camp guards; a school play casts ten-year-olds in a staging of Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom; a teacher encourages the academic achievement of her boy students by rewarding them in an entirely extracurricular manner; a nun appearing on a Joe Pyne-style TV insult program is publicly reduced to a fluttering wreck when the M.C. savagely probes into her sex life; an aged international entertainment biggie, known only as Star Maker, stays alive on the transplanted organs of his employees.

Comic Irony. Richler, 37, a Canadian who now earns his chips in London as a TV and film writer, delivers his blue bits with the relish of a nightclub comic shocking an audience of miniskirted grandmothers. It is totally irrelevant that the setting of the novel is England; despite its slapstick, Cocksure is well within the American mode of contemporary black humor that U.S. Critic Kenneth Burke has called "the drastic irony of paranoia."

Between the abundant yuks and cackles squirms the sadistic little tale of Mortimer Lucas Griffin, an all-Canadian boy in London who has the misfortune to be born white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in a time when the values of disaffected minorities are on the upswing. Cocksure's premise is that the special pleadings of minority groups--Jews, Negroes, artists, homosexuals--are funny. So Richler finds humor in the way Jacob Shalinsky, messianic editor of an obscure journal called Jewish Thought, hounds Mortimer with the wily accusation that he is really a secret Jew. And he finds rich irony in the fact that a svelte Negro beauty, who craves Mortimer's body, insists on a pay-as-you-go arrangement in order to cater to what she presumes is his sense of racial superiority.

Inversions. Richler's ploy is to turn the liberal Jewish character inside out, making Mortimer an inversion of the author's own experiences as a youth in Montreal's intensively competitive Jewish enclave. Says Richler: "Our mothers read us stories from magazines about astigmatic 14-year-olds who had already graduated from Harvard. And reading Tip Top Comics or listening to The Green Hornet on the radio was as good as asking for a whack on the head--sometimes administered with a rolledup copy of the Jewish Eagle, as if that in itself would be nourishing. I was brought up on the idea that it was hard to be a Jew."

In keeping with Cocksure's basic gimmick of inversion, Mortimer discovers it is hard to be a sober, hardworking, bill-paying, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. His difficulties assume grotesquely amusing forms, including the neurotic suspicion that minority-group penises "were aggressively thicker and longer than WASP ones."

For all its inventiveness, Cocksure is never more than a stylish farce. Its absurdities are never truly disturbing in the manner of the best black humor. But the laughs seem endless.

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