Popularity: I really want to know about this

omehow, today's planned discussion of Speak devolved into a weak conversation about popularity and unpopularity in adolescence. Since this is one of THE MAJOR themes of lots of YA realist fiction, it's worth talking about. It's also, as far as I can tell, a major theme among high schoolers.

As I have in past classes, I asked this gaggle to put up hands if you considered yourself popular in high school. A goodly number raised their hands; I wasn't surprised by any of them. I asked who would identify themselves as distinctly unpopular, and got a few hands (I always put mine up for this as well; the older I get, the more relieved I feel that I wasn't well-liked by my classmates). So I tried to get them to analyze what it means to be popular. Is it being well-known? Well-liked? does it have to do with class? Why are so few people ready and willing to cop to being popular in high school?  I have some thoughts of my own on all of these subjects, but I really am extremely curious about this as a topic, and I was hoping to get some decent responses from my students.
As usual, they mostly just sat there and looked vaguely at me, or possibly into space, or "secretly" at the phones in their hands, "hidden" under their desks [industry secret: those desks have no fronts. i can SEE your phone in your lap]. A handful responded with various things, some more thoughtful than others, some more anecdote-laden than others.
The idea of popularity as relational came up, as did the phrase "people who would talk to you," which, when extracted from the high school context, kind of sounds awful. The point being made there had to do with proximity. Take random Popular Girl A. Put her in, say, English class without her normal Popular friends. Who will she talk to? A hierarchy organizes itself then, based on that class; Girl A may talk to you in English, but she won't sit with you in lunch when her other friends are there.  This really needs to be mapped visually, but I don't have the time or talent for it now, but it makes a lot of sense.

But what I really want to know - and I sincerely, devoutly hope that people, someone, anyone, will post a comment about this - is how popularity was defined or organized in YOUR high school experience. One remark that was mentioned today - and affirmed by about half a dozen students in this class - was the "everyone in my class was friends, we all got along, no one was unpopular." I have heard this remark before, and every single time I hear it I want to shake my head and sigh.  I suspect this often means "No one I knew was unpopular," or "None of my friends was unpopular." Because there's a swath of kids in every high school, I imagine, who are largely invisible. They might just be quiet kids; they might be weird, they might just be so average as to disappear. Maybe they don't join any clubs or sports; maybe they work two jobs, or have some weird out-of-school hobby. Maybe they simply don't fit into any readily identifiable archetype or social group and thus, uncategorizable, become invisible. There are people like this in every environment I've ever been in - high school, college, grad schools, workplaces - people who seem to never be talked about, never seem to draw attention. People who fade in and fade out and have very little to do with anyone as far as you can tell (and when you ask your friends about that person, often many of them don't really know who you mean; or maybe one does and has a tiny tidbit of information, like: he eats lunch in fourth period, or I think he used to work in Communications.

I just cannot believe in the existence of any high school in America where everyone's friendly and kind to everyone else. Where there's no one who's the weirdo loser. Where there's no small band of uber-nerds, clinging together for safety, but generally the butt of everyone else's jokes. Someone who no one likes.  ALL group environments seem to resolve themselves into hierarchies of some kind, even hippie quasi-communes like my undergraduate institution.  There's always at least that one kid that no one you know has ever seen speaking to anyone.

One girl, in class today, put forth the intensely troubling idea (especially in the context of Speak) that anyone who isn't "friends with everyone in the class" has brought it on themselves. That they don't want to be happy. That they don't join things, or "put themselves out there."  Implied in her remarks was a negative judgment: if you don't join in, then you kind of suck.  But then I think of Melinda, in Speak, and her silence and what it conceals and reveals. I think of all the troubled fictional teenagers who have no or few friends because of a perceived issue that is actually a symptom of some truly grave problem.

I know the terms popular and unpopular are simplistic and reductive and possibly not useful. What I mean, I think, is whether you perceived yourself to be unpopular, or popular, in high school. Not what other people thought of you; not what you think of other people. But how you felt, or feel, as a high-schooler.

Two easy criteria: were you ever picked last, or nearly-last, for teams in gym class?  Did you ever have to eat lunch alone because you had no one to sit with?
And a third, a corollary of these two: Did you ever have to worry about the likelihood of either of these things happening?

Control, Comedy & the Geek

Last week I read Adam Rex's novel Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story. I'm not sure yet how I feel about it, and like a fool I returned it to the library (from whence it came via interlibrary loan), so I can't re-read it and see if I've figure it out yet. I can say that the "Fat" in Fat Vampire is not as Fat Accepting as I could have liked, though it allows for the intriguing premise, not adequately explored in the vampire fiction that I'm familiar with, that perhaps being an immortal teenager in a never-changing body is not wholly desirable. Doug, the eponymous fat vampire, is stuck in a Fat body forever, now that he's been made into a vampire. And the fat body is marked here in many of the stereotypical ways that fat bodies are marked.

And Doug may not be the hero of his own story; in many ways, this book is as much, if not more, about Sejal, the Indian exchange student, sent away from India to a bland-seeming American home because she has "the Google," an evidentl diagnosable illness that manifests as an inability to function without internet mediation. That is - Sejal's life is only real to her when it happens via webcam and internet connection.

The intricacies of the plot of Fat Vampire are better left alone until I've figured out how I feel about the book.

What I found immensely interesting and revelatory, however, is this passage from fairly late in the book (page 250 in the hardback library edition I read).

Control was the basis of all humor. Even as its most innocent, what was a joke or clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.
People like him - the unbeautiful, the less popular - were almost inhuman in some people's eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. ...The word 'geek' had once referred to a circus freak, hadn it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bite the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover.
Wasn't this how they always tried to compensate? To overcome a girl's disgust or another boy's contempt and make them laugh despite themselves was to take some small measure of control. No wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny. They didn't have to be. Why else would people find it so hilarious to see some short kid's textbook stolen, held high above his head, out of reach? It wasn't funny - it was pure control. Insult comedy minus the comedy.

 That tired old chestnut, to laugh at oneself as a way of preempting the laughter of others, to make them laugh so they won't hit you, has an obvious referent in this quote. But what struck me most was not the comedy-as-control (or power) idea, but the really almost shocking "no wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny."

As far as literature is concerned, the funniest YA novels that I can think of also tend to have the dorkiest, or most outcast, protagonists. King Dork. Gordon Korman's masterpiece, A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag. Even Speak is funny, in its grim and dark way; Melinda's observations about high school never fail to make me laugh.

Then I started thinking about my own adolescence. Trying to recall one's own past as a way of measuring or evaluating texts is definitely dodgy, though recalling my teenage years is definitely less tricky than remembering back to my elementary school days, which at this point are largely a blur.
But last fall, while teaching the Adolescence class, I retrieved my old high school yearbooks from the back of the closet at my parents' house, where they've languished since the time I graduated. I dug them out because I was having trouble remembering how people dressed when I was in high school, and dress - or rather, identity through wardrobe - was a frequent topic in class. Finally, those yearbooks come in handy for something.
And flipping through them, appalled at the mid-90s belts-and-tucked-in-shirts of my schoolmates, I was reminded again of all those cheery smiling Popular People [I was not cheery, smiling nor popular in the slightest]. I tried thinking of the people who were funny, the people who made jokes or snide remarks or sarcastic comments that made me laugh. Admittedly I can be hard to please; crude or obvious humor, and anything slapstick, makes me cringe, not giggle. But still - I'm ready to laugh at things most of the time.
None of the shiny Popular People were the joke-makers.
I think of my post-high-school life, to the people who made me laugh, the people who I made laugh - and rarely are the funniest of them the ones who are also the most socially acceptable and well-adjusted.

This is not to say that well-adjusted, socially acceptable, well-liked people are not or cannot be funny. It's more to say that, both in my lived experience and representationally in fiction, they are not the stars of humor and comedy.

I think, if I had given this much thought before (which I haven't, truthfully), I would have chalked up the unfunniness due to a kind of obliviousness, a lack of observation skills. The gaps and chinks and lapses are often where humor lies, but you have to see them; you have to be perceptive in a big-picture way. You also have to be willing to stick your neck out, to leave yourself open to - well, yes, laughter - but also criticism. Humor often rocks the boat, and many of the upper-echelon folks are very happy with nothing but smooth sailing (and of course, because, as Adam Rex points out, they own the boat and they're in charge of the rudder, the sails and the charts).

Humor is also a way of being seen, of making oneself visible. As Doug muses, in Fat Vampire, the "unbeautiful" are barely human in the eyes of the "beautiful." The pretty people turn away from the freak show. To get looked at, to win attention - which again, is power and control - the unbeautiful need something. The Pretty People have their Prettiness, or an illusion of prettiness, and for a lot of them, that's enough to get noticed. It keeps them visible. But the D&D-playing geek? He needs to deliver something else. And humor - funniness - is one thing that is hard to resist, even if you're one of the beautiful people.

It's an interesting dichotomy: unbeautiful & funny/beautiful & unfunny. It's one that I find myself thinking about in the "real world" now, with people I know. It explains a few comments about the relative funniness of pranks, made my students who are clearly beautiful people; pranks which, to me, reeked of crudity and simple unkindness.
So much of bullying is written off with "it was just a joke," or explained as "i thought it would be funny." And so often that bullying is done by at least marginally Beautiful People. I've always had a hard time grasping these notions of humor, which are really just cruelty of a very simple-minded variety. Fat Vampire articulates, wonderfully, both the power/control issues at play, as well as the hierarchical divisions at play, in these kinds of situations.

I hope I'll remember to keep this in mind for future reading: who gets to be funny? Who truly is funny? and how do humor and control interweave?