The Magician's joke, and other ways tarot is funny

A woman named Carmen sat across from me in my Echo Park apartment two summers ago, looked at the Three of Swords I had just placed in her present position, and burst out laughing. Not a nervous laugh. A real one. The kind that bends you over. She kept trying to apologise and couldn't, because every time she looked back at the card, three swords stabbed through a cartoon heart in a rainstorm, she lost it again.

It was the most therapeutic moment of the entire session. Not despite the laughter. Because of it.

I want to make a case today, on a day of the year that suits the case, for tarot humour. Not jokey tarot, where the reader tries to be clever. Not dismissive tarot, where the cards become bits. Actual letting yourself find what's funny in the deck, in the session, in the situation, because the deck is, genuinely, sometimes very funny. And solemnity is not the same thing as depth.

The Magician is performing

Look at the Magician. I mean really look. He's got one hand up, one hand down. He's wearing a robe. There are red roses and white lilies arranged around him like a stage set. The infinity symbol is hovering above his head. On the table in front of him, every suit of the tarot is laid out like a magician's prop case. He has a wand. He has a literal wand.

This man is performing for you.

He is the most theatrical figure in the major arcana. He knows you're watching. The pose is studied. The setup is meticulous. He is, on every level, doing a bit. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. The Magician is not a card about quiet competence. The Magician is a card about someone who has set the stage carefully, in good shoes, with the correct lighting, and is now waiting for the audience to be impressed.

This is funny. It's also exactly what makes the card useful. The Magician shows up when you, or someone in your life, is performing capability. Sometimes the performance is the work. Sometimes the performance is the problem. Either way, the card has a wink in it that most reading guides miss entirely.

The Fool has a dog

The Fool, the card we treat as the most spiritually loaded image in the deck, the wandering soul at the beginning of the journey, has a dog. A small white dog. Jumping at his heels. Possibly trying to warn him about the cliff. Possibly just excited.

You can write a thousand words about the Fool as the seeker, the open heart, the leap of faith. All true. Also there is a dog. The dog is not symbolic of anything in particular. The dog is a dog. The fact that the most cosmic card in the deck features a dog as a major compositional element is one of the great quiet jokes of tarot art.

I bring this up because it tells you something about how to read. If the artists who made these cards built dogs into the cosmic ones, you are allowed, in your readings, to be a person who notices the dog. You are allowed to point out that the figure in the Eight of Wands looks vaguely embarrassed. You are allowed to say "this guy is being so dramatic" about the Five of Pentacles. You are allowed to remark that the woman in the Star is, frankly, naked in a way that nobody comments on. Tarot humour is not disrespect. It's looking at the cards with the same eyes you'd look at any other piece of figurative art, which means noticing what's actually there.

The Ten of Swords is doing the most

I want to spend a real paragraph on the Ten of Swords because I think it is, structurally, the funniest card in the deck. A man is lying face down on the ground. He has ten swords in his back. Ten. The sky is black. There is a red sash. The mountains in the background are a different colour from the foreground for no real reason. The whole composition is the visual equivalent of someone collapsing dramatically onto a fainting couch and going, "I'm fine."

When the Ten of Swords comes up in a reading, the temptation is to handle it like crisis. Sometimes it is crisis. But more often, in my experience, it is the moment after the crisis, when the worst has happened and you're alive, and the over-the-top nature of the card is doing emotional work for you. It is saying, in cartoonish form, look how bad it got. You can stop bracing now. The collapse already happened. The sun, look at the corner of the card, is starting to come up.

A client of mine pulled this card last winter when she'd just lost a long job. She looked at it, said, "Ten? Did they need ten?" and we both laughed. The laugh did not minimise her situation. It located her in it. She was already on the other side of the worst moment. The card knew. The card was, gently, taking the piss out of her own catastrophising. You could feel her shoulders drop in real time.

The case for laughing in a reading

There's a culture in the corners of the tarot world that treats laughter in a session as inappropriate. As if the reading is a religious ceremony and any levity would break the spell. I find this attitude both wrong and counter-productive. Wrong, because the cards themselves are funny. Counter-productive, because clients arrive at readings tense, and tension does not produce insight. Loose attention does.

When Carmen laughed at her Three of Swords, what was happening in her body was the release of a tension she'd been holding for, by her own account, three months. Her heart had been broken. She knew it. She'd been carrying it around with the kind of seriousness our culture rewards heartbreak with. Then the Smith-Waite Three of Swords, three swords through a heart, rain, no subtlety, broke through the seriousness with a kind of visual hyperbole that her own internal monologue had been doing for months. She saw herself in it. She laughed. And in laughing she let the grief stop being precious and start being something she could carry.

That's the work. That's what funny does. Funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is what serious feels like once you've metabolised it.

Things I find genuinely funny about the deck

A list, in no particular order, of things in tarot I find funny and have learned to point out in readings when the moment is right:

• The Hierophant's two acolytes look like they're at a wedding they don't want to be at.
• The Knight of Cups is riding extremely slowly. He's not in a rush. He's giving you a lot of time to see him coming.
• The Eight of Cups is the most dramatic exit in the deck. The figure does not just leave. He hikes off into the moonlit mountains. With a cane. He is making a statement.
• The Devil's chains are conspicuously loose. The figures could leave any time. They are choosing not to. That's the joke.
• The Lovers card has an angel above the couple who looks faintly embarrassed to be supervising.
• The Two of Wands is a man looking at a globe on a balcony in a posture that, in any other context, would be a meme.
• The Page of Pentacles is staring at the coin like he's never seen money before. He's a kid. He hasn't.

Once you start seeing the cards this way, your readings warm up. Not because you're making jokes at the client's expense. Because the cards stop being austere objects and become drawings made by a human, with humour built into the composition, that you and the client get to look at together.

A small note on April Fools

I'm publishing this on April 1 for a reason. There's a tradition, in certain magical practices, of reserving one day a year for laughter at the things you take most seriously. The Sufis have it. The fool in Shakespeare has it. The Hopi clown ceremonies have it. The point is not that the serious things are unserious. The point is that holding them with humour, for one day, keeps them from calcifying into religion.

If you're a reader who never laughs in sessions, try it. Just notice, this week, the funny parts of the cards. Notice the dog. Notice the Magician's stage. Notice the Ten of Swords' theatrical excess. Don't force a joke. Just let yourself smile when the card is, plainly, smiling at you first.

And if you're a client and your reader makes a deadpan observation about how dramatic your spread is being, laugh. The reading is still real. You're allowed to be a human in the chair. Carmen left my apartment that summer evening with her hair down and her shoulders unclenched, and the breakup that had been crushing her in May was, by October, the start of the best year she'd had in a decade. The Three of Swords didn't fix that. She did. The card just made her laugh first, which made the rest of the work possible.