3/23
danielle evans
on
three dog night, “joy to the world”
(march badness)
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
A confession: I fundamentally misunderstood the premise of “March Badness.” I maintain that “Joy to the World” is not a bad song, and given that the tournament asked people to vote on which of two songs was worse, this essay deserved to lose on principle. But I stand by its defense of strange and fleeting joy in the face of grief and absurdity.
This essay was first published in the early days of the pandemic, just before things shut down, a new moment of terrible grief and anxiety that the essay’s list of griefs and anxieties didn’t anticipate. There is not enough space or language to appropriately note the litany of new griefs, anxieties, and atrocities that we are currently living through. Many days I feel more than ever like a prophet of doom, and we will need more than joy to survive the present, but we will still need moments of joy when despair is logical, we will still need a grief that lets us hold the warmth of who and what we lose.
Jeremiah the giraffe still lives in my office and now wears a jaunty tie gifted to him by a former graduate student who went on to great success. One of my small joys for the past few years has been telling people who compliment his tie to go read her book (Milk, Blood, Heat). Another has been telling people that my giraffe hates Phil Collins and refusing to explain further. —Danielle Evans
danielle evans on “joy to the world”
Certainly, if you want to think too hard about it, “Joy to the World” poses some curious questions. Where did the bullfrog get the wine? When we give in to our appreciation of slant rhyme and go to throw away the cars and the bars and the war, why are we throwing away all of the cars but only one the one war, and are we throwing away the bars, as in all the drinking establishments where the beverages aren’t served by our friend the bullfrog, which seems to lack sound moral basis, or the bars as in the things imprisoning us? Is the you of the second stanza the same as the you of the chorus and if so, what happened in the chorus between the singer announcing his intention to throw everything else out and only make sweet love to you and the verse where he proclaims himself to be a high-life flyer who loves the ladies, because frankly that shift seems unlikely to have been universally joyful for everyone, and also perhaps at odds with his claim to be a straight-shootin’ son of a gun? If the joy is for the whole world, how did the fishes in the sea earn being singled out? Approximately how many times in the history of seasonal parties has this song accidentally ended up on someone’s holiday playlist?
But is this song “bad”? Can you listen to it without dancing a little, without singing along? Can you not feel—dare I say it—joy? Are you betting on the kind of future where you can afford to reject joy because it’s a little silly? Maybe it is a fleeting joy—the joy of good wine, the joy of wherever the night you meet a man who introduces himself by telling you he loves the ladies and loves to have his fun is headed, the joy of wordless communication with your closest, tipsiest, froggiest friends, the joy of whatever magic one might be under the influence of to sing Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine as a placeholder lyric, and decide to let it ride, as Hoyt Axton claims he did. But I am writing this in January 2020—the war Axton meant, in all its unhealed wounds, and the forever war in all its incarnations, is still with us, the cars haven’t gone anywhere and the planet can tell. I am writing from a country where the prison bars contain more of us than ever, even, lately, babies, and the drinking bars can’t comfort our perpetual anxiety, from a country where time can move in ugly circles, where when my parents were born they could have legally been denied the right to vote in many states, and when I was born I could not have been, but increasingly it seems that could change by the time I die. I am writing from a world where at the rate water is coming to reclaim things, the fishes might just be joyful because they’re waiting us out, though at the rate the water is heating, the fishes won’t make it either. Is this the kind of time when you’re going to be picky about what kind of joy you get?
*
A few years ago, in the second year of having stage four cancer, my mother went to a hospital to have a complicated, somewhat experimental surgery that would take up to eight hours if it went well. When you accompany someone to the hospital for a surgery of that length, the waiting room has color coded screens so you can see what stage of the surgery your loved one is in without nagging the hospital staff all day, and they give you a buzzer, the same kind you’d get waiting for a food order or a table at a busy restaurant, so that you can leave the waiting room and be summoned back if needed. I walked to the hospital gift shop. I was summoned back. It had barely been an hour. My mother had been cut open and the doctors had immediately seen all the cancer that hadn’t showed up on the scans and concluded that the surgery couldn’t happen after all. She was not a good candidate for curing. She woke up with the grogginess of anesthesia and the pain of a surgical incision and the news that there was no good news.
I had canceled my first week of classes because I planned on staying with my mother in the hospital for a week or longer, but as it turned out we would only be there a few days. She was moved out of the surgical ward by the end of the day but could stay in the residential rooms attached to the cancer hospital until she was recovered from the incision, in case healing was complicated by all the chemo she’d had. My mother rested. I padded around the residential wing in my pajamas. I curled into a chair in the lounge and ate the free cereal bars on offer there because the cafeteria felt like too much work. I gave a handful of people updates about my mother’s condition, varying in degree of specificity and truthfulness, as she had instructed before the surgery. My phone dinged with increasingly insistent messages from a man I’d met in a bar some weeks earlier, who wanted to know when he could take me to dinner and why I wasn’t responding to him. I muted the phone. A white woman asked me to fix the coffee machine and seemed skeptical when I told her I didn’t work there. I left the lounge and went back to the gift shop.
When my mother was awake enough for conversation, she asked what I’d been doing all morning. I told her I had gone to the gift shop and had a comforting conversation with a stuffed giraffe. I described the giraffe. She wanted to see him, so I brought her downstairs, where the giraffe was front and center in the gift shop entrance. He was plush and nearly five feet tall.
“He really is a handsome giraffe,” she said. “I thought you were just being silly to try to make me feel better.”
“I wouldn’t lie about a giraffe,” I said. “He’s a good giraffe.”
We bought the giraffe. We could not really afford an enormous stuffed giraffe, who would cost as much in various forms of transit as he did to buy, but we bought him nevertheless and took him upstairs on the elevator, and he sat in the corner of our room waiting for a name.
“Jeremiah?” said my mother.
“Like the bullfrog?” I asked, at the same time my mother clarified “like the prophet.”
My mother paused.
Jeremiah was a gi-raffe, she sang, because in the right circumstances a joyful thing can be any or all of the things you need it to be.
*
My mother wasn’t the only one who wanted Jeremiah to be a prophet. Allegedly, Jeremiah was a prophet was meant to be the first line of the song, but everyone hated it, so the bullfrog went in as a temporary fix to hold the melody and made himself at home. The song was originally conceived as part of a series for children that never aired and repurposed for adults when Axton teamed up with Three Dog Night, the description of the program makes it seem somewhat likely that the bullfrog may have been there all along, right at home in a child’s fantasy land, though perhaps without his wine. People trying to interpret the song have looked for the prophet, for an underlying religious meaning, but the band says sometimes a bullfrog is just a bullfrog. As for the prophet Jeremiah, he was tasked to prophecy the destruction of the kingdom, which did not make him many friends; driven into exile and later imprisoned, he wrestled with his faith but clung to it in the end. Much of Jeremiah, the longest book of the Bible [1], is a chronicle of despair. For example:
You have deceived me, O LORD, and I was deceived. You have overcome me and prevailed. I am a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out, I proclaim violence and destruction.
*
I never asked my mother why she wanted to name the giraffe after Jeremiah the prophet. By the time she was sick I had not been religious in many years, but I didn’t remember Jeremiah having particular significance back in the days when church was something we shared. In the face of her resilient faith, I often felt like the prophet of doom, the person who had to be logistically and emotionally prepared for what would happen next every time we didn’t get our miracle. But perhaps my mother identified with Jeremiah, with the feeling of being exiled from your life in spite of your faith, or perhaps he just seemed like the kind of prophet you might need in a hospital, one whose open doubts and sadness didn’t undo his truth. It is too late to ask her; my mother died two and a half years ago, in a different hospital, after a terrible few years, but not before we wrestled that giraffe in the backseat of the car and rode four hours back to her house with him, not before my mother, some months later, took him to the UPS store where they shipped him in two taped together boxes and he arrived in my office on my birthday, wearing a ribbon around his neck, and not a single person asked what I, a 30-something professor, needed a giant giraffe for, I’d like to think because his purpose was clear.
*
I cannot tell the future and I cannot tell you exactly what the song means, but I can tell you this—the fleeting joy of holding on to something when you know you’re going to have to let it go is a joy that I believe in. My religious faith has been gone a long time, my faith in humanity wavers, but my faith in fully committing to the moments of real joy the universe lets you have, to the joy that looming destruction can’t take, is still here. I cannot tell you whether this song is “good”, but I can tell you it is damn delightful, that it may be absurd but so is everything that brings us joy when despair makes sense, and if you disagree that’s fine and you may feel free to go chase your own fleeting joys and hold them close, but you may not help me drink my wine.
[1] by word count, in the original Hebrew. Some sources use number of chapters, which makes Psalms the longest.
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for Fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and American Short Fiction, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. Her second collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.