Laughing and Crying

I’m grateful to the gardeners, down on their hands and knees decorating the world in multiple shades of purple, and to the bread bakers, filling the air we breathe with a yeasty aroma. I’m grateful to the miracle of the shortstops, extending themselves parallel to the ground, catching the ball and making the throw, all in one motion. I’m grateful to the tap dancers, elevating our heart rate, and the poets, speaking the heart’s language. But today, in particular, I’m grateful to the comedians who make funny their life’s work. Like other talents, like musicality or speed, funny is god-given but has to be practiced, honed for timing, body gestures and intonation. Like other artists, the funny person starts out playing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” with one finger and graduates to pyrotechnics, to Rachmaninoff.

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

There are, of course, deadpan artists who make you laugh by staring you down, Jack Benny-like, so that the joke seems to be a secret between the two of you that calls for no explanation. But I’m partial to a song-and-dance man, a comedian who can talk very fast, somebody like Robin Williams or his maniacal predecessor, Jonathan Winters. In my childhood, there was the virtuoso, Sid Caesar, who worked his magic by speaking at a rate that seemed superhuman, effectively burying all your earth-bound troubles in an avalanche of words. You couldn’t think about anything painful because you couldn’t think at all. The words were coming at you so fast all you could do was stand there and get hit by them or duck for cover like a child caught in a snowball fight. Caesar took it a step further by specializing in made-up languages that sounded sort of like Japanese or sort of like German but weren’t. There was a sense of being bombarded by semi-coherent sounds that knocked you off whatever habitual track you were suffering on. This kind of comedy is similar to the mayhem of slapstick but it’s a world apart from pie-in-the-face. For me, there was always more joy in watching someone go down in a barrage of language than in watching him slip and fall. 

People who can make me laugh are like shamans. They seem to have the capacity to transmute my anguish into laughter.  They are intimate with my anguish, spending many sleepless nights worrying about the state of the world and my place in it. They identify with my tortured condition and they’re willing to take on an extra portion. “Here,” Robin Williams seems to be saying, “I know you feel like shit today. I feel like shit, too. But I’m a professional. I can take it.” It’s an extraordinary generosity that propels a person on to the stage, makes them porous to all the grief in the world, ready and willing to work the alchemy of transforming it into laughter. They are the gods of the goofy and we can’t do without them. I like to think of the word-jugglers Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen intoning their abracadabra, cooking up their potions in Sid Caesar’s writers’ room. Into the cauldron…two parts Coney Island, one part Ebbets Field, a dash of Catskills, a generous portion of shtetl and there it is…a routine so hysterical it will wake you from a nightmare squealing with laughter.  

Somewhere along the line, a meme emerged that suggested that funny performers were really sad, frightened, self-loathing people who make jokes to cover their pain. This idea is very entrenched in the culture and promotes the image of a comedian as someone who is hiding behind a mask, someone who doesn’t want you to know who they really are, doesn’t want you to see how much they hurt. But what if the special gift of funny isn’t the ability to distract us or to plaster over pain so it doesn’t bleed through and dribble all over the stage, so much as the rare capacity to hold comedy and tragedy at the same time? What if it’s the capacity to live with contradiction, sweet and salty, joyous and sorrow-filled? Maybe we’re laughing from relief, the tremendous relief of watching someone offer up the whole of themselves, the whole of human experience in all its unboundaried glory.

 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In November, we look forward to a contribution from psychotherapist, writer, photographer, and printmaker Peggy Braun. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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