This week: Pessimism is Comedy Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.
—Voltaire
Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
—Ambrose Bierce
Optimism is the opium of the people.
—Milan Kundera |
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"You should be more positive!"
Okay, fine: I'm positive something will go wrong.
Positivity can only lead to disappointment. As I'm traveling this week, I'm going to be lazy and steal some of the material from my own blog to demonstrate the futility of optimism.
I decided to visit Los Angeles, which is almost but not quite as far as I can get from my house and still be in the contiguous US. I'd been meaning to do this for a while, until finally I'd had more than enough of the mid-Atlantic winter weather to want to spend a week in Southern California.
So I arranged for a flight out from my hometown on Friday, fully expecting, pessimist that I am, that the flights would end up being delayed to some extent due to the aforementioned winter weather and maybe due to World War 3.
Friday morning comes along, and I get a notification that my first-leg flight is not delayed, but canceled, and I'm rebooked on a different flight at some godawful cow-milking hour on Saturday morning.
This was worse than my initial estimate of "maybe arrive in L.A. a few hours late," which honestly was my imagined worst-case scenario. (Of course, when talking about air travel, there's always a true worst-case scenario, but those flying machines fall out of the sky so incredibly rarely that even I don't include that in my calculations -- you have a much higher chance of being killed crossing a street.)
Now, I don't want you readers to get the impression that I'm just complaining about this. I had no deadlines for getting to L.A., so this was a minor inconvenience at worst. I'm merely illustrating the folly of not expecting and planning for the worst-case scenario.
So of course I started running through such scenarios in my head for the rescheduled flight. There will be mechanical problems and the plane will take off late and I'll have to get a different connecting flight. Some asshole on one of the planes will assault a flight attendant over being requested to wear a damn mask. I'll get to the connecting airport and then that flight will be delayed, forcing me to stay in an airport for hours when the bars aren't open. I'll catch the 'rona overnight and they won't let me fly. That sort of thing.
Imagine, then, my pleasant surprise when both flights took off on time and landed early.
This is the power of pessimism: one can only be pleasantly surprised.
But having everything go right offends my sense of how reality is supposed to work. Something has to go wrong. Always. It's inevitable, and if it seems like it's not going to happen, that just means that it'll happen later, after you've settled into complacency.
Maybe, I thought as I waited by the baggage claim at LAX, maybe the airline sent my checked bag to Cleveland. I mean, this would suck, of course, but at least it would vindicate my view of the universe.
But no, my bag was about the sixth one off the carousel.
Several years ago, I flew out to Vegas. Similarly, I was waiting at baggage claim, figuring either my bag had taken a left turn to Albuquerque or fell off the carrier and was broiling on the hot McCarran tarmac. But no, behold, the very first bag off the conveyor was mine. "Well," I thought. "This will never happen again."
So that's what I was thinking of when I pulled my suitcase off the baggage claim, because nothing else had gone wrong: "I was right. Mine wasn't the first bag off the belt."
When you expect the worst, you're either pleasantly surprised, which is good, or you have the supreme joy of being able to say "I told you so."
Plus -- and this is why I felt this little anecdote would be appropriate for a Comedy newsletter -- pessimism is just plain funny. It's great material for comedy. Like, "Watch, the pilot will screw up and land in Mexico instead." You also get to make fun of inherently funny cities, like Albuquerque and Cleveland.
On the other side, there's nothing funny about optimism. Even when your optimism is inevitably shattered, it just makes people feel bad for you.
So I came up with Waltz's Second Law of Comedy ▼Since you didn't ask, Waltz's First Rule of Comedy is: Never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one. : Pessimism is comedy. Optimism is tragedy.
Now I have to go think about all the ways my return trip will suck. If you live near Cleveland, please arrange to send me my luggage. |
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Last time, in "Walking the Walk" , I walked about talking. Wait. Scratch that. Reverse it.
🌕 HuntersMoon  : Good job, Robert. Yep, even old jaded me can appreciate situational humor although your reminder of the temperature drops we've recently had put a chill on it.  Looking forward to your next one!
Thanks! It's warmed up a bit since then, but now we'll get to deal with 80 mile an hour winds.
QueenNormaJean maybesnow?!  : Oh you sleigh me. No uber here in the barren wasteland. You hoof it or you beg a ride or drive a beater car or take loving care of the one you have. I walk here in town, or ride my wonderful red bike. Walking is great.
Certainly if I lived in another place, such as out in the country or in Los Angeles, walking wouldn't be an option.
So that's it for me for now. I'll see you at the end of the month, just in time for (gulp!) April Fools' Day! Until then,
LAUGH ON!!!
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Comedy: March 02, 2022 Issue [#11237]
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