 Comedy: August 27, 2014 Issue [#6516] |
  Comedy
This week: Requiem for a Funnyman Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Comedy is acting out optimism.
-Robin Williams
You can start any 'Monty Python' routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.
-Robin Williams
In America they really do mythologize people when they die.
-Robin Williams |
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Yeah, yeah. I know. Everyone and her brother has done a Robin Williams tribute. But I haven't, and this is my first Comedy newsletter since his death, so you're just going to have to deal with it.
Still, I'm not going to talk about the man himself so much. That's been done to death. What I'm going to address is the far less funny topic of suicide. So I'm afraid this is going to be another unfunny Comedy newsletter, except for the occasional bad puns such as "done to death."
I was in a chat window when the news broke, and, predictably, there were expressions of surprise, disbelief, anger... all the classic five stages of grieving in the usual foreshortened time as measured on the internet.
And part of the anger surprised even me: "How could he be so selfish?"
I think some people misunderstand the nature of comedy. I'm no Robin Williams, though for a while there, people said I looked like him, which is annoying because before that, they said I looked like Patrick Swayze. Now I get Danny DeVito comparisons. They tell me I'm funny. I tell them looks aren't everything.
But I digress... people misunderstand the nature of comedy. I'm reminded of the "joke" Rorschach tells in the graphic novel Watchmen, from back in the 1980s. Told by the most unfunny character in the story, it goes something like this (paraphrased because I'm too lazy to dig out my copy of the book):
"A man goes to a therapist and says, 'I feel like life is meaningless, a vast abyss of nothingness, a pit of gloom and despair. What can I do?' The therapist says, 'I know what you can do. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him.' The man bursts out in tears. 'But doctor,' he says, 'I am Pagliacci.'"
What we forget about comedians is that they are, by the very nature of comedy, observers, not participants. To hold up a mirror to society as they do, you have to stand outside society. Comedians are, with few exceptions, not part of the mainstream of any culture - they're apart from the mainstream. In America, most comedians are Jews, immigrants, African-Americans, or basically anything that's not white, protestant, ancestors came over on the Mayflower, etc. (Robin Williams was a notable exception to this trend, but that's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make here.)
So you're a kid and you're not part of mainstream culture, so you don't fit in anywhere. You might as well be invisible. Few people, especially kids, want to be invisible (unless you're a boy and want to sneak into the girls' locker room), but you can't quite figure out what you're doing wrong, what makes you different from all the other kids.
There are several paths you can take. Some are truly dark, and I won't go into them here. One path is if you figure out that you can make people laugh, and they start paying attention to you. This is not simple attention-seeking for its own sake; it's a bid to be noticed at all, to somehow make people, if not like you, at least acknowledge your existence.
What you don't realize when you're a kid doing this is that you've trapped yourself. From then on, you have to be the class clown, or you're nothing again. You can't have off-days. You can't stop being funny.
Some people manage to parlay this into a career in movies or radio or stand-up comedy. Others end up working as accountants and die of heart attacks in their 40s. But once you're funny, the minute you're not funny, at best, people will look at you with concern and go "Is everything okay?" At worst, they go back to ignoring you.
But remember, you're still not a part of society. You're still an outsider, an alien interpreting the silly things that people do. Even if you find love, even if you find a place with like-minded people, you never feel like you truly belong because instead of participating, you're looking for material.
Oh, sure, you can make the world a better place. But sometimes at the cost of your own sanity or well-being.
And that's my take on it, which is totally, 100% non-autobiographical. |
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Last time, in "The Line" , I talked about when funny stops being funny and starts being hurtful.
🌕 HuntersMoon  : Dear Mr. Waltz,
Excellent advice - both on "the line" and on the importance of tougher skins. We all have heard over-the-line jokes and probably laughed at them. Being a fellow Virginian, I know we've heard jokes about West Virginia (call them rivalry jokes) that I first heard as ethnic jokes and later as Marine, Air Force, and Navy jokes (you guessed it, retired Army here  ). I agree - some sensitivity is required on the teller's part and some insensitivity is required on the audience's part. Humor can be and should be a unifying force but only if we allow it to be. Here's to the power of sharing a laugh.
Ken
Yes, you can use humor to unite or to divide. Often, we'll tell a joke among friends or people of similar backgrounds that we wouldn't dream of telling to a mixed audience. It can be a bonding experience - but at what cost?
Quick-Quill  : I agree the line is this but only to thos looking for it and for those who already have issues. Generally speaking most good comedians make fun of all ethnic, social and economical peoples. You have to laugh at yourself first. I feel the line is crossed when jokes are made AT a persons expense singularily. To continue because it got a laugh once or twice but none after than you have crossed the line.
Comedy has the power to guide people into doing, or not doing, certain things. If you make enough jokes about, say, video gamers, either the video gamers will be shamed into venturing out into the harsh glare of the daystar, or they'll internalize the joke and stay in their mothers' basements. But we have a choice whether to play video games or not; you don't get to choose your skin color or nation of origin.
Mummsy  : I don't know ANYONE with a video game addiction! 
What was that? I couldn't hear you over the sound of all the zombies dying.
☮ The Grum Of Grums  : "People who can laugh at themselves are never short of a source of amusement." I don't know the source of this pearl of wisdom, but if you're prepared to laugh at yourself, even in public, then you'll never cross the line.
I never laugh at myself. I don't like doing what everyone else does.
And that's it for me for August - enjoy what remains of your summer (or winter, as the case may be)! Until next month,
LAUGH ON!!! |
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