How tragedy plus time equals comedy
“I wish you could swim, like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim. Though nothing, nothing will keep us together. We can beat them, forever and ever. We can be heroes, just for one day.” — David Bowie
Tragedy plus time equals comedy.
You could probably amend it to say “publicly acceptable comedy,” because the minute tragedy strikes, the comedians already have the jokes. They don’t need any extra time. It’s the public who needs the emotional distance to process the trauma before they’ll consider laughing at it. A joke, especially a risky or controversial joke, has to overcome the trauma of pain if we’re going to laugh at it, but laugh at it we will if it’s funny enough. Laughter is an involuntary response.
Too soon, we may say, but the comic understands that the funny arrives alongside the tragedy, often in the same car, as it were, whether we are ready for it or not. Comics also recognize that the audience has sole discretion over when and if something is funny. Comedy might be the only truly meritocratic form of art. If it’s funny enough, people will laugh, no matter how dark or taboo the subject matter.
We’re not always ready.
There is something to be said for giving a significant event room to breathe before you tackle it. I know in my own life, it’s often difficult for me to write about something important, in the moment that it’s happening. I’ve never enjoyed being that type of journalist or writer who covered live events and came up with hot takes on a tight deadline. I always preferred having the time to process it, putting it into context for better analysis.
Explaining precisely what happened without context is not terribly helpful, even though people think they want straight, unadulterated news. We really don’t. Most of the time, we would have no idea what to do with the information being provided. Which leads to another, perhaps more insightful question we need to ask ourselves. Do we process the news on the merits of a face value evaluation?
Do we even know what to think about an event without first checking the temperature of the room, or figuring out the tribal identities of the people involved? We think we do. We imagine that’s how we do it. We think we can look at the facts and not the political persuasions of the persons involved, but I suspect that’s disingenuous at best. If you gave most people just the facts, stripping out any clues to identity, people would either struggle to make a definitive determination or be all over the map with their hot takes. There would be no ideological consistency. They would struggle to determine who was the hero and who was the villain in every story.
I find myself living in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the future looks terribly bleak, dangerous, and uncertain, while the existential need to continue to plan for the future remains. What little news I do read all leads to a strong belief that the country will never be the same, the economy may very well collapse at any moment, and personal freedom and fundamental liberty are under intense assault. Meanwhile, I find myself planning for the future regardless, strategizing long-term client work and considering new retirement investments, as if the world isn’t on fire all around me. I’m in the middle of the battle in the middle of a war, and none of it is funny.
In 1944, at the height of World War II, I doubt anyone found Hitler funny, but just two decades later, Mel Brooks wrote and directed “The Producers,” a film lampooning Hitler and the Nazis. A year later, Hogan’s Heroes premiered on television, a half-hour sitcom about a Nazi concentration camp where all the Germans were fools and idiots and none of the prisoners were in any real danger. That’s a little like doing a 9/11 comedy today, complete with a cast of wacky, incompetent terrorists.
I love what Brooks had to say about it at the time. He felt that ridiculing Hitler was the ultimate revenge for his unspeakable atrocities, because it cut the legs out from under the evil of it all. You couldn’t match his horrible acts or his hateful speech. But you could make light of him. Hitler was a buffoon, and now that he’d been vanquished, he was no longer worthy of inspiring terror. He would be remembered as a ridiculous character, one who was ripe for ridicule. He would become the butt of the joke, rather than the indomitable ruler he’d imagined himself to be. Becoming the conquering hero meant calling out the king’s lack of clothing. The king, it turned out, was a clown.
There is something about the underdog, succeeding against all odds, that touches us somewhere deep within our souls. We love to cheer on the unlikely hero, the reluctant champion, the humble crusader. We can imagine being that person ourselves. We don’t identify with the superhero, the special forces soldier, or the street-wise cop, but with the ordinary schmuck who overachieves beyond all expectations.
It’s a concept we can wrap our heads around, because it seems possible, even though unlikely. We want to believe that all is not lost, that if we try our best, with a little luck, we just might succeed. It’s not that we believe it is our destiny, or a foregone conclusion, but simply that it’s possible. It’s a hope in the future without any practical foundation for aspirational thinking.
It can be hard to determine what all the fuss is — about, anything, really. It’s not that I think everything is so horrible, or even necessarily bad, but that everything, no matter how good, is fundamentally flawed and will ultimately fail to deliver on its promise to make us happy. Everything in life is destined to disappoint you, so it’s best to keep your expectations low.
You can be mildly optimistic that things might work out for the better, but don’t hold onto any of it too tightly. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and expect nothing in return. For better or worse, and it’s usually worse, there remain surprising flashes of beauty, romance, compassion, and generosity. Our very sanity leans heavily on those moments.
Most of us alive today do not remember a time when America wasn’t winning. We look back on the latter half of the 20th century as if that’s the entirety of our glorious history of being a world power, but that’s only a small part of our history. There is not a moment in time when we were not deeply flawed and contradictory concerning our stated ideals and the reality of our existence. Slavery, genocide, bigotry, misogyny, and class warfare. As bad as it has been, it’s always gotten better, even when the improvements were incremental. Rarely have we gone backward for any true length of time. Always forward.
That does not mean we haven’t had setbacks. We have. The problem is, we have no personal memory of them. We did not live through the market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. We have not lived through a world war. We have mostly had a stable government that at least aspired to democratic principles, even if the reality was often flawed and inequitable. Americans were united in what we thought of as our theory of the case. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No oligarchy, theocracy, or monarchy. A secular, law-based meritocracy that rewarded hard work and ingenuity. A land of opportunity, where everyone was capable of rising to the top. That was the dream.
There have always been poor and disadvantaged people, but there are quantifiably far fewer than there used to be. As a wealthy nation, we have become largely unaccustomed to living with great adversity in America and are consequently unprepared for the task at hand. It’s why the transition has been so painful. I would imagine that vulnerable groups in America could tell us everything we need to know about living under an oppressive regime, but most of us find ourselves caught by surprise.
I have no way of divining the future, no way of knowing how long this will last, where it will go, or how it will resolve itself. I know that it will end, but I do not know if I will be around to see it. Not all the Israelites lived long enough to set foot in the Promised Land, including Moses. We are guaranteed a front row seat to the nightmare, but no promise that we will see the end of it. All we can do is traverse the battlefield as best we can and hope that we survive long enough to see the end.
I saw a picture once, of a crowd of fascists. Everyone was giving the fascist salute, arms straight out, hands flat. Everyone except one man, who stood defiantly, arms at his sides, and a determined look on his face. He wasn’t making a fuss. He simply made a conscious decision not to go along with the crowd. This was in his power, and he took advantage of it. I have no idea what price he paid for his defiance, but you could imagine that the risk was real and significant.
All too often, we think that unless our actions are epic in scale, they won’t be meaningful, but historically speaking, that simply doesn’t hold water. Small actions can trigger impactful events, like a lone pebble setting off a massive avalanche. We aren’t forced to rattle the cage of the authoritarians, risking arrest or worse, to stand up to tyranny. If each of us refuses to go along, to speak up about what we see, to reject the normalization of fascist thinking, we will give others the strength to enjoin sanity and rebuff the absurd.
We don’t know what will start the avalanche, but it’s usually something small and unexpected. Rosa Parks didn’t know she was going to be a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Anne Frank had no way of knowing that we would all read her diary one day. Greta Thunberg was just a kid protesting by herself in the rain for months. We don’t know who or what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Therefore, we all need to go about our lives with purpose and intention, making small choices that align with our values and principles. This is how we move the ball forward. This is how we stand up to tyranny. One small bit of resistance, a person at a time. We become the pebble with the power to take down a mountainside.
It does make me wonder when any of this will be funny. You could argue that it’s so preposterous that there are elements of comedy even now, but I would counter that the pain is still too real and immediate for me to laugh at. You have to be out of danger before you can think it was hysterical. It’s not a close call if you’re still in the burning building.
As Col Kilgore in Apocalypse Now said wistfully, “Someday this war’s gonna end.”
I hope I find the funny. I hope I live to see it and laugh. I hope.
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