On Comedy

I would like to begin this entry by being completely honest. I wrote a few pages on this concept about two years or so while I was in the Air Force. I was tied to my station, which had no e-mail access, and was forced to print out the result. In all that time, I never took a spare moment to just type the damned thing out, and now that I am dedicating time to writing, the original copy is nowhere to be found. Fuck me. I can only hope that this is close enough to the original, as it was written in the unique fugue state that comes with being stuck at a desk for hours on end with nothing to accomplish.

And now, my thoughts on comedy:

               Through the years which I have dedicated to the mindless consumption of, and endeavors in the field of comedy, I have come to a particular belief on the subject. From what I have discerned, in all of its forms, comedy is at its best and most potent when derived from the negative end of the spectrum of human emotion. As a clear fan of dark comedy, it is easy to see where I would derive such a hypothesis, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you for drawing the conclusion that this has biased my information. I can’t say for certain that I trust my brain either. For your benefit, and to offer the viewpoint which fuels my belief on this subject, I shall tell you a little story. For the love of all that is good in this world, I hope that it bears no resemblance to actual events.

Chris and Mike are roommates. By some manner of twisted coincidence, they have been consigned to share a living space despite being near polar opposites. Chris is generally considered a jovial fellow who accepts the circumstances around him with a smile, and who always tries to find the good in things. Mike is the living embodiment of bitterness and nihilism. He knows, without the burden of evidence, that the universe is against him, and would start a fistfight with God with minimal provocation. Anything, in Mike’s eyes, can be construed as provocation if his baseline mood is foul enough.

One day, Chris was working fervently in the living room to add the finishing touches on his masterpiece: a cross-stitched wall mural depicting what he considered the most poignant moments of the original Star Wars trilogy. Having secured the final stitch, Chris barely managed to fight back tears of joy as he pinned his life’s greatest work to the largest wall in the living room, covering it in the vague yarn likenesses of Han shooting first, and Yoda lifting the X-Wing from the bog with the Force, and so on. He barely managed to eke out a whispered “I did it” as he gazed into the unblinking eyes of slave Leia (tastefully done, as Chris prides himself on being a gentleman) before he was taken by the flailing, graceless throes of what was estimated to be a victory dance.

Locked, mind and body, in his trance-like focus on the mural, Chris had failed to notice Mike’s cat peeking around the corner from the hallway. Its every muscle was tensed with murderous fury as its wide-eyed gaze locked onto the loose threads at the back of Chris’s mural. Now that Chris was distracted with his bizarre seizure, the cat jumped at the opportunity to rain clawed death on some bundles of spare thread from Chris’s bag.

Chris’s joy was overwhelming in the wake of his artistic triumph. His eyes were closed to the world, and his body was seized with a level of rapture often sought through drugs or religious experiences. In this state, Chris was unable to detect Mike’s cat fervently battling the bundle of thread on the floor. It was a battle which would tragically find itself intersecting with Chris’s spastic celebration, as one awkward dance step would find itself intersecting with a small lump of fur and flesh.

An inhuman yelp of unprecedented volume shattered the air of the living room (and possibly Chris’s left ear drum) upon impact. What was once a glowing mask of pride instantly twisted into a face of abject horror upon recognition of what had just occurred. The mournful death rattle of Mike’s beloved pet ushered in an air of dread throughout the entire house. A second sound soon twisted Chris’s stomach into a sickening knot: the sound of Mike’s door splintering as he stomped down the hall toward the living room.

Mike was attempting to sleep off his daily hangover when the pitiful whining had started, rousing him for his first shouting match of the day. All his anger, along with his lifelong sense of disappointment in the universe, couldn’t prepare him for what he would see in the living room. When he discovered Chris petrified with mortal terror just a few feet from his mangled cat, his very soul was filled with a sadness he thought he had long-since replaced with anger.

While he harbored an innate hatred for virtually every human on Earth, that cat was his sole companion in this life. No matter how betrayed he felt by society at large, the sweetness of his tiny, feline confidante always managed to permeate his thick skin and take some of the sting out of the day. He truly loved it more than any person he would ever meet, and now it was a twisted ball of dying hair left howling in its own blood on the carpet.

No one is entirely sure what transpired next, as Chris’s mind worked tirelessly from that day to repress any further memories, and Florence ADX fears that a new memorial will have to be erected if Mike hears any further mention of the incident in question. What is known is that authorities were alerted to the scene when the neighbors called about a washing machine that had found its way from Chris and Mike’s house to their bedroom via a direct, arching path. They were questioned, but failed to provide many details as they pondered the irony of an image of Han Solo frozen in carbonite on fire. Other nearby houses could only confirm a deafening stream of vitriolic and inventive curses that theologians of the future will someday cite as the reason God doesn’t listen to us anymore.

And thusly ends my tale. If you weren’t previously taking note, please take a moment to reflect on the moments in which you found yourself laughing. If you didn’t laugh at all, you are emotionally dead and this has been a complete waste of your time. For the rest of you, you may have found yourself smirking at the absurdity of a man spending so much time on an ultimately pointless endeavor. Maybe you chuckled a little when Chris began his ungainly celebratory dance. I’m willing to bet that your laughter was louder (even on the inside) when Chris demolished Mike’s cat. And, if I know my typical audience, you found most of your delight in Chris’s recoil of horror, and Mike’s inhuman anger, and the rampage it fueled. The question I aim to raise in all of this is “why?”

People laugh at other people falling down and getting hit with things. Fact. Even children’s cartoons consist of a lot of violence and anger. Laughing at the pain of others is a concept so ingrained in our society that the Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. I have to believe that it is, like so many things, a remnant from the days of early man.

If a member of your tribe is eaten by tigers, there probably isn’t a whole lot of laughter around the campfire that night. If he simply got whacked by another guy’s club on accident, but was ultimately okay, there might be some chuckles had. I believe that, deep down, we laugh at someone else’s bad situation because it’s our brain’s way of reaffirming that we are fine. If we can laugh it off, we will likely live to see another day. It’s a hardwired coping mechanism. We laugh at someone’s anger or indignation because we internally are aware that the same misfortune hasn’t befallen us. We laugh at absurdity because our brain has discovered something that doesn’t make sense, and that’s the flag we throw to make us feel okay about it instead of freaking out. Only children laugh at Laffy Taffy, because they aren’t fully formed yet, and real people don’t laugh at puns because puns are the hallmark of twisted skinwalkers that don’t understand human emotion and have failed to blend in properly.

Again, this is all just guesswork. I have no more science-backed insight into the human mind than any other asshole. I just think about it a lot. If you like what you’ve read, though, keep it in mind the next time somebody thinks you have a sick sense of humor. You aren’t laughing at someone’s pain (specifically) because you’re evil, it’s a conditioned response. You laugh when somebody jokes about death because it’s absurd for us to worry about it. You’re not a monster. It’s evolution, baby.