Three things brought the topic of humor to the forefront of my mind over the past few days. The first one was two nights ago when Denise and I had gone to bed at 10 pm in a quiet house and then around 3:30 we heard loud voices emitting from our living room. We are not the kind of people (shhh, don’t tell anyone) that grabs a ball bat and races to the scene. Rather, we both try to ignore it and go back to sleep. I was told once by a body guard in the developing world, that I had to immediately vacate my tent because some terrorists were coming to cut our throats. I argued with him, successfully, to leave me alone and let me sleep and I would move to a safer place the following day. I like my sleep when I can find it.

But after about an hour of this noise, and being re-awakened over and over, I stumbled into the living room to find Greta (our Saint Bernard) sitting up on the couch, looking at the TV, the TV on and blarring the lastest news from CNN. I was perplexed. Then I started to feel around Greta’s butt and discovered the remote. So, apparently she had jumped up on the couch and sat on the remote. Not only did she inadvertently turn on the TV, but her butt had channel-surfed to CNN and then turned up the volume to that maximum level. I think she was as startled as we were and was frozen in a sitting position, watching the bright screen. She once almost drove my Defender into the lake when she was in it alone and jumped from the rear to the dirver’s seat, knocking it in gear during the process. She’s a big girl, not knowing her size.

I turned off the TV, which made the living room totally dark, and started to fumble my way back to the bedroom, only to trip over an ottoman, turning a flip (think of the old Dick Van Dyke show’s intro) and landing partially on my feet. Then I returned to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Why? Because I got the giggles so bad that I lay awake for another hour.

The second thing, and this may sound odd, was the sad death of Alexey Navalny. If you don’t know who he was, you should watch the documentary about him (see here). He was an incredibly courageous man, the lone voice to stand up aginst the powerful, mad-man Putin. He was a clear voice of democracy and freedom. The reason his death reminded me of humor within tragedy is the fact that he had one of the most dangerous jobs in the world (was poisoned almost to death by Putin), but all his friends talked about his humor. He joked about everything, especially as a satirist about Putin and the Russian system. A real hero. The kind of decent man that American politics would not be familiar with anymore.

The third thing was my niece, a graphic artist / media source person by training, put together a powerful video montage about my late aunt, Helen.

Helen was one of the greatest people I ever knew, not a selfish cell in her body. But she was also a prolific comedian.

I grew up in a house of comedians as my aunt (who lived with us), and her brother, my dad, kept us in constant stitches. Pranks were a daily occurrence. But you have to understand, the two of them came out of tragedy. Their entire family was wiped out by TB in the 1940s, and when that was over, Dad (her brother) took a “retreat” to the beaches of Normandy in 1944. The two of them had suffered a plethora of events, each enough to cause PTSD. But they learned to laugh . . . and did they laugh!

Humor became central to our lives, due to their influence. I must have done well with it as I was voted the funniest person in my high school and it was a rather big school. Then in college and graduate school I wrote the scripts and perfomed in comedy skits on a frequent basis. But once I got out of the south, my humor didn’t work so well. As I’ve observed before, all cultures are pretentious in places. The difference in the deep south is that we are aware of our pretentiousness and we make fun of ourselves. That doesn’t work so well in other regional cultures. I had a co-worker in the upper midwest say to me once, “Mike, I don’t don’t know how to read you, you are too serious and too silly at the same time.”

I could mention one other example of this tragedy-comedy combo and would be Richard Pryor. He had a horrendous upbringing, growing up in his grandma’s brothel and suffering abuse from many strangers, yet he became one of the most successful comedians of the twentieth century and taught many of us about racism.

The serious side of me is that I’ve always been curious about the world, how people think, how culture works. I see the world through a philosophical framework. Socrates, was my teenage hero. He deconstructed the culture of Athens so much it earned him a free cup of hemlock tea. I liked his love of truth over the fad thinkings of his day, something I wanted to emulate.

What keeps me up at night, literally, is the fact that humanity does not live up to its potential because of lies that it beleives. War is obsolete. Death by viruses can be avoided. Our government is a chaotic wreck awashed in conspiracy theories. Politicians have always been liars, but now the deception, for the sake of partisan victory, is pathalogical. Christianity as a culture is failing as a movement, and it didn’t have to, but now it may be better if it does fail. I have no agenda but factual truth because, as I’ve said many times, the closer we live to reality, the better we live. I do believe that late postmodernism has ushered in a mini-dark ages. Reason is no long in vogue, and like its bigger brother a thousand years ago, human life will suffer in its wake.

No, the sky is not falling. I also know that my voice is virtually helpless against this tide, yet I feel compelled to write. No, I don’t see myself smarter than the crowd or a better person, but simply my passion for the study of culture in general and the historical thinking fads specifically has been my due diligence to understanding how I’ve gotten things wrong in the past and how I think general society gets it wrong now.

No, my serious side is not as a religious dogmatistsl as if I’m looking through a grid of a thousand and one absolute dogmas to judge you and the world as I did a long time ago as an evangelical. Back then we engaged in competitive Christianity, always trying to prove that one was more spiritual than the next. That is the real MO of religious dogmas I believe. Now, I start with the assumption that all the others are better than me. Smarter, nicer, more spiritual. My grid, as stated, is simply factural truth. I fear conservative Christians have sacrificed factual truth for power and the progressive Christians have sacrificed factural truth for peace.

My other serious side is of course my cancer. But cancer is not the first bad thing to happen to me . . . nor the worse. Fortunately, I learned a long time ago, when I faced my first great disappointment in life, how to keep the counter-balance of humor. By the time I worked through some really bad things, I put a poster on my wall that said, “Don’t Take LIfe Too Seriously, it is Only a Temporary Situation.” That thought rekindled the humor I had learned from my aunt.

When I was first taken to the hospital five years ago, I was in ICU and had been told that my life was in jeopardy, a nursing student came in to start her first IV. She was very nervous. I, while dealing with my own angst, tried to calm her nerves, “It won’t bother me if you aren’t successful with your first try.” But her fear was sucking the oxygen out of my space. It was over the top. Then, as the trembling needle came in contact with my skin, I faked a seizure. She jumped. I laughed. My aunt would have belly-laughed. But some people wouldn’t think that was funny. But this humor was a satire on life. Here I was possibly dying and all she could focus on was how nervous she was. My pesudo-seizure was a statement, “Honey, relax. Don’t take this so seriously. If I’m dying and can laugh about the absudity of it, you should laught too.”

To nuture my own sense of humor, I often wake up at 1-2 am with the weight of the world on my heart and I watch the late-night comedians (via You Tube) for an hour or so. They hold no punches, mocking Trump and Biden alike. They reveal the absurdities in a way that gives your heart peace rather than angst. SLN, Week-end Update is my favorite.

My point with this whole post is how a well-cultivated sense of humor is the perfect balance of living in a serious world, not a paradox.

I guess this would quality as a “rambling” which I said I wouldn’t do. But I haven’t had the time to get my other blog off the ground and my friend Chuck, rightly so, told me to thicken my skin and to ignore the people (e.g. competitive dogmatists) whom I piss off.

Mike

Iti is 3 am and I wrote this instead of watching my comedians, please over-look any typos from caused by my blurry eyes.