Standup comedians are good at finding funnies in daily life but so, too, are writers and philosophers—as we may find when we spend time with people whose life’s work seems to be to receive professional therapy guidance as they navigate an endless current of trials and tribulations. Henry Miller provides a revealing rejoinder to life’s abject seriousness, like fear of falling into an outhouse toilet hole: “the worm in the apple of human existence is consciousness. It steals over the face of life like an intruder. Seen through the mirror everything becomes the background of the ego. The seers, the mystics, the visionaries smash this mirror again and again. They restore man to the primordial flux, they put him back in the stream like a fisherman emptying the net.” (248). Given the seeming disaster that is the planet and toxicity within our culture perhaps the very egos we least suspect of being to blame—our own observing selves, need to, as the saying used to go, take a chill pill. And remember to laugh! Because in social science or cultural studies, there’s certainly no sense in being dour.
Consider three decades ago the height of youth cultural comedy: you had Bart Simpson aggravating teachers and Parental Advisory Committees alike with his “eat my shorts” jocularity. And you had Beavis and Butthead, whose “Experience” soundtrack album lampooned Jimi Hendrix while addressing core concerns of infantile males. Within rap and rock tunes Beavis and Butthead’s guest singers dispensed relationship advice. And they provided some appraisals of the ethical domain. All for a laugh and with no crescendo of backlash beyond the mean. Witness two excerpts from the teen culture goings-on in 1993:
“Monster kinky have no morals
Monster love to get oral (ummmm!)
Got ten cars and the girls like that
I was born and bred to be a mack’”
There’s no salamanders in the mouth implied, but we can imagine the line of conversation prior to Teresa’s poetic justice moment where the lizard landed in her male interlocutor’s oral orifice. Male vulgarity had led to a moment of clarity about where the newt might reside, whereby to address a common and not-too complex dalliance of even the saintliest of monastic mind.
As such, wondering what might happen often can be very aggravating in a moment of concern over what is happening.
Next up, though, from the Beavis and Butthead literature:
Positive K:
“See you gotta be a Don, and turn ’em on
Like Orville Redenbacher, I keep ’em poppin’, baby, take ’em shoppin’”
Butt-Head:
“Shopping sucks! Huh-huh! Hey Positive, I thought you got chicks ’cause you were cool!”
So, let’s slam dance, or break dance as the case may be, forward to the present day, where many folks in assorted lines of work and education have to mind their p’s and q’s like never before. Political correctness reflects a dubious level of anxiety, whereby words have come to replace sentiments, or so some say. But one is reminded of a joke I used to tell to my Quebecois orchard worker colleagues: “what sound do you hear from a French existentialist bird, a crow Camus or a seagull Sartre?” “Pour qu’ai!” As it happens, the pseudo-bilingual crows have at last come home to roost in the US White House, with the rise of Westmount High’s Kamala Harris erstwhile schoolgirl resident of Montreal. During a year of French immersion, Kamala claimed that “I used to joke that I felt like a duck because all day long at our new school I’d be saying, ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’ (‘What? What? What?)”.
Okay, so it’s not a crow exactly, but Vice President Harris’ words sort of quack like comedy. It’s like the helpful MIT scientist who created a chip to understand and explore possibilities for the female gender in terms of bacterial vaginosis: Dr. Don Ingber claimed that the chip “walks, quacks, and talks like a human vagina”. Whenever animal and human realms mix and interact there’s a certain humor there, as a contemporary Colbert late night tv show reference made clear to millions of viewers when Colbert wondered aloud if, like in a monastery, poor Dr. Ingber’s science laboratory lacked a requisite female presence whereby to gather descriptive data for their new computer chip.
Anyway, no matter how the universe seems to be unfolding in a given moment let’s remember that the tie that binds us all together in common humanity, no matter our ideas, beliefs, genders, or chromosomes, is that we all of us now and forever retain the dignified capacity to laugh – including at ourselves as well as with others! So don’t let’s get a salamander in our slacks or a foot in our mouths for want of silence. Let’s just loosen up and have some fun while we better our brains!