Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
Don’t we all know somebody who needs to lighten up a bit, have a little fun and get the joke?
But really? A joke? After all, life delivers tragedy and belly laughs in about equal measure, doesn’t it? Or maybe for some people the laughs, jokes and good times don’t even balance the bad.
Well, maybe that’s the point. If we want to go on living, and by that I mean a good life, no matter how bad things get, we have to get over stuff and go on. If we can’t find a joke in it all, we have to at least find the peace.
Since this is the week when Lucy Fest comes back to town, I thought I’d make my point in the words of a few comedians who have been our guests from time to time.
Take Joan Rivers, for instance. Funny Lady with her own (un)fair share of tragedy behind her. She said, “As comedians, we are all laughing because life is so horrible. Life is so difficult, and I cope with it by making jokes about absolutely everything.” And we can be sure her daughter, Melissa, who will be in Jamestown this week to talk about her life in her late mother’s shadow, has made the same discovery, along with Kelly Carlin and Violet and Julian Ramis, all orphaned by very funny people.
I wonder if, after time and reflection, it all simply becomes who we are… or maybe we become whatever we make of it all. The lines blur and life becomes whole again.
Bo Burnam, comedian, singer-songwriter, satirist and Comedy Central star, whose viral YouTube alone has more than 150 million hits, put it like this, “There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.”
A funny thing can happen to hard times, bad news and tragedy after a while. It’s like foot-stomped, smashed up grapes in the bottom of a barrel. It can become a treasured flask of the most rarefied and expensive wine in the world, perhaps a Domaine Romanée-Conti with decades of refining behind it, maturing in a cold, dark cellar. Sound like anything you’ve been through?
When a pile life experiences does that we call it something else. The fine wine of the soul is called “Wisdom.”
Then, once in a while, the bad stuff just shows up as absurdity and we can laugh at it right away. Will Rogers went to Washington one day for some new material. When he came back, it all made sense. “I don’t make jokes,” he said. “I just watch the government and report the facts.”
Even the world’s most un-comical people, the professional “serious fellows” not typically thought of as good at frat party beer pong – like an Austrian philosopher with the totally non-hilarious name of Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein – get the point. Ludwig said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
So whatever you do with the bad stuff, whether you’re like Bo and you make it into poetry and songs, or even satire, or like Joan and make it into wild and crazy jokes, take a trek on down to Lucy Fest this week and make some Wisdom Wine for yourself.
And if you don’t have any of life’s stomped grapes just now, laugh yourself silly and get your goofy on. It’s all good. Life’s a joke, after all.
And, with your copy of the Jamestown Gazette firmly in hand, enjoy the read.
Walt Pickut
Editor
The Jamestown Gazette