Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The best medicine

Not long ago I watched (on good ol' PBS – where would I be without PBS?) the ceremony that was held last fall at the Kennedy Center honoring comedian George Carlin. He was awarded, posthumously, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. I don't think I'd ever actually seen Carlin perform, though I'd heard a few clips from his comedy albums. I dipped into his book Brain Droppings when he died last June, and we put out what books by or about him that we had at the library (this is what we do whenever anyone famous dies). I wasn't particularly impressed – the book seemed so totally negative, and he was awfully enamoured of the word asshole, one of my least favorite words, as it is both crude, and ugly-sounding. But there were certainly some laugh-out-loud bits.

The award ceremony showed quite a few clips from Carlin's performances, over many years, and I discovered that this was, indeed, a very funny, as well as astutely intelligent, man. He was not just this scruffy guy who liked to use dirty words. ("There are no bad words.") We saw one of his earliest performances of his "Al Sleet, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman" skit, on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Sitting there with his short, neat hair, in his suit coat and narrow tie, you would never know that this was the stringy-haired, shaggy-bearded, tee-shirted hippie of later years. And his weather "forecast" had me, the audience and Johnny Carson screaming with laughter.

The final line of that "skit," delivered nonchalantly, had to do with the fact that the radar, which had picked up some thunder-storms, "has also picked up a squadron of Russian ICBMs, so I wouldn't sweat the thunderstorms." When I stopped laughing, it occurred to me that human beings are remarkable not so much because we laugh – it seems to be pretty well-established that at least chimpanzees do, too — as for what we will laugh at. The things we can see the humor in. The line above is clearly an example of "black" humor, and made Johnny Carson fall out of his chair laughing.

I also started thinking about how remarkable it is that we still have court jesters. For isn't that what professional comedians are? People who are paid to make us laugh. (I wonder if medieval court jesters were paid, or just received room and board.) Having something to laugh at is so important to human beings that we are willing to pay people to provide us with that "commodity." I suppose it isn't all that remarkable that there are people who are willing to become comedians, even before it starts paying, since most of us like to make people laugh. We don't like for people to laugh at us, but we like to say things that others find amusing (and why is that?) I guess comedians are just people who really, really like that feeling, crave it, want it repeated. And with our need for laughter, the rest of us have to be very grateful that they do.

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