Seriously????

So, a couple of things happened in the last week or so that has inspired me to write this blog. The first was that I attended a Bar Mitzvah on the 4th of July. I had originally grumbled about the choice of date...okay, that's not entirely true, I grumbled the whole time about the date, I'm a huge fan of Independence Day and thought I should be out in the sun, but I changed my tune. While attending the ceremony, I started to find myself enjoying the experience of attending an event outside of my own culture and finding it fitting for the holiday. But I digress. One of the things that came up during the ceremony, was that the young man was praised for his sense of humor. Specifically, he was praised for his ability to use humor as a way to disarm defenses and help people to see the world in a different way. This gift, it was said, would help him throughout his life as a way to help people get passed their own difficulties and see new ways of approaching life. I was pleased. More on that later.

The second event came last night while teaching my film class. We started talking about how comedians will often take serious roles in an effort to be taken more seriously as artists. It's the nature of the beast really. Humor works because it sneaks in through a back door. Because it's light and fun, it makes it seem easy. Great humor is making an effort to comment on truths about life, but doing so in a way that surprises us. If there isn't a surprise, there isn't a punchline. Makes sense really, if we can see the punchline coming too far in advance, then it's not a punchline, it's the end of a self-evident statement. The trick is that after the delivery of the punchline, the truth of the statement it makes will hopefully sit with us and as it does, we become aware of the effect it had on us, the effect on how we see things.

Humor does great things for us. The first thing it does, God willing, is it makes us laugh. That's no small accomplishment. Laughter opens up all sorts of channels to our soul. A good laugh brings us into the present. It makes us feel alive at THAT MOMENT. It wakes us up. So when we are awake, and in this open state, a joke can then go a step further and make us reflect on one of life's truths. This is GREAT STUFF. This is why the young man was being praised, and also why some comics need not fret about if they are being taken seriously or not. The work they are accomplishing with their humor, should be reward enough. I realize that they are ALSO taking serious roles to express another side of themselves, but I hope they can appreciate the side of themselves that they have become known for as a gift, and one that has very welcome and very serious benefits.