Merry 8s

From the mind that brought bikini wax, basketballs, shaving-cream pies, and chainsaws to The Masters : Eight propositions – in no particular order.

1)    We take ourselves too seriously. We are all narcissists to one degree or another. This is a difficult state of mind and feeling to escape.

2)    One way to escape is through farce. We recognize in farce that however ordered is the physical universe – in fact, farce depends on physical order (especially the law of gravity) – the social fabric is frayed and splitting; it is tattered, torn, darned, patched, etc. Note the terms: physical universe, social fabric.

3)    And re-consider farce. Tragedy assumes an order to society that does not exist.  Pride doesn’t always go before a fall. Tragic flaws need not yield tragic consequences. In short, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, on their crops and on their picnics.
     Comedy assumes an order to society that does not exist. In tragedy, misunderstanding leads to complication leads to further misunderstanding leads to bloodshed. In comedy, complication leads to confusion leads to misunderstanding which is unraveled; there is resolution. In farce, complication creates complication creates misunderstanding creates confusion creates chaos, and any resolution is obviously fake.

4)    Laughter is better than – and healthier than – tears, if only because it is less self-indulgent. (See (1).) Tears turn us toward desire for control: the world is not as it should be, and it has been particularly unfair to us. (How can it not recognize its own sun?) Laughter is social. Yes, the world is unfair, but it hasn’t singled us out: it’s just the fornifreculated freak show it is.

5)    Freak shows. Carnivals. Circuses, Gallows humor. Flatulence to body parts falling off.

6)    It is unlikely we can always be merry. (Certainly it is unlikely I can be.) But merriment can be nurtured. (As I write this, Roz swings the back-stair door too wide and knocks a Chinese plate of its hook in the kitchen; it shatters on the wood floor – it puts a gouge in the floor- and there is colored china everywhere. We pick up, and we sweep up, not grimly; but no one laughs until she says, “Well, that’s enough of that for today.” And that’s funny because we know something like that will happen tomorrow – just not today, please!
     If we can cultivate melancholy, we can cultivate merry.

7)    re (5) While resolution in farce is obviously fake – Wile E. Coyote can’t return whole from every misadventure any more than he can walk on air until he realizes the earth is no longer under him – nevertheless the way the heroes (and goats) of farce bounce back from accident bordering on mayhem makes us merry. We’re not precious flowers either, china plates on a wall, Humpty Dumpties: we knit – and the looser-limbed we are when we slip on the banana peel or step off a cliff, the wider we swing our tongues to lick the pie off our faces, the merrier we are, the sooner we knit and can begin again. Or if we don’t knit? So we die. In tragedy, that is that. In comedy, the heavenly bridegroom will come for his bride. In farce, from our graves we sing “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.”

8)    Sexual humor? Bathroom humor? Both, maybe the last more than the first, explode any illusions we have that we are in control. Some, granted, refuse to give up: “Here’s what I can do next time to prevent that’s happening again.” But watching a political candidate’s team huddling over their tablets, parsing their calendars, and charting pee breaks is as funny as watching the candidate wet his or her pants.