For some reason, I elected not to publish the post I wrote on Sunday afternoon about laughing in the face of a serious subject... and I'm glad, since that turned out to be a much more timely topic than I had any way to anticipate. Almost immediately after the announcement of Bin Laden's death, the jokes started, closely followed by uncomfortable parsing of exactly what sort of reaction was allowed to decent folk under the circumstances.
I thought, as I often do, about Groucho Marx.
Groucho was dark, the kind of dark that comes from having a deep and complete belief in the value of human decency accompanied by a deep and perpetual disappointment in how humanity, as a whole, approaches fulfilling that promise. If your only concept of the man boils down to funny glasses with attached plastic mustache, get yourself some
Duck Soup like, now. (Do not start with
Cocoanuts.)
Visiting Germany in 1958, Groucho did the only thing one can properly do atop Hitler's bunker:
A vigorous, albeit joyless, two-minute-long version of the Charleston. ("Not much satisfaction,"
Marx later allowed, "after he killed six million Jews.")
God knows it didn't right any wrongs, but it makes me really proud as a human being to know that Groucho Marx danced on Hitler's grave.
There's a distinction between that act and gloating. It was irreverence rather than chest-thumping. It was the attempt to find some balm in being alive and oneself, having outlasted unrepentant evil, fully aware that others did not.
Gearing way down, the near-universal experience of laughing through difficult experiences bears consideration.
A few weeks ago, amid a varied and exciting smorgasbord of stressors, I went to lunch with a couple of friends. And you know what we ended up laughing about? A dead cat. Or, more precisely, the fact that one of us had been driving around all day with a dead cat in the car.
Let me stress this first:
Dead cats are not funny. Really. Crazy cat lady here. I am second to none in my love of the Furball American community. But when everything in the world is going wrong
and then you find yourself driving around with a
boxed dead cat... oh dear God. In times of profound stress, there's likely to be some element of the experience that is not merely bad or unhappy or inconvenient, but also in some way surreal, strange, or illogical. THAT'S what's funny: Life's absurdity doesn't stop to let you sob undisturbed.
There will always be people who are offended by any given instance of laughter, because it is too soon, too close to the bone, too risque, too tasteless, too
much. This stops arguably inappropriate laughter about as effectively as cement sidewalks stop weeds... and aren't the leaf-filled cracks in a sidewalk tremendous evidence that life finds a way?
An old family story--it's too much like my people to
not be true--holds that one of my relatives was, literally, late for his own funeral. (The body went on the wrong train.) I don't doubt for a moment that the family was laughing heartily. I don't doubt for a moment that some fussbudget was tut-tutting from a distance.
Whether absorbing a small, routine tragedy or facing unimaginable evil, humanity's great self-defense mechanism is the ability to take serious things not completely seriously. You may get hurt--you
will get hurt, at some point--if you laugh, love, or learn to ride a bike. But the wounded sensitivities and the bruised egos and the skinned knees heal, leaving us wiser and better able to balance.
And it's all in the balance. It's only natural to be relieved when bad things happen to bad people. Honoring the persistence of human decency is a distinct impulse from bloodlust.
Laugh. Dance on the bunker. Just remember that we're supposed to be enjoying the fact that we're better, kinder, more peaceful people than our enemies.
