“I Can’t See What’s Funny About This”

I can. That’s why my life is so full. And how I earn followers.

This is an article about writing. Yeah, that’s a cop, but stay with me here.

So yesterday I took a mental health afternoon and drove the nearly two hours to the smallish-but-growing town of Tualatin, just south of Portland. I spent the entire trip talking to my buddy Melissa. She was on speaker phone, the phone was out of my hands and on my seat, and I had the directions to the TJ Maxx Home Goods on so I wouldn’t miss the exit.

We hung up, just as I approached the exit. I put the phone to my ear to check the directions, parked, then realized that the cop car with the lights on was stopping for me.

Busted. Phone to ear. Since 2018, this has been a big deal in Oregon. He was nice, I was surprised. Well, SHIT. It’s a big fine. However, being who I am, we were talking pleasantly when I glanced at the ticket. There was a box- god help me I can’t recall the exact wording- something having to do with mental (fill in the blank). I read the words as “mental infidelity.” Not what it said, but what I read.

It absolutely skewered my funny bone.

I broke out laughing. Couldn’t help it. Cop leans in, wants to know what I find so funny about a really nasty ticket. I point to the box, helpless with laughter, and asked him,

“Mental capacity compared to WHAT?”

Okay. That cracked HIM up.

Next thing I know, he asks me when I served. Vietnam, I told him, and explained I did half my tour enlisted, half officer.

He said, “My dad served in Vietnam.”

Before I could say, “Please thank him for his service for me,” the cop rips the ticket out of my hand, folds it up, smiles at me, and says,

“Stay off the phone, okay?” Waves goodbye, gets in his cruiser and disappears.

WTF?

I suspect that cops don’t often pull folks over who then make them laugh. And I would also bet that said laugh break was one of the better parts of his day, given that they probably get their fair share of abuse.

While there are times that laughter can get you in serious trouble (like giggling at the size of someone’s penis, for example, or being Black and getting pulled over, but that’s another article and it’s not for me to write) the ability to find the funny in the shitstorms of life is the only real superpower I possess. It’s also one of the best writing skills you will ever develop.

People love funny. They crave funny. And while outrage gets you eyeballs, funny gets you followers.

Helping people see the absurd around them, something that my fellow Floridian-escapee-now-Canadian Nicole Chardenet does with wicked-ass skill, is a very highly-developed emotional quotient. Not everyone can do it, and for my part it can come and go depending on how much pain I’m in, but most of the time the humor muscle I’ve worked hard to build pays off.

Shortly afterwards, I had the phone on the seat again, and was talking to another friend of mine, who is incredibly smart and savvy. I told her this story:

Ten days ago I was hanging a very heavy, tall, carved wood Buddha statue from Thailand on a high wall in my living room. I was pounding in three huge, thick screw bolts into the big plank on top of a wall at least ten feet high. You had to use a hammer to start the bolts, then slip a screwdriver through the eye to screw them in using the screwdriver as leverage. Hard work.

I was whaling away on the third bolt with everything I had- and you can see what’s coming- the hammer skewed off the curved top of the bolt and exploded the tip of my middle finger of my left hand.

The same finger that I had fractured in a car accident last year, that was just getting back to normal. The same tip of the finger that I had just gotten caught in a folding door and given myself a bitch of a blood blister an inch long.

THAT finger.

Blood everywhere.

I calmly put the hammer down, slowly backed down the step ladder, cleaned up the blood, wrapped my screaming, cursing, exploded-like-a-water-balloon finger in ice, and sat cursing at the top of my lungs until the worst of the pain wore off. Aided along by two very potent pain pills. Then I wrapped it up, climbed the step ladder, finished the job, and got that goddamned fucking Buddha on the goddamned fucking wall.

Where it beamed down at me, all serenity and light, while my finger shrieked

FUCK YOU.

By evening, I was done with chores. Took off the wrapping. It was bad. Two hours, five shots and six stitches later, I had the perfect response to those MAGA morons storming the Capitol:

A middle finger with a bit fat white condom. Here. Shove it.

Since I had last week managed to re-fracture my right pinky toe on my bike trainer, I was back to precisely where I was six months ago: one hand down, one foot down. The Black Knight from Monty Python. You cannot make this stuff up.

I had tears running down my cheeks, retelling this story. It gets funnier every time I tell it.

Silence.

My friend said,

“I can’t see what’s funny about that.”

Which made me laugh even harder, much to her consternation.

Which is why, at ten years my junior, she has much deeper frown lines than I do, and she has a harder time with online criticism than I do.

I see that shit as comedy fodder. So does Nicole. And as Nicole wrote this morning, she gets vilified by folks who may not always see what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. Which, kindly, doesn’t make them stupid. It may well mean that the investment in anger, which often is wholly justified, may be in the way of being able to see things from different angles. Those angles - which you and I can inspire as writers using humor- may well be the doorways to solutions that laughter unlocks.

The wisest among us, as writers, understand the searing power of humor to peel back, often with sarcasm, the thick layers of self-righteousness and anger that so many of us wear as armor. I do it too, I suspect we all do. However this is why many on the far left despise Bill Maher. Those who are equal-opportunity mockers of our ridiculousness give us the chance to watch, with equal hilarity, how we so often miss the point, we can’t see the absurd, and because we can’t allow ourselves the great relief of laughter at said absurdity, are dragged into the depths by it. Maher points that out. People with a few brain cells can laugh at themselves. Those missing those brain cells find offense (stay with me here, we can grow them..shit, if I could anyone can).

The Far Right and the Far Left would find offense if someone swatted a fly in fucking outer Siberia, but I digress.

However, and this is fair to say, that when we are in great pain, it can be very hard to see the funny, but therein lies the Deep Work. Deep Work allows us to laugh at the absurd simply because we are looking at it from an oblique angle, and said new angle allows us to create different solutions. THAT is my point (finally, geez Louise). It is immensely difficult to move forward with ideas and creativity when our anger is acting as serious mental constipation.

However if you are as full of shit as I am, that is a lifetime challenge.

The more serious the issue, the more important it is that we find the absurdity in it.

Why is this so critically important as writers (FOR CHRIST’S SAKE FINALLY SHE GETS TO IT)? Because when you and I can wield humor, sarcasm and other tools to get people to burst out laughing, we also open their doors to release, greater creativity, and a badly-needed comedy moment. Mark Twain famously wrote that comedy is tragedy plus time. Much to the annoyance of many around me I can often see the funny a hell of a lot faster than they can. It is most often at my own expense, which makes it a lot safer for Dear Reader who FAR too often takes themselves FAR too seriously.

As do too many of us Dear Writers.

While I can’t speak for anyone else, I am aware that some topics, especially around race, are indeed deadly serious. Still, the more serious, the more important, to my mind; it’s even more important to tease out the absurdity. Which is why when I read authors like Marley K., sometimes what she writes about what White folks do is so insane, and so insanely true, that the only response I can muster is laughter because It’s. Just. That. Bad. Then I can think of a response, because my creative juices are coming up with brand new angles and ways of seeing. That to me is one of her greatest gifts: she is an incredible observer. Good writers always are.

What Marley writers, and other authors like her, soaks in far, far more deeply not because of outrage — which of course I feel- but more so because I can pull back far enough to see the insanity. THAT is what has helped me learn so much this past year. Being willing to take these incredibly important articles and see them through different lenses. When I can see the absurdity, that is where I also see potent, powerful connections that weren’t obvious before. For my part that is the genius of comedy. Comedy is putting two and two together and getting a turkey turd. But the process of getting there is one hell of a teacher of facts, perspective and above all, connectivity between and among previously hidden elements. That is what makes you immensely powerful as a writer: helping people see those connections. When people laugh, they can see differently. When they see differently, they are often a lot more open.

The other great and abiding truth is that which we find funny, diminishes in its threat to us. Threats ONLY hold the power we allow them. Again, when it comes to difficult and deeply complex issues like race, I am not trying to minimize the cost. I AM saying that when we can undermine the stupidity we see with humor, we gain power over those threats, rather than the other way around.

That is precisely what Viktor Frankl wrote about in Man’s Search for Meaning. I don’t doubt for one moment that one of the survival techniques that Holocaust survivors used was dark humor. Again, sometimes that is all we have left to us, and it is one mighty sword. When we teach others how to wield it, we give them great, abiding and lifelong power.

Is there a point here? Hell, I don’t know. There sure isn’t on the tip of my left middle finger; I smashed the holy shit out of it, bone and all, and have a horizontal blast zone to mark where I really did nearly take the top off. And yet, ten days later, here I am typing 140 wpm, because….

laughing heals.

If you get nothing from this other than I am really clumsy, get this:

LAUGHING HEALS.

I have laughed myself back into shape after some of the most godawful injuries you can imagine. I healed a forty-year eating disorder when I started to find the funny about it.

Had I not found my funny I’d have been dead years ago. Which might have done the local tulip crop a lot more good than my writing but I digress.

You and I can do a great deal more good in the world as writers when we can, at least on occasion, make fun of the stupid shit we do as humans. Hell. Look around. Please tell me you don’t see comedy material everywhere.

Mine starts as soon as I pad into my bathroom and look in the mirror.

That’s my god killer.

That is what makes me Wonder Woman. It sure ain’t my looks, my athletic prowess (BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) or my charm.

But at least I’m having fun.

AND I don’t have to pay that ticket.