Something Hopeful, Something Terrible, Something Sad, Something Funny, Something Weird: Part Four
Laughing in the dark, at the dark.
“Here,” said Wonko the Sane, “we are outside the Asylum.” He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing, and the gutters. “Go through that door” — he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered — “and you go into the Asylum. I’ve tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there’s very little one can do. I never go in there myself. If I ever am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and I shy away.”
“That one?” said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.
“Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.”
The sign read:
“Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.”
“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.
“And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how,” he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, Oh. Well that’s all right then. “I intend to remain.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
PART FOUR: The Funny
When the going gets disturbing/ uncomfortable/ awkward/ embarrassing, humor is my balm. It’s a survival instinct to deal with all the dismaying things I have no control over. It’s how I process the big and small traumas I’ve collected throughout life, not to mention the ones we share. It’s my way of whistling past the graveyard of our collective perception.
I’ve never considered myself as someone who struggled with anxiety, but maybe early in life I created tools to mask it. Humor has an oblique way of dispelling tense and threatening situations. Levity makes a palace out of misrule. I was a regular target for bullies at school and abuse that prowled within and around our neighborhood trailer park. Family life was unpredictable—calm seas would turn calamitous without warning. Seasons of love came and went in my desert of neglect.
This is how I became a court jester. The hard truths that circled around the periphery of my small and powerless frame couldn’t be confronted head-on, but could be parried and charmed with my quick wit.
And now it’s the Terrible 20’s. The firehose blast of shameless inanity, caustic corruption, blatant lies, and unending parade of hard-to-swallow events shows no sign of stopping. All of it seems baked by momentum and inertia at this point—a cake of consequences that we, regardless of choice, get to have and eat, too.
What to do? Curate the laughs, motherfuckers.
And finally, Paul Rudd speaks for us all.