How did comedy become a tragedy?

I know I’ve tried to write about the importance of comedy and dark humor before. I distinctly remember researching it; however, I don’t remember if I ever finished the article or published it. The research consisted of some quotes from the comedic actor that voiced Iago the parrot in Disney’s animated Aladdin, and whose name escapes me momentarily, if not the legendary voice.

Have you ever heard of laughter meditation? I heard of it from Dr. Andrew Weil on an Aubrey Marcus podcast. I remember the part of the woods I was wandering in in North Carolina, when I lived with Chris. Weil said that the leader/guru will start a vast room of people laughing, I think just by telling them to laugh. Of course - it is fake laughter. Nothing is actually funny yet when they begin. Maybe the starting point is some nervous titters and awkward eye contact between participants. But the situation itself is absurd, so it only takes a few rounds of the fake stuff before it becomes a genuinely uproarious experience with friends. What is bonding more than a genuine good laugh?

• If you want to know who rules you, look for who you can’t make fun of. - Someone, the Internet

The relief of our gaseous air bubble of offense-taking culture when people have permission to laugh at things! Audiences at comedy shows won’t laugh ONLY because a joke was attempted, of course, it needs to actually be funny. But when someone accurately points out the absurdities we either all were thinking (but scared to say) or hadn’t realized yet, it is a glorious event!

The fear of saying the wrong thing is a plague, and one I know so well. I will often write and rewrite text messages based on how I think the other person will respond, stressing to find something that lands in just the way that will keep me from cultural banishment. I also enjoy hiding behind memes and letting them do the talking for me in my stories on Instagram. While I have a few friends I can be as dumb as I want with, there is lingering doubt around my edges that they will always be there when I want them.

I cannot overstate the glory of being able to laugh at any situation that happens.

Any. Situation.

@therealspidey94Im dead #molestedisnotajoke #tom #Meme #fyp #fypシ

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Men are better at this for the most part. God bless ‘em.

The real reason I started writing this today though was to share this actually well-written (in loving constrast to my conversational blogging) essay I found mention of in a Substack comment section tonight — Julian Gough’s Divine Comedy. I was able to read it for free on my phone, not sure about on a computer view. A few lines:

The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is superior to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages, western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh

Indeed, both physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools for writing the western comic novel because they do not require absolute faith and they do not claim with absolute certainty.

Autobiographical novels are particularly revealing of the bias in the culture: in real life Goethe felt no need to kill himself after his heart was broken, but when he wrote a book about it, it had to be a tragedy and the hero had to die. A comedy would have been far more suitable. It might have led to a cheerful late 18th-century Europe. But no, he gave us the furrow-browed Romantics. Tragically (or comically, depending on your temperament), the bias caused by Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylus and the church continues today. The youthful brow remains furrowed.

It uses far more educated references and discussion than I do here about the actual divinity and persecution faced by people who attempt to make us laugh. One might wonder why comedy is so seriously oppressed by those with a tendency towards tyrannical behaviors.

Seriousness is safe. It’s so safe. To laugh at something and point out the nude emperor is the thing that gets one beheaded.

I like to think it also stirs up the chakras, whirls them around a bit and then lets them settle in a better spot. Unlike the dark pools of deepening seriousness that just get darker and darker, laughter splits things apart to let the light in. I am pretty sure that if you force yourself to try and laugh about anything that after the first couple of awful fake “ew” feelings you could change your life around. As usual, this is advice to me. It is always helpful to have some friends to do it with though. Please point out what is funny about my frustrations, for they are surely absurd and overly serious just like yours are. We are not as great as we think and our lives do not exist to punish us, friend.

Tribes sing, dance, and make fart jokes. I definitely wrote about that before. Everything else in the field of psychology might just be a compensation for a refusal to laugh.