Comedy is an old word.
Dante used it to describe his wanderings through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. While it has its funny moments (particularly when the devil salutes his confreres by making 'a bugle of his breech' before sending Dante and Virgil into a trap - which they elude of course but that's another thing altogether) it hardly makes sense to think of the three books as a comedy until you realise that its earlier meaning was that of a story that had a propitious but not necessarily happy ending.
Myself I use the word in its current sense - something that makes us laugh.
Most of us are two pay checks away from bankruptcy. Those of us that have kids are busy watching them make all the mistakes that we did, plus a few of their own, and are largely powerless to do anything about it. We are all of us surrounded by the pap churned out as popular entertainment, by 'news' that we don't want to hear because it either terrifies us, nauseates us, infuriates us, fills us with despair and frustration and impotent rage. All of us know that the ground could open up beneath our feet and swallow us whole (which is why we so greedily imbibe the brightly-colored super-sweetened turds shat out of the arse of Hollywood and its ilk - it distracts us from looking what we know in the eye).
And at the end of it what do we face? A dark so deep that no one's ever come back from the other side of it to tell us what's waiting in it for us - except the prophets and the holy men and the diviners and the tarot readers and their kind - none of whom agree among themselves, never can and never will.
These are the terrors we all share, no matter who we are or in what society we live or in what period of time. The terrors of childhood and adolesence. The terrors of adulthood and old age. The terror that comes from the never-to-be articulated knowledge that we live in a universe that is greater than every means we are able to deploy in order to understand it, that we will never control no matter how clever we become, in which we will never ever be safe.
To paraphrase Lovecraft, we're just smart enough to realise that we are impotent and just dumb enough not to be able to find a way out.
And that's why it's funny. Watch a kitten tie itself up in a ball of twine. The kitten might be seriously pissed off by its predicament, possibly even distressed - which only makes it struggle the harder, becoming still more tied up, and ever more laughable to the human watching from his oh-so-much removed and superior perspective.
It's only when you take such a view of your own life, when you realise that our terrors are pointless because we're all going to die and rot anyway, that the comedy kicks in.
Life is funny precisely because its terrifying, and because there's no escape from it - and no, suicide is not an escape. You might like to think of it as the exclamation point after the punchline. In some cases if you didn't have the exclamation point you wouldn't know that everything that preceded it was a joke. And please don't berate me for my insensitivity in finding suicide funny, or weep over some humourist who took himself so seriously that he killed himself because of it - because I'll laugh my ass off at you.
And don't take what I'm talking about to be a kind of schadenfreude, that peculiarly German brand of humour that laughs at the misfortune of others.
I'm in this shit too, and that's the difference.
Part of my desire to come to America was rooted in the desire for escape, to run away to somewhere different where the bullshit we all know and love didn't occur. And that I find truly funny because, as I've learned to say to myself since I've been here: different country same old shit. I work here, I pay taxes here, I have co-workers who annoy the fuck out of me here, I'm a part of the same endless round of everday frustrations, inconveniences and annoyances here - all that's different is the faces, the names, the accents, and driving on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car.
Different country same old shit. Right.
So what am I going to do? Cry? Or laugh?
Myself, I laugh.
