Hello Reader,
Got a foundation for humour?
Humour is like the musician in a marching band who plays the cymbals: He asked his band master, “What’s the most important thing for me to know about playing the cymbals?”
Answer: “…When!”
For me to include in my War of the Worlds poetry manuscript a funny poem or two would be to ignore the film student who asked his teacher, “When do you insert a minute of comic relief into a terror movie such as Day of the Triffids?”
Answer: “…You don’t!”
Sometimes the subject matter, such as the entire human race being under assault by Triffids, is just too serious, even if this means inflicting a relentless tension on the poor audience.
If the danger is merely to the lives of all the passengers and crew of an aircraft, because the two pilots have been incapacitated, then OK: There will be a brief scene of a passenger being funny. I am referring to the script of Flight Into Danger, which we took in school. Besides comic relief, it also had a recap scene, in the guise of an air traffic controller on the radio, because the movie, when televised, would be interrupted for “the six o’clock evening news, with Walter Cronkite.” That same movie, complete with a civilian former fighter pilot saying the plane flew “sluggish like a wet sponge” was later re-written to be Zero Hour, by the author of Airport, and then re-written again to be a feature comedy called Airplane.
On my blog, to give my readers their money’s worth—which ain’t much, the blog is free—I try to pair my War of the Worlds poems with a wee prose essay. After all, not everybody likes poetry—go figure. My poem today is not a comedy, as I wanted unity of tone, (When? You don’t!) hence the sober mid verse, but I did try for a fun rhythm to match at the happiness at the passing of the evil Martians.
Meanwhile, how ‘bout that foundation for humour?
As a child, back in the days of weekly frontier shows such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket, (King of the wild frontier) I remember a children’s book with a scene where a one-room-school teacher is looking down at a little brother and sister who are so very serious and quiet. At the time, I thought, as the teacher did, that farm life must have beaten them down. Like the grey people on a farm with Dorothy in Kansas (You may recall it was only her dog Toto that kept Dorothy from being grey too)
As an adult, knowing that struggling Abraham Lincoln, as a child in his family lean-to, (before the log cabin) had no time to even make soap, yet nevertheless managed to have good humour, I remain skeptical that a harsh life would mean no sense of comedy. As a young man Lincoln was valued on work crews for his humorous stories, even as farmers hated how his stories distracted the crews from their labour. Perhaps that girl and boy were oppressed not by their labour but by their parents… Just as novelist Pat Conroy was.
Recently I came across a line in a Pat Conroy book where he once more tries to understand his horrible father, a father exposed in Conroy’s nonfiction memoir My Losing Season, written after his father’s death, and, from during his dad’s lifetime, Conroy’s first fiction novel The Great Santini.
Question: How horrible was Pat’s dad, Santini? Answer: Conroy didn’t think any of his siblings would attend their father’s funeral. Seriously. But they did, because of the novel.
It happened this way: To be publishable, Conroy had to tone down just how horrible the actual great Santini really was. The novel was commercial success, complete with a movie version starring Robert Duval. Then a strange thing happened: Santini decided to live up to his hero image. He changed. By the time he died, the whole town came out to his funeral, and so did his children.
(The flip side to Santini’s change is people living down to a bad image. As in the old folk saying, “If you give a dog a bad name, then you might as well hang him.”)
As for humour, here’s what I envision: As a US marine fighter pilot and squadron leader, Santini would surely have a fine sense of humour, not just to give himself some laughs, but for group morale too, especially when the going got tough, and of course to buck up any marine who was failing to cope, “dragging his tail.” Nobody ever said the marine corps was easy. I can’t imagine any marine being without enough ego to show his pals that he too could crack a joke.
So imagine how dumbfounded I was to read, in Conroy’s final nonfiction memoir, something about his dad:
“Of all the shameful things he did to us when we were kids, he never once made us laugh. In his retirement years, Dad had surprised himself and shocked his children by developing a terrific sense of humor.”
I had to put the book down and start to think: In our everyday life, don’t we try to make our loved ones laugh? If something amusing happens in the morning, don’t we save it up to tell them in the evening when they come home? Doesn’t looking out for them include, besides asking how their day went, also trying to support them to feel better about themselves, and trying to make them laugh? Don’t nearly all people, including parents, role model behaving this way? Well, not my parents, and not the great Santini. That man was a poor excuse for a father, being neither safe nor supportive.
I put the book down, stared into space, and realized: My family of origin was a lot like Santini… I can remember, in my twenties, feeling a surge of anger when a wife and college student told me she “wanted her kids to feel good about themselves.” Not Santini, not for his kids, and not my parents for theirs. In our family, I regret to say, I am sure the youngest three children, including me, were rather like those two frontier kids. Seriously. (The older three children had known better times)
Those three kids eventually came to realize they had a humour gap. In my case, before there would be any point in rushing out to buy a book of jokes and one-liners, hoping against hope I could thereby learn to be funny, I needed first to get a handle on the
foundations of humour:
Looking for the good in others, projecting warmth, and reflecting on how “angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” No mortal can discern something funny, or generate humour, while uptight… or while desperately obsessing, struggling and straining to become “good enough.” Better if I take it easy, knowing I am already loved, by the Lord. And then, over time, learning what a humour-state feels like, the way stage-actors learn what a relaxed body feels like.
I can relate to a certain atheist hard-drinking fellow, truly as atheist as any other alcoholic, who got into recovery in AA, and who at last said, “Some need God to avoid hell, I need God because I’ve already been to hell.” I hear you, brother. I guess God sits next to the lightest of angels.
As it happens, at the same the time I knew that lady in college, I was seeing a college counsellor, while role modelling humour from a few people in both my past and present. Hey, that’s a nice thought: People are never really gone if you can still role model off of them. (I still learn from Abe Lincoln)
Another thought: You’re never solely a victim if you can help others. And help I did. And do. As a life style. Recently I received a reply to my e-mail, which had been a reply to a sensitive poet. By “hear it” she means the e-letter:
Thanks for the reply Sean, I hear it in your voice which is always fun and often involves humour! I have read this at a difficult time as my mom isn't well, and your words brought a smile. Thank you…
She ended with a quip of her own, then graciously said, “Happy Easter.”
Being gracious is something else I had to learn as an adult. So I looked up from my screen and thought, “Hey, I’ve got fun and humour in my voice! Not bad, for a serious survivor of a home unsafe, a home relentlessly unsupportive. Not bad at all.”
Poem
In a dusty depopulated land recovering from the onslaught of the Martians, I imagine a good, clean, wholesome couple having access to pre-war goods. Those two might sound too good to be true, but hey, if I can imagine them then they can exist. As a healthy ex-convict once said, “What a man can conceive, a man can achieve.”
Jasper and Holly
Jasper and Holly were known to go bike,
past crumbling towns to wherever they’d like.
They were always so clean, a couple so blessed,
who stayed to be welcomed, then pedalled off west,
with glimmering chimes and a bell.
Jasper and Holly carried bags of good fun;
sour old clouds would yield to their sun.
They brought popcorn to pop, and sweet brown toffee,
ointments and gauze, and real canned coffee,
and wore Rover berets of bright blue.
Back at home
Jasper leaves the toilet seat up,
Holly scatters clothes unfolded.
She asks: Do you love me?
Jasper would sing and Holly told jokes;
they had one story they always told folks:
“There’s no terror, no chills, nothing to fear
as at sunset we coast in our slowest gear
past a Tripod that leans, just a dark shell
with its Martian long gone,
gone down to hell.”
Sean Crawford
April
Calgary
2019
Shadenfreud Sidebar:
I for one, shudder at all those oodles of pythons, with no natural enemies, in the Florida everglades. Not funny. Our NATO allies have a word, shadenfreud, meaning to laugh or take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. High above NATO and planet earth, I wonder if Aliens from space would feel shadenfeud at how pathetic humans, generation after generation, keep failing to learn the lessons of a) don’t do war, and b) don’t bring in invasive species.
National Geographic magazine, for April, has a special edition on Cities. One of the cover titles is Rats—they’ll always be with us. As you know, rats came over here from Europe. The practise of putting a cone over the hawser so the rats don’t crawl to shore was not observed by our pathetic ancestors. That’s not funny to me, still no shadenfreud.
“Cough.” If I was to have shadenfrued, which I don’t—who, me?—then I would tell you that my city, and the cities north of me, and to the south, are totally rat-free. Hope you’re not too jealous, but I live in the largest rat-free land mass in the free world! Ha-ha. How? Well, here on the flat prairie, (Joke) you can see the rats coming. You then call in the Rat Patrol—yes, that’s their actual name; yes, they’re taxpayer funded; yes, I say thank God for government—whenever you have any sightings at the border. We still need to build our farm grain silos out of corrugated steel or cement, but we don’t have nearly the loss to our gross domestic product (GDP) that we would have if we allowed rats into the fields.
Did I say the plains are flat? Joke: How flat are they? You can watch your dog run away from home for two days.
Update: Someone at BBC reads my blog. Here's (link) a story on "rat free cities."
Update: Someone at BBC reads my blog. Here's (link) a story on "rat free cities."
Footnotes:
~Folks have put up Youtubes with with a side-by-side comparison of the two Airplane movies: one serious, one comic. Here’s a link to a shorter Youtube.
~If I preface a line intended to make you smile with “joke,” then it’s because the humour gear is not one’s default, I want to give you a micro second to gear up. That’s “up” not down, as the synonym for laughter, levity, comes from the same Greek base as levitation, as in lightness. The opposite is “grave” as in gravity, and the grave face of Lincoln, who dripped melancholy as he walked—no wonder he needed his famous Lincoln humour.
~In one of the Austen Powers comedy spy movies, the scene where the evil genius bounces a harmless beach ball off his son’s head and says, “Are you gonna cry now, are you gonna cry?” was a satire of a scene in the Santini movie, where the father kept bouncing a hard basketball off his son’s head. So I guess The Great Santini movie did well at the box office, back in the day, if folks still remember. (Critic Roger Ebert gave it 4/5 stars)
~Conroy’s final book about his dad was The Death of Santini: The story of a father and his son. The quote in italics above is on page 155. The book included revelations that struck me like a blow, but that would be best told in another essay.
~In a family like mine it is normal to “kinda, sorta know” that things are wrong, while also failing to grasp the impossible truth—God gives us “denial” (mental defence) for a reason. Even our greater society, with generations of folk sayings, proverbs and folk tales for coping, dares not be too “clued in.” Hence even at my age, I must confess, I am still learning about things.
~As Tiny Tim says, “God bless us, everyone.”
~Update: Today I found this on the Free Fall blog
In Summer
I never thought you’d leave in summer.
The hardest part of school was over, I’d marked my last exam, graded my last essay, and at last I could relax with you. Weren’t we going to go to the lake? I wanted to see you laughing on a boat. Lord knows I haven’t laughed all semester, nor you, nor have I tried to make you laugh.
And that’s it, I guess. I stopped trying, and we stopped relating to each other in any sort of a rhythm. I did my teacher thing, with teacher facts, just as I would write on a dusty chalkboard, but there’s no rhythm there.
Sean Crawford, June 5, 2015
Posts
