He isn’t the funniest late night comedian. But he is, in my opinion, one of the top three. I rarely watch him anywhere but on YouTube, well after the fact. But his monologue about the birth of his son had me riveted. Is it possible to dry yourself out completely and turn yourself to powder just by crying? That’s what it felt like.
If you haven’t already seen it, you should. But having a heart means you will need something to mop up the tears. The people whose job it is to make you laugh sometimes make a more important point by making you cry. True, I may be more affected by his story about spending time in an ER in agony over what happens next to your child because I have been there with my own children. I have lived it. And the story he tells brings it all back like the storm has started raining sledge hammers instead of rain. But anyone with at least a little bit of empathy will get the point he is trying to make.
Humor is like that. It makes you laugh to soften the pain. But it also makes you cry because that is how it changes you for the better.
In Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I find a lot of things to laugh it. The schemes of the King and Duke are ridiculous and they get what’s coming to them by the end. Yet, I cried at the part where Huck finds the dead body of his young friend Buck Grangerford shot to death in the creek by the feuding Shepherdsons. It was a totally brutal and senseless death. And we learn more about the hypocrisy of slavery and its injustice and cruelty by the sadder, more painful things that happen to Jim along the journey. Humor is meant to be weapon against the things that harm us. And sometimes the people who harm us.
It is relatively easy to laugh at the mutant racist orangutan we accidentally elected to lead us. But the laughing part is not the part we need right now.
The damage he is doing may be permanent and irreparable. He is trying to profit off of health care reform and destroying it in ways that may kill many of us. He may have already done permanent harm to the environment by removing regulations with executive orders. There is reason not only to be moved to tears, but to be horrified to the point that we need to take immediate action.
Jimmy Kimmel has been through a hard thing and deserves our empathy. But even more that that, if you heard the appeal at the end of his monologue, the tears he made us cry are reason to take action, and thank him for his courage in using his tragic moment to lead the way.
May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose!
I was planning to write a piece about insult humor for a while, and then Don Rickles had to up and die… that danged old hockey puck!’
So the master of insults is gone, and it will be even harder to explain why calling someone a proud and prissy poo-poo head is not a bad thing to do. Because, really… strong language is not really strength and it takes intelligence to be a mean little picky-wit. (No pun intended… because no pun was used, Duh! How slow are you compared to molasses around Christmas time?)
You may have heard me say that I don’t like hurtful humor. I don’t believe bad words are required to make something funny. I don’t think humor should be weaponized. Jokes that make you die laughing are too much like murder, and people who have no sense of humor can’t be hurt by them anyway.
It is true that some people can’t be touched with insult humor. Republicans and conservatives generally never get the joke. Unfortunately for them you have to be at least a little bit smart to even know when you are being made fun of.
I have heard that Kim Jong Un and President Orangutan in a Bad Wig recently attempted to assassinate each other. Trump had a specially trained batch of a dozen Easter chicks sent to Kim Jong Un. They were trained as mini-ninja assassins specializing in the death-peck attack. Kim had a dozen plump Korean beauties dressed up in bikinis and poisoned lipstick sent to Trump with orders to make him fall in love. Shortly thereafter Kim sent a thank you note to Trump for the delicious chickens. He had kept one as a pet and you can still see it sitting on top of his head if you look carefully enough. (It hasn’t killed him because it mistaked his head for an egg, adopted it, and is trying desperately to hatch it.) Trump, in turn, re-gifted the bikini babes to Mike Pence, and it is likely they will die of cold and exposure while waiting in his outer office.
Stupid people are immune to insults, karma, and consequences.
So you don’t insult people as a form of humor to hurt anyone physically… or even psychologically. You only do it metaphorically to pay them the compliment of thinking them worthy enough to bestow the gems of your wit upon.
And if you believe any of that bull-puckie, I may know of a Bridge in Brooklyn I’d be willing to part with cheaply.
So, there you have it. Cheap laughs at the expense of doody-heads. And calling into question the self-importance and the ridiculous-but-strongly-held political beliefs of others… especially the dumb ones can be a public service… of sorts.
Leave a comment
Filed under artists I admire, comedians, commentary, humor, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Don Rickles, humor, insult humor