Fluffy Topics, LaughFest and the Nature of Humor

First a brief message from the elephant in the room before I move on to the "fluff" going on inside my head…rather, trying to go on inside my head. Fluff is running around up there looking for room to grow and spill out onto my computer screen. But after all that’s happened since the school shootings in Parkland, Florida it’s a real struggle. The elephant will get this and the next paragraph of rage and then I shall be a good little blogger and get off the soap box. Those of us who’ve been tuned into the national debate since 14 kids and 3 teachers lost their lives to a military-style assault rifle in the hands of a troubled teen don’t need to hear any more, and those who’ve been tuned out from what’s been going on since Valentine’s Day---Well, bless your heart, but I can’t do that. 

Okay. Rant on: I’m sick of the gun toting conspiracy theorists and alt-right “news” sources---even the president's son---spreading rumors that the students from Parkland are “crisis actors” and the shooting rampage itself is a false flag, meaning a staged play so the government can come take our guns away. Sorry, if you’re paranoia enough to believe that, then maybe you shouldn’t own guns! And certainly you shouldn’t own enough of them to hold off the Drug Cartel in your backyard! And I’m sick of people mocking, criticizing and dismissing those incredible kids who got baptized-by-fire into the realm of activism. It’s despicable! That’s just two of the side-car debates going on now along with the idea the president is pushing of arming our teachers. Jeez, what could possibility go wrong with that scenario? Rant off as soon as I say that lawmakers better get their balls back from the NRA and pass some sensible and meaningful gun control laws if they want to stay in office because the Never Again Movement is going to be a force to reckon with.

Fluff. What is it? I’m glad you asked. It’s the kind of topic bloggers search for---often in vain---when trying to write something that won’t offend anyone but won’t be as boring as brushing our teeth. Oh, we may say we’re writing for ourselves and it doesn’t matter if no one reads what we write but don’t believe it for a minute. Many of us bloggers live to find like-minded cyber friends or at least cyber friends who can engage in fair and respectful disagreements. We live to compare notes on what makes us laugh and cry, feel proud or insecure---what we think about as we navigate through our world. Fluff like that keeps the personal blogs community turning. By the way, if you’re a blogger never mix up the meaning of lifestyle blogs and personal blogs. I’ve made the mistake of using the terms interchangeable and that doesn’t fly in blog indexes. A personal blog is digital storytelling based on the blog author’s daily life and experiences. And lifestyle blogs are based on a person’s interests in a particular topic like the food, fashion, downsizing or whatever-floats-your-boat.

Raise your hand if you’re still reading. Good. A few of you are still following my rambling and as a reward I’ll tell you a joke: “Why do seagulls fly over the sea? Because if they flew over a bay, they would be bagels.” Our annual Gilda’s Club LaughFest starts soon so I’m getting ready to see two weeks’ worth of local media coverage. If I was a drive-downtown-after-dark kind of person I’d check out some of the 30 events spread out over the festival featuring various genres of comedy and performers. My heartthrob, Travor Noah, would be first on my list. Maria Bamford, Bert Kreisher, “Weird All” Yankovic and others whose names I’ve never heard will also be doing stand-up acts, improv, humor workshops and family friendly comedy. Even an exhibit of humorous portraits will be in town. 

My days of going to comedy clubs dwindled out after bell-bottoms went out of fashion. (I still miss bell-bottoms!) But won’t you agree that our humor also changes as we age? When we were kids we thought knock-knock jokes were the cat’s meow. I spent my entire childhood and teen years laughing for reasons I couldn’t explain. Then came the era of long-playing comedy records and sitting around on Saturday nights listening to records like Inside Shelley Berman and The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, The Smothers Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx and George Carlin---those were some of the most popular vinyls when comedy ​33 1⁄3 rpms were the in thing. I even remember the Bill Cosby record with him joking about slipping ‘Spanish Fly’ (an aphrodisiac) into women’s drinks. I remember thinking, why is that funny? Well, who’s laughing now, Bill?

Most humor gets dated or maybe it’s just that we get jaded as we age. The world we were born into is certainly not the same one we’ll be leaving behind one day. And for that reason maybe we don’t need to fear dementia as much as we need to embrace it. That’s a joke in case you couldn’t tell. Dark humor walks a fine line between laughter and tears. ©

Books, Ball Busters and Blindness

The wind all week was roaring outside my windows like the proverbial lion is supposed to do this early in March before leaving like a lamb when April arrives. I’ve lost a dozen shingles off the roof and I’m not entirely sure how to handle that, so I’m applying the Scarlett O’Hara Rule and worrying about it another day. Winds were recorded as high as 50 miles an hour and one of my favorite restaurants lost its roof in the middle of the day with the place full of diners. I’d just been there the day before! No one was hurt but they’ll be out of business for a while. 

Thursday was a ball buster of a day. I need a new expression. I just used that one a few blog entries ago but it really does describe my long, hard day. I got up early to go to the gym, then came home for a quick shower and a can of Slimfast for lunch before going off to my book club. After book club I went to a lecture titled, “Take a Walk on the Sunny Side” which was about great books that will warm your heart and make you laugh. After the lecture I headed north a few miles, to the funeral home for my sister-in-law’s visitation. When I added the visitation to my schedule I thought about skipping the gym but I couldn't go Friday, Saturday or Sunday and I worried that if I skipped the gym so many days in a row it would be like starting all over again on Monday. I couldn’t skip book club because it would have been a pain to return the book and get the new one from the facilitator and the librarian's lecture was a RSVP, limited seating event and it wouldn’t have been fair to someone who couldn’t get in for me not to show up. I guess what I’m trying to say is I didn’t plan a ball buster day, it just happened and I couldn’t fix it.

I found out at the funeral home that my sister-in-law died from chocking on a pill. How does that happen in a nursing home where aids stand there watching you take your medications? A nurse gave her the Heimlich Maneuver but it didn't dislodge the pill and/or they gave it too late. I can make peace with anyone dying of natural causes but this news was upsetting.

If you’re not a reader you can skip this paragraph listing the books the librarian raved about at the lecture. I go to this particular event every year, not so much for the book recommendations but because the librarian is so funny and animated in telling about the books and it’s probably no coincidence that it happens to be Gilda’s LaughFest week in town. It started out as a small fund raiser for Gilda’s Club but is growing into quite popular draw. 50,000 people come to town to see both well-known and new comer comedians. Comedy is King in every venue we have for ten whole days. The books: A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, Lost and Found by Brooke Davis, Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig, A Murder of Magpies by Judith Flanders, Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper, News of the World, by Paulette Jiles, One Plus One by JoJo Moyes, My Mrs. Brown by William Norwish, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick, and Landline by Rainbow Rowell.

Our book club discussed Crashing Through by Robert Kurson. It’s a true story about Mike May, a man who was blinded at age three but who went on to set records for Paralympic downhill skiing. He worked for the CIA briefly, was an inventor and at age 43 he was given a chance at a rare stem cell transplant surgery that enabled him to see. It was fascinating how his sight came back in ways you’d never expect---they never expected. For example, he couldn’t tell faces apart---even his own two sons---no matter how often he saw them. He couldn’t tell genders of people he’d see. He had trouble understanding shadows on the ground, clouds in the sky and so many other things we take for granted. 

Mr. May worked with vision researchers to try to understand why the transplant itself was successful but his brain couldn’t make sense of what he saw. This is how their findings was explained in the book: “Children have an overabundance of available neurons for learning; those that don’t get used actually die as a baby becomes a small child. Adults, however, don’t have that kind of ready supply of neurons available for learning. To learn something as staggeringly complex as vision with all its subtleties, shadows, cues, priors, exceptions, contexts, and confusions---a person needs a massive amounts of neurons available and ready for the propose.” Mike May had used his early supply of neurons learning how to identify things using his other senses, and the researchers gave an example of how children can easily learn two languages at the same time compared to how difficult it is to learn a second language as an adult. Mike was that adult trying to learn a 'second language' so to speak. Crashing Through was an interesting book and one I wouldn’t have read without a club. ©

Gilda Radner’s Legacy of Laughter

 

I’ve been re-reading my blog posts from last year, getting them ready for Blurb to slurp them up into a hard copy book that I can put on my library shelf and I’ve come to realize that I use the word ‘damn’ entirely too often when I write. At least I did during my second year of widowhood, and probably in my first year as well, Back then, I’m guessing I even used a few more colorful swear words along with the damns. In my offline life, when I’m around “real people” I check myself from saying things that might offend others. I might accidentally slip with the D word on occasion but never the F or P word. Let’s back up here a minute: I’m not saying the people who might be reading this online aren’t real people. It’s just that readers have the option to quit reading at any point. When you sit next to someone out in public it’s harder to just walk away or to tell them that you don’t appreciate their “colorful” language. I’m not a language prude, don’t get me wrong, but on the other end of the scale I also don’t like comedians who depend on blue or crude language to get their laughs. To me, it’s like listening to a band that only plays two notes over and over again. Get a dictionary. Learn something new!

For the next ten days my city is hosting its 4^th annual Laugh-Fest, a festival of laughter that includes over 260 events spread out over 65 stages in the area, half of them free and many of them child-friendly. The whole event is billed as a “Laughter RX series, a prescription for emotional health” and the proceeds all go to the local Gilda’s Club. This year the headliners are Jay Leno, Jim Gaffigan and Lily Tomlin and in past years we’ve had Lewis Black, Betty White and Bill Cosby in town performing their acts. There are amateur stand-up comedy competitions as well as professional acts plus films, bands, open mike joke nights, storytelling and a ping pong competition with some weird twists. Even a 5K race takes place where you have to wear your underwear over top of your running suits to participate. Heck, even I got an invitation in the mail to see a standup comedian doing old people humor at a retirement village.

Gilda Radner, for anyone not old enough to remember her from Saturday Night Live, died of cancer and afterward her husband, Gene Wilder, and her cancer therapist co-founded the first Gilda’s Club in New York City, a place where cancer patients and their families can get free support. The movement to establish a Gilda’s Club to my city was started by one of the pillars of the community after her own bout with cancer and, boy, is it successful. This local club house gave birth to the very first festival of laughter in the U.S.A. and its grown every year. It’s sad that until this year I didn’t appreciate what is going on right in my own back yard. But I do now, and yesterday I read through their schedule of events looking for something free I’d like to see. I found an art exhibit at the local art institute billed as ‘humor in craft’ that I may go to if the snow ever stops messing up the roads. The whole city wants to make us laugh. Even the libraries are displaying books known for their humor.

I love the following Gilda Radner quote: “Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.”

I rarely do that but it sure is a good goal to work towards, don’t you think? In our Western culture we can get obsessive about planning the future and micro-managing our days, and we think we can know where we’ll be in life five years from now, even ten or twenty. But something comes along like cancer or the death of a spouse or a disability and we have to rearrange our thinking in a big, hard hurry. Suddenly, we start lamenting the fact that we didn’t take more time out of our hectic schedules to watch a sunset at the beach, appreciate the sounds of a summer evening, or even to play connect-a-dot with our freckles and an ink pen. 

“Taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what will happen next.” Jeez, half the time I can’t even enjoy my first cup of coffee in the morning without looking over my job list for that day. How do we get to that point where we can quit worrying about what will happen next and just live in the moment, find things to laugh about and love that are right before our eyes? We can all name times in our lives when living in the moment happens spontaneously, or when something grabs our attention and won’t let go like Gilda’s legacy of laughter is bringing to town, but is it realistic to think we can truly maintain living in the moment on a daily basis? Is it even necessary for us to so? Or is it good enough just to seek balance---the yin and yang---the calm after a storm, and laughter to balance out our tears? That darn Socratic Method I learned decades ago in college sure taught me how to ask questions, didn’t it, but it did nothing to help me learn how to sort out the conflicting answers I receive. ©

 French comedians..........