Person 1: “I say, I say, I say, what is the secret to successful comedy?”
Person 2: “I don’t know, what IS the secret to successful co-“
Person 1, interrupting Person 2: “Timing”
Comedy, as with most of life, is a subjective thing. I love the tv show ‘Lucifer’, yet some staunch Southern American Christians on my Facebook feed patently don’t and have told me so and suggest I will go to hell for even watching or talking about the show.
I don’t like ‘Fawlty Towers’ because of its violence and the cringe-worthy behaviour of Basil Fawlty. Yet others say it is one of the ‘greats’ of tv comedy.
At the strong suggestions of various friends of mine, I bought the entire series of ‘Breaking Bad’; I couldn’t get past the fifth episode of series one. To me it was laboured and boring, to those friends it was the best tv show ever. ‘Just give it one more episode’, they said. I kept giving it ‘one more episode’ and kept finding it boring and humourless.
That same ‘give it one more go’ also figured in my viewing of ‘Game of Thrones’. Watched three episodes, found nothing there I liked. At the suggestions of these same friends, I tried one more episode. Mildly interesting. Watched one more, ten one more. Hooked. Bought the whole show and binged it in a week and a half. Although, one can hardly call it a comedy (except, perhaps, the execrable final series).
Most US comedies I can easily ignore (except some US female stand-up comics, who I find exceptionally funny when they talk about their very female lives and encounters). Many of the UK comedies I still feel affinity for decades later—Harry Worth, Russ Abbott, Jasper Carrot, Fry & Laurie, Harry Enfield, The Young Ones, The Dame Edna Experience, Red Dwarf, Have I Got News For You, Yes Minister, Are You Being Served, Eddie Izzard, Qi, 8 of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Mock the Week… lots more, topped of course by the incredible Blackadder. I’m not a man who cries easily, but I certainly did at the final scene in the final episode of Blackadder.
I concur with Pagliacci that humour is a disguise worn by the depressed. But I don’t agree with that for all instances across all of one’s life.
I have suffered at the hands of Clinical Depression before US psychiatrists came up with the much hipper-sounding conditions Bipolar Disorders I and II. I have spent many hours with my heart hidden on my sleeve telling jokes to school friends and hoping that they will therefore like me.
But at the ripe age of 64, having come to realise who I am at 62 (a ‘creative’ and therefore utterly unsuited to the office life I kept failing at), and falling in love with someone new at 63, I am now very happy indeed. My psychiatrist keeps me healthy, sane, and stable courtesy of some first-rate medicines. No more depression, just the rare moments of glumness when something doesn’t go quite as I wanted it to. That mood lasts but hours compared to the decades of pain and suicidality of my life in my pre-teens to my late 50s. Sure, my creativity is stunted by the medicines, but I will take stability and no more crushing depressions or suicidality over blinding creativity anyday!
Now, when I tell a joke among friends, or share a funny meme on Facebook, I do it with a joyous heart. I take great pleasure in laughing along with my friends, both old and new, for the sheer enjoyment of it, not because of a desire to ingratiate myself with them and manipulate them to like me.
But certainly, Pagliacci was right. Mostly. Until the last two years.
A man goes to a doctor. “Doctor, I’m depressed,” the man says; life is harsh, unforgiving, cruel. The doctor lights up. The treatment, after all, is simple. “The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight,” the doctor says, “Go and see him! That should sort you out.” The man bursts into tears. “But doctor,” he says, “I am Pagliacci.”
Working out is like a drug to me.
I don’t do drugs.