Laughing again

The Onion returns to publication with a little satire, a little pathos, a slight sock to the stomach and a hearty tickling of the ribs.

This week, I have been moved most often not by the pundits or the preachers, but by the clowns. Jon Stewart's remarks at the top of the September 20 edition of The Daily Show brought tears to my eyes. The Onion did it again, however improbably, with "American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie":

When the president finally appeared on TV, it was George W. Bush addressing the nation, not Bill Pullman or Harrison Ford. At the conclusion of his address, Bush did not grab a leggy blonde reporter out of the crowd and kiss her. When Americans finally staggered into the streets, desperate to talk to anyone to try to make sense of what they had just seen, there were no Attack On America collector cups waiting for them at Taco Bell. The dead and injured did not, like Jon Voight, stand up in their wheelchairs as the music swelled. And Ben Affleck was nowhere to be seen.

In my repertoire, there are two possible responses to tragedy: to scream and weep or to laugh and try to move the world just a little. The editors of the Penguin Book of Australian Jokes put it this way:

Laughter is the other way of reacting to the raw deal of our brief existance. Whilst closely related to screaming, it is less shrill and more congenial. And it seems to produce in humans some as-yet undiscovered enzyme that dulls pain and gives a feeling of pleasurable acquiscence. Scientists studying tears of sorrow have recently detected a chemical that cannot be found in tears of joy — it seems that simply by weeping we produce infitesimal amounts of an internal narcotic that hits receptors in the brain and, in turn, dulls our pain.

To laugh in the face of death, destruction and unimaginable pain is not to ignore its stinging blow. Laughter alone permits us to neither forgive nor forget. By itself, laughter cannot heal us, emotionally or physically, and it cannot bring back our innocents or our innocence.

But laughter can push the pain away, just for moment or two, and give us the precious opportunity to focus our thoughts, to clarify our feelings, to steel our resolve and to go forward with purpose and without caprice. Laughter can and must be essential to grieving, because it is the gentle, avuncular relation running interference between Father Time and Mother Courage.

Uncle Laughter keeps his pockets filled with hard candies, to help us better face the bitterness ahead.

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