I was definitely looking for laughs. Watching John Stewart of The Daily Show refrain from a near-complete emotional breakdown actually made me feel, for the first time since all this madness began, very sad and mournful. The moment that the clowns begin to cry in plain view is a terrible moment to behold. It means that there is real sorrow sweeping throughout the land. Normally, the clowns and the jesters (the ones who snicker and ridicule everything because they must) cry in private, their demons and tortured natures hidden from the public.
My friend and co-worker Hoss asked me to go with him to a comedy club.
"This is the first event they've put on since the attacks," Hoss said, standing in the doorway of my office. "They didn't want to do it, but no one wants to stop either. It's their jobs, you know? That's how they made their livings... Anyway, my boy Georgie is doin' a set tonight, and I don't wanna go all the way out to Santa Monica alone..."
"Yeah, I'll go," I said. This was remarkable: for the last two years Hoss has been trying to get me to go with him to one of his friend's comedy spots. I've always resisted, not because of Hoss or anything like that. Hoss is a cool character, and we've hung out on many other occasions. But I could never get it up to see any stand-up, because it was always hit-or-miss. Too many unfunny comics and not enough genuine talent, that's how I felt.
But now I was curious: How does laughter hold up in the face of unrepentant horror?
After work, I went home and changed clothes. The phone rang-- it was Wyatt, Sharky's younger brother. He wanted to know what was going on for the evening; I told him to come along with us. We met Hoss over at his place, smoked some buddha, and then drove out to Santa Monica.
The club was actually a bar and grill; the promoters moved the comedy venue from location to location, and this was the Wednesday night spot. Comics milled about, talking to friends and regular attendees. We met with Georgie, who'd lost at least fifty pounds since I'd last seen him. Hoss had brought Georgie to my apartment for bong rips. He was very funny. His act consisted of his pissed-off ruminations about life. Georgie is one of those guys who are funny when they are seriously upset. He was appreciative of our support, shaking all of our hands and thanking us for coming out, quite a contrast to his stage persona.
We got ourselves a table and, in a stoned mix-up, asked the waiter for menus as opposed to just ordering drinks. None of us had any money beyond the two-drink minimum, and none of us were particularly hungry... at least not yet. Still, we sat there and opened the menus and our eyes bulged out of their sockets as we read the prices.
The waiter, snide in his observation and sizing-up of us, snatched the menus back and took our drink orders. I was drinking seven-and-seven, Hoss had a Long Island, and Wyatt settled for a Diet Coke, being that he was the DD.
"That waiter's a dick," Hoss said, shaking his head.
"Well, he knew we weren't going to eat. But you're right, he didn't have to be snippy about it... Oh well, I'm sure that's not the last nugget of rudeness we'll be seeing in the days to come..."
"You think anyone's going to be funny?" Wyatt asked, in a somber tone. "I mean... I wonder if anyone's going to address it..."
"They have to, man... But maybe they'll just devote a minute to talk about it, then go into some jokes... who knows?" Hoss was just as curious as we were.
I had plenty to say about it. "George Carlin once said that anything can be funny, as long as the exaggeration is funny. Every joke has an exaggeration, and whatever that exaggeration happens to be is what makes a joke funny or not. He said you could even make rape funny, if you imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig." Hoss and Wyatt laughed.
Hoss said, "Yeah, I think I heard that CD a long time ago back at UCSB."
"I haven't heard much Carlin," Wyatt said, as our drinks came to us.
We toasted-- to what I can't remember --and drank up just as the show started. The host came out and said a few words, tossing out jokes here and there, gauging the crowd.
I whispered to Hoss, "I figure, if people came out to see comedy, they're looking for laughter. Or comfort, maybe."
Hoss said, "Georgie's the ninth comic up tonight." I wasn't sure if he'd heard what I said.
The comedians were, once again, hit-or-miss, but it was also a visible struggle for some. One woman sounded like she used to do nothing but George W. Bush jokes, because she had absolutely nothing to offer beyond mother's-point-of-view anecdotes and I'm-so-mad-I-could-scream-in-the-supermarket-style one-liners. The second female comic fared no better: joke upon joke about the guys she's dated. The third female comic, and the fourth for that matter, were hysterical by comparison. Their jokes were intelligent and caustic, and revealed a vulnerability when they had to reference the attacks somehow.
The rest of the comics were male, and even though it sounds sexist I have to say that the comics got better as the night went on. Two or three of them had done the Leno show or the Letterman show, and one even had a Comedy Central stand-up special out recently. They all mentioned the attacks either before or after their sets. One comic hit a nerve with me when he wondered aloud whether men were now going to use the old End Of The World line on women they wanted to sleep with. I had wondered the same thing, perhaps three or four days after the 11th, and kept it to myself because it seemed too terrible a thing to say out loud.
Georgie went up to do his thing. The crowd was happy, slightly drunk, less restless than they were at the show's start. He took the mike and gave a warning, of sorts.
"I usually get up here, and I talk a lot of shit... and I just want to say right now, for those who have never seen my act before, that this is what I do. And all this material is old to me, but to those who have never seen me perform, I apologize if anything I say offends you. This is what I do, and I never talked about politics anyway, so I didn't have to change my act at all. This is what I do.
"I also extend my condolences to anyone who has lost a friend or loved one in the bombings." He cleared his throat, and then he did his act. And it was funny, partly because I'd never seen him do it. The crowd reacted well, and responded at all the right moments. It wasn't as inflammatory as he'd made it out to be: his main topic is how much working sucks, but he never said anything overtly outrageous or untrue. I was wondering if he would make a joke about how the attacks gave everyone a day off from work, but then again it wasn't me in front of several dozen drunk people, on a stage with a microphone, taking a risk.
We left after Georgie performed, and I concluded that having a sense of humor was probably going to be the biggest avenue for those looking to cope with the loss and the hurt. The clowns could cry, and they could even cry in public now if they wanted to, but they would not be clowns if they did not feel a bloodlust for euphoria. The laughter that they wish to instill in their audiences is contagious, and is meant to spread all over and make us feel good. We cannot fault them for obeying their instincts, even if they seem to cross the line or talk tastelessly about certain subjects.
Nevertheless, it is hard, with the wound so freshly inflicted, to find anything funny about it, which goes to show how protected Americans were prior to this. Critics and scholars decried, in recent years, the jaded cynicism and nihilism that was consuming our culture. We were becoming desensitized, shallow, voyeuristic, sadistic, sycophantic, materialistic, soulless monsters through our choices of amusement and recreation. It was decadence, when you think about it, and prior to the Twin Towers going bust there was very little in the way of sacred cows. Everything under the sun was up for grabs when it came to satire and parody. Shows like South Park and The Simpsons were scathing and relentless in their skewering of any and all cultural notions.
We were thick-skinned and sometimes callous, impervious to the opinions of others. A common phrase heard all over the United States, before the World Trade Center went up in flames: "Boy, you've got too much time on your hands..." Another one: "That was way more information than I needed to know..." Nowadays, who among us can be so flippant to say or even mean such sentiments? And if there is someone who can utter those phrases with any conviction, can't we just write it off as repressed fear in the face of the morbid?
In the face... I say that a lot in reference to the attacks. And it describes how I feel very accurately. This thing is all up in our faces. There is no way around it. It must be confronted, and that unsettles many Americans because in the past there wasn't anything on this planet that an American couldn't somehow avoid confronting. There was always a safety valve or a hideaway for us when it came to the ugly reality of today's world.
As rats in the maze, we always knew where the cheese was. Now, someone or something has moved the cheese, and we don't know where to go or what to do. But for a rat like me, who wasn't too enthusiastic about having to negotiate obstacles just for a piece of cheese, I know what I have to do and where I have to go.
I have to go on, and I have to do it now.
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