01.25.09
Around the Next Bend
While watching Planet of the Apes marathon today, I thought of something for today’s Comedy Around the World. The humans were climbing over the rocks and into crevices, trying to hide from the gorillas. The humans kept running away, and eventually found a surprise: They had stumbled onto (or into) Queensboro Plaza subway station, thousands of years into the future.
That scene reminded me (partly) of a trip to Eilat in Israel. A twist of fate caused me to become a chaperon to a high school field trip to that mountainous region. We spent all day climbing through, around, onto, and off of high rock formations. Like those other humans, we also didn’t know what was around the next bend. We just trusted our leader, trusted the people who went before us, and trusted ourselves to place our foot securely on whatever rock we needed.
Comedy is a lot like that. It is a tradition whose leaders blazed a trail. Whether it was breaking the rules of conformity like Andy Kaufman did, or bending the laws of vocabulary like George Carlin did. Maybe your comedy leaders were like mine. They were women who made being funny a women’s job, too: Carol Burnett, Goldie Hawn, Lucille Ball, and Mae West (yes I know, that’s old school).
And just as we trust their track record, we trust the current comics who are not only performers, but commentators on our life-and-times. They are the sounding board for dissent, for creative thought, and for unpopular (but clever) opinions. We can learn from them–we can learn to listen to our own voice, too.
Finally, once we know our own story, our truth, we can create our own brand of humor from that. It’s a story we believe in. It’s a story that may be painful, but we can cull humor from it. And that will always be funny, no matter how fast the gorillas are running.
