I never got out of the car.
This was surprising because I’m not one to shy away from committing to a joke, no matter how lame it might be. But it was cold and rainy and I have heated seats.
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My premise was bad, yes. But something much worse was happening inside of me. I had decided that with all that was going on in the world, nothing felt funny at the moment.
This is a problem when your job in the journalism world is to make dessert, and when my editor reached out to ask if I still worked here, I told her the best I could come up with was a story about just that — how nothing felt funny anymore.
And that’s exactly where I thought this was going. I worked on it and worked on it — my paean to the death of my sense of humor — but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t make the piece work. Which just led to more stress and dodging of editors.
Then something wonderful happened. A friend texted me an article about how the guy who stormed the Capitol dressed in a fur hat with horns sticking out the sides was refusing to eat in jail because the food wasn’t organic.
Just like that, I remembered how to laugh. Even better, it reminded me of why we laugh.
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“A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason,” the humorist Dave Barry once said. “Laugher is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”
I am not short on anxiety at the moment. We’re pretty full up over here. But the more I tried to stick to my premise that nothing was funny at the moment, the harder it became to defend.
Humor is how we confront absurdity, and laughter is the signal that we’ve opened a valve in the head to release the tension we feel from the ridiculousness of the world around us.
And we are not short on absurdity at the moment. We’re pretty full up over here.
The President of the United States is being advised on martial law by a guy who shills pillows on infomercials.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner won’t let Secret Service use one of their six bathrooms.
We have two political parties at war, each accusing the other of trying to steal an election while actively trying to steal the election themselves.
We have members of Congress who believe that a secret cabal of Satanist cannibal pedophiles are controlling the government.
The people who stormed the Capitol to overthrow the government recorded all of it and posted it online. They say they’re pro-law enforcement, so I guess they wanted to make it easy to find and prosecute them?
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I was recently informed by the Internet that I have maskne, which is what the kids are calling acne caused by wearing a mask. I have gray hair.
I could go on and on, but you get the point. You’re here. You know.
This is a nervous week in America. There’s much that can go wrong. I hope it doesn’t. But if it does, I can always go back to the beach and dig that hole. It won’t make our problems go away, but at least it will allow me to hide from my editors.
Plus I hear that salt water is good for maskne.
Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @billy_baker.
The Link LonkJanuary 19, 2021 at 10:23PM
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I tried convincing myself nothing’s funny right now — I failed - The Boston Globe
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Funny
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