After another week away from this series (honestly, I forgot I was doing this “How I Became Me” series last week after working a 1-9pm shift and, as I often do, whipping off a zero-effort post to keep my daily post streak alive instead of doing something a bit more in-depth and time-consuming.)
Anyhow, we’ve covered all manner of things that have had a strong influence on who I am in the past few entries (parents, friends, books, travel, sociability) so let’s add another pick that’s a bit off-the-board of what you might expect on a list like this – comedy.
I’ve always enjoyed things that make me laugh from reading MAD magazine as a kid to watching Saturday Night Live religiously as a teenager (the rule of SNL is your favourite era is the one you were a teenager in) to David Letterman as well as any popular 1980s stand-up comic from Eddie Murphy to Robin Williams to Dennis Leary on through discovering comics that maybe didn’t have as much commercial success but were even more influential – George Carlin is probably my favourite of all-time (so much so that when my parents took me to Vegas for my 21st birthday, I asked to go see him and beyond how funny he was, it’s also hilarious to think back on how awkward it was to sit at a two-drink minimum table in Vegas with my parents and my younger sister while a comedian the rest of the family barely knew did his “101 Names for Dicks” routine!).
Part of the reason I think I enjoy comedy so much is that’s because comedy is comprised of things that also make you think – fun word play, clever puns, twist endings. (Really, at its essence, all comedy is a setup followed by an unexpected twist.)
I’ve learned so much from being a fan of comedy – about language and how to communicate ideas, about politics and pop culture, about sex and relationships, about religion and atheism, about human foibles and frailties, about hypocrisy and how ridiculous so much of how we live and the world we live in truly is, about the nature of offense and the importance of identifying current issues, addressing taboos and pushing society forward – whether that’s Lenny Bruce or Hannah Gadsby.
Honestly, when I think about it, comedy might not be the biggest influence in my life but it might be the single most underrated influence on my worldview.
I regularly think of the famous George Carlin quote – “Inside every cynical person, there’s a disappointed idealist”. I don’t consider myself cynical per se but I do think there’s much in our world that leaves one disappointed when it’s clear how easily things could be much better – if we treated others better, if we had a more equal society, if we recognized our communal problems and addressed them. Who else but a comedian can do such a good job of summing up universal truths so compactly yet so eloquently? Maybe a songwriter? Some authors? Beyond that? Not many.
Anyhow, I’ll leave you with another of my favourites which happens to be the first comedy cassette I ever owned, a classic that came out when I was thirteen years old. Crazy to think that was 30+ years ago and Robin Williams was only 35 years old. Also heartbreaking to listen to the final five minutes where he does a bit about his three-year old son knowing that Williams would end up taking his own life eventually.
Er, that’s not a very funny note to end on but maybe that sort of makes my point about why I’ve always found comedy so powerful. At its worst, even the most amateur open-mic comic will give you a laugh (though maybe not for the reason they intend.) But at its best, it will not only make you laugh but make you think, make you feel, maybe even make you cry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mkF5gQdV0I
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