Gratitude essay: Comedy

“I’m bringing a caterpillar under the umbrella.”

“Nope.”

“Seriously?”

“Here, I’ll give you a hint: I’m bringing under the umbrella, ummmmmmmm….”

“That’s not a hint! You’re just saying ‘um’!”

It’s easy for me to hold onto frames. Having a mental rubric, being able to place what’s in front of me within a setting I understand, reads as safety to me. If I don’t understand the order of what’s going on, I either jump in to reorganize it, or I race to try and unlock the secret, find that logical set of precepts I’m not yet perceiving.

That desire to know the secret is often what prevents me from seeing what’s actually going on. I remember my intense frustration in high school, playing the “Umbrella” game during a free period with friends, seeing them “get” the puzzle one by one, until it was only me who was stubbornly trying to haul a bunch of stuff under the umbrella I couldn’t bring, because I still failed to see the game’s basic governing rule. I tried out one potential pattern after another, but pride in my rational thinking blocked me from dropping the frameworks I came in with and listening to the game as it was actually played.

Comedy, I think, works like that at its roots. You don’t “get” the punchline by solving it like a math equation; you “get” it by dropping out of the chase for meaning entirely. That’s what a good joke does - it pushes you out of your pre-selected framework by force, sending you through a trick door into a space where you’re able to see the whole scene in a new light. Suddenly you’re viewing it from up above, or down below, rather than having to pick left or right.

In the classic vaudeville bit, someone wants to know who the first baseman for the St. Louis team is. The answer is, of course, Who - “that’s the man’s name!” It doesn’t sound like much of a joke, but watch Abbot and Costello do it, and you can see something profound at work. In their total commitment to the bit, we’re able to see both sides of the conversation at once - Costello’s increasing fury at receiving no apparent answers to his questions, and Abbot’s unwavering commitment to giving him the exact right answer to every question. With this dual vision, we are taken beyond the paradigm of logical framework (who’s right and who’s wrong?) and are placed in a realm of pure delight.

And it is this realm from which all good things flow, not just comedic things, but all of life. Hua Tou is a form of Buddhist meditation where you repeat a given phrase without ceasing. These phrases sound a lot like jokes without punchlines; in fact, they sound like extra dialogue from the "Who's On First" bit: "What is it?" "Who is repeating the Buddha's name?" "Who is dragging this corpse around?" The purpose in repeating a chosen phrase is not to deduce by logic an answer to the question, but to penetrate beyond the question-and-answer pattern entirely, entering into what is called the "Great Doubt". In this state, you slip out of the assurance you once had of any order in life, calling into doubt every framework you've ever held. Only by entering into the darkness of this doubt can all "entangling interpretations...be put to rest" and true wisdom be found, as 17th-century monk Boshan puts it.* Or, as Costello puts it in the depths of his own doubt: "Because. Why? I don't know. He's on third, and I don't care!"

The interpretations we pick up in life help us in one situation, then entangle us in the next. What we always forget we want is that place beyond good and bad, beyond question and response; we want to slip into pure Who? into absolute I Don't Care!. Life, up to that point, is an exhausting chase towards an unfunny punchline; past that point, the chase circles around us, and we look on in contentment, not wanting to spoil the punchline too soon for others. We seek for this turning point, desperately straining our eyes, ears, and brain, expecting the answer to enter through them; meanwhile, it enters in through the back door, and stands waiting patiently for us to blink, to waver into doubt, so that it can embrace us in its full comedic force, in a humor beyond laughter.

*translated by Jeff Shore.