This I Believe: I
believe in laughter. I laugh at
everything. When I was in college I took
a course called Tragedy and Comedy
that absolutely changed my life. The
course consisted of reading plays by the Greeks, a few medieval plays, and
several works of Shakespeare. Reading
through these works we constantly asked: Is life ultimately comic or tragic? In Aristophanes’ The Frogs, a group of women worshiping Bacchus get radically
drunk, one mistakes her son for a lion, cuts off his head, parades it around
town on a pike, and slowly sobers up until she realizes what she has done. To me, this was hilarious. My classmates, and professor, were horrified. I’ll never forget Dr. Roper looking at me,
shaking his head, and saying, “Charles, you think everything is a comedy.” I just smiled and nodded.
But why? I think the
great comedienne Joan Rivers put it best.
After making a Helen Keller joke in Wisconsin a man in the audience told
her that the joke wasn’t funny because he had a deaf son. After a few expletives, Ms. Rivers shouted at
the man, “Don’t you know what comedy is?
Comedy is to make everybody laugh and deal with things.” She gave the further example of the tragedy
on September the 11th: “If we
didn’t laugh, where the hell would we all be?”
Life is hard. Life is
very hard. There are deaths and diseases
and injustices and failures and a whole litany of terrible things. So why even bother going on? Quite simply, I believe we go on because life
is ultimately a comedy. We get through
by laughing. That doesn’t mean tears don’t
have their place. Everyone knows that
the best comedies also make you cry. I
offer up two examples of my favorite plays.
First of all, Shakespeare’s Much
Ado About Nothing. Claudio falsely
accuses Hero of cheating on him, and she weeps bitterly. The injustice and unfeeling nature of the
scene always brings a tear to my eye.
How often have I been hurt by someone I love? I know I have opened up my soul to people
only to have them take advantage and rip me up.
Another example: Robert Harling’s
Steel Magnolias. In the film version Sally Field has a
breakdown in the cemetery after the death of her adult diabetic daughter who
has just given birth. I have never
watched that without crying. Yet in both
these examples, I am laughing hysterically within minutes.
Does this mean that we just brush off life’s tragedies by
laughing it off? Certainly not. The Neo-Classical rules of Drama state that
if a play has a happy ending, then it’s a comedy. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. My Christian faith tells me that
there is a happy ending awaiting. Hero
and Claudio will get married. M’Lynn and
Shelby will be reunited in heaven. It’s
a simple theology, but it gets me through life’s rough spots. I believe that in Jesus all will be restored,
all wounds will heal, and I will laugh boisterously with the saints.
You can see the Joan Rivers video here. Fair warning: it contains some rather vulgar language.
