If You Don’t Laugh You’ll Cry

On the first day of the new year I read this depressing piece about Gandhi, and this long fascinating one about how archeologists and anthropologists are making sense of what happened when Columbus first came to the Americas. That and a lot of tweets about Louis CK and Donald Trump convinced me that of course, as a human project, we can’t help but succeed—that’s just a little joke. The only way to cheer myself, besides the bouillabaisse, which I recommend as a warm comforting dish on a blisteringly cold day, was some Terry Pratchett and a desultory helpless chuckle about history and life.

I probably say this every year, but 2019 should be the year of laughing—at the self, mostly, and then, with some measures of kindness, at other people. It is too tragically easy to be very serious about who I am and what important things I must be doing and thinking. And then to go online and read about what other people think they are doing and the Very Important Thoughts and Feelings they are having. To, then, see that They are Wrong. To take a thread of offense and bind it tight to all the other threads I am holding in my sweaty, disconsolate fist. And then to go on through the day morally outraged about the failings of people I will never meet.

This is obvious and we all know it. But how can I trick myself out of it? Without total humiliation—because humiliation isn’t really that funny, except when it happens to my enemies of course, those twitter profiles I mount up in a heap of rage. I am not alone. Humiliation is the common cup that makes us all feel better—not our own but other people’s. The only way out is to laugh at the self, but that’s so hard, sometimes even impossible.

An Anglican archbishop did up five helps for the new year a long long time ago (I found them on twitter, don’t worry, I’m not reading important books or anything),

1. Thank God. Often and always.
2. Take care about confession of your sins.
3. Be ready to accept humiliations.
4. Do not worry about status.
5. Use your sense of humour.

And who am I to quibble, because maybe they worked back then, in the last century, but what about today? What if you have no sense of humor? Or what if it’s so rusty you don’t even know what to do with it? And what if you can’t help but worry about your status? And what if you run away from the first whiff of humiliation even when you know you shouldn’t? And what if you can’t see the sins you should be confessing? Everyone else can see them, of course, but you can’t because you’re so busy and tired and anxious.

In other words, nothing about modern life tempts any single person to the humility of laughter. It’s too hard, for one, and too subversive, for another, and our corporate anxiety over the future is too big and too great.

The future, and the present, are scary. They aren’t funny. Nobody wants to laugh. But if you don’t laugh, you probably can’t confess your sins, and you certainly can’t be grateful, because those two actions take unclenching your tight fist and letting go of some essential part of who you think you are. I mean me—who I am. And if you are wallowing in moral superiority with a clenched fist of righteousness, you’re not going to be part of the solution, you’re already part of the problem. I mean me—sorry, not you, of course.

Christians have a helpful way out. It is the trick that makes all these useful laws—because that’s what the being grateful, and confessing one’s sins, and being humble are—even possible. It is to stand wherever you are, although I am sitting slumped over in a chair, practically comatose with food, and count up actual ways that other people are more important, or, to use the words of the Bible, more significant than I myself am. I can start with Jesus to make it easier, and move on from there to people who are clearly good and more intelligent, and then to people who are at my same level, and then on down to people who I might readily despise, either for their wrong opinions or for their failing abilities. I might even make lists, if I need to. All those people are more important than me.

To even whisper it, stings. But looking at the cold hard evidence—the reality that other people matter and are significant just for being alive, not because of anything they do or say—is also the key to laughter. Because I myself am absurd, and so is everybody else. So it’s fine. I should go ahead and laugh. And laughter pushes away anger. Which is good, because anger is not a good path to love.

And, as we all know, the things we need most in 2019 are peace, which we can obviously have just by trying really hard, and love, which is also very easy. Love love love. And peace. I guess I’ll go eat another mound of chocolate. Remember, if you don’t laugh, you’ll probably cry. Happy New Year.