It’s Not Funny

I was about to start blogging yesterday when I realized that I had to rush the Baby Kitty off to be made into the kind of cat that doesn’t think about other cats “in that way” if you know what I mean. We really had to give him a name before this critical moment so we decided on Peter—Peter Sancho Panza Whimsey. The vet wrote down Peter the Cat, which is good, because we know a lovely baby named Peter, and didn’t want anyone, especially not the vet, to become confused. So now there is Peter the Cat and Peter the Baby and hopefully, everyone will be happy all the time.

The rest of the animals received Peter the Cat back with great curiosity and interest, so that was nice, but the whole business about not allowing him to “run and jump” for any amount of hours turned out not to be a thing. When we finally opened the carrier he shot out of it and leaped on everything he possibly could. Oh well.

Anyway, someone sent me this depressing thing a few days ago:

Goober the Clown
(who had an abortion when she was 23) pic.twitter.com/1rFv6UrPGu

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) November 7, 2021

If you don’t want to watch it, essentially, SNL took the brave step of having a woman dressed as a clown being interviewed by a clean-cut young man dressed in a suit on the Weekend Update portion of the show. He begins the segment by reporting on the Texas Law forbidding abortion after the detection of a heartbeat, and then says, “Here to cheer us up is Goober the Clown who had an abortion when she was 23.” She rolls out on one of those rolly chairs to tepid applause. “It’s a rough subject,” she says, “so we’re gonna do fun clown stuff to make it more palatable.” She squirts water in the eye of the interviewer and tries to squeak a horn that doesn’t work, narrating her lived experience as one does and making light of the whole thing as best she can.

Except that it’s not funny. Nothing is funny. This is the very death of humor, as far as I can tell. Which is fitting and right. The problem is that for humor to work, a person has to have enough critical distance from the thing to be able to find a nugget of truth and use that to overturn the expectations of those for whom the joke is told. The person making the joke has to be willing to appear ridiculous—not by dressing up as a clown to show off the idiocy of one’s ideological opponent, but to be willing to stand back from oneself enough to laugh. Laughing requires humility, and humility requires the truth, and the truth is the kind of thing a person is liable to break her teeth on.

How did we get here? Why can’t we have funny things? Because it is immoral, in this new age, to be wrong, to be found to be foolish. Putting on a clown suit and angrily parading through the various reasons why abortion is good because it has been accepted for nearly 70 years, and because so many people have it is one way among many to illustrate the badness of one’s enemies while illustrating for the wide world one’s own true victimized goodness. That’s the way it works. It’s not funny because being funny is not the point, even on a program that was originally invented to tell lots of jokes, even about difficult subjects.

Personally, I don’t think the question of abortion should be made light of. I agree with Goober the Clown in this. Crying is better than laughing. There is no reason whatsoever to joke over a person finding herself in a clinic, reading the stories of other women like her, who felt so desperate that they were willing to end another person’s life. That is not funny. Nor is the statistic that one in three women have apparently made this choice, and yet, don’t go out and tell anyone. For, says, Goober the Clown, wrapping up the interview: “Wow, we kept this secret for so long in spite of being so grateful and happy.” The audience claps dutifully and so the long joyless and bitter internet day wears on.