Quality Laughter,

 

If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. Therefore, if you are going to laugh, you might as well laugh about yourself, because, let’s face it, your usual laughing about others is phony laughter. The problem is, you already laugh so very little, that you can’t stand any criticism of your miserly so-called laughter. Just the small quantity alone tells you, there is something wrong, qualitatively. In genuine or quality laughter – which, of course, is laughing about yourself – you would laugh much more than you currently do.    

 

Since you have settled for fake laughter, you get so little of it, that you never even get a chance, to understand, why you actually laugh so little? The reason is you don’t know how to have fun. Also, you don’t know how to relax, how to be at peace with yourself or how to live a meaningful life. That is why, besides comedians, you have all these other people – politicians, priests, gurus, psychologists, journalists, actors, writers – who, presumably, give you a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to have fun – or meaning, safety, hope, understanding, entertainment –  but, this is all the fun – acceptance, togetherness, insight or consciousness – that you’ll ever get. You have bought into an idea, a promise of good things that are going to happen, but that future never comes. You only receive miniscule teasers.  

 

When it comes to your own happiness, you are such a miser, such a minimalist. You do what it takes to survive, but for what? To experience endless misery and conflict, to feel only very rarely free and easy? Besides, your life is not what you say it is and you always pretend to be happy, while, in fact, you are not. And this is another aspect about your concept of laughter: your laughter about others is based on the false assumption, that, whenever everyone laughs, you’re having fun. This is such absolute nonsense.  

 

We may all, at times, be part of this or that kind of hype, but, one moment, we are, supposedly, having fun, but next, we are willing to march in a group of Nazi’s. Yes, laughing about others is inextricably connected to the group-behavior, which is antithetical to our individual freedom. Indeed, your usual way of laughing, is not only superficial, but you are crying yourself all the way to the bank, as you’re unfazed by the fact that you laugh at the expense of others. Yes, that’s exactly what you do. To put it bluntly, you are psychologically laughing yourself to death.    

 

Just as only a little bit of poison is needed to kill someone, only a little bit of so-called humor is sufficient to turn people into zombies.  You’re laughing because everyone else laughs and you don’t want to make it seem, as if you don’t have any sense of humor and refused to drink the cool aid. Laughter is a real clusterfuck, once you start to unpack it. You’ve got everything upside down, that is yet another reason why you laugh so very seldom or – not uncommon – not at all.

 

You can only laugh as long as you still have some sense or memory of what is normal, but when everything is fucked up and abnormal, there’s nothing to laugh about anymore. Since everything is completely out of whack these days, the only way to restore our ability to laugh, is to bring back a sense of regularity, order and normalcy. While everyone was having so much fun, while demonstratively laughing so hysterically about all the crazy stuff, that has been spouted by these outrageous stand-up comedians, we’ve totally lost track of reality.

 

With regard to humor, supposedly, we never can get weird, awkward, disgusting, twisted enough, but what happened is, we have started to laugh even less than any other people who have lived before. The good old times seem to have been gone for good and, apparently, all that is left, is to give in to the overwhelming  humor, in which any attempt at understanding is doomed. We’re gas-lighted into the belief, that the punch-line doesn’t matter anymore and, presumably, we should all be very happy that we are being told what we wanted to hear.

 

Only if we go back again, to laughing about ourselves, by owning up to our own failures, to our own stupidities, will we be able to laugh with others – instead of about them – who are just as foolish, stubborn, fallible and as easily confused or upset as we. Laughing together with others about ourselves makes us human but laughing about others – in spite of what was said to justify it – has made us inhuman, insensitive and psychologically dumb, numb, deaf and deranged.