Post by laughter on Jan 26, 2014 4:53:28 GMT -5
I've spoken of insanity here many times, and I've been criticized for doing so as that is also seen by some as mocking and belittling. The sense of insanity often becomes palpable, and sometimes overwhelming to the point that I cannot continue some conversations. I don't mean to say it is painful, only that it is much like you might imagine trying to speak to a person in the somnambulistic state between waking and an interesting dream.
I cannot enter that dream, and I am often unaware of the dreamscape that is playing out for them because it is not happening here at all. I might ask for information as to what that dream looks like, but I can't make it go away for them, and I cannot enter.
The entire scenario is what I can only describe as absurd, and like it or not, absurdity is the very essence of humor. Folks will be offended at the idea that their own unconsciousness is the source of my humor, but that cannot be helped, and the humor cannot be subdued any more than you could fail to laugh at a finely timed joke. Humor is not a human mistake, and laughter is not an ego response. There is a laughing Buddha deep inside each of us and it will not be subdued.
You will ask, how can God laugh at the misfortune of his children, which is, itself, cause for hilarity. If I laugh, I laugh at myself. If I mock, I mock myself. There is no other way to look at it. The essence of all jokes; the core absurdity, is that i am here and you are there, and that I can somehow bring harm to you with my words. The notion that I could belittle you is equally absurd, and quite insane. I am literally boundless and have no means of becoming any more or any less. The mocking and belittling is a dream that seems interesting for the moment for some reason.
I cannot win this 'argument', and it's not my intention to try, only to be true to myself. If it seems I am straddling contexts and not making sense, this is a truer version of where all humans stand, with one foot in the dream, and the other in eternity.
So Sue and I were on a sofa satsang last night and we randomly channel surfed to a show titled “Outrageous 911”. The situations depicted ran a gamut from the cute kid who called the cops on his dad on Christmas Eve for having busted one of his toys to a poignant call from an older woman who couldn’t open the two bottles of beer she’d bought to help her get to sleep.
All of them were of course absurd, but it was interesting to notice how the humor manifested in different sorts of shades, and how there can be a mix of emotions that ride along with it. A segment on a jack-ass guy who jumped onto the back of a truck at a stop light to impress his buddies got pretty funny once he made the emergency call from his cell when the truck hit the highway. But I found the two years of probation that a single woman got for calling 911 to get the name of the cute cop who her neighbors had called to her house to get her to turn down her music to be an excessive bummer.
The purest pleasure-laugh for me was from the story of a woman in a minvan with her two kids at a Burger King drive-thru who called the cops ‘cause they either couldn’t or wouldn’t get her order right. The show plays the actual tape of the 911 calls and dramatized the events in video, and the distraught look on the face of the actress set to the call dialog of “they’ve given me the wrong order four times! is it too much to ask to get a western barbecue burger made the right way??”. When the operator told her “no, we’re not going to come out there to enforce how to make a hamburger” the poor distraught woman exclaimed “you’re supposed to protect me!”.
… there’s actually a whole youtube channel devoted to the phenomenon!
that is my britishness maybe!