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All of my friends laugh at me – with me.
And vice versa.
Which means we have to do the serious work it takes to get to where we can laugh at ourselves. And not nervous laughter, a calmfident chuckle at the bozos on the bus we really are.
I don’t mind the work though I mind it plenty. Laughing at me is good for me even though I take life very seriously – just not too seriously I hope, or it just wouldn’t be funny.
Life is funny. If all the world’s a stage, it’s one playing out in tragicomedy or epic slapstick.
Think about it. You may think you know what will result of your actions but you never really do. You never do anything for just one reason and it never has just one effect. Some of your proudest accomplishments backfire, and some of your most shameful actions yield surprisingly positive results. Life is like playing piano with oven mitts on. You go to hit one key; you hit others unintentionally. You avoid some keys and you end up hitting them anyway.
Life is funny and dead serious. It takes a lot of live-and-learning to get to where you recognize the tragicomedy, work that some of us never get around to doing.
Laughing at ourselves doesn’t come naturally to people. The tendency instead is self-aggrandizement, a kind of blind pride, or personal patriotism, especially when push comes to shove as it does for all of us eventually.
George Bernard Shaw said patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because were born in it. Apply that to self-regard and you get personal patriotism, the assumption that you are the best simply because you were born you.
Personal patriotism is the default. It takes a lot of work to get beyond it in a way that doesn’t hit a bunch of wrong keys – blanket skepticism, humblebragging, milquetoast uncertainty, nihilism, eating humble crow, or crowing about your humility.
Here’s some personal slapstick: To sustain my mojo, I need a margin of unjustifiable confidence. I’m at my most productive best when I think I’m better than I really am. That’s something to laugh at about me with me.
If I didn’t laugh, I’d start to believe that, no really, I’m better than I really am. I’d slip over into blind pride and personal patriotism. the kind that would have me saying, “No I must be right. I’ve checked with myself three times and every time I’ve agreed!”
Of course, there are people who are tortured by self-incriminating inner voices. The poet Philip Larkin describes it beautifully in a poem addressed to “neurotics”:
The mind, it's said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.
Sometimes the push comes to shove internally. We end up with a chip on our shoulder that’s too much to bear. Such a chip on the shoulder motivates blind pride too. If you’re always already attacking yourself, you can’t stand a challenge from others. You’ve had it up to here with your own self-incrimination. Someone else piling on could break you, so you circle your wagons.
We hear about this hypersensitivity-turned-insensitivity in the argument that Trump’s self-confidence is a cover for his debilitating lack of self-confidence. He’s hypersensitive. That’s why he is all about vengeance and self-glorification. He can’t afford empathy for others or a laugh at his own expense. It takes all of his attention to keep feeling great about himself.
It’s “Make Me Great Again and Again and Again.” That’s what resonates with his authoritarian followers. Not his policies which he doesn't have.
These days, Trump and Republicans, in general, are unwilling or unable to hear a single self-discouraging word, even as a joke. They are snowflakes marshaling everything they’ve got in an anti-snowflake campaign.
Maybe they never grew up. Maybe they grew up so damaged that their mission is self-redemption at any cost and by any means. Maybe they think unreceptivity is what it means to be a grown-up, learned from parents who berated them from atop their high horses.
Maybe they’re con-artists who know that self-aggrandizement attracts the gullible. Maybe they’re too gullible to have noticed that their self-certainty is just a bag of cheap tricks for never ever having to laugh at themselves.
Whatever the origins, they’re humorless with regard to their own character. And don’t you dare touch it. If you do, you’re the evil enemy. How dare you?
Gone from their thinking are the standards by which one earns merit, hollowed out to platitudes. They have pounced on their keyword positive superlatives – patriots, Christian, Americans, liberty – and stripped these terms of all meaning. The husk that remains is, to them, the idea of unadulterated merit which they affix to themselves exclusively. Self-labeled as the pious and patriotic, they can do whatever they please without recrimination. Don’t tread on them, though they’re free to tread on you.
What has swept into the GOP is an epidemic of blind pride and personal patriotism. The GOP has become a party that promises the benighted what they crave most: Infinite mulligans.
They mock others from behind their imaginary wall of un-mockability. To mock them is sacrilege, persecution, oppression, disrespectful, unfair, unkind, evil.
But for them to mock others is to deliver justice, honesty, truth, reason, fairness. They are the supreme judges, the unquestionable, un-mockable ultimate authorities. They are permanently mounted on their high horses. One does not mock God which is what they hold themselves to be.
It’s a standard move, certainly not exclusive to the GOP. The impulse to mount one’s high horse, never to dismount comes to any of us in a flash of exasperation. We say “Aw, hell no! I’m not going to take it anymore!” From that point on, negotiation is over. It’s us against the world.
Nothing vaporizes faster than our recollection of our own errors when we’re outraged at someone else’s equivalents. Someone cuts me off on the road and I become a selective amnesic, unable to recall having ever cut anyone off. In such moments, it would give me no satisfaction in to remember that I’m human.
In the past three weeks, I’ve had conversations with a feminist who had been cut off by an ex and a new ager cut off by scientists. There was no talking to either of them. They were dead serious, dead to even the mildest challenge. They were tooled up with the best “nope-ing strategy” of all: If you disagree with me, you are the enemy of truth.
It takes a lot of hard work to get over yourself and then to stay over yourself even when umbrage overtakes you. That’s work we don’t always get around to, work discouraged, not just by the GOP these days, but by today’s vivid fictions in which we can identify with the champion of truth, justice and above all ego. It’s no accident that Kanye and Donald are becoming a mutual admiration society. They’re at the pinnacle of this popular fiction, successes as role models for the blindly self-aggrandizing.
The capacity for self-mockery is not the same as tentativeness or tolerance, some universal softening. No, it’s the ability to fight for what you believe knowing full well that you could be wrong, demonstrable in the way you can stand corrected, your pride intact, chortling calmfidently when you are proven wrong.
It’s the ironical stance: No matter how certain you are of a bet, you’re still more confident that it is a bet.
Humanity at its sustainable best is everyone laughing at each other with each other even while taking each other seriously.
That's irony. Irony is sometimes defined as saying one thing while meaning its opposite. I don't buy that definition. That's sarcasm. Irony is saying one thing and meaning both it and its opposite, as in "but seriously I'm kidding."
Mockers who think they're un-mockable vs. mockers who know everyone is mockable: I begin to think it's a huge difference that deserves more of our attention and not just in politics. At home too. Irony is love lube. Nothing keeps couples together like the ability to laugh at each other with each other.
