In Search of Laughs in Flat Rock

In the musical Hamilton it is sung that Mr. Hamilton wrote his way out of every difficulty.  Another way through life is to laugh one’s way across every barrier.

Sometimes, at bedtime with my wife, with the difficulty of sleep at hand, I will make funny faces. Jean will laugh, and she will also laughingly reach out to cover my face and say, “That’s not a good look for you.” This encourages more faces.

I remember going to see the movie The Kings of Comedy the night before I took the graduate school exam. I had been studying pretty hard for it, but I took the general advice to get my mind off of the exam the night before. That movie had me laughing so hard, I was wiping the tears and other fluids off my face long after I left the theater. And I scored well on the exam.

Lately I have felt profoundly tired from the effort of moving from the big city to the mountains. I notice I’m not laughing as much. In addition to the fatigue, the reign of the current pandemic requires me to avoid people. And then there’s the urgent need to move forward in race relations and against domestic violence. For the playground of life I am relegated to the humor that’s available in gifs and memes.

And my face, which under the right conditions can build up great laughter and accompanying fluids, I must keep shut behind a mask.

Remember that study that showed children laugh about 100 times more per day than adults do? When I heard about it, I felt really sad about that study, and I made a very adult resolution to laugh more. But then something happened, and I forgot. Probably something very serious, like I had to take out the trash or wash a dirty dish. 

Fortunately I have people like Brian, Margaret, and Jean, whom I had the pleasure of hanging out with today, over in Flat Rock. Brian gets me laughing well, these days. He can take any stumble in conversational speech and turn it into a pirouette of wit.

I am also finding wonderful laughs in Marcel Proust’s writing. In Swann’s Way, a young character arrives as a guest for dinner in a solidly middle-class home. The host notices that the guest’s clothes are wet. He asks the guest if it has rained. The guest replies,

“Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.”

I think Proust was another one of those who wrote his way out of every difficulty. And he wrote himself some laughs, too.