“Neither of us would ever die of love, we will grieve, part and separate. For we were not meant to be tragedians. We were meant to be comedians.” – Graham Greene, The Comedians
I have always wanted to write something that will make Graham green. Something that would certainly be funny.
Much of today’s laughter is tickled both by comic situation, by punning or repartee.
Humor has its own merry laws but is an end in itself.
The human comedy is the picture of people, of life and truth that it delivers so gaily with smiles, guffaws, chatter and belly laughs—washed down with occasional sighs, moans and tears. Now isn’t that its own justification?
Face to face with foibles and the incongruities of people, comedy arouses laughter and nimbleness of wit.
The jokes, the quips, the human characteristics exposing its vagaries and drolleries disguised as irony, as satire or caricature in a gallery of human folly.
Comedy has many faces. But if there ever was one tongue that everybody in the world could understand, it would be the language of laughter—bringing joy and tears, groans and chuckles, tangled up like a ball of thread after a playful kitten gets through with it.
One moment it ripples joyously, only to be suddenly muted by a wistfulness when humor turns mean and cruel.
Humor in the role of comforter? It is a very old practice. When you’re hungry, sing loud if you have a good voice. If that voice is awful, sing even louder and get even with God!
In times of loss, you laugh in order to give yourself the courage not to grieve.
You shed a tear or two, because the human comedy is no laughing matter.
When it’s distilled with pathos, laughter achieves a balance of sanity.
It gives one perspective and a view out of chaos.
While wit is sudden and startling (usually scornful), as it leaps audaciously and wickedly, humor is said to be slower, rarely malicious—it does not fly to assault the mind but laughs its way into the heart.
Satire is probing and critical, cutting through pretension with quick corrosive acid: its purpose is coldly destructive.
But humor seldom analyzes. It is simply warm and sympathetic, playful, sometimes high-hearted, sometimes hilarious.
Unlike the poisoned barb of satire (Oscar Wilde); and the killing point of wit (Winston Churchill), humor is healing—it is not only wholesome, but recreative and rejuvenating.
It makes us smile, giggle, shriek or laugh incessantly.
Yet, could it be otherwise? While people can laugh easily at the absurd, the pretentious or even the mean, why are they hardly likely to be sent into gales of laughter by the sincere, the upright and the noble?
Virtue is no laughing matter.
Jokes work if they are funny and fresh, they can make a comedian out of anyone. The laugh-getter is always appreciated.
But I’ve been advised to stick to my amusing little comments about the ingredients of a corn flake.
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