The Brokenness of Comedy

 Last night, before falling asleep, I got to thinking about comedy. Comedy is designed to make people laugh, but so often the people doing the comedy don't feel like laughing themselves. When I was in high school, I did a stand-up routine for a talent show. I used jokes from other comedians, because I've never really good at developing stories, even funny ones, into the form of a joke. Everyone has their strengths, and that's just not one of mine. But my delivery was good enough to make people laugh, so that's apparently one of my strengths. One of my brothers has always said that I'm the funniest person he knows, which I think is an interesting by-product of a childhood that resulted in myself and my siblings not being good with emotions. For me, one of the by-products is using comedy to get those around me to feel a happiness I thought I couldn't.

That seems to be a pretty common thread. The prominent example that comes to mind is Robin Williams -- a renowned comedian who committed suicide. He spend so much of his life making other people happy, but was himself depressed. Not that there's a direct correlation between happiness and depression -- depressed people can still feel happy, it's just a lot harder to maintain in. Another example that comes to mind is Adam Devine. I watched a comedy special of his where he did stand-up, and there were several times that after finishing a joke he would just mumble "stupid." It seemed less like an acknowledgement that his comedy is lowbrow, and more a form of self-deprecation stemming from a place of doubt and fear. But then, as someone who suffers from depression and self-doubt, I am reminded of the saying that to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

I'm not saying comedy is bad or that all comedians are depressed, just that it's interesting that, at least based on observation of this one facet of humanity, people give that which they lack. Perhaps it's a cry for help from a broken people trying to put more of what they need in their lives into the lives of others.

What is the Focus?

It seems strange to start a blog without any idea what the focus of it is going to be. While it's not entirely true that this blog has no focus, the previous statement is still a good example of life. We go into life and reach several milestones with little to no focus for a long time. We are born with no focus, become teenagers with little focus, and usually don't really know what we're going to do until around age twenty. If the average life expectancy is about seventy-three years then, on average, humans go through more than a quarter of their lives with few ideas about what they will do with the other three quarters. Why is that? Why do we blindly follow a path that we don't know the destination of?

It makes sense that in developmental years we wouldn't choose our own path -- it's both unsafe and unwise to leave a developing mind to wander untethered into the cesspool of modern society. So the real question is why don't we do more to help those minds develop in a way that allows them to know their focus and thus have something to work for.

Ironically, I type this while completely distracted from what I'm saying, the white noise of the house punctuated by the anime my wife is watching right next to me. ADHD has a tendency to take my focus off the thing I'm trying to do and put it on something that I have no reason to focus on. In a restaurant, I hear a conversation between the family three tables over better than the person right in front of me. Focus is a funny thing. It can mean so many things. If this were a college paper, it would be horrible because there is no consistent thesis throughout. And because I've been ending sentences with prepositions, switching between first and third person, and I started this sentence with "And." Obviously I majored in English. But does that mean that's my focus? Does it mean I want to be a writer? Does it mean I want to teach English? Maybe. Maybe I don't know what I want, what my focus is, what this blog is about. But maybe someday I'll find out. For now, this blog is going to be a pouring out of thoughts as a way for me to practice writing. Not necessarily because I want to be a writer, but definitely because I want to be a better writer.