What Makes You Laugh (redux)

A Saturday Prompt

There was a time when the actions of Donald Trump were almost laughable. But as the sickening transgressions pile up we are exposed on a daily basis to his heinousness and capacity for evil, it has gotten harder (at least for me) to see him and what he’s doing through the funny lens. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to laugh. In fact, we need it even more. This prompt was originally published on October 14, 2023.

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The other night I was with my 22-year-old daughter and we started to laugh so hard—deep from the belly laughter—and I realized I hadn’t done that in far too long. I don’t remember exactly what we laughed about, just that it was full and contagious and warming. I was happy to do it with her.

These have been difficult days, what with the chaos of the Republicans, the ongoing derangements of their leading candidate, and the atrocities of Hamas in Israel and the escalating violent response that portends more bloody days to come. My mind keeps turning to the William Butler Yeats lines: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

There will be more to say about all that. But not today. My mind is focused on laughter. How about the Chris Farley sketch in which he plays motivational speaker Matt Foley, hired by a dad to scare straight his pot-smoking children? Over and over—in tones over-wrought and bombastic, his movements exaggerated and extreme as he makes his case and struggles to keeps his pants from falling down—Farley delivers the classic line: “I live in a van down by the river.” It never fails to deliver for me.

So do most Will Farrell performances with their passionate ridiculousness. There are many laugh-out-loud examples, but I confess I’m always laughing when he and John C. Reilly play forty-something men thrust together as step brothers when their parents marry. As critic Nick Schager puts it, Adam McKay’s Step Brothers “is a preeminent work of man-child absurdity, a smorgasbord of nonsense involving grown men acting like adolescents who’ve been hit on the head a dozen times too many, and parents struggling to stomach their progeny’s willful inanity.”

Pomposity getting its comeuppance, bad hair choices, bad life choices and the desperate, often humiliating attempts to fix them—all this usually makes me laugh, maybe nowhere better than in The Office. Steve Carrell (the cringe-worthy boss Michael) and Rainn Wilson (the boot-licking deputy Dwight)—responsible for the important work of selling paper for Dunder Mifflin—always prove that what could go wrong will go wrong. One example among many: “The Injury,” when Michael badly burns his foot on a Foreman grill because he likes breakfast in bed and the smell of sizzling bacon.

What about you? What makes you laugh? Perhaps you want to mention particular movies or shows. Maybe you want to share favorite actors or comedians. Or maybe you have a specific life experience or joke that always makes you laugh. I suspect we can all use a little of this necessary elixir.

As always, I look forward to reading your comments and for us all to hear from each other. Please do be respectful in your responses.

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*Photo is Chris Farley as motivational speaker Matt Foley (with David Spade and Christina Applegate) in the classic Saturday Night Live sketch written by Bob Odenkirk of Better Call Saul fame.