Looking for humor in the darkest places
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 20, 2024
- 769
One of my best friends in high school was fond of saying, “It’s my sincere belief that there is humor to be found in every situation.”
He was whip smart, witty and utterly without guile, the kind of guy who had way better ways to negotiate the treacherous hallways of adolescence than to hang around with the likes of me, a self-confessed pessimist with not a whole lot of time for phony façades.
I was lucky enough to have been given valuable space in the student newspaper to write not one, but two personal opinion columns in every edition of the twice-monthly publication. It was maybe not the best editorial decision ever made, but I knew enough to make the most of that kind of golden opportunity.
“It’s a little bleak,” my editor said, unhappily, holding out her red-penciled copy of my work as if it were a dead skunk or a rancid slice of American pie, something better served in a landfill stew.
“You want me to rewrite it?” I asked. “Not a lot cheerful about the ending of ‘Easy Rider,’ but I can give it a shot, pardon the pun.”
She winced, all too familiar with my trademark sarcasm, but in the end she relented and let the piece run as intended, so I said thanks.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “It’s just too well-written to kill.”
“Might be my epitaph,” I said, heading down the hallway, where the lunchroom and my friends awaited. “Good meeting, though.”
It would have been well within my editor’s purview to insist I tone it down, leaven the gloom with a little hope, and she knew it.
But when you’re in high school and there’s a war going on, when Nixon says he’s not a crook, a couple of years after four students got gunned down at Kent State, it’s best to let the dark anger rage.
Someone please crank up a little John Mellencamp for us all:
“Well I was born in a small town
And I can breathe in a small town
Gonna die in a small town
That’s probably where they’ll bury me.”
So it’s been a couple of weeks since I made my prodigal son’s return, and well, I can’t really complain, though I feel kind of lousy when someone pulls in beside me when I’m parked, just sort of reacquainting myself with the same real estate that used to mean so much to me, you know — lost loves and music and growing up, that sort of thing — the interludes that make an exile feel less lonely.
After that, I felt bad when I didn’t immediately recognize the guy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my sunglasses to get a better look, wishing I was a wiser person. “I know I should know you but … ”
And that’s the way it’s been going. I’ve been making mistakes, and if there’s one thing that the last few weeks have taught me, it’s best to forgive myself when my intentions don’t quite equal my actions.
We age … we get older … we don’t look the same … that’s life.
Which brings me back to that high school friend, the one who understood, even as an 18-year-old, that there were going to be uncomfortable moments when, well, you just had to laugh a little.
As I recall, the triggering episode involved copious amounts of liquor, the Beatles blasting on the stereo, sex nerds without dates and the fact that the party’s host might really be entering a coma.
Not a laughing matter, or so you’d think; nonetheless, we howled.
When you’re on the blind side of adolescence and college life is out there, a fog-shrouded lighthouse, a beacon on the horizon, all you really care about is making good grades and not screwing up too much. True, a bunch of us got in trouble for having broken into an elementary school — not to trash the place or steal stuff — but to shoot some hoops because our little town was buried deep in snow.
And then you might run a little sideways of school rules when you hoisted a tire up and over the flagpole that stood just this side of the main entrance, not because you meant any disrespect, but more because it seemed like an excellent idea, the kind of harmless prank that only the most straight-laced adult might quibble with.
I could go on and on, cataloging the juvenile — if creative — ways we discovered to stretch the boundaries and push the envelope of acceptably eccentric behavior, you certainly get the silly point.
Humor is the best antidote toward mitigating hideous mistakes; in fact, I’d venture to say Bob Dylan said it best in “Idiot Wind”:
“We’re idiots, babe,
It’s a wonder we can
Even feed ourselves.”
When I moved back home earlier this month, after spending 23 years on a seemingly endless beach vacation, I understood I might not have a smooth winter re-entry and was liable to ricochet off Earth’s fickle atmospheric barrier and get flung into deep space.
But I also understood that, as my high school valedictorian friend explained way back before Nixon resigned, you just gotta laugh. Otherwise, when you get close to living 70 years on this planet, you might realize, far too late, that no one’s laughing along with you and there’s absolutely no fun — real, cruel or imagined — in that.