Why It Is Good to Die on Stage

Well, if I am supposed to start a diary…

There were a couple of comical moments in my most recent day. I was arguing a point through email when someone wrote back something very insulting. I wrote back “don’t make me pull this Internet over” which she thought was a funny remark. I am not quite certain how one pulls an Internet over, but I will admit, there are lots of times I wish Al Gore hadn’t ever invented this thing.

By the way, to come to Al Gore’s defense: while people make fun of him for that, he actually did chair the committee in the U.S. Senate that did approve the creation of the first Internet system. The Internet began as a Defense project so lines of communication should flow more quickly and continue even if conventional means of communications were destroyed during combat. Somehow, the truth of a matter becomes a laughing stock.

That’s how Republicans operate, I notice. They take someone good a Democrat does and turn it into a joke. Republicans, on the other hand, take jokes and turn them into policy. Speaking of which, how’s that war in Iraq going with the Iraqi throwing flowers at our soldiers. They’re throwing something, but it’s not flowers.

Enough politics. That is supposed to be a humor blog. It’s just that whenever I want people to laugh, all I have to say is “President Bush” and universal laughter emerges.

Then there was a bit of coomical reality. to my day I was catching-up with a friend, with whom we hadn’t spoken with for several months, with news. I was telling the news of a friend who died from contamination. In the midst of my telling of this person’s passing, my friend started interrupting with rave reviews of a new restaurant, which ironically was the same location where this person died. Since humor is the brain’s processing of ironic events, my stating that this person died at the same location of the restaurant she was praising at the same moment, resulted in severaly inappropriate laughter. Since laughter was wrong for that moment, this contradiction only allowed the brain to register more irony, which created still more irony which led to even greater laughter. Eventually, this escalating laughter became just about the funniest thing ever emitted.

We can now say we literally laugh at the face of death. Because, when you think about it, death really is quite silly. One minute you’re alive, and the next, you’re plopped down in some inappropriate pose that you have no control over. Which, when you think about it, should make stand-up comedy just about the easiest job. You ask a comic “how was your performance?” and the comic responds “I died on stage” you can then add “I bet the audience was howling.”