Oh, no, we're certainly not laugh out loud funny; in fact, there's only one of us. We're not even good; we just try real hard and string a few sentences together like beggars pleading with grocers for pennies. And we don't demand you listen and make you throw up until you die against your will because we're just that funny; rather, we gently caress your skin, at each caress obtaining new consent, needling and kneading new purchase at each pass, always by your will, until we've turned your doughy child's face into a man's wizened, chuckling brow, thence to fat chortling jolly middle age, and finally thence kneaded into a happy corpse. Congratulations, I will exclaim at your funeral, Congratulations. You have lived a full Pearls of Mystery humor-based life.
Look, I know I'm stretching it pretty thin. I'm not Richard Pryor here; my wordplay is so bad it will make you wish you never had eyes to read it nor ears to hear it. I once tried to write a snappy punchline and it stretched for 1200 words and it still didn't really work. You might never laugh at anything I've written, I get that, but the first spark of inspiration is really always in the realm of jokes. And I mean, that's what my endgame is. I want to make you laugh and, if I can't make you laugh, it's an abject failure.
The problem with comedians is that if you put them in one place for too long they start to scrape at the walls, and then die, especially if you don't feed them. That's a real bummer. You only let it happen once and then you learn your lesson. Haha, no, I never killed a man. That was a metaphor, son. Keep up. But I do need to keep eating (producing) content, and scraping the walls of this blog (deploying irony) so that it can break open and become existence entire.
Part of being a comedian means you always hold on to certain notions because you're immersed in them from birth, and yet some part of your nature is a destroyer (or at least a deconstructor), and so you chip away and lop off limbs from your notions, and those notions die or transmute or come back from your abuse with tenacious vengeance. And in the course of your life new notions are born, and the hard part is that you are a prideful artist whose art is to destroy. And you hold your first child in your hand and struggle to balance the knife in the other, and as more children come you think of dropping the knife entirely, going on the road of standard life, and creating without much judgment a lot of new notions to live by, unencumbered by your vicious streak of destruction.
And your new life of high concepts becomes unwieldy and then you get a sick thought that maybe, just maybe... the number and quality of notions you create are only as good as the number and quality of notions you can first destroy without shame, and so you have to put aside your precious, wonderful notions to pick up a dull knife and hack it and sharpen it with more unkindly gore than ever before.
And you curse that you'd ever put the knife down, because suddenly your notions are so high-falutin' that you need to fall again yourself to destroy them. You'd been floating on air, and writing high sentences about bloated concepts uncritically, and now you need to come back down again. And all your life you wish you'd had the sense never to have put the knife down, had simply killed and killed every tiniest notion you'd had with your comic sharpness as it emerged, until all you had were diamonds in your hand and a sword worthy of slicing anything less hardy.
You cry, you slam your hand against the hardest surfaces you can find, you do anything to try to recapture the natural and cool rage you had when you were younger, that natural and cool rage that deconstructed anything that looked more beautiful than it was.
And you wonder why you feel so hungry and trapped all the time. Your metaphors lose their luster, you slow down; worst of all, you start to think of the social implications of writing something down.
We ought to take risks artistically until we die, but we don't. Not with the government and corporations breathing down our necks looking for any tiny margin to observe or take by which we can be considered dangerous or marketable. Not with the natural forces of paranoia and anxiety and the need for validation. Not with the sense of reasonable calm that emerges with age. No, we sacrifice our shining lights for dull commodity-fluorescent abominations when we are in our primes and need to (and can) shine our lights most brightly.
I'm a unique snowflake, and so is everyone else, until the powers that be herd us into a room together and say there's a tiny peppermint candy for the most polite young man. There might even be a job, or a reprieve, or some kind of exclusive access. And don't even think of what we'll do to the least polite. He won't be that way for long, I'll put it that way.
Snow just turns into dumb water when everyone huddles together for warmth. Nourishing but not unique. Then again, I still haven't fed those comedians in my basement, so maybe they'll take that over nothing. Just kidding. No, the only comedian I'm keeping locked in my basement is me, until I come up with something funny enough to justify a post on that paragon of laughs known as Pearls of Mystery.
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