Get Happy

I was given a large grant to perform my comedies, but there was one condition they placed on the funds  - I had to do it in 15 minutes, and, as they say, in one take, right or wrong. Here's the bit I came up with! Hope you enjoy. Heh.

They say life's a bitch and then you die, but I never bought that. I always felt that life could be pretty good if you just stepped back and took stock of what was good about life. If you noticed all the flowers in the world growing. If you noticed all the light shining on the beautiful grass and that children would play on. If you noticed all the beautiful love and happiness that everyone in the world seemed to have. Then you could be happy.

But happiness itself isn't all it's cracked up to be. Mo money mo' problems, they say, and the same is true with happiness. It's hard to maintain your increased happiness without resorting to drugs and violence. You have to, like, maintain your metaphysical turf if you catch my drift. You have to done shot someone that steps to your little patch of happiness. You have to guard that happiness like it's a giant pile of upbeat cocaine.

So I built myself up a little bit of happiness a few years ago and - mo happy mo problems - everyone comes piling in looking for a share of the bliss. And all I can do is tell them to form a line and pay me to tap on their shoulders and tell them everything is going to be alright. I tell them that they will get what is coming to them, unless they're bad, in which case they'll instead get forgiveness. I get this line of unhappy people and I make them feel better. They rarely leave having wasted their money.

But it starts to gnaw away at me, because I mean, I'm just offering them empty reassurances. I mean, I don't know with any certainty that the good will get what they deserve and the wicked will be forgiven. I'm largely just speculating, on that front. In fact, not only do I have no idea, but I start to wonder if making people feel better is itself a worthy sort of goal... if I would place myself into the former or the latter category. Is this something I should be given divine providence for, or is this something for which I should seek forgiveness? Not just was it good or bad but was it even purposeful in any way? So the line of people grows every day and I start to wonder if my own special reserve of happiness hasn't always just been my own gift of delusional optimism writ large upon my worldview. Hey, if things are gonna work out then there's no reason to frown right?

Anyway, so I end up going into a massive depression and here's the thing... in the midst of things I still keep going to my little storefront to cheer people up, keep telling people that they're going to feel better, even though I don't believe it myself. But my prestige and status keep increasing and the people come from far and wide at this point to get happy. I even start to wonder if becoming cynical has made me better at what I do - if the process of learning my own delusions has actually made me better at creating those delusions.

"Hey, are you that guy that makes people happy?" someone says to me on the street around this time. I hand them a business card and barely acknowledge them. A few taps on the shoulder at restaurants - which used to thrill me - now bore me and make me irritable. I don't go out much anymore. I watch whatever's on and hold back the fear, take my medications, and tell whoever of my clients calls that I'm open from 9-5, but that I'm not going to bail them out outside of that. I'm not their friend, no matter how happy or optimistic I might sound. A stranger is no longer a potential friend but a likely impediment, and I realize that all my optimism is dead irrevocably.

I lose the spark, I forget how happiness is wrought and brought about, and I end up quitting and becoming a much more cynical financial consultant. I sell financial instruments all day and talk about optimism and pessimism with apparent engagement, even while in reality I feel nothing. Anhedonia I think they call my condition.

Anyway, that's my bit!

(pause for audience laughter)