Funny

September 29, 2001, Saturday Night Live came back on the air after a three week hiatus brought about by the terrorist attacks three weeks earlier. The episode was introduced by New York City's mayor, Rudy Guliani. At one point, producer Lorne Michaels came out and asked The Mayor, "Can we be funny?"
Guliani replied, "Why start now?"
Nineteen years later, things are about as awful as they have ever been. The folks at Saturday Night Live were doing a Zoom variation on their "live" show for three weeks during late April until the first week of May. Were they funny? Opinions vary. They were, at the very least, a distraction from the moribund sameness of the first month of quarantine. The May ninth episode was the season finale, with the cast and crew released to go about their summertime plans which probably didn't include the standard vacation or movie production. My guess is that they are all at home feeling much the same way their counterparts from two decades ago. Cane we be funny?
I feel that too. I know precisely how dark and troubled my writing has been over the past few weeks. Even my always reliable nostalgia machine has left me high and dry. I have drifted past the point of satire and cynicism to full-on troubled. I wake up in the night feeling despair that I cannot push into the corner of my mind. The focus of my waking hours seems to be the ongoing pain and suffering felt everywhere. Unrelenting.
There are still folks recovering from COVID-19. There are still birthday parties taking place. There are moments of joy, not the least of which was experienced on the streets of Oakland last week when protesters danced on past the curfew. Only one arrest was reported that night. Which is happy, but it's not funny.
There is a sea of angry comments out there being directed at the powers that be, some of which could be described as "funny." Not "funny ha-ha," but "funny sad." A contradiction in terms, it seems to me. But contradictions seem to be playing a big part of our collective lives these days. What we are told and what we see are two very different things. "Things are fine, go back to work!" No thanks. Not until people aren't dying by the thousands. "There is no systematic racism problem in law enforcement."
Um. No.
It's not funny.
I miss funny.
I miss a lot of things right now, but funny is right up there at the top.