Bring in the Clowns

In a world of clowns and bores, I'll take the clowns.

Chesterton, that stout Englishman who managed to see the cosmic joke amid the Edwardian fog, put it plainly enough: the bore is the poor sod who finds nothing funny, while the clown finds everything funny.

We gotta avoid both extremes like Odysseus threading the Straits of Messina, but if I gotta err, I'm erring on the side of the clown. He's closer to the existential mark.

Nothing about life in this vale of tears is consistent. Nothing is rational. Nothing is predictable. Our own minds deceive us 15 times before breakfast, and our steeliest aims, goals, and resolutions deflate like an erection accosted by a picture of naked Janet Reno.

Inconsistency is the only constant. Only unreliability is reliable. Always expect the unexpected.

Humor is the proper response to all this.

Inconsistency is the soul of humor. It juxtaposes inconsistent things. The more sudden and unexpected and harsh the juxtaposition, the funnier. It could be a man slipping on the ice (his inherent dignity slashed by his flailing efforts to regain his footing) or one of those harsh and unexpected twists that mark deadpan comic Anthony Jeselnik's style.

"I saw my favorite porn actress at the end of the bar. . . I told the bartender he shouldn't serve her because she's only 13." Jeselnik (paraphrased)

I'd take the clown option one step further these days. In this zany vale of shit that Western culture has become, the clown has become the only effective option.

We debate whether a penis belongs in a girls' locker room and whether people should show ID to vote when they're required to show ID in every other important area of life. People use terms like "grand-dogs" to celebrate their children's self-inflicted sterility, "safe space" to justify neuroticism, and "love language" (a term that no self-respecting American male can hear without biting his lower lip and grabbing his crotch) to describe the only thing that makes life bearable. A blanket of governmental regulations, like 2,000-page building codes, hobble human flourishing as effectively as that fat guy sitting on a prisoner's head in Idiocracy.

To all this, there are only two possible responses: violence or humor. Violence is abhorrent, so I'll take humor.

The brain's left hemisphere is rationalistic. It only appreciates and pursues those things that the explicit reasoning process can understand. Because modern culture is so overwhelmingly left-hemispheric, rationalistic conclusions govern its operation, no matter how awful the results (cue the penis in the girls' locker room and building codes that fuel homelessness).

We can't apply more rationalism to it any more than we can save a gunshot victim by stabbing him repeatedly with a kitchen knife.

Enter humor. Summon the clowns. Celebrate the obscene fools at 4Chan. Embrace the absurd. Slap every building inspector with a Zen koan every time he requires an electrical outlet to be moved two-tenths of a centimeter to the left.

Zeno of Elea concluded that movement wasn't possible. His argument was rationally ironclad. Diogenes didn't reply rationally. Instead, he stood up and walked around.

Diogenes was pretty clownish. He took nothing seriously. If rationality said "checkmate," he flipped over the entire chessboard.

Such is the necessary response today when a culture-wide left hemisphere approach to the world has produced a slew of rational yet ludicrous conclusions.

You can't respond with rational arguments when rational arguments gave your opponent his conclusions in the first place. You can try, of course, but it'll be pointless until you somehow crack that rationalist cocoon that created his safe space in the first place.

Humor is the most effective hammer. We can wait for grace to break open the cocoon or for the quiet influence of joyful lives well-lived to make an impression. Those are good things, no doubt, but they move slowly and unpredictably.

If you really want to flail away at the rationalist cocoons, enjoy yourself, and preserve a measure of sanity all at the same time, embrace the clowns.