in her novel, The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker writes:
i love this scene so much.
in my little foray into ~futility~ last week, i learned that one root meaning of the word is ‘pours out easily or easily emptied’2
absurdity is one of the wells I draw from as a comedian. in Morgan Bassichis’s words: “Time and place are the beginning coordinates of a joke. Where we are is probably weird, and when we are is probably weird. The joke is already in motion; it’s around us…”3 i don’t totally understand why absurdity is funny; i suspect part of its humor is its honesty.
futility is one of the mega absurdities we face, on this rock, or at least the prospect of it. this can be crushing or liberating depending on the day. i know, i know, it’s a choice to entertain the possibility or reality of futility. on a good day, something about it does feel entertaining.
if life might be4 futile, and we—humans, containers of life—are too, i wonder if there’s something about laughter as an emptying on our own terms. i wonder about staying close to the humor to experience the freedom that lives in the unexplainable process of putting what’s unbearable in its proper perspective. laughter as the both the emptying and gladness/acceptance that arrives on the other side of it.