Posts Tagged comedy

I Am Not a Cat

But you can see that, I suppose.

How are you doing? As of this past weekend, we are eleven months into operating under pandemic restrictions. A year ago today, what did you think mattered? What were you looking forward to and what were you dreading? Thinking about this reminds me of how bad we all are when it comes to our assumptions about the future.

But that works both ways, too. Whenever you find yourself thinking, “This problem will never get better,” I want you to remember that you don’t have a great track record of predicting your own future. Most of our assumptions about our own futures are based on way too little information. And we get lulled into a false sense of foreknowledge because just assuming that the future will be like the past does, in fact, work up to a point–but then when that point comes we are suddenly wildly off track and totally unprepared.

That’s how comedy works, by the way. It’s where the “rule of three” in humor writing comes from. A joke is something that intentionally sets up an expectation by drawing to points on a graph, daring us to assume we know where the third point on the line will go, only to smash our expectation with a punch line that shows the line wasn’t a line at all but a curve. Our momentary resorting of our expectations versus our results, and the tension and release that comes with that, is the core of comedy.

Where am I going with this? Well, on a serious note, I hope you are finding ways to laugh, to surprise yourself, to humbly acknowledge your ignorance, and to experience an occasional catharsis of endorphin-releasing light happiness. Because statistics say you could probably use it. Symptoms of anxiety and depression are sharply up over the past several months, and people are hitting the COVID wall.

We’re not out of this, yet, and it can feel like we’re swinging from one hoped-for turning point to another like a crazed trapeze artist sometimes. For awhile, people took solace by saying blaming the year, but going from 2020 to 2021 didn’t seem to make a big difference. Maybe a new President of the U.S. will make things better? Not instantly, at least. Yay, there’s a vaccine? But…not really sure when we will all actually get it.

Things are progressing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. But sometimes looking forward to relief turns into a spiral of disappointment and impatience. Sometimes (often) the best thing to do is to let go of the future a little, and focus on the very immediate present. When the people cried out to the Lord because they had been forcibly relocated from their homes to the strange land of Babylon, they were told through the voice of the prophet, Jeremiah to settle in and make a life, and to stop yearning to go back to how things were:

“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Jeremiah 29:5-7

So look for what’s good right in front of you. And find ways to be a part of what’s good in the immediate lives of others around you, too. There are steps you can take to shore up your emotional resiliency. Prayer, meditation, laughter, humility, and useful service are all healthy parts of living purposefully in the present. I encourage you to pursue them.

And, like I said in a sermon two Sundays ago, read the Word. Not just as a form of instruction, but also as a means of connection with the Lord.

Speaking of reading the Word, I am planning a new online group that will be starting in a couple of weeks: “Let’s Read: The Easter Story According to Luke”. Starting a week from next Wednesday (February 24th), and for six Wednesdays leading up to Easter, I will facilitate an online group for reading and discussing the Gospel of Luke’s account of the Lord’s final week on earth. This group is open to interested people everywhere through the Grand Human Project. So mark your calendars. I’m looking forward to exploring this story with you all.

That’s it for now. Have a great week.

[Chekov’s Cat Reference]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hopping Half

Another magic effect for your viewing pleasure:

As some of you know, I have formally studied stand up comedy writing and presenting as an art, as part of my pursuit of excellence in preaching (or whatever we call it). My brother Pearse tells me that (I think) Malcolm Gladwell says an expert is someone who has put 10,000 hours into their particular skill/craft/art/etc. I will never hit 10,000 hours as a public speaker if I only do it once a week. Even without any weeks off, that’ll take over 190 years. So I practice.

But I also study. And I’m a big believer in multi-disciplinary cross-training. You’ve already heard my initial thoughts on what stage magic can teach the preacher. I think the most valuable lessons stand up comedy has taught me have to do with structure and with timing. I originally started stand up because I realized that public speaking no longer made me nervous, which I took as a sign that I was no longer growing in that art. When your weight training workout no longer leaves your muscles sore, it’s past time to add on some weights, right?

So I took up comedy because, frankly, it terrified me. In stand up you get almost instantaneous feedback, moment by moment, of exactly how badly you are failing. And comedy writing is one of the most demanding and unforgiving forms of verbal communication ever attempted by man. A comedian can go from killing the crowd to drowning in his own flop sweat with the addition of just an extra syllable to his punch line.

Anyway, (and yes, I know I’m rambling, today), it very recently occurred to me that comedy and magic have so many structural/architectural parallels to one another that they are almost topologically identical! For instance, both are totally dependent upon misdirection: in magic, misdirection (either temporal, spatial or kinetic) causes the spectator to think one thing is happening, and when it has been revealed that something else has happened, the surprise causes delight; in comedy, the setup creates a “first story” in the spectator’s mind that is shattered when the punch line reveals that a “second story” was the truth all along, thus leading to surprise and delight.

Another example (that I suspect is also shared by musicians, by the way): in creating a comedian’s set list (magicians call it “routining”), a comedian will “hammock” their bits, usually putting the best material at the beginning and end, starting with something fast, finishing with something dramatic, hiding new stuff they’re still working out somewhere in the middle, and trying to overall build toward a climax. Magicians use the exact same “best trick at the end, second best at the beginning, sag a little in the middle” approach, with an emphasis on being quick hitting and visual with their opener.

It’s that first structural similarity that really gets me, though. Are there any other arts or crafts that depend so heavily on misdirection followed by surprise the way comedy and magic do?

Actually, I just remembered one: mystery writing!

Can anyone think of any others? What do you think about all this? Anyone else out there just love thinking about the “bones” of an art form like this?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,