The Best Comedy Is Meaningless

Joy has no purpose except itself

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Hey. So still trying to figure out how to enable payments without compromising my anonymity: I can’t work out how to guarantee that my phone number or some other bit of personal information won’t appear in subscribers’ bank statements, without resorting to spending on things like a Google Voice no. and a virtual mailbox. Any advice from other anon writers welcome!

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Three years ago I wrote about the glorious mayhem that is Peter Cook's 1965 comedy sketch "Alan-a-Dale". Towards the end I quoted Erik Tarloff, for whom the skit's complete and utter absurdity ('no purpose, no object, no logic') adds up to 'an implicit philosophical nihilism'. I agreed, saying 'Squint a little and this silliest of sketches is aggressively confronting you with the arbitrariness of the meanings we assign to things and the stories we tell ourselves about them...so why is watching it the least bleak experience you can possibly have? Why do I enjoy "Alan-a-Dale" so much I think joy would be a better word than enjoyment? Actually, I reckon that the more chaotic, anarchic and meaningless a piece of comedy is, the funnier it is.'

I promised I'd elaborate on what I meant by that in a future post, and I'm someone who believes in keeping loose promises three years later, so here goes. 

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The word "nihilism" generally has connotations of resignation and despair, but I've written before about the possibility of taking a more cheerful approach to meaninglessness. And nowhere is the paradoxical connection between happiness and absurdity more obvious than with humour. Yes, a lot of comedy works because it plays with meanings and definitions, titillates the mind, progresses with a ruthless internal coherence - take the Two Ronnies' classic Mastermind sketch, or David Mitchell's celebrated "angry logic". 

But a lot of my favourite humour is made of much more chaotic stuff. I like skits that have a certain anarchic wildness to them, that go straight for the funnybone without bothering too much about making sense along the way. For me, the greatest comedy performers aren't the ones with the best material, they're the ones who just exude funniness no matter what they're saying or doing. They don't make funny jokes, they just are funny, and they're taking us along for the ride. 

It's a joy to watch them breaking all the rules of comedy and getting away with it, or cracking themselves up as their creative process takes even them by surprise, or making mincemeat of their own material and recovering right before our eyes. They're less like joke-tellers and more like trapeze artists, performing dazzling tricks that shouldn't work, keeping us on the edge of our seat as we wonder if they're going to make it. We're mostly laughing at the sheer nerve it takes to attempt this in public. 

I'm thinking of Bob Mortimer spinning yarn after yarn on Would I Lie to You, Norm Macdonald breaking every rule of television in his talk show appearances, John Cleese trying to make Michael Palin laugh more than the audience during a live version of the Dead Parrot skit, Peter Cook doing the same with Dudley Moore as both repeatedly go off script during a sketch, Foil Arms and Hog stretching their material to past breaking point in their live performances, Karl Pilkington trying to improve proverbs on the spot, Daniel Kitson using five minutes of a six-minute slot to ramble on about pigeons, and Spike Milligan repeatedly ruining his own acceptance speech. Nearly all comedy sets out to attack something, but in these clips the artform's rebelling against itself. 

Everyone loves the sight of a baby laughing, right? But have you ever wondered what it's laughing at? From the adult's point of view the answer is nothing at all, at least nothing we'd recognise as a joke, and that's exactly what's so appealing about the phenomenon. It's just unadulterated joy in life itself, what hippies call the "cosmic giggle".

People delight in reading political, philosophical and satirical intent into Monty Python sketches, and there is a lot of that stuff in there, but the troupe always insisted that their main goal was to be as silly as possible. That's why the group's favourite of their own sketches was the fish-slapping dance - it's the most purely nonsensical thing they ever did. Meanwhile Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers were seen as anti-establishment in their time, but that was mostly a side-effect of the pair's inherent anarchic wildness. They weren't ripping down the "establishment" so much as the very idea of adulthood itself, with all its boring responsibilities and tedious logic. 

Peter Cook himself got pegged as a satirist early on, but he never thought of himself as a political comedian so much as someone who just liked winding people up. The same applies to Norm Macdonald: he did political humour better than anyone, but when it came down to it his mission in life was to mess with people for no reason, play around with random old-timey personas and see how long he could stretch out directionless shaggy-dog stories. His best moments hit me in a place much deeper than conventional humour - they exhilarate me, liberate me, make me glad to be alive. I feel like that laughing baby.

Just look at this clip, where towards the end of a mostly straight-faced interview Norm suddenly decides to have some fun and mess with Larry King’s head a little, all while grinning like a naughty schoolboy. His ridiculous homophobic-but-desperately-closeted character sets up a kind of comedy Zen koan, designed to break your brain so that you stop even trying to make sense of it and just enjoy it as it washes over you. It's really clever and really stupid at the same time. It's just...silly. So you laugh.

All these comedians are whip-smart and politically aware, but their best satire happens by accident, as a byproduct of their subversive randomness, their childlike joy in play. They want to have fun, and the less meaning gets in the way the better. 

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For me, then, the best comedy - like the best music, art and philosophy - is all about what you might call benign regression. Returning to the oceanic consciousness of the infant, where you’re just chilling in your cot, laughing while your parents make funny faces. Of course, babies are also incredibly vulnerable and completely incapable of fending for themselves, so everything that makes survival possible has nothing to do with the child’s trusting, openhearted enjoyment of life. But everything that makes survival desirable has everything to do with that enjoyment.

The baby who never grows into an adult can appreciate the world but can’t navigate it, and the adult who forgets what it’s like to be a baby can navigate it but can’t appreciate it. Comedy is one of the ways the adult remembers what that babyish appreciation feels like. The trick is to bring that consciousness back with you from YouTube so that when you’ve stopped watching Norm Macdonald clips and started back into tackling your overstuffed inbox, you remain suffused in the comedic view of the world.

The problem is we don’t want to live life this way, because we’ve convinced ourselves that the importance of something is proportional to its seriousness and difficulty. It seems frivolous, almost obscene, to think that you could approach the weighty matters of the world with a light touch. Cheerfulness somehow devalues everything, makes it more enjoyable but less important. Suffering is nobler than joy, and tragedy is deeper than comedy.¹

I think this is the wrong way of looking at things.

In this post from four years ago, I wrote about how pain certainly takes place at a deeper mental level than the fake kind of happiness that comes from too much privilege and too little insight, but we’re making a big mistake if we take discomfort to be the deepest level of truth. The realest reality is joy. Dig a little underneath happiness and you find pain; dig a little deeper and you find joy. The kind of suffering that keeps us feeling stuck is nothing more nor less than a refusal to allow pain to take its inevitable place in this wild, dizzying corporeal ride we’re all on. When properly handled, nurtured and externalised - fully felt with no resistance or evasion - all emotions have joy at their core. It’s the substance of all life.

So just like any good joke has its “rule of three”, life has a tripartite structure. Everything seems OK on the surface; there are dark undercurrents underneath; beneath that is total stillness. We’re created in Eden; we’re kicked out; we’re redeemed. Frodo has a normal life; he goes to Mordor; he comes back wiser to resume his life. We’re born innocent; grow up, eat from the tree of knowledge and discover the world’s bitterness; eventually infuse the bitterness with the sweet taste of that original innocence by practising relentless self-compassion. 

Of course, there’s a key difference between the last act of the structure and the first. The final bliss is hard-won. It’s not ignorant any more. It knows what it’s like. It’s passed from primal innocence through the pain and horror of knowledge to emerge out the other side at wisdom. Wisdom, then, = innocence + knowledge. This and that. Seeing everything, accepting everything, resisting nothing.

The baby’s happy because it doesn’t know any better. Adults do know better, so they’re sad. The enlightened adult knows better and is happy anyway.

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So if babies are happy but not about anything in particular, what are happy adults happy about?

I don’t think they’re happy about anything either. There’s no about here, nothing to laugh at, no object, just happiness pure and simple. In the classic Chinese parable of the laughing monks you never find out what they’re laughing about, because they’re not laughing “about” anything. They’re just enjoying themselves.

There’s an interesting bit of circular reasoning at work here. Joy is the highest thing you can aspire to, which means it must be the meaning of life. But as I’ve written before, there’s nothing to feel overjoyed about except the simple fact of being alive. It follows that there’s no “meaning” to life to be found outside of life itself - the point of living is to be (wholly, fully) alive. That’s it.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, then, life is meaningless. There’s no referent outside of life that can be appealed to in order to make it any more than what it already is. But philosophy can only operate on the conceptual level. To me meaning isn’t a conceptual thing, it’s an experiential one: the more fully we can inhabit this existence of ours, the more meaningful it is. 

It sounds strange for a spiritually-oriented person to call life meaningless: isn’t the existence of a layer above, beneath and beyond the physical one the thing that gives the world of atoms its dignity and meaning? Isn’t this the referent that stands outside the world of the senses, the thing you can appeal to and say ‘The world makes sense because it’s contained within this’? 

Well, yes and no. This point of view really only pushes things back a step. You believe that there’s a dimension beyond what we can touch, see and taste that gives the world more richness and vibrancy? In other words you want your life to be as rich and vibrant as possible, because the point of life is to live. You believe that you’re a spiritual entity, and the purpose of your life is to sink deeper and deeper into the truth of that? The result of that is a more complete, authentic, joyful existence - so the point of life is to live. You believe that one day you’ll be united with God in the afterlife? What are you going to do there? Be happy with God - so the point of life is to live. 

‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’

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So it’s no wonder my favourite comedy is completely pointless. Joy is completely pointless too; so is life. There’s another three-part structure going on here: (1) The baby can laugh at something as simple as the silly face you’re making, because it’s smart that way. (2) The adult, busy navigating the world through an intricate web of interlocking conceptual frameworks, isn’t so easily amused (unless they’re taking selfies or really high). (3) So the comedian, like the Zen master, uses the intelligence of the mind to defeat the mind, expertly leading you through a maze of carefully crafted nonsense until you’re laughing helplessly at the absurdity of the world again.

No matter what your belief system, no matter what conceptual framework you live your life by, no matter what your values, the point of life is just to live. And there’s no better way of doing that than throwing your head back and laughing at something completely stupid.

1. I thoroughly recommend Julian Gough’s excellent essay on tragedy vs. comedy now and then (now being over the last few centuries and then being in ancient Greece).