I have to admit that I needed some advice on how to address this weighty issue most effectively – that the best way to get across a serious message is with a light touch; a humourous touch.
Unlike my esteemed team-mate, I am not a comedian. I’m a writer. And I’m a serious writer, but not in the most common interpretation of the word. I’m not literary, grave or overly earnest in my writing – I write about girl spies, flaky women, and boys who turns into dogs – but I do take my writing very seriously. It’s my job, my chosen career, and I deal with serious issues: the breakdown of families and marriages, the loss of hope, of love, even of children. Yet I still believe that the most important part of my job is to entertain, and it is by entertaining, with laughter and humorous characters, that I manage, I hope, to discuss these other issues which form the heart of each story.
So to take a sombre and literary route to this discussion, I decided to look up the dictionary definitions of the words “serious” and “comedy”. I turned first to the Cambridge Dictionary, and looked up “serious.” The first definition given there was ... bad. The second definition of “serious” was ... not joking. While I was pondering the rather impoverished vocabulary used in a dictionary from what is arguably – well, not arguably, it just IS – the finest university in the world, my eye was drawn instead to the little advert that appeared twice around the definition, top and bottom.
The advert was this: TRICK OF A TINY BELLY! Cut down a bit of your belly every day by using this 1 weird tip. Next to this was a diagram of a woman lying on her side on the floor, doing some peculiar side lift. When she was up on her elbow, she was plump, when she was flat on the floor she was thin. Amazing.
And from this I deduced three things:
1 – how easy it is to be distracted from a serious agenda by something lighter, like that woman up on her elbow.
2 – that the students of Cambridge University, of whom I was one many years ago, will in the future probably be very dim, but extremely toned ....
And 3 – that I really must lie on my side on the floor more often.
Anyway, I gave up on the Cambridge dictionary and turned to another, where “Serious” meant “requiring deep thought or application”. And I thought – yes, so for those not given to deep thought or application, which is, after all, most of us, then comedy is the perfect conduit for feeding us with serious information.
And what is comedy, according to the dictionary? It is: a piece of drama of light and humorous character in which the central motif is triumph over adversity. And what could be more serious than triumph over adversity? The origins of the word came about in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and lord knows they needed a bit of triumph over adversity then, what with Black Death and plagues, life expectancy of about 14 and a half, and a fashion statement being the wearing of a wimple.
Comedy came about, I’m sure, because of the need to make sense of, to deal with the weightiest and darkest of situations – sickness, loss, pestilence, death, war. And isn’t it true that comedians themselves often developed the art of being funny in order to survive the most serious of personal situations: bullying, being ostracised, even massive and manic depression. Some of the greatest comedians of all time, present company excepted, have used humour to exorcise the demons of their dark and serious minds – John Cleese, Tony Hancock, Robin Williams to name but a few.
They worked out that it’s much harder to be angry, to victimise someone, to beat them up, even to kill someone if they’re making you laugh. My teenage daughter worked this out for herself when she was still very small. Now she’s 13 she’s got a whole stand-up routine to divert me when the need arises, and I find it really hard to seriously consider murdering her ...
Building on that, I’d like to pick up on a suggestion made by comedian Sanjeev Baskhar in a recent episode of the Monty Python series. He pointed out how good comedy crosses age and religious and cultural barriers like nothing else on earth. His idea was this: to drop Mpegs of Monty Python’s fish dance scene into war zones, because it would be so much harder to want to kill someone when you’re watching a famous man in silly shorts being slapped with a snapper. Or the more likely image these days of a famous man in silly shorts being photographed with a celebrity wannabe stripper, which is not being slapped with a snapper, but being snapped with a slapper.
In fact, I like the idea so much that I’ve got an even bigger suggestion to make. Why stop at Mpegs and videos? Now that the Comedy Festival’s all over, we’ve got hoards of NZ comedians with nothing to do– why not drop them bodily into war zones to do a bit of a routine and take the attention away from people killing each other. Picture it, people - Dai Henwood in a little flak jacket; Jeremy Elwood in fatigues. They wouldn’t just record the news of the last Seven Days, they would BE the last seven days. And if we get a few of the manically depressed ones as well we’d be killing two birds with one stoned comedian ... the comedy antidote to Al Quaeda suicide bombers. We’ll call them ... the ComiKazes. And furthermore, by sending a dozen comedians into battle, we’ll be doubling the size of the New Zealand Armed Forces, so it’s an all-round winner. The triumph of humour over adversity.
I think it would work. Because there is no doubt in my serious writer’s mind that comedy is the best way to tackle the dark issues of the world. And if you take away only one thing, one useful tip, from this debate, then I hope it’s this:
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