You could call what is going on in this country right now is a comedy of errors.  You might laugh but it will only be an aerobic event, for in the end you will need to cry for there is nothing humorous in the content. I have seen a lot of political comedy on the internet and yes for a while I laughed and allowed the aerobic relief to accelerate my anger.   But this writer is past that because it is clear what I need and the country needs is more than comic relief.  Comedy is for cartoons and life is not a cartoon unless you buy into certain insulated views of the world.  Even if you do, life will escape the limits of comedy and meme and eventually set you straight with the lessons of tragedy. That is how it works

But humor is different. Oppressed people who fight oppression for generations shift from comedy to humor at some early stage of pain and that humor, which is often a form of blade sharp irony, skillfully carves breathing space inside the bodies of the multi-generation resistors of oppression.  The irony allows those peoples to survive, and in private moments chuckle a bit.  As far back as ancient Egypt healers referred to humours as chemical systems regulating human behavior. Humor and humanity are cousins in their etiology. New immigrants will often develop a brilliant communications system of inside jokes that work only when you can grasp the pain of their existence at least in the outlines.  In this writer’s career whenever I had the honor of occasionally working in the Indian Nations, a meeting often opened with gifts, the narrative irony of the day, and then often a prayer. Only after the prayer and acknowdgement of ancestors might we get down to the business of the day.  The brand of laughter was often the chuckle and rarely if ever the explosive belly laugh. Oppression teaches a people to lower their sound profile until the right moment. Humor heals community because the content softens the edges of any conflict by humanizing both the object of the humor and the narrator.  Oppressed people don’t have people to waste, Humor creates space for everyone to breathe out a chuckle.   Our current President has modeled the lowest form of divisive comedy  which is very often blades out and blood on the sidewalk.

Modest Proposal for Good

You might not have noticed, but we are becoming an oppressed people. We are not quite all the way down the path, but at this rate we will get there soon enough.  Comedy is a cheap, dangerous laugh as the stakes get higher.  We can’t afford more blood on the sidewalks. Comedy can be a paved road to cruelty and cruelty the freeway to violence. In times of long term oppression the resistor who survives with health and soul learns humanitarian humor which shows respect for the object of the narrative, the listener and the narrator.  That respect has to be drilled down to the level of reverence for your fellow human beings.  That would be good.  Chuckle on.