What I'm aiming at I'm not entirely certain. Morbidity is in the air, but the interest for me is this thing known as comedy (relative to the former), its lifeblood so often, if not exclusively, supplied and nourished by death and despair. I am not so pompous as to suppose that I can deliver a treatise on the subject of Comedy, about which even the casual observer of a certain age (mine) has probably absorbed the following via the admonitions of performers like Carson and Leno: once you try to analyze it or propose a formulaic guide to getting laughs or defining it, you're at sea, have become un-funny and are with no illuminating results to show for your efforts. Actually, I only agree superficially with that view. Perhaps Carson and others didn't wish to divulge any trade secrets. There are, after all, simple physiological and psychological conditions, which, if in place when a joke is delivered, a hearty guffaw will come into the world, i.e. one will have "made a baby." Surprise is a key element. Timing too, of course, is a huge factor. The juxtaposition of incongruous elements is also well known. Surely also, there is that intangible, or rather many intangible entities that are inextricable from the personhood of the joker as well as the "joke-ee", as it were (we're all familiar with the stony silence of a culturally alien audience or the perpetually clogged aisles of a theatre whose ticket holders, happily predisposed, keep rolling in them). What makes a line delivered by a Jackie Gleason so howlingly hilarious, while the product of a Joyce Randolph's delivery of the same, a mere titter? Is it a question of "personality?" Or perhaps it's an expectation of the joy of watching Gleason's Kramden (that particular creation depicting a unique human soul) suffering or having his swollen ego punctured with an imagined but unmistakable sound that's mimetically an auditory "dead ringer" for that of dignity-shattering flatulence?
During my lost youth and days as an aimless undergraduate, there was one class I rarely cut and one book for it that I actually attempted to and may have indeed completed reading. The English professor and taskmaster involved was a young and swarthy Southerner who did not suffer fools in his classroom, and fear of punishment was one of the last motives still operative within my brain's fog enshrouded value system. The title of one of this assigned book's chapters was, I believe,"The Broken Circle" and a subtitle was something to the effect of "The Narrow Escape Through Comedy" (a pause here, as I now utilize the magic carpet ride known as "googling" to hopefully offer accurate and exact information to you, dear reader, as I am not so proud as to fancy my brittle memory adequate enough for transmitting the facts I am trying to share). I do recall writing a more than acceptable essay about the chapter, as a genuine interest in the subject (quite apart from the spur of the professor's whip cracking) had already germinated back then.
Ahem…yes, I have just returned from another part of the galaxy of cyberspace and can now report the title of the book as "The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape Into Faith" and its author as Nathan Scott, Jr. Well, that advances things very little. Am still left with some faded forty year old memories, but am sure that their collective upshot was this: comedy provides the vehicle to get us out of psychic jams. Like some sort of four wheel drive with a turbo charged engine, comedy allows the muck and mire of life's quandaries and gloom to be shaken off as traction is achieved and our destination (a kinship with the divine?) is perceived as within sight. One passage I remember, referenced Kazantzakis' "Zorba The Greek" and it told of the character's monumental plan to bring timber or some valuable natural resource down (or was it up?) a mountain by way of a complex Rube Goldberg-like seriers of pulleys and wooden poles and numerous other devices and contrivances. At a critical moment, perhaps the maiden attempt to put the system in play, the entire project literally collapses and dreams as well as materiel come tumbling down from the heights. Zorba's friend, the rational young Englishman and others, all predictably wince and lament the colossal failure. Zorba sees it differently. He commences a long sustained outburst of delirious laughter and seems to derive new energy from the fiasco. "Live and Laugh At It All" is the final lyric of "Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherries" and seems to me, to encapsulate Zorba's world view or that of any of life's truly "successful" persons, i.e. great comedians: those who continually achieve a kind of transfiguration of their material if not of themselves. That is, they seem to convert nearly everything, however bitter and dire the circumstances, into a glowing reality with a laughing, sunshiny lightness and golden quality. I am not speaking of a sugar coated explication that tries to drown out the awful reality of a situation with a sort of distracting din of stirring tunes or saccharin jingles of encouragement (e.g. Gleason's Kramden's dutiful and later hilarious recitation: "Pins and needles/Needles and pins/A happy man is a man who grins!"). No, this is a luminous something, maybe the irrepressible human spirit incarnate. Whatever it is, it's a very real phenomenon, its messengers majestic in their tattered rags. The clown, the vagabond, Basehart's "Il Matto" in "La Strada", Chaplin's tramp, the phrase "A fool for Christ": all seem to speak to this relationship of the apparently silly, friendless and insignificant to the cosmically wondrous and overwhelming.
"I have gazed into the Abyss. And the Abyss has gazed into me. And neither of us liked what we saw." Yes, that's vintage Theodore (a redundancy perhaps: dear Brother T. was an "old soul" at conception, I'll bet, and his utterances were classics the instant they came out of his mouth). He's not merely whistling past the graveyard here alone. He has with him a full orchestra accompanied by the Brooklyn Dodgers' Sym-Phony Band, the Little Rascals' immortal International Silver String Submarine Band, and an army of kazooists and glockenspielists, all telling Death to go suck on a lemon.
Another thought about the scoring of points by the guys with the white hats: C.S. Lewis in his "Screwtape Letters" reminds us that the Devil doesn't have much of a sense of humor. In fact, the old Ultimate Reprobate simply can't abide any poking of fun, particularly at his expense. This severe case of pridefulness (Duh!! He IS Satan, remember?) causes him to climb (and scratch) the walls of his lair in howling agony when one mocks and belittles His Blackholeship. So the obvious ought to be encouraged. Tease the heaven out of or into Ol' Scratch. Take him down a peg with ridicule and knock off his haughty top hat with a well placed comedic snowball (this kind will have a chance) or rotten tomato. All good comedy, satire and intelligent vituperation accomplishes this. Theodore does not do it with a frontal assault, but he's a steady ally of more conventional clowns while donning his metaphorical and irrevocably dingy white hat (he "has seen too much" to own a pristine one and in actuality his performance costume was a black turtleneck sweater and his sole prop: a flashlight) while chipping away at El Diablo's severe and austere dismissiveness of humanity with his (Theodore's) malevolent histrionics and intimidating presence that is a brilliant imitation of The Evil One's message, usually punctuated with a delightfully disarming turn, like a luger that is pointed and shoots with a resulting unfurled banner hanging from the "rod's" barrel with the one word: "BANG!" One of his actual deflations of demonic balloons: "Upon my death my head is to be immediately severed from my body and is to be replaced with a bouquet of broccoli. It's the artist in me." This was topped by the surprisingly tender and plaintive "Dear God, if you exist please help me. And if you don't exist, please help me anyway!" How more deeply and succinctly has anyone besides Theodore expressed the whys and wherefores of religion?
Well, what to do and where to go? Friends don't necessarily flee, but worms assuredly wait, though cremation can, no doubt, pre-empt 'em. Then again: about friends, and relatives, and certainly nodding acquaintances and others of one's Gemeinschaft world, here are the cold hard facts as far as I can tell. I have noted them as I have grown older and there's clearly a pattern with my many older relatives and friends who have died or are dying. As their universes contract, there are fewer and fewer who enquire of them and their health. They're no longer "in with the in crowd." And I am guilty as well, with less frequent visits and easier and easier rationales to stay away. Even with Theodore, I learned of his passing a year or two after the fact and I felt a bit ashamed of myself after all the years of genuine joy and delight he had so generously given to me. This was especially so since I had had the pleasure to talk with and to meet him on two occasions, (though not unusually so, given his lifestyle in the '70s and '80s: he was in the Manhattan directory then listed simply as "Theodore"). I was just an ordinary fan, but there was nothing ordinary about the thirst for recognition and love that his gaze plus his courteous and reserved handshake communicated. Self-reflection, self-centeredness, contemplation, introspection, intelligence and outstanding comedic talent: Theodore had all of these in superabundance. If I've any of the above, they're just little droplets compared to his oceanic supply. But we both shared, I'm guessing, a recognition of the irrevocability of the hands we are all dealt (regardless of any possibly varying views about free will), the idea captured by his forever memorable: "I would rather be a contented pinworm than a tormented Brother Theodore, but unfortunately, I have no choice in the matter." But you did choose, my dear friend, to use your talents, whether God-given or not, to love your brothers (and sisters), by sharing your angst unstintingly and forever healingly.
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