masque12

I've always been a junky for the funny. As a kid growing up, I loved the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Warner Bros. cartoons, anything I could get my hands on. Until I was about 11, the only music I listened to, hell, the only music I owned was "Weird" Al Yankovic albums.

I started watching Comedy Central constantly as soon as it became available to me when I was 12 years old. There was a great show on the channel at that time called Short Attention Span Theater, hosted by Jon Stewart. It was an hour long show that featured clips of lots and lots of standup material, along with interviews with comedians promoting albums, movies, tv shows and the like. It was kind of a predecessor to the Daily Show, and like the Daily Show, was at its best when Jon Stewart hosted it. I watched it every single day when I came home from school. My favorite comics were always the ones who talked about real stuff that would normally be scary, but they made it hilarious. I got my first exposure to George Carlin there, Bill Mahar, Lewis Black, Dennis Miller, Sam Kinison, and Will Durst. They were all fun, and I learned a lot from them. When they would talk about something I didn't know about, I would look it up.

Then one day, sometime in 91 or 92, I flipped on the television when I got home from school, and there was a guy standing there, dressed all in black, doing his act:
"If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, then go home and burn all your records, all your tapes, and all your CDs because every one of those artists who have made brilliant music and enhanced your lives? RrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrEAL high on drugs. The Beatles were so high they let Ringo sing a few songs."

I didn't even sit down on the couch. I stood there, dumbfounded. Who the fuck was this guy? When that clip was over, they showed another one:
"A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a cross? It's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant."

And another one:
"Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like...every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make."

And then, after the various clips, they went to the interview portion of the show, and there Bill Hicks was. He was there promoting his new album Relentless. I was hooked. When I actually found a copy of his albums a while later, it was even better, because he had all kinds of stuff that I never would have seen on Comedy Central, and we didn't have HBO or anything.

After Bill Hicks, I found out about Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor (his standup, anyway, I already knew who he was from Superman 3), and later Chris Rock, along with a whole new level of stand up comedians who were hilarious, but also had important stuff to say. Like Bill, I'm a reader, but my exposure to those comics got me interested in all kinds of different topics I'm still into today, but more importantly, and especially because of Bill Hicks, I learned to question everything anyone in authority told me, because they were probably full of shit.

Fast forward a few years, I hear about the Church of the SubGenius from a friend, check out the Book of the SubGenius from the library (yes, they had a copy, even in the Woodlands) and loved it. I even sent in my $30. Through a blurb on the back of the Book of the SubGenius, I found the name Robert Anton Wilson and read Illuminatus. A few years after reading it, (at this point I had already started down my magical path) I found out about Wilson's more esoteric writings, along with the fact that the Discordian Society was real. Around this time I was also reading about chaos magic, and while reading the Principia Discordia in conjunction with chaos magic writings talking about banishing with laughter, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I viscerally "got" the idea of the sacredness of humor, and that I was pretty much already devoted to that concept. In my early magical/pagan religious explorations, I always found myself drawn to various trickster type gods, Loki, Hermes, Coyote, Eris (in her Discordian Society conception), JR "Bob" Dobbs of course, and other ones I read stories about, like Anansi, and in particular started to make associations between other things I grew up with. Hell, the Warner Bros. cartoons are damn near a pantheon of tricksters unto themselves, and a lot of those cartoons had similarities to the trickster stories. When I read Edith Hamilton's book, Mythology, in 6th grade, my favorite section was the prose retelling of the Iliad, especially the antics of Odysseus, who has trickster aspects of his own. Bill Hicks, tragically dead for years by now, was already a god in my mind in everything but name, and I basically realized that while I wouldn't say I worshipped anything in particular, I was fairly well devoted to the concept of the Sacred Jester in all hir forms. Most of my methods of taking in new ideas and philosophies began with humor, as did many of the coping mechanisms I had developed.

More than just that, I started to realize how much power comedy and laughter contained. When finding out about scary shite, either new diseases, or political idiocies, or new and wonderful ways that the world was doomed, if it was filtered through the shield of comedy, the fear and frustration that I'd normally be wracked with worrying over those things would be gone, and while I'd still find out about the reality of the situation, its power over me was gone, and I was free to actually figure out what I thought about those things, rather than just having a gut level fear reaction.

Also, comedy could be used as a sword to destroy by ridiculing those things or people that were getting too powerful and influential and were trying to manipulate the masses into doing things by playing on their fears and desires. A Jester can get in there and turn them into an object of derision, usually by holding up a mirror, or simply poking holes in their manipulative scenarios.

This essay was inspired by a conversation I was having with a friend earlier in the evening. We were having a conversation about politics, particularly the ease with which people can be manipulated into acting against their own self-interest, and the conversation drifted over to parallels between the Bush administration and the Nazi regime. I then pointed out that unlike the Nazis, the Bush administration is failing in so many of its more fascist goals because a.) there are still enough mechanisms of democratic government that they haven't been able to seize absolute control yet, and b.) there are so many different sources of information out there that they simply don't have the kind of lock on propaganda that the Nazis enjoyed. More importantly, in my opinion, are the few mainstream sources that DO embody the role of the Sacred Jester, because you can have all the blogs, public radio, and cable access you want, but all of those have limited audiences, especially in comparison to the mainstream outlets. You can print up, forward, or tell people about the stuff you learn in those venues, and you might even influence some of them, (most likely if they leaned your way politically already), but the vast majority of people aren't going to listen, simply because they find you boring.

However, if you take someone like Letterman, Leno, a show like Saturday Night Live, and, most important in my book, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, those guys are going to be using a lot of the same info you get off of your public radio and your internets, but they're going to make it funny, and MILLIONS of people are going to absorb that info. It's like stealth information. It is my opinion that the seeming decline of the fortunes of the current administration is credited to the wider perspectives offered in "new" or "alternate" media sources, but is in large part due to the Sacred Jesters calling the bigwigs on their bullshit at every turn. As with me growing up, people are going to watch, laugh, and then a huge number of them are going to think about what was in the joke, and do something about. To borrow from Illuminatus, the powers that be create fnords in the media they control, causing you to regard everything with fear and suspicion. The Sacred Jesters give you the laughter that you can use to see through the fnords and resist their manipulations, and think for yourself.

One of the best examples I can think of for this "Comedy as Sword" concept, while also illustrating the power of alternate media, is the speech Stephen Colbert gave at the 2006 White House Press Correspondents' Dinner. With George W. Bush seated maybe not even as much as 10 feet away, Colbert proceeded to rip apart Bush, his policies, his personal quirks, his lack of any meaningful capacity for rational thought, and also managed to berate the media for its utter abandonment of journalistic integrity and willingness to march lockstep with the president while he drove the country over a cliff. Not only was Bush sitting right there, but the audience was full of ALL of the various people he was taking shots at. Needless to say, while the dinner was broadcast live on CSPAN and MSNBC, his speech received minimal coverage in the press the following day, and I myself remember seeing some rather lengthy coverage of the event on local Houston news, wherein they devoted several minutes to the routine preceding Colbert, which involved Bush and a Bush impersonator cracking jokes, but didn't mention Colbert once. The few mentions he did get said something to the effect that he bombed at the dinner.

Well, Colbert was speaking at the dinner, but he certainly wasn't speaking to the attendees, he was speaking to America. In spite of its lack of coverage in the mainstream press, Colbert's performance EXPLODED on the internet, and generated so much buzz through individuals firing it back and forth that a few days later, the mainstream press was forced to actually cover it. His performance, and the word of email distribution of it, actually got the mainstream media to talk substantially about the very things that Colbert was criticizing it for in his speech. And, of course, it was also hilarious.

As reality and mythology both show, the Sacred Jesters of the world cause all kinds of trouble, but that trouble usually results in positive change in the long run. Laughter is their sword and shield in their war against the forces of Greyface, and it can be yours, as well.