Pain

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Transcript:

I started doing stand-up when I was in dental school.  A classmate of mine stopped me in the hallway and asked me once if I thought comedy comes from pain.

That’s a common question: are comedians troubled people.  It’s this weird irony - the saddest people can be the funniest.  Tears of a clown when there’s no one around.  It makes perfect sense why this is the case once you understand the mechanics of comedy and joke writing, but it does seem odd on the surface.

I didn’t have the confidence to answer my friend at the time, because the answer was yes, but the other thing about comedians is we don’t like admitting that we’re sad.  That’s why we get on stage and act happy.  We’re trying to get past the sadness.  We don’t like it.  People don’t react well when we show the sadness, that’s why we save the tears for when there’s no one around.  Show ‘em the happy face, then maybe the sadness will go away.

Even when we do show sadness on stage, we tend to immediately flip it into a joke.  We don’t end on a sad note.  By definition, that’s not pure comedy.  If you go back to Greek tragedy vs Greek comedy - tragedy has a sad ending, comedy has a happy ending.  That’s the definitional difference between the two, how the stories or plays are structured.  It’s no different with jokes.

So I said something to my classmate like, “Yea, that’s definitely a common theme for comedians to have some kind of pain they struggle within their lives that helps motivate them toward comedy.”  But I didn’t open up about my personal motivations for getting into comedy.  I didn’t have the confidence for that level of honesty with an acquaintance off stage.

There’s some advice in writing stand-up, I don’t remember where I picked this up, but it’s in my little Comedy Advice notes that I reference when I’m writing: “No one wants to hear about what you like.  Comedy is PAIN.  Struggle.  Don’t ask: “What’s funny to me?”  Ask yourself: “What bothers me?  What frustrates me?  What do I wish I could change?  What can I simply not stand?”  Then, ya stand up, talk about it.  That’s the process.  That’s interesting to people.

Comedy is this wonderful transmutation of pain into joy.  It’s a magic trick that relies on slight shifts in perspective.  Well-timed flips in how you look at something, the angle of approach.

It’s interesting, because when you study the physiology of pain perception, you realize how much of it is in our subjective control.  Pain signals are ultimately “felt” and regulated in the cortex of our brain.  The cortex is the most recently evolved and developed region of our brain.  We’re pretty sure it’s responsible for why we’re conscious as humans.  For us, large aspects of pain are a subjective experience.  We can manipulate it consciously.  That’s how you can get things like Buddhist monks dousing themselves in gasoline and burning themselves alive without flinching.  There is a very literal mind over matter aspect to pain.  Your brain doesn’t have to accept that pain inputs must be interpreted as painful.  Comedy plays in that same space; our modulation of our pain experience via input from the cortical layer of our brain.

I listened to this excellent audiobook; it’s called WonderWorks by Angus Fletcher.  Dr. Fletcher, he’s a professor of Story Science at The Ohio State University.  He’s working on something called Project Narrative.  I’ll put links to that in the video description.  It’s very interesting stuff.  He wrote this proof about how computers can’t think narratively and how that puts a hard cap on the artificial intelligence capabilities of robots.  Humans, we think in narrative and story because of how the animal neuron - neurons, the cellular units of our nervous system - those function differently on a hardware level than computer hardware does - leads to fundamental differences with far-reaching consequences.

Ya know, everybody worries about robots taking over the world; I always thought that was silly because robots don’t have an underlying motivation structure - they don’t have a hypothalamus in their brain telling them to seek out food and sex the way humans do.  The hypothalamus, that’s the source of our fundamental motivations.  Computers don’t have that.  You have to tell a computer what to do.  But anyway, Dr. Fletcher, very interesting discussion of story science and how it relates to artificial intelligence.  Project Narrative.  Super interesting stuff if you’re into computer science, AI, biology, psychology, neurology, literature - all those fun things.

But Dr. Fletcher, he wrote this book, WonderWorks.  It’s all about the psychological and emotional effects of literature.  It’s such a refreshing way to approach stories.

If you didn’t like literary analysis in school - where you try to pick the themes out of a story - what was the author trying to say here?  What were the logical stances being put forward by this work of art?  Fletcher doesn’t approach stories that way.

He’s interested in the emotional effects of stories.  And he ties those emotional effects in with what is happening inside the human mind on the neurological level.  What areas of the brain are being activated when we read or hear certain stories; what effect does that have on us, emotionally.

Chapter 23 of WonderWorks is an interesting one, the whole book is interesting, but this chapter is relevant to a discussion of pain and comedy.

The Chapter is called: Unfreeze Your Heart: Alison Bechdel, Euripides, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and the Invention of the Clinical Joy

Here, Dr. Fletcher talks about tragicomedy.  This is a mash up of the genres of tragedy and comedy.  It doesn’t follow the tradition in Greek tragedy or Greek comedy exclusively.  It plays with elements of both.  This has become very popular in television in the last 15 years or so.  The term Dramedy gets thrown around a lot.  You get these serious shows with bits of comedy and absurdism thrown in.  This genre has been around for a long time, but it’s become much more popular than it used to be.  Didn’t used to be as relatable for audiences.  It’s a bit of an acquired taste.  It’s more complicated in some ways.

Dr. Fletcher traces the origins of tragicomedy to the Greek playwright Euripides.  Then he talks about how Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot wrote plays after WWII that had strong tragicomic elements.  He discusses Alison Bechdel’s work - she’s a cartoonist who works with darker themes for comic effect.

And Dr. Fletcher points out how tragicomedy can actually help people work through PTSD.  There are different subtypes of PTSD.  If you experience something horrific, it can cause a very strong, emotionally hyperactive response when you recall that memory, or you can react with numbness.  You can go sort of emotionally dead inside.

That emotional deadening is regulated by our frontal cortex; again, that’s the topmost layer of our brain, the logical part of our brain, the part of our brain that evolved most recently.  The frontal cortex basically tells our limbic areas of the brain - those are our underlying emotional brain areas - the frontal cortex tells those areas to shut down if something is too painful.  It just says, play dead.  This hurts too much.  Pretend like nothing happened.  Go numb.

So you get this sort of internal dissociation from yourself.

And there are two types of dissociation:

1. Depersonalization- our thoughts and feelings feel unreal, like ghosts inside our mind.  

2. Derealization - it’s the outside world that seems not genuine - like a dream we’re drifting through

So, Greek tragedy, Dr. Fletcher discusses tragedy as a literary form that helped people deal with the first type of PTSD.  When you watch a tragic play together with others, the audience is exposed to trauma in an otherwise safe environment - potentially surrounded by friends and family.  It’s a form of exposure therapy to try to sort out the traumatic event.

Then Euripides sort of flips this on its head a bit with his tragicomedies.

With tragedy, we feel connected to everyone around us; there’s this sort of shared social support in experiencing the play and the trauma to the characters in the play together.

Tragicomedy is a little weirder.  It actually heightens our self-awareness.  It makes us look inward and assess our own feelings more.  We don’t get an obvious answer from the play itself - it makes us assess whether the behavior is funny or tragic - is it hilarious or sad?  It’s ambiguous.  We’re unsure.  We pause and think more about what we’re seeing.

The psychological, neural effect in our brain is that this helps alleviate the numbness of type two PTSD because it helps us relax our emotional brake.  The frontal cortex was telling the limbic system to shut down.  Tragicomedy invites us to reevaluate our feelings in this weird situation.  It opens us up to feeling something again in this subtle, bizarre way.

“What am I feeling and why?”

So, unlike a classic tragedy that triggers raw emotion in our limbic system, Euripides' tragicomedy inspires meta feeling in our frontal cortex.  Instead of our frontal cortex telling our emotions not to exist, our frontal cortex starts looking at the emotions and asking why we have them.

And, if the tragicomedy is funny enough and prompts us to not only evaluate our complex feelings more in-depth but actually laugh as well, that loosens up our emotions and engages us with them even more.  We are able to be less emotionally numb.

One of the works discussed in the chapter is Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot.  I haven’t read it yet - I have it on my nightstand to read but haven’t gotten to it yet.  I’ve read a bit about it.  It seems a little on the nose, but Waiting for Godot, Waiting for God.  God never shows up.  There’s no deus ex machina at the end of the play that results in a happy ending.  So you’re left with this weird limbo situation.  Nothing too bad is happening.  Nothing too good is happening.  There’s a barren tree in photos I’ve seen of the play - that’s pretty easily seen as a substitute for the tree in the Garden of Eden - why can’t we return to paradise.  Life is so darn hard?  Where’s our happy ending? We’re just stuck waiting around absurdly in modern times post death of God and all that schtuff.  Can we do anything about this condition or do we just have to sit and wait?  Is there an alternative to just waiting around for some miracle to come rescue us from our existential meandering?

One of the miracles of comedy is that you can get redemption for suffering, small and large, by making something funny with it. When you’re ready, when you’ve processed something and moved through it to some extent, then you can try to write something funny about your mistakes, setbacks, or even tragedies.

I think the best comedy is NOT escapism.  It’s not a running away from.  It’s a way of facing and processing real pain.  It helps you move forward.  It is a step back toward joy.

“What you most want to find will be found where you least want to look.  The brightest lights are in the darkest places.”

There’s this band I like, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats - how’s that for a band name?  “I’m Nathaniel Rateliff and these are the Night Sweats.”  “Couldn’t we be the cool guys?  Nathaniel Rateliff and the Cool Fellas?  The Hip Bros?”  “Nah, you’re the Night Sweats, deal with it.”  Anyway, they have this song Say it Louder, one a’ the lyrics is, “They say sometimes what you need is exactly what you fear.”  You gotta go into the dark, scary place before you can run outta there laughing like a crazy maniac.

The definition of Greek tragedy is that it has an unhappy ending.  Greek comedy has a happy ending.  You can actually look at the Biblical story of Jesus this way.  It doesn’t matter if you believe in Christianity; the story structure of Jesus suffering and then coming back - it’s the ultimate transformation story.  The story of Jesus is supposed to be completely unbelievable and ridiculous - it's not supposed to make sense to go into your own death and then come out of it - that’s supposed to be a shock/surprise that a human being could do such a thing.

Jokes have a similar structure.  Jokes are little mini-miracles.  They lead you into this dark or painful corner, and then flip the script.  Something better rises out of the ashes.  That’s very appealing to our brains.

Part of the reason the Jesus story is so popular.  What’s darker than death itself?  What’s a better comeback story?  We love a comeback story.  We can hardly believe it when some poor shlub carpenter ends up being the son of god.  Sounds like a joke.  

“This guy, he’s a carpenter; he’s goin’ around tellin’ people he’s the Son a’ God, jus’ cuz he knows the Torah better than everyone?  Just cuz he feeds people with extra fish?  Just cuz he can walk on water?  Just cuz he can heal the blind?  Who does this wacko think he is?  I heard he’s friends with tax collectors!  What a bum!”  But we like that story.

It’s weird and ridiculous and unexpected and horrible, yet ultimately hopeful.  It’s a very extreme life for someone to live - but we want that kind of life.  We want to be the nameless carpenter who figures out how to defy gravity and overcome death.  Those are the kind of whacked-out aspirations we have as human beings.  Because life is painful, we get reminded of that all the time.  Wouldn’t it be cool if we could flip all that awful dark pain into something redeeming and uplifting?  So convert to Chrisianity!  No, I’m kidding.  Please don’t do that.  I’m only discussing the Jesus story as a work of literature.  What is the psychological impact of that story…This is not an evangelical video, I promise.

But yea, jokes are little miniature versions of the resurrection story of Jesus.  That’s why comedy comes from pain.  How ‘bout that?