Enough. Aeschylus, you’re fired!
Thus far 2020 has been a roster of tragedy. The COVID-19 pandemic and its 150,000-plus American deaths. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd at the hands of white vigilantes and police. (The list of carnage goes on.) A plummeting GDP (the steepest three-month dip on record), a roller coaster Dow (with a loss of 2,997 points—the greatest one-day drop since 1987), and an ever-widening gulf of income disparity.
Not to mention the mind-numbing sideshows: the murder hornets, the Twitter hack, and, wait, wasn’t there an impeachment acquittal back in February? On top of it all, no Broadway, no movie theaters, no summer camp, no restaurants. And it’s only August. Fuck.
The ambient, existential dread is enough to make any sane adult pull the covers over their head and wait it out till 2021. Amid the angst about infection, acid-tipped political rhetoric, fears of the future, and even displaced routines, it can be hard to see the light. And yet, like single-celled organisms—those harbingers of life that coalesce in the primordial sludge—humor has a way of poking its head out from the morass.
How to find comedy, though, when we’re mired in the tragic—an absurd abundance of it? When horrors confront us on our newsfeeds? When we don our masks to pick up milk around the corner? When I can’t even embrace my mom or dad for fear of dooming them? (Okay, I admit it. Once or twice I’ve thrown a towel over each of them for a hug.)
It’s called gallows humor for a reason. The abysmal begs for a laugh. There is something about a horrendous situation that can be mitigated by laughing at it. Historically, many of the greatest comedians have been depressed. Or repressed. Or oppressed. Or all three.
Since March, pandemic-spawned humor has already traced its own cultural trajectory. The first month or so, we awoke each day shell-shocked at all that was happening—and all that was not. And many of us put up new comic shields to navigate this new quarantine life. We devoured and shared COVID-related videos and memes, cloaked in irony, and posted them on social media, texted them, emailed them. (I’m sorry to report that the COVID-19 weight-gain meme turned out not to be a joke.) As the world locked down, some of our usual go-tos for laughs—familiar late-night talk show hosts—began broadcasting from unfamiliar settings: their homes. A socially distanced Saturday Night Live returned—with Brad Pitt as Dr. Anthony Fauci—around the same time that Zoom bloopers became A Thing.
These mediums and formats were part oxygen, part soma. And yet once they became passé or played out, we began distracting ourselves with other ones. Like TikTok videos, from the political (Hi, Sarah Cooper!) to the myriad dancing moms and grandmas who became internet famous. And of course there was Twitter. Recently I was flatteringly deemed the winner “of the internet” after partaking in a joke challenge that was wending its way around social media. The general idea was to complete the sentence “I have a joke but…” My version, “i have an intern joke and it… nevermind,” caught on for a nanosecond or two. (If you don’t get the joke, God bless you!)
Throughout the spring and summer, millions of virus shut-ins (myself included) returned to old standbys, rewatching films and series we knew would bring some light, some relief. (I was partial to Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the always-reliable Curb. I watched Crazy Rich Asians—for the fourth and fifth times.) Others discovered classics, or recent hits, that they’d missed; on my syllabus were Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, and—at long last—Kate Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in the screen adaptation of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Stage Door.