Health and comedy

So I'm kind of working on, but mostly just thinking about working on, a play that has two characters—a man and a woman, formerly romantically involved, recently separated—and that concerns the two characters' careers as much as it concerns their failed relationship. They're both comedians, and during their dating years they lived together, and they had always stored all their material in a single filing cabinet, and since he's moving out they have to divide the contents of the cabinet, which puts them together one last time telling jokes. But then they encounter some conflict when they can't always determine to whom certain jokes properly belong. So he, for example, wrote a joke, but its humor and efficacy hinge on something she told him her mother said, so she comes to contest his total ownership of the joke. But if they divide the jokes further, into their constituent parts, they're just not funny anymore. And she may not even be funny to begin with, or at least, according to him, she's not always funny.

                                                                        TONYA

                                    When am I not funny?

                                                                        ROB

                                    I'll tell you when.

                                                            (rummages through papers)

                                    This is yours.

                                                            (reading)

                                    "Wouldn't it be great if you could kill yourself … but just for a few days? Carry your consciousness into nothingness and just, you know, sit there for a while?" You know why that joke doesn't work, Schopenhauer?

                                                                        TONYA

                                    Why, Gallagher?

                                                                        ROB

                                    Well, first of all it's grim as fuck. But its next problem is logic. How do you sit in nothingness? What do you sit on?

Ultimately my goal is to have the play turn from a comedy into a tragedy (because they kill all their jokes), but that's an insane goal to have for (at least) two reasons:  1. I'd have to come up with a bunch of jokes and also interesting ways to destroy them, and 2. No one believes in the possibility of tragic theatre anymore. Aron is always making really funny jokes, so maybe the first problem can be resolved by tape-recording him. When they first put up these traffic signs in Athens that say, "NO CRUISING ZONE," Aron looked at one and said, "Sorry, Tom." That's just one example of literally billions.

I love comedy, which isn't, unfortunately, the same as being good at it, although I do believe that the ability to appreciate good comedy contributes in a major way to the quality an individual's character, which might at this point sound like bragging. It might just be subjective preference, but I doubt it:  probably 95% of Dane Cook fans are bad people, and probably 95% of Liz Feldman fans are good people. For Louis CK it's probably a 50-50 spread, because almost all of his jokes wear the face of Janus. Anyway, I love comedy so much that I wish I could major in comedy in college—but I guess majoring in philosophy (I'm switching back, again, from women's studies) is sort of like majoring in comedy, insofar as it's laughable that a 20-something year old would ever think she's in the position to address a question like, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?"

Anyway, I’m talking about comedy because I think my health depends on it. My emotions have been all over the place lately, and I have been behaving self-destructively (letting myself become dehydrated) and entertaining emotions that are ridiculous (I was incensed to learn that Kate Hudson, who is neither talented nor attractive, and Gael Garcia Bernal, who would be my husband if Aron weren't, will be playing love interests in a movie called A Little Bit of Heaven, so my anger is actually jealousy over Kate Huson's fictional character's romantic involvement with Gael Garcia Bernal's fictional character—she has cancer, and he's a sexy doctor). I've been reading Are You My Mother? (after that I'll read Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics for a third time this week), and Bechdel's book is so fantastic that I know I'll be slightly depressed when it's over. The memoir calls itself "a comic drama," but I think it's more drama than comedy; if it were more comedy than drama, I wouldn't be sad for it to end. And that's one of the many things that makes good comedy so great:  it's nothing to get upset about.

Here's another thing that's so great about comedy:  "You are a really good friend, and you threw a really great abortion." That's a line from the new HBO series "Girls," and in context and with Lena Dunham's delivery, it's a really nice joke, and the great thing about comedy that it illustrates is that comedy has no limits. Sarah Silverman has a hilarious rape joke. So anything that might feel unbearable might, if you can make a good joke about it, actually not be. Maybe art generally has this ability, but I privilege comedy. I always have to look up how to spell privilege. For some reason I always want to put a "d" in it. That's what he said.