You know, the usual.
I have a joke that I want to jot down for the next day’s column, but I am resisting (or should I say, I am #Resisting. A few months early). If I start writing, I’ll have to admit I’m awake, and then I’ll want to keep writing and probably tweeting, and then I’ll check the news, and then I will never get to sleep and I will be either grumpy or late to work (survey says: both!), which will lead to me not responding to emails or being a better person or building a community or figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing in this life.
And what is the benefit if I do write it down? The best thing that can happen: Everyone laughs. That’s the point, right? It’s a humor column on the internet in the days before nothing was ever funny again. When the jokes work, people like them and share them and it feels for a moment like all of the internet laughs. Positive internet attention is the best thing that can happen in this scenario.
The worst thing: No one laughs. Public scorn. Being canceled. And also lateness, not being a better person, eventual death, etc. The over-under isn’t great.
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I am aware that this is not the way anything is supposed to work. The job, the opportunity, the positive attention. It feels unearned, even though I am in my mid-thirties and it’s not like I haven’t been unsuccessfully writing things—some of them funny—for years. But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise. And that’s true and not true. Did I have a plan? No. Did it work out? Seems like it. It’s easy for me to see the blind luck at play and hard for me to see the parts of me that put in the work. On top of that, writing the column is fun, and as someone who has started many games of Monopoly and finished zero, I know that capitalism is not supposed to be fun.
Though I do have a constant hum of low-level anxiety about organizing my time, and producing a punchline, and keeping this gig, I still feel like I should be struggling more. Remember how Carrie Bradshaw got drunk at lunch every day and stayed out till four in the morning on dates, and wrote just one weekly column but was still on the side of a bus? I’m not on a bus and I write every day, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’ve put enough effort in to deserve this.
Deserving anything related to money is a fraught concept for me, particularly when it comes to art. If you’re pursuing some kind of artistic product—and I think of writing as art—then you’re doing what you love, and your labor is one of love. So, money is good, and money is necessary, and money is that thing that tells you that what you’re doing is not a fool’s errand. But the money is also an albatross, changing your relationship to the art. It’s like writing a random joke for a couple hundred people you’ve met throughout your life and then suddenly having thousands of people you don’t know respond. It is not bad, but it is hard to navigate. Who am I doing this for and do they want what I want?
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The Notes app is a blank slate that celebrities use to apologize publicly and which I use to shape the random asides in my brain into textual non sequiturs I hope to understand in the morning. On the night of the 2016 DNC, I write, “Michelle Obama is Usain Bolt–ing her way out of that White House,” referencing the intended effect of the First Lady’s powerful speech at the DNC hours earlier. You know the one. “I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves.” The one that I can’t even think about without automatically giving praise hands and letting out a low hum, church-style. The Declaration of Independence, remixed. That one.
I am lying awake filled with inspiration and a little bit of heartsickness and that good ole American low-level rage as I replay Mrs. Obama’s words, which convey both a fervent love for this country and a soul-shaking desire for it to be less terrible. And I am doing the thing that I do with things that I love, or am frustrated by, or don’t understand, or am infuriated by: I am making jokes.
Mrs. Obama is, rightfully I think, totally over the ugly presidential campaign and probably the presidency in general, but has been doing everything in her power to ensure that the next president is someone who will carry on her husband’s legacy of, at best, hope, and at worst, less terribleness. She has lip-synced for the country’s life and, hours later, I am still thinking about it. I will probably think about it forever. It feels, to me, consequential. Life-changing. Even though it is, ultimately, a campaign speech at a political pageant. It’s theater. The only way it could preach to the choir more is if there were an actual choir (suggestion for next time). And of course, it doesn’t end up winning her chosen candidate the election. So, what is the consequence, really? Or rather, who was she doing it for? I guess I believe she was doing it for me. For her. For the future.
In the moment, that’s enough. I don’t know if anyone is actually tracking the movement of the moral universe, but I’d wager that bend is a lot longer than any of us can bear. This is not to suggest that Dr. King’s famous quote is wrong. Rather, justice may be a lot farther than we think. I’m a Bend Truther.
And yet, we get out of bed, sometimes we give speeches, we have kids and/or dogs, we take those kid-dogs to Washington, DC, and we show them that place in stone where it says the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice as if that’s something they’ll see in their lifetime. Why? Hope. That’s the only thing I can come up with. We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope. And who am I to joke about that? Michelle Obama is trying to change the course of history and I’m making quips online. Who is this for? And what does it add?
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The comedic surprise I’m always trying to get to in the column is hope. A joke is built on a surprise. You might anticipate a punchline, you might see it coming from a mile away, but if you laugh it’s because there is some part of you that is surprised. I find that interesting because comedy is also made up of formulas. Jokes have structure and those structures have been in place for years. They’re probably hardwired into our brains or the way language is organized. The structures evolve and shift, of course, but the basic arithmetic of what makes us laugh remains the same. That’s the reason “Who’s On First?” still works and that’s the reason the latest meme works. That’s, really, the reason memes exist at all. Memes are open-source joke structure. A meme shows you how the joke works and then invites you to fill in your own details. Comedy on the internet, like everything else on the internet, can be democratic. But, because it’s comedy and because it’s the internet, it can also be a fucking trash fire.
My goal is not to add trash to the fire. I know it’s not a given, but I realized early on in the writing that the thing that interested me most was not punching down on the world that seemed to be sinking ever faster, but rather punching up to an idea of what we could be. I’m aware I’m not writing a motivational column for O, the Oprah Magazine (hello, Oprah, I am available whenever you need me), but it seems to me if I’m going to try to make people laugh on the internet, maybe it should also make them happy. Like the original viral Facebook post said, “We may be two minutes from doomsday but…”