After years of regarding human behavior as magical, godlike in its triumphs and pardonable in its defeats, I had an epiphany which demanded deep-thinking adjustments. Of course to think anyone might care about my viewpoint is preposterous, farcical even. Forgive me, then, for the following assertion.
Farce, I now admit, is the nutmeat of “all-the world-is-a-stage” metaphor and should be considered the prevailing leitmotif of human activities. Don’t we witness buffoonery and absurd behavior on every screen, every news release, each precinct through which we travel? Don’t we observe people presenting themselves to be something they are not? Don’t we hear it when we are told “to run, not walk, to the nearest Ford dealership for savings of the century”? To better tolerate the world and its creatures, wouldn’t it be amenable to consider God’s whole stagey creation as if it were a Moliere play, the humor of it taking center stage? Bada bing bada boom!
Absurdity is not the turning point of our existence, as Camus claimed. His conclusion was life is absurd because the world (however one wants to define it) is indifferent to meaning, which may be blindly absurd, as well as farcical, don’t you think? No, surely our existence is more farcical than absurd, if you’ll allow my attempt at semantics to parse the difference.
Farce is funny, of courbut also dead serious in its fundamental insinuations. We laugh at the roughshod horseplay and buffoonery of The Three Stooges, though getting slapped and clunked on the head, “nyuck-nyuck-nyuck,” is no laughing matter. And think of the Marx Brothers and their farcical take on Hitler, high society, pretentiousness, and just about everything else their audiences took seriously. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, an apt example, is farce from start to finish; it is also satire and alarmingly sober in its conclusions. Tears of laughter seem appropriate even though you may weep for what the theme portends. Waiting for Godot yet another example of absurdity capturing our attention and applying farcical suggestions, leaving us somewhere between laughing and weeping. Because, at its core, funny is what we are, how we act from day to day. We are an up-to-date Punch and Judy show, complete with smacks in the face and a howling audience.
MacBeth’s poetic claim seems to apply: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Sure we may be sad figures as we stride across this stage, but at heart we would do well to laugh at the absurdity of our strutting and fretting as we melt away to the wings during our cameo appearance speaking our mostly silly and vainglorious lines.
In its raw state, politics is a decent (or indecent) example of farce, something like a clown show featuring sex, violence, and all the seven deadly sins demonstrated for our risible gratification. Election season brings out the exaggerated and ridiculous in all of us, and we get an extra helping of mistruths. This we know. Biden’s verbal stumbles and his obliviousness to his diminished capacities are funny if taken in context. As Kamala Harris took the baton from Biden, she believed her constituents, educated people along with fed up underclass people would carry the day by a landslide. She drew knee-slapping chuckles from Republicans and crushing dejection from many Democrats. Detached, it’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Trump’s need to humiliate his rivals by using a stream of fabrications is funny if one considers how brazen and clownish he is, posing as he does in a blue dress suit, red tie, and topped by his ridiculous red baseball cap, as if he is one of the good old boys. Posterity will likely judge him in the same category as we view Alfred E. Newman, a consummate buffoon and laugh-provoking ass. Take a close look at the cast of characters in Washington D.C. the ultra “woke” crowd, George Santos, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville, and Paul Goser—all these seemingly thoughtful figures are entertaining because they are serious about what they do and say. If they stood before a mirror and could somehow see how others viewed them, how they acted and heard what they said, they might consider starting new careers as stand-up comics. Bada bing bada boom!
What does it all mean? What purpose do we serve if farce is the thesis of everything? What is the purpose of darn near anything at all.
Maybe not much, but on close analysis, absurdity and all that, great and fleeting value must be found in family, kindness, faith, and whatever the work of the moment is. Even if it is all—all of it—sort of funny.