Not long ago, I was surfing the Facebook waves one day, where an old acquaintance shared one of those widespread, silly little "memes", one that said something to the liking of "How can I tell you're being sarcastic...?" With all candor, I responded, "At this point in my life, even I can't tell anymore. And even worse, I'm not too concerned..."
Fact of the matter though, is that indeed it was an evaded concern haunting me in more recent times. Despite this acclaimed, life-long, exterior veneer of adorable, cherubic innocence, somehow over the years, in ways genuinely unbeknownst to myself, there emerged this counterbalanced, razor-edged, sardonic and brilliantly-just-as-subtle beast, one that would send the humor of Albert Brooks and Martin Mull to the borscht-belt woodshed.
With a life-long commitment against morphing into anything even remotely cliche, my young adulthood was certainly cautious enough not to become a T-shirt clone of the renown MTV's Daria, the pop-culture comic House Representative of the morose, Gen-X 1990s. As I recently channeled the spirit of the immortal Rodney Dangerfield and his "no respect" act, my quote was "When I was a kid...? Depression was somethin' we did for fun...!" When it comes to the 1990s, that's no hyperbole.
Early youth in the late 70s and early 1980s had me garnering no respect for my peer culture. If a kid in my high school bio class were to develop a cure for cancer, I'd have likely concluded that he was probably on drugs, and just being a trophy for his rich parents. I gave short if no shrift to the pop music of the period, and MJ's white glove. Instead, I spent plenty of headset time late Saturday nights with my mom's old Dylan Blonde On Blonde LPs, studying the musicianship of the arrangements. My mother was in fact my best friend during my altogether blacklisted pre-adolescent peerhood, the innocent, sweet little rotund boy. At age twelve, I thought the term "jerking off" referred to some kind of sports penalty. Needless to say, my innocence of the world's avarice and my generalized belief against any such thing as a "bad kid" got me injured, robbed and death-threatened in the far corners of some the borough's finest public schools.
At the same time, my mother even more viciously infuriated than I, there was a stern teaching, that to turn vigilante, and act against their violence or anger with mine would only render me something worse than those troubled and injured souls, both inside and out. It was a good reminder. It served well in an adult future where you'd need to remember one thing: Standing up for yourself in victimhood will at best end you up a courtroom defendant. The best revenge is somber defeat.
As I leaned into my mid-twenties at the time, despite a lifetime of alienation from the peer culture in general, I couldn't help taking note of how the hair-flipped pastel aerobicizing of the Reagan era had starkly turned dark-flannel, black matted-haired, dark, coffee-slurping inertia. For those whose young, presumed "Wonder Years" and "Happy Days" were spent on the dateless, friendless, disconnected, misunderstood sidelines, this was the spiritual revenge your whole life had resisted suicide for. And somehow, you ultimately ended up questioning whether this is in fact what you wished for. In some ways, I found myself bearing an even greater sense of violation at the time. Seemed like everyone was suddenly stealing my act..!
And that was a good thing. Even if was going to take myself too seriously, I wasn't going to expect to impress anyone in the process. But even still, my exterior always remained that of the quiet, innocent, respectful lad that bore no irreverence. Or at least displayed none outwardly. It was my professional passkey in life. I don't know how many doors it opened for me necessarily, but it certainly didn't keep me locked out and kicking them when my hands were full.
That didn't stop me from adopting the world's best weapon against the intolerable and inescapable injustices of generalized disrespect, ineptitude and stupidity to which I'd be forced to acclimate in this world. And I found it in nature's best source: Humor.
Not the volatile or brazen insult kind of humor, much less the sociopathic grime of the immensely popular "Jerky Boys", or the smirking punk arrogance of Kevin Smith's beloved Clerks protagonists. Like the figures cited earlier, I took my cue from such enlightened luminaries as the writers acquired discriminately by creator Norman Lear, in his efforts to use humor as a tool, to see our human flaws in the mirror before us, to "check us", in effect.
To do that on a one-to-one basis in sardonic capacity however, is a dangerous knife-throwing act. People at large, no matter how cynical you are about human intelligence, are still way smarter than you think. And if you have any doubts about that, you're just the violence-embracing kid who's no better than his hallway harrassers.
My own deep-rooted sardonicism has rarely, if ever been used as a one-on-one weapon, with the exception of confrontations that might send others into some heated, self-defensive shouting match. My defense, in contrast, has been that of polite, quiet and curious response, an unassuming padlock that only the intelligent stranger requiring his just desserts will detect the combination.
Somewhere along the line, maturing as I, and many have into a culture who's anthem has long been the revenge of the underdog, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Joe Don Baker in Walking Tall, or maybe Charles Bronson in Death Wish, my prized recipe for personal-insight-humor-coated social balance lost it's eminence.
At some predictable level, where the victims would out-populate the antagonists, youth violence would erupt nationwide, onto peers and others. The desperate plea for a "kinder, gentler nation", the once-famously misguided mission statement famously coined by the war-abiding Republican George H.W. Bush, was now the outcry of a United States in siege. A new renaissance of enlightenment was illuminating our despaired culture, imploring each and every individual to see not themselves exclusively, but the needs, wants, and deprivations of that creature before them, human, animal or otherwise. Walking home one night, I let a scurrying waterbug cross my path. I was too intimidated to squash him. Or her. It could have been a "her".
Sure enough, after years of enduring my own oppression, the still-no-less-than-oppressive culture now also saw fit to view themselves as eternally persecuted. Translated into my social currency, this meant that any curiously kind, polite response I'd offer to anything that might otherwise be deemed inapproachable or objectionable by some would immediately be deemed viciously and inappropriately insulting. In the most extreme circumstances, to meet a curt, or insidiously malicious comment with a most innocent "hey, thanks so much...." would meet with a departured "Don't talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot...!!!" To respond with, "Well, I think you asked for it" would certainly, I'd find, be an insult to the both of us intellectually. So, I'd just lumber off in silence, invisible trophy in arms.
That's the successful working version. Trouble is, there's the unchecked, unperfected, dangerous version. Still working on that, and I'm unfortunately not so sure the algorithm for success is in fact attainable.
The whole science here is based on nothing more or less than the science of human dynamics. But in lieu of the unapproachable factors, I have educated myself towards a few modifications, as my trunk has cultivated its rings of time.
For starters, humor is generally unwelcome as an approachable technique. To try to institute yourself commonly as the brilliantly clever final box of a daily Doonesbury or Calvin & Hobbes strip, in the effort to provoke cluster-wide, situation-enlightened, irony-observant laughter is about as entertaining as "pretending" to be a knife-wielding, death-threatening Martin Sheen in The Incident. An ungotten joke can be socially and interpersonally fatal. You might have the urge to take pride in being "hipper than the room", until one day you realize: There's actually in fact no room hip enough for you, except the one you're in all alone. Is that where you want to spend your life..?
Have you ever watched Star Trek: Voyager..? Since I'm no enthusiast of the genre, I never would, until my Trekkie-wife introduced me to the 11PM strip reruns years later. It's magnificent. For me, it's picked up where my teenage 11PM M*A*S*H viewing ritual left off. Of all the Trek re-constitutions over time, I'd put this one on top, and not for it's related sci-fi association. With it's stellar cast and writing, it's primarily about interpersonal experiences, trust, emotion, betrayal. All the things that make us the human machines we are. Nothing says it better than Jeri Ryan's brilliant portrayal of the ice-cold, stoic Seven Of Nine trying a concerted effort at embracing humanity. There's a reason a show like this remains popular well beyond the Trekkies in the living room. It's about the struggle of every human to relate properly to one another and themselves.
I could easily define myself over time as "Vulcan", but they're just not as complicated as us desperate and confused humans. They're relatively comfortable in their emotional isolation. No chance of that here. Weaponry becomes necessary, and for those in this category, it's a matter of intellectual cynicism, sardonicism, and overall incomprehensibility. My response to that meme was the most truthful self-assessment I've admitted in years. To myself.
In the effort to follow Seven Of Nine's admirable intentions, I've in fact sought to consciously ditch the crutch ironic-commentary humor, and respond to people and situations with merely direct and sincere straight answers. No smackdown punch lines are needed to make my way into a room filled with private jokes. No need to slather on some artificial Peter Brady-esque "Ya like my new personality..??" charm. Expression of kindness and concern is always best and universally embraced before anything. The late, great Edith Bunker in her lifetime was never known for making instant enemies.
Discriminating fiction consumer that I am, one of the few contemporary pieces of work I've treasured remains Caren Lissner's Carrie Pilby, a first-person narrative I would embrace as a cautious mirror. Carrie is a somewhat mis-placed young woman of nineteen, on the borderline between guarded youth and accelerated adulthood, in a struggle to break her force field of life-long cultivated distrust against others, to begin the process of her only option on Earth: relating to others. As with the best fiction, it's a treasure to know that you're one of the few, and probably the many so well and articulately understood by the author. Lissner's Carrie did it. On a less intensive, and more elusive level, so can I.
And at the same time, human science being what it is, like a dramatist clueless on the roar that line got, I'll see my innate humor appreciated when I expect it the least. Like when somebody mentions something miserable, with no possilble rejoinder but silence, and I'll bravely chirp, glaring out the window......."Nice day out, though..." That once met with a quiet individual's hearty, startling, explosive laugh and a handshake . "You're somethin' else, man...!", and we'd part. And I'd walk off, quietly but with pride, knowing I brought someone some momentary joy and comfort, in a way no one could. I'd like to think that's what I'm really here for.
Noah F.
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