{"id":7173,"date":"2010-03-26T11:33:30","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T15:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7173"},"modified":"2022-03-04T13:49:30","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T18:49:30","slug":"laughing-all-the-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/laughing-all-the-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Laughing All the Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"intrinsic-container intrinsic-container-16x9\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ec8h_DojbMQ\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Classic moment from <\/em>Young Frankenstein<em>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>From <a title=\"whiskey river: 'Hiding in a Drop of Water,' by Robert Bly\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2010\/03\/hiding-in-drop-of-water-it-is-early.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Hiding in a Drop of Water<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for<br \/>\na while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.<br \/>\nI am ready to praise all the great musicians.<br \/>\nWhatever happens to me will also happen to you.<br \/>\nSurely you must have realized this from hearing<br \/>\nthe way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.<br \/>\nFrom the great oak trees in the yard in October,<br \/>\nleaves fall for hours each day. Every night<br \/>\na thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.<br \/>\nStill we know that at any second the soul can stand<br \/>\nup and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up<br \/>\nriding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.<br \/>\nIt is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.<br \/>\nIt is this way of hiding inside a drop of water<br \/>\nthat lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.<br \/>\nGautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel<br \/>\nstops turning, you will still be way up<br \/>\nthere, swinging in your seat and laughing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Robert Bly, from <em>My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<a title=\"whiskey river: C.S. Lewis, on the immortality of everyday beings\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2010\/03\/it-is-serious-thing-to-remember-that.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">and<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations &#8212; these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit &#8212; immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(C.S. Lewis)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Not from <em>whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins&#8217;s &#8220;<a title=\"Poetry Foundation: 'The Windhover,' by Gerard Manley Hopkins\" href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/archive\/poem.html?id=173667\">The Windhover<\/a>,&#8221; for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, &#8220;That&#8217;s <em>too much<\/em> nonsense,&#8221; but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry.<\/p>\n<p>Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.<\/p>\n<p>For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of every sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that the poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Kay Ryan, from &#8220;Laugh While You Can: A Consideration of Poetry&#8221; [<a title=\"Poetry Foundation: 'Laugh While You Can,' by Kay Ryan\" href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/journal\/article.html?id=178088\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nasrudin is with his cronies drinking coffee:<\/p>\n<p>They are discussing death, &#8220;When you are in your casket and friends and family are mourning upon you, what would you like to hear them say about you?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The first crony says, &#8220;I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The second says, &#8220;I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and school teacher which made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Nasrudin says, &#8220;I would like to hear them say&#8230; LOOK!! HE&#8217;S MOVING!!!&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>([<a title=\"Wikibooks, on Sufism\/Nasrudin\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikibooks.org\/wiki\/Sufism\/Nasrudin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(George Bernard Shaw, <em>The Doctor&#8217;s Dilemma<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p>Finally,yes: I&#8217;ve already included one <em>Young Frankenstein<\/em> clip; when I read Robert Bly&#8217;s poem, which mentions &#8220;strings cry[ing] out&#8221; and laughter within a few seconds of each other, I thought immediately of Frau Bl\u00fccher&#8217;s &#8220;He vas my <em>boyfriend<\/em>!&#8221; moment. But then I kept going in this post, and kept finding all these intermingled references to laughter at inappropriate moments &#8212; and when I hit that &#8220;Look! He&#8217;s moving!&#8221; line I just knew I&#8217;d have to include another bit from the same film.<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"500\" height=\"404.7\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/cw2IIU0a9qw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\"><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\"><\/object><\/p>\n<p>(Mel Brooks&#8217;s movies are so much better when he&#8217;s not in them himself.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Classic moment from Young Frankenstein] From whiskey river: Hiding in a Drop of Water It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for a while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive. I am ready to praise all the great musicians. Whatever happens to me will also happen to you. Surely you must [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,53,5,36,251,713],"tags":[207,811,1061,1395,1705,1706,1707],"class_list":{"0":"post-7173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-movies-media","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-reading","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-humor-writing_cat","13":"tag-laughter","14":"tag-young-frankenstein","15":"tag-death","16":"tag-robert-bly","17":"tag-nasrudin","18":"tag-george-bernard-shaw","19":"tag-kay-ryan","20":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1RH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7173"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25269,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7173\/revisions\/25269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}