There’s a long-standing belief that comedy is our primary means of dealing with tragedy. I feel like this year, we need to laugh more than anything.
You think of something like Trump, where it’s like… if you were looking at it on the surface from four years ago, you’d think maybe there were three or four jokes that could be made. But the reality is that it’s actually very fertile ground, right? I mean, you also have the means of distribution, which have changed. I’m thinking of Twitter, primarily—the use of Twitter is crazy compared to where it was four years ago. It was very much a niche thing, and now everybody’s gotten more comfortable with it. At the same time, it’s not always just jaded distancing humor. There’s a good way to use humor to get good ideas in people’s minds.
I’ve always had a compulsion to be funny. I don’t think that’s unhealthy. I had this epiphany maybe two years ago where I used to assume the number of types of things that could be funny was fixed. But then I was like, ‘No, that’s not the case; things that were funny 40 years ago may go away, but 10 times more different types of funny things have occurred, and that number keeps growing.’ It’s a valuable skill everywhere, too. You have to get your points across, but making people laugh is a way to have people empathize with you.
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