The Shamanism of Comedy
By Rose Blume
In ancient times, the people who wore masks, played characters, changed their personality before their compatriots were not called comedians. They were shamans.
They were vital to society working.
And they never went away.
Comedy is a form of social self-repair.
It exists to speak unspoken-but well-known truths. To describe and articulate and diffuse built-up tension and to nudge all to better cohesion.
You want to get rid of it?
Dangerous.
Remember this: Jokes are not written in the mind of the comic, he is a performer and interpreter. They emerge in society’s collective mind. They are contradictions and frustrations which can’t be normally resolved.
These live in everyone.
The comedian is one who is sensitive to these, who can give form to these collective thoughts and embody them for a while.
A comedian is not human. A human is an individual, one mind in its own life. A comedian is the embodiment of society’s contradictions and contrivances. He concentrates himself in the mind of the performer, to act out his dance in an act of exorcism.
To see a comedian is to have a part of your world ordered and repaired. Things that were biting at the back of your head but which your eyes were not clear enough to see, float before you in the form of the performer.
What you must understand: The comedian does not write the jokes, society does. The comic simply hears them first. If he was not channelling and healing the collective mind, these jokes would still be written. But they would be without a punchline. Contradictions, frictions and frustrations growing in the minds of all-now this is a dangerous thing.
In a society, there are things everyone knows but no one can say.
There are people who are hypocrites. There are adulterers, layabouts, cheats and liars-and, too often-everyone is too polite to talk about it.
It’s better to turn a blind eye and ignore these annoyances. But they are still there. Mainly these are the subtle ones, not encountered every day but ultimately they are known.
But no one can talk about them, so no one can fix them.
Imagine we are in the primal forest.
We are in a small tribe, a tribe that has morals and laws.
Gradually, people start acting outside of these, or they behave according to the rules, but not as they were intended. But no one has it in them to say-it’s a subtle thing no one really is able to talk about. But everyone quietly knows.
Rhy-Haa knows better than most. He is baffled and bewildered by the contradiction in his world. But conventions won’t allow anyone to talk about it.
Finally, Rhy-Haa has had enough. He goes into the forest, ties feathers to his arm, drops ink in his eyes and returns with a manic grin wearing the mask of Droh-Hahn; the trickster spirit. A tribal devil who watches all.
He becomes Dro-Hahn. Dro-Hahn skips through the village, drawing a great crowd. He sings and rhythms and jokes. He embodies all that is wrong with their culture-and makes light of it, shows the needlessness of the tribe’s angst.
And they laugh and are relieved: Nothing he says is truly new to them, they had it all in their heads, but Rhy-Haa is clever, he can think a but further, and show the absurdity of their frustrations.
All is said now. The devil makes one last repose before returning to the depths of the jungle to cleanse himself.
Rhy-Haa returns from the woods.
No one judges him for what he’s said, it is understood that it was Droh-Hahn, the tribe’s spirit that spoke through him.
Comedy is not just fun.
It is an ecstatic state. It is the collective mind focused on, and cleansed by the performer. It is resolution and regulation of society’s excesses. It restores and repairs the bonds that bind.
A comedian is not the source of social contradictions and frustration-he is a valve for releasing pressure which is there with or without him. Though without, and unreleased, it is want to become violent.
I was aware of comedy’s mysticism before I understood it.
It was I who walked to the stage, anxious and wired. It was my character who climbed it-entirely in his element-perfectly crafted for the role-not me.
Is Borat a man? No. He is a collective spirit that has found form and expression in the body and mind of Sascha Baron Cohen.
Where do his jokes come from? Why is it funny?
Society’s unspoken contradictions and frictions. The half-truths, the contrivances, the polite convention.
Borat is Truth.
He is the reality of our society. He can not be stopped.
If Sascha stopped channelling him tomorrow-the spirit would still be there, growing in force as the unreleased frustration grew-finding release in some other form: Another performer would give himself to the entity we know as Borat.
Complaining about a comedian is missing the point.
He didn’t have those ideas: We all did-he simply understood and ordered them, and now he’s helping us to do the same. You’re not really offended by a comedian; you are hurt by the truth about yourself being shown to you.
As Atreyu is warned in The Never Ending Story: ‘The mirror of truth is a terrible thing/ Many a man has gone mad seeing his true self reflected at him’.
These problems don’t go away because we close the pressure valve.
They build, and become horridly black and ugly, a force that can tear society to pieces.
We need these comedians, these shamans to heal our spirits-to clear our minds.
And remember: They are not human.
They are come to us to show us the way.
TIP:
Heretic displays better if you press
f11 or fn+f11
