Why Don’t Elephants Smoke?
(They can’t get their damn butts in the ashtrays)
If you can’t laugh about things, about life and this crazy “society,” the freakish spectacle of famous people, politicians, human foibles, yourself, and even injustice and the great inequities in life, you've had it.
There are some things we know about that aren't funny—many, in fact. But just about everything else is hilarious. What we lack most is not the ability to change these things, but the ability to laugh until we cry at them. Because much of the time that’s the most we can do, will ever be able to do, and even if we’re trying to change something, seeing the absurdities all around us and laughing at them is what will keep us sane. Taking the stupidities of mankind and our “Grand Vision” too seriously will drive you batty, into depression, or give you a nervous breakdown. Laughter is the blessed juice that will save you.
Sitting at a red light one day I saw a plain piece of paper neatly stenciled on a light pole that read: I Heart BS. Maybe it was just that day and place and time, but it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. Just sitting there I laughed tears and kept laughing the rest of the day. What genius! Some serial jokester’s secret message to us, an anonymous kindred silently cackling friend telling us simply: There is so much bullshit in the world, I've learned to love it! Not only do I not let it get me down now, it’s what I live for!
Every Wednesday I meet an old friend and musician at a different Chinese restaurant in town just to go into hysterics. We used to do stand up together, and you can’t be around him without laughing, it’s impossible. The people who work there are patient with us, sometimes avoiding eye contact or pretending not to notice us, because my innocuous friend behaves like a joyful lunatic. He quietly slips in and out of these bizarre happy characters, giggling at his own craziness.
“Not dangerous, he’s a comedian,” I say to the worried waitress who bows and smiles at us, bringing us more tea.
In our twenties when we were doing off the wall comedy, every day was an hilarious feast. No matter what happened, and especially when the train was coming off the rails, he’d say “Another perfect day!” and it was a running joke that in itself kept us laughing. Every day was “perfect,” because usually it was so absurdly imperfect, uncannily calamitous at times: cars breaking down, girlfriends flipping out, jobs falling through, no money, people going crazy on you or attacking you for no reason, people just behaving crazy as hell in every imaginable way, especially in the news. All of it, with the right attitude, was hilarious.
“You have to go crazy to stay sane,” he’d to say to me. And I still recommend it.
I was always in some heartbroken trouble with women in my twenties, it seemed, and consciously used stand up as a cure for it. It was like magic really, a pact with the laughing public. You couldn't feel really down about anything or anyone after a roomful of people had been laughing at you for a while. It was a natural kind of miracle drug, an alchemy that turned chicken shit into chicken salad.
In fact, running, laughing and sex produce the same kind of euphoric endorphins, and making people laugh is even better. After a good off the wall night on stage where I had the room howling and saw laughing faces in front of me—happy because of the physically goofy things I was doing—my whole perspective changed and I realized I wasn't heartbroken any more. I transcended it all and felt like I was levitating.
My focus on one girl, who wasn't right for me in the first place, shifted to the universal all where we all share in each other’s pleasure, pain, laughter and bliss. I’d cheated the grieving process, jumped ahead in time to where it just didn't hurt anymore, took the Me out of Me and became the all-celebrating Us. Realizing again how many kindred spirits were in the world, and they were with me whether this girl was or not.
I’d come onstage carrying a woman’s manikin leg like a guitar and do an off the wall spiel, and gradually have the place amused. At some point I’d say I was going to try to reach Ty Cobb through Morse code, then stick the microphone down my pants and start tapping it lightly. Appearing to be getting off on it, the tapping getting harder and faster, I’d go into a kind of suggestive convulsion, bending over, writhing, smiling, looking completely, comically insane, this staccato rapping going faster and louder and faster, flailing around until I was on my back flip-flopping on the stage like a giant tuna out of water or someone being sexually electrocuted, building to an obvious peak, collapsing and laying there a few seconds while people cheered and howled. Then I’d pull out the mike and say: “I tell ya, working here at the Uptown Cafe is making me a better person everyday…I’d like to give everyone a back rub and piece of cheese….I’d like to give everyone a mink stove…”
This kind of ludicrous behavior went on for a while, often followed by taping one black wingtip shoe to the top of my head with masking tape and meticulously, painstakingly pushing the other shoe across the stage with a pencil on my knees, each infinitesimal movement of a toe or heel evoking spurts of maniacal laughter, along with a boombox recording of myself chanting: “History repeats itself!….History repeats itself!…History repeats itself!…”
It was all about visual stupidity and the absurdness of so many things we do in life. We would throw in an elephant joke as a joke about making jokes, about corny comedians. There were no jokes, just physical insanity. My comedian friend who inspired it called it “The Theater of Embarrassment,” and you couldn't watch it without laughing. Though sometimes people would just sit there in shock, which was even better.
Physical humor is beautiful because it requires no words and unites us all in this frail human spectacle of absurdity. We’re all stuck in this silly (and sometimes glorious) physical world, we all do stupid things and look stupid and have a grocery bag split open in a parking lot, or have some kind of ridiculous pratfalls, some kind of “Lucy moments.” So watching some idiot onstage flopping around with a microphone in his pants brings us all together, reminds us we are all in this hilarious visual and circumstantial mess as one, and can keep us smiling for days while driving down a highway or sitting in a meeting. Laughing together, or later when we’re dealing with day-to-day BS, is contagious and life-giving. If God made us in his own image, I’m damn sure He laughs with us all the time. After all, where else would laughter come from?
We laugh at comedians because “they release our fears.” That’s essentially what comedy does for us. Bill Maher got the longest laugh recorded on the Johnny Carson show at the beginning of the Aids epidemic when people were freaking out that sex was going to kill us all. He came on and said: “You know, this Aids thing is really scary, it’s getting to be very serious, people dying from having sex. I just want to meet an old fashioned girl with gonorrhea.”
And the studio erupted with laughter that went on louder and longer than at any other stand up act on the Tonight Show. There was so much anxiety and fear at the time about what Aids really was, if it was Biblical punishment and the end of mankind, people were terrified of it. And the fears he released by that seemingly innocent joke about “the good old days” of only having to worry about curable gonorrhea, brought everyone together in howling relief.
Nothings pulls you out of yourself like comedy and laughter. It is one of the blessings of the ages while we whisk around this lonely universe. It doesn't matter that we’re all going to die one day, because we can laugh right now. And that says we are bigger than this whole thing, our spirits can rise above it. We’re not trapped here as long as we can laugh at what we know to be ridiculous.
You see apes laughing at one another: they know something we never should forget. They've passed the Big Joke down through the ages from the primordial swamp: this hilarious silly parade has to be honored with hoots and howls.
The next time somebody acts like a lunatic and blows up at you in traffic, wave and yell to them with a big joyful grin like they’re your long lost friend. Hey, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you! Then really laugh about it. You’ll be amazed how you can ride above this mess if you laugh more at it. At least see the humor in the absurdities surrounding us, and you’ll be surprised at the lightness you feel. There’s material for all of us in this beautiful farce we call Mankind.
So what do you give an elephant with diarrhea?
Plenty of damn room, but give me another drink bartender!
I thank you for the clap!
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Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor and writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
