The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

FtL: Head Meet Wall

"Invalid Entry" 

Everybody is looking to be entertained, it would seem.

It's not enough to be yourself in a quiet, observant way. Your worth is always tethered to the reactions you evoke from others. From the moment you wake, until the moment you fall into bed, you are performing. You are gauging your value in the expressions of those around you and though you tell yourself it doesn't matter, nearly convincing yourself that this is true, you reluctantly acknowledge that it does.

If you can't make them cry, you will try to make them laugh. If you can't make them laugh, you angle to make them livid. Every tear, every hiss, every chuckle with you in mind gives you relevance. You try to please them. All of them. You sit back and assess their needs before coming out with a new version of yourself which will surely satisfy their passing cravings. Before long, the words you write, the things you say, are in no way connected to who you really are. You're doing it for them, and you don't even get applause.

I imagine the loneliest role in the world is that of the comic. I don't think anything could possibly be harder, trying to make people belly laugh with a quick hit of clever wit. It would be exhausting, I think, to always be looking for the one-liner, to be finding the funny in the unfunny. All of the people I know in my personal life who are the most comical are also the ones who have endured the most pain. They have survived unholy touching, untimely deaths of those they held dear, abusive love, dismissive rejection and outright neglect. What they have done is recreate themselves, as though making those remaining laugh will push away all the harm which has been done. If they laugh, they will not look closer and see what is being hidden. It is defensive, a way of pleasing those who are still watching, and it is the mode which must always be switched on. A funny person doesn't have the right to be sad. The jester has to get back up when they appear to fall down, and it has to be done with drollery and farce.

I can be funny, if I'm not trying that hard. I have made people cry with laughter, one even wet her pants, and always after I would be told 'You're so funny! I didn't know you were so funny!' Oh? Me neither. I am the sarcastic girl in the corner. I wear dark colours, I think most of performers are hopeless, and their weaknesses tend to give me relevance. I am trying to stop this, though. I know it doesn't make me a better person. The one-liners, the acidic barbs which delight the rest of the audience only make me feel good for a second, until I let myself feel the pressure of being expected to be funny, forever. I can't. I'm not that smart. My cleverness comes and goes and no divining rod will ever help me tap into it, like a line in a steady stream.

We need to be entertained so that we can ignore ourselves. We need to laugh at someone else because we feel like they owe it to us, the distraction from our own shaky germaneness. We love the tragedy of others, the sadness, the depression because their misery shifts our focus from our own. Oddly, another's happiness does not have the same influence, but how many of us really have to worry about that? Happy people are actually kind of threatening in a weird way, like serial killers armed with cream pies, singing and dancing their way toward us, planning their attack under the guise of brother and sisterhood. They're weird, aren't they? They perform for themselves and they actually buy it. They don't need us as an audience, and I find this infuriating. Happy, sick, cream pie bastards. Now, if you trip and choke on it, I will laugh until I'm sick, but that's me.

I admit, though, that I need you to work for me a little. I need to find something in you which engages me and I cannot connect to an observer. Rather than find wisdom in you, I'll likely deem you pointless. I need a bit of drama, a dash of finesse, but I will keep my expectations to a minimum. I think that by placing expectations on another, we eliminate expectation from ourselves, so that we may sit back and critique their cracks and fissures, waiting for them to fall apart entirely while we eat our popcorn and sip our soda. In this way, we allow ourselves to do nothing, which would be fine, if it didn't mean that others had to do all the work.