Editor’s Letter

THE FUNNY MAN

Humour is a gift from the gods. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated to do the job.

BY DAVID HOLT

Growing up, my sister and I called our grandfather Fred Emerson “The Funny Man.” I don’t know how it started, but he was funny. A distinguished retired lawyer and passionate scholar and musician, he was also a prankster. One day my grandmother had had enough. Please tell the children to call him Granddad, or something, she said. He was Grandad from then on.

Our aunt and uncle, his children, were two of the funniest people I have known. My mother was funny too, but not in their league. When my Aunt Carla from Newfoundland and Uncle Harry from Toronto were both staying with us in Nova Scotia, the house would fill up with neighbours who just happened to drop by. To be entertained. It was all unscripted. Harry would tell stories about the incompetent people he met on his business travels, mostly by car. He had his own one-man ad agency and crossed the country in a succession of (mostly used) Cadillacs. He excoriated other business people and government officials – those who were, in his view, supposed help. Police officers were a favourite target. Both Harry and Carla grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland where comedy is an art form practiced on every street corner. It’s the Irish wit, brought over from the old country. Nova Scotia, where I live, is a wonderful place, but conversations tend to be linear. We want to be understood.

The Irish genius is to make conversation an art form. If you can’t make people laugh, or at least smile, you’re just not trying. As a teenager I watched black-and-white films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Geniuses who had lived through hard times. Their brilliant humour also contained the pathos of real life. In fact, all comedians have this, if in lesser amounts.

When people smile, smirk, laugh, and sometimes just lose it and gasp for air, the brain finds another dimension. Pettiness and worry are replaced by imagination, open mindedness, creativity – that stuff we pretend we like but that actually scares us. Dionysius coming up from the depths, wine glass in hand. Shakespeare was a master of puns -- some were pretty crude. Einstein wrote funny poems and had a gift for one-liners. In fact, like my grandfather he was a prankster with little patience for the portentous. The growing militaristic Prussian culture of the 1930s, for example. Einstein sided with Charlie Chaplin in mocking Hitler. They both knew where terminal seriousness could lead.

Comedians get this. It’s their craft. The irony is that to make us feel good they have to retreat to the trenches, fine tune their material and practice, practice, practice. Even the greats went through the initial phases of unpaid stand-up nights, rejections, gruelling schedules. They touch on our common humanity. We leave the experience in a different zone. OK, world, bring it on! Thanks, Russell Peters and friends.

David Holt is the Editor of SILVER and the Editor in Chief of HUM@Nmedia Inc.