WEDNESDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER 2003
People, myself included, are too serious. Take the whole story of having to move to another flat. You live in a place for almost five years, and then you get a call one night. The owner informs you they want to sell the apartment, and you should have been out yesterday. You feel a little anxious about the place that will soon be your new home, about your new surroundings, new roads you’d have to explore. What I want to suggest here is that this issue, like so many others in life, does not justify nearly so much seriousness.
That was the first remark. The second point is that the first point is a load of crap. I mean, some things are never as bad as you initially imagined they would be, but if you have to be honest, you’d have to admit that life is a fairly serious business. If you laugh at every second thing that happens to you, or at every third person who crosses your path, you will definitely see your ass.
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Life is no joke, but outside the great truths like “Doughnuts make you fat” and “The earth is round” few things are as true as that you can forget about surviving in this world without a good sense of humour.
To laugh at things that are “not really funny” also subverts our calculations. Is one plus one not two? And if that is the case, then we’re not supposed to laugh at three-quarters of the things we laugh at, right? Yet this is exactly what we do, and on the cosmic calculator this is exactly what enables us to go on living despite what circumstances sometimes dictate.
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