The Comedy of the Working Class

There's something about being poor and desperate that makes a person funny. When I was a jobless malcontent, working for my father as a semi-skilled construction lackey (not really a job at all in the "adult" sense--what you gonna do, live with your parents all your life??!--hence the "jobless" label), I was a fucking laugh riot. I amused myself and all who came within my sphere of interaction with my comic renderings of the day's events and our fellow workers' foibles. It was absolute gold material, too. I suppose that my utter hopelessness translated into fearless experimentation with the limits of taste and language.

But now I'm a damn bourgie graduate student, and I "consume" books and write overly-serious papers that nobody wants to read. And I am not funny. And it's eating me. My sister and her husband were just here. With them were my two nephews. We spent a week together and I can't remember making them laugh even once.

What happened to me?

If you don't think I'm serious, take a look at the archives. The early stuff on this blog I stand behind without reservations, even in its awkwardness. Have I done anything even close to that since? No. That wasn't even a-material and I look back at it longingly.

I think the difference is geographical, as well. With my sisters and my parents, it's always a scream. They are the funniest people I know or have heard of, and when we are all together it's like magic--we all work from the same experience and play effortlessly off of each other in what I can only imagine is something like what great musicians experience when they collaborate. But of course we are not high art; we are crude, and vulgar, and utterly proletarian. These are my favorite memories and my highest aspirations--to make my family laugh. And I don't think it's exclusive: anyone would think it was funny, even you.

There is no one like that in graduate school. I am only the student who isn't "really serious" and every day is one slog after another. Is this what life is like? Why do I feel like I'm becoming dumber by the second? Why is my vocabulary shrinking--all those magnificent epithets replaced by horrid bastards like "problematic" and ""presentist" and "evidentiary threshold"?

Autobiography is not art. Sorry to go on a wank-fest there, but these are the questions that have no answer. What happens to academics to make them such unholy bores? Wouldn't anything be preferable to brain death--or I suppose, the death of the part of the brain that produces comedy?