The Origin of the Intrinsic Human Ridiculousness – Astutillo Smeriglia
In coma è meglio[🡕], re-posted in 2022 under my suggestion
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The biggest tragedy of humans, let’s even say the tragedy that constitutes the essence of their existence itself, is that the more they try to be serious, the more they look ridiculous. This is particularly clear in those people who feel like highlighting their supposed seriousness with specific costumes (suit, uniform with medals, tunic and aspergillum, etc.); aren’t they funny? But even forgetting about these extreme cases, how hilarious are those who never joke around? Never, not even a small self-mocking hint to how ridiculous it is to never make a joke. Aren’t they an unlimited source of belly laughs?
They are.
Why?
Good question. The short answer is: I don’t know.
Now onto the long answer.
In the past, I’ve always taken for granted that the cause of all this involuntary human ridiculousness were death. Of course, I’m not talking about death as an event, in fact all animals die, even hamsters, and they are not ridiculous at all.
What’s funny about death is not the passing, but the stubborn will that humans have, this innate wish to remove death from their life. You can notice that, for example, when one says “passed away” instead of “dead”. It’s not tact, it’s the attempt to tamper with reality using words, like when we say “I love you” instead of “I would like to breed with you.” Or take God: how hilarious is a poor mammal well conscious that it is going to die, that asks an infinite being (of its own fabrication) to make it immortal like him? Isn’t that ridiculous?
It is.
Isn’t it fun to listen to all those people talking in full seriousness about infinity and afterlife, and then to watch them as they run to their physician like everyone else as soon as they have a tummy ache?
Hilarious.
However… this explanation of the human ridiculousness has never convinced me 100%, I’ve always found that there was something missing. Like I’ve said before, death itself isn’t funny, in fact, it’s a sorrowful event, we could easily call it tragic. The idea that a person spends his/her whole life selling, say, socks, watching soccer matches and making children in the groundless hope to keep something of oneself alive after one’s death, instills empathy, not amusement. We agree on this, don’t we? Thinking about it, this enthusiasm of humans for the infinity even though they are conscious that they are doomed, has something heroic about it, not fun. Or maybe heroic and ridiculous at the same time, like Captain America, the superhero with the most hilarious costume in the world (it’s not a criticism, that’s his charm).
So, why are people so funny when they try to be serious, to the point that there is nothing funnier in the world than a person who never says something funny?
After a long deliberation, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the cause of all this is not death, but poop. I know, I’m sorry, but the fact alone that simply naming poop is taking away all the seriousness from what I’m saying here, actually confirms what I’m saying already.
This fact that humans need to poop, and that they actually strive for pooping daily or else they start to have a feeling of discomfort that in the long term can ruin their day, is something that doesn’t quite match with seriousness. Poop, exactly like death, has been removed from the normal conversation between human beings, even though the reasons for their suppression are different: death has been removed because it takes away meaning from existence, while poop because it makes it funny. It’s quite difficult to take seriously someone who’s giving lessons in morality to crowds if we imagine him/her sitting on the toilet. And contrary to death, which gets to be really removed from human awareness, poop gets to be removed only from conversations, but everyone is always perfectly aware that the person we have in front of us, whoever that is, poops. Every one of us, when we shake hand with someone, know well that the hand has previously cleaned the butt of its owner, some hours before. We take care of our attire, we adorn our body with multicolored symbols of seriousness, we use pretentious words full of “listen here how serious I am”, but then we always end up on the toilet taking a dump, every day, or at least we hope that we will.
It’s this in particular that makes the human being funny: pretending that we’re not that type of person that takes a dump every day, when everyone knows, of course, that we do, even if we say “metaphysics”, “dialectics”, or “phenomenology”.
So… how can you discuss serious topics without sounding hilarious? Well, I don’t have a definitive answer to this, but I can at least say that a method – that won’t maybe solve the situation, but could at least improve it – is to stop pretending to look serious.