write a funny eassay on coronavirus . dont write what it is.
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The coronavirus pandemic has caused so many things to happen, some predictable, others not. European leaders have confined people at home and seen their approval ratings soar. Right-wing politicians have temporarily socialized their national economies. And as the world hunkers down, threatened by the worst global health crisis in 100 years, there’s been a mass outpouring of gags, memes, funny videos, and general silliness. We might be scared, but we seem determined to carry on laughing.
What is it about tragedy that is so funny? Why do I find myself flicking through Twitter in the evening, alternately looking at tables of COVID-19 death rates and bidet memes? How can I find something so scary one minute so funny the next? And what is it about this crisis in particular that has spawned such an industrial output of humor? Even as I wrote this piece, looking out my window on a locked-down London, a video arrived from a neighbor featuring a stack of empty beer cans singing “Nessun dorma.” Is this some kind of hysteria?
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Liz Neeley: How to talk about the coronavirus
The why of humor has long been a mystery. For ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, it was a dangerous phenomenon, something that had the potential to undermine authority and the good order of society. Laughing at those in charge was a serious issue then (and still remains the case in more autocratic parts of the world). Today, in democratic societies, we know the importance of mocking those with power, and we celebrate it, on Saturday Night Live in the United States and Have I Got News for You in Britain. On Sunday, after Boris Johnson—recently diagnosed with COVID-19—announced that he would send every household in Britain a letter urging people to follow social-distancing guidelines, I received a doctored picture of the prime minister, red-nosed with watery eyes, .
The British comedian and writer David Baddiel told me his experience has certainly been that people turn to comedy at times like this. In his most recent public stand-up tour, before Britain implemented restrictions on social gatherings, he opened with a coronavirus gag: "It's great to see you're prepared to congregate in such large numbers at this stage in the apocalypse.” It always got a laugh. In his final gig, before his tour had to be canceled, a man in the audience performatively coughed in response, which garnered an even bigger laugh. “People want jokes,” Baddiel told me. “Partly because jokes are a relief, and they take the edge off danger; partly because they are a way of processing the experience; and yes, partly because … this is a massive shared experience.” People are looking for the release of comedy—and the knowledge that they are not alone. If we’re all finding this experience of being forced to stay at home funny, it’s reassuring, a form of collective therapy. “We can't really do much about these things, but we can laugh in the face of them,” he said. “In a godless society, it's the one eternal victory we have.”
Tim Minchin, the British Australian comedian, actor, and composer, agreed. “We don’t laugh at scary things because we don’t understand their seriousness,” he told me. “We laugh because they’re serious. Making jokes gives us a sense of power over the threat.” Minchin, like Baddiel, rejected the notion that joking about serious issues was somehow inappropriate—those making that argument, he said, were actually reaching for the same thing: a sense of power over the scary. “Their weapon is signaling their moral purity,” Minchin explained. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, though. “Both the clowns and the virtuous can at times be bores or boors or bullies,” he said. Moralizing is not simply comedy’s opposite, but the flip side of the same coin. Both offer people hope or relief and the sense of a shared experience, and both have dark sides.
Reflecting on these strange couple of weeks of coronavirus house arrest, I realized I have had more funny videos sent to me from neighbors in 10 days than in the past four years that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. Perhaps this is also why when we receive jokes from friends, we often immediately forward them to others. We are reaching out, establishing a shared experience. And when all the jokes are about life in lockdown, we instinctively do so even more; because we have been banned from congregating in person, we congregate online—we are a congregation.
rather be feared or disliked than ridiculed..