"...being the Comedian's the only thing that makes sense."

Sunday, cigarette #5
Outside Gourmet Heaven, 5:45pm

Sacha Guitry, who was apparently “the French Noel Coward,” said You can pretend to be serious, but you can’t pretend to be funny. (If he had been the French P.T. Barnum, he would have said You can sucker somebody into believing you, but you can’t sucker somebody into laughing for you. If he had been the French Heidegger, he would have said Humor participates in authenticity to a greater extent than does seriousness. If he had been the French Philip Roth, he would have been Michel Houellebecq.)

Intellectual movements attain their perfection in their humor. If the Sokal hoax proved that real serious-sounding postmodernism and fake serious-sounding postmodernism are basically indistinguishable (whoops, guys), Andrew Boyd proves that the line between real postmodern humor and parodic postmodern humor is so fine that it probably doesn’t exist. These are a few helpful hints from Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Helf for the Post-Hip:

2. Implicate yourself in every interpretation.
33. Be as if.
97. Negotiate identity.
138. Disperse yourself in a cloud of disparate elements.
179. Manufacture nostalgia.
200. Collect worldviews.
221. In an attempt to demystify, further obscure.
237. Take irony for granted.

Visitors to his site can also enter the existential contest. ("I can't go on; I'll go on; what's up with that?" "When you Facebook friend the abyss, the abyss also Facebook friends you." "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must change the subject to something we can all enjoy.")

By the way, that Sacha Guitry quote is also the reason I like politics-as-comedy better than politics-as-tragedy or politics-as-melodrama: there’s a better chance that the thing people are responding to is true. (Although, to be fair, this isn’t always a good thing.)