Everything Can Be Joked About

The idea that everything in life can be joked about is something I personally hold as an adamant core belief.

While only twenty-one years old, there have been numerous constitution-shaping events that have occurred in my life. Some of the most influential being, two stints in drug rehabilitation, one being a two-month long habitation in the Escalante of Utah in the midst of Winter; friends committing suicide, and my father being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Normally, experiences such as these, I suspect, would hollow a person’s morale, so much so that they’re left a shell of a person. The only constant in my entire life has been having the ability to find humour in the most emotionally crippling of circumstances. Being able to exert a visceral and cathartic exhalation, which helps me to cope with all of these traumatizing events, has honestly, saved me.

Scientific studies have been conducted that prove every species of animal (of those studied) display some form of noise characteristically reminiscent to laughter. This proves that laughter is an inherent attribute. In regards to horrifying historical events of the past, I believe that the only way to fully overcome past atrocities is by being able to make jokes about them. Almost everyone has heard a joke that, due to the political constraints of our society, we know we shouldn’t laugh at, but there are, and will always be, people who do laugh. I consider people who have the ability to find laughter in the darkest of places to be more highly evolved than those who cannot. Personally, if I feel the need to make a joke about something most people don’t find humorous, there will never be an occasion where I won’t do it. I cannot be told I’m wrong in saying this, because the nature of the word “wrong” is subjective.

I make myself laugh almost every single day, multiple times a day. I know without laughter, at least for myself, I wouldn’t be able to bare the amount of sadness in life. Why tell people there are certain subjects you can’t make jokes about? Comedian Ricky Gervais, considered by many to be one of the most controversial comedians of all time, is also one of the most financially successful. He has said, “Comedy is laughing in the face of adversity…we use comedy as a sword, a shield, as a medicine, as a getting to know you. It’s fundamental. It’s a fundamental we understand comedy and we have humor, because it’s built on empathy, and that’s what being human is…there’s nothing you shouldn’t joke about…it depends what the joke is.”

We are all individuals, and if we, as a people, continue to demand that others believe, or say what someone, or something else believes, we’ll end up in the same manner that Mount Vesuvius left Pompeii…silent amongst the ashes.