A Humorous Interlude

Come on, admit it, you are ready for a little humor. I promise it won’t take long. And it is relevant to what I have recently written.

I tried and tried to be a great composer. But it was frustrating, because I learned just enough about music to recognize how great the Great Composers were (are?) and how I would never match them. If I had worked on composition all my life, I might have been the late twentieth century equivalent of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Never heard of him? That’s my point.

I recently wrote an essay (August 9) about genius. Humor is a kind of genius. One kind of comedic genius I envy is stand-up comedy. You have to come up with something really funny, with essentially no time for preparation.

Here are a couple of examples of great ripostes that I could have made, but didn’t think of them until it was too late.

I was an incoming freshman at Santa Barbara in 1975, which was, I think, very early in the Anthropocene Epoch. Departments with low enrollments recruited students by having tours during orientation week. I visited the geography department. While I was there, a student (I hope not a graduate student) was practicing his presentation in front of a paper map. When he saw us clueless freshmen walk past, he turned to us, and pointed to the map. “This is a map.”

If I’d been a comedic genius, I might have said, “Oh, really? Is that what they teach you here? Wow, maybe if I’m a geography major I will be as smart as you someday.” But, of course, I didn’t think of this response until decades later.

I was teaching a university botany lab one time about ten years ago. I had the students taste different foods that they, in their rural Oklahoma dietetic narrowness, had probably never tasted. One of them was seaweed. One student in the class clearly considered himself too good to be in the class. He should have dropped it and taken something more interesting to him, like a correspondence course in shit-kicking. He swaggered in, a half hour late, with a smirk on his face. The others had tasted the seaweed. I had him taste it, too.

"Tastes like shit," he said to the silent class.

If I'd been a comedic genius, I might have said, “How do you know?” But of course I didn’t think of it until long afterwards.

Genius requires a lot of neural connections. I have a lot of them. But they have to work fast also. They have to work like monkeys jumping around. Mine sometimes work more like naked mole rats, bringing up a brilliant insight from deep underground just before it decomposes.

Happiness is Fill in the Blank

I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expecting much, not having much interest in the classical authors (Dante was especially silly), but just in case I missed something, I wanted to check.

Rather than to discuss the summaries of the “great” philosophers, which would lull you to sleep, I have chosen one narrow question: What is happiness?

Aristotle answered this question in a prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. His was the doctrine of the golden mean, which says that happiness is where you have enough, but not too much, of everything, from wealth to strength. Is there anyone who didn’t already know this? Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is as much as possible, but even they get worn out once in a while, and they will probably admit this. Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is none at all, not even accidental thoughts of sex. They are not happy, protestations notwithstanding. But the vast majority of humans already live by the doctrine of the golden mean. I certainly do.

While the golden mean seems obvious, there are lots of people who say that happiness is different for every person. Let me cite, rather than a philosopher, the mid-century musician Ray Coniff, whose song said that “Happiness is different things to different people” (“To a beatnik, it’s a beard, beard, beard…”) In the 1960s, when as a little kid I was absorbing television, I heard the tobacco corporation version: “To a landlord, it’s a great big rent, to a smoker, it’s a Kent.” (I’ve never heard this song on the radio since the 1960s. I assume the tobacco company bought the rights to the original song and is hoarding them.)

I think we all, regardless of philosophy or religion, know that there must be some universals to happiness (except among psychopaths). And, I maintain, many of these universals match the behaviors and feelings produced in our species by evolution. We can only be truly happy when we can honestly feel we are doing the right things with our lives—that is, altruism. We actually enjoy being good (up to a point), and having allies rather than having only enemies and competitors. And having a sense of purpose—which is also the product of evolution—and not just disconnected events.

Happiness is, therefore, not just whatever rings our bells, or floats our boats, or tickles our fancy, or verbs our object. It is a product of evolution, just like language and toenails and the cockles of your heart.