It was just another night with a group of theoretical hipsters in the bedroom at Halo... Well it was originally a Corto Moltedo dinner but it ended up at Halo. The girls were fawning over Giancarlo who had just flown in from Tokyo. The guys were getting drunk(er) and fawning over the girls. I was in a corner with the unassuming marketing manager for the brand, John, trying to make the most of the night. In typical pseudo-intellectual fashion, my first question was "so, do you read?" Amazingly he did. And he actually shared a favourite book with me - Marquez's Love in the time of Cholera. So the conversation went, with the occasional interruption from this wierd gay DJ or promoter dude who would come over and coo for the sake of being everyone's best friend...
John is a huge fan of "laugh out loud" books. I ( again: dark, pseudo-philosophical, brooding by nature...) had never really bothered with this genre, having dabbled with it briefly when i was in high school (a time when now, upon reflection, I probably wasn't sophisticated enough to UNDERSTAND why these things are FUNNY) and being sort of confused as to the funness of it, put it aside in favour of genre's that I deemed to be more inspiring... Anyways: so, deciding that this crazy random had good taste in clothes, art, and at least ONE book, i took his advice and bought DRY by Augusten Burroughs. And Naked by David Sedaris. And, like all the books ever written by Dave Eggers...
Some people say that comedy is the only way to deal with the world today. With all the famines, wars, natural disasters, social inequities, etc etc, deflecting through humour is our only tactic for survival. For a long time though, for me at least, what was deemed comedic or funny was really adding fuel to the flames of the fact that we are coming end of the world as we like it. Big Momma's House? Excuse me?
But, what i discovered was that certain people have a flair for wit. Oscar Wilde's of our times perhaps... Writers who can take life as we know it, hilight the absurdities, and be completely without remorse or anger or justifications or rationalizations... Does it make me feel better about the world or more able to see the truth in situations? Probably not. But is comedy really a just a coping mechanism? Not if you like to have fun...
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