One summer in college, a group of us were sprawled out on the grass after a night of drinking, and we played truth or dare. When my turn came, I picked truth.
"Alex," one girl asked. This was not a group that called me Boz. "What is your humor a mask for?"
This happens to me a lot, and I never know what people expect me to do in these situations. Something tells me they want a movie moment, like the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Willams's character pushes Matt Damon's character into tears just by saying, "It wasn't your fault." Or maybe they want me dumbfounded like Chandler in that episode of Friends, the one where Monica's therapist boyfriend asks, "But what happens when the laughter stops?"
The girl at college had a sly smile, so I think she was looking for the second kind of reaction. She wanted me stunned. Instead, I roasted her, because I knew what she was going for, and it irked me. Then again, I irk a lot of people when I start going on a bit and can't seem to stop, which is fair. At one point I was a shy kid with hidden absurdity, but somewhere along the quest to break out of my shell, I overcorrected. I like to joke that the people who encouraged me in this thought they were freeing a beautiful bird of some sort. Instead, they found that a reptilian creature had snuck into the nest.
Obnoxiousness could be a separate essay. I'll leave that pending review for now. But I want to make sure I don't get so bogged down in a personal dissection that I miss the larger point of this essay, which is to defend humor itself.
Here's another popular narrative, one like the goofy guy who goes too far and then gets shut down: funny guy is secretly sad, and when the laughter stops, all that's left is a breakdown. Robin Williams has become the poster child for this dynamic, but there are plenty of other examples.
As the resident comedian of many friend groups and work situations, I have become really annoyed with this premise. It's not wrong, but it is judgmental and reductive. The idea is that the funny person should stop joking and instead work on their problems. The premise assumes that someone can't joke and work on their problems at the same time, nor that joking might be useful for solving said problems. That instance in college, for example, came at a time when I was doing all kinds of work on myself. College was the first time I could get therapy and I sought it out a month in. College was also when I found meditation and journaling. It was also a four-year experiment in the use of anti-depressants. I even threw in a side of group therapy to round out the mix. Say what you will about college Boz, he was working on himself.
I can't categorically deny that my humor in college had cry for help overtones, but I was already getting help. The problem was that things were still hard, and it was going to take years of work to get better, and many more years than I initially thought. And you know what's funny? I'm still not done. I'm still trying figure out this tangled little life of mine, and these essays are a new phase of that.
But here’s the thing: everyone is sad at some point. Everyone finds some sort of coping mechanism. My therapist outright told me so, and he's normally the evasive, Neo-Freudian, help-you-discover-the-answer-yourself type. So, when he speaks with such forthrightness, it's a rare gem. And what he says in those moments sticks just a little bit more.
Of course, some coping mechanisms are healthier than others, and I can't defend humor outright. Humor can be unhealthy. It can be a method of avoidance. But that's not all humor can do. I'm biased, but I think when done right, humor can be an incredibly effective form of sublimation (for any of you playing Boz bingo, sublimation is B3).
See what I did there? That was a joke at the end of a serious paragraph. And now I’m going to overanalyze that joke, so it won’t even have the chance to be funny. What was the purpose of that aside? There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of the Cry for Help theory, as I’m a fan of sublimation and don’t want to be cured of my passion for it. The actual purpose of that joke was to anticipate criticism, namely for how repetitive I can be, which is something I’m called out for a lot. I think that’s where someone could argue for that kind of defensive humor as a crutch. You see, I first discovered self-deprecating humor in elementary school. I was incredibly sensitive as a child, think the Wells for Boys sketch on SNL but with a lot more crying. I cried at everything, but teasing really got me. I just couldn’t handle it. There was plenty to tease me for, and of course, having such melodramatic reactions to being teased only encouraged further teasing.
One day I went crying to my dad about something my sisters said, and he reached his limit.
“You’re too sensitive,” he said. “You’ll never survive like this.”
When I tell people that story it’s usually met with condemnation. The last time I relayed it, a coworker threw out the dreaded label of “toxic masculinity.” But here’s the thing, my dad wasn’t wrong. At that time, bullying by my peers was mostly verbal, and for the most part, mild. But in fifth grade we moved to a poorer county where we could afford a bigger house. In this county, however, the schools were underfunded, and kids got the shit beat out of them on a regular basis. If I stayed as sensitive as I was in elementary school, I would have been eaten alive.
I think that’s one facet of toxic masculinity that doesn’t get discussed as much: how much men traumatize other men, especially while those men are boys.
Before the move to that county, I experimented with self-deprecating humor as a way for the teasing to hurt less. I have a specific memory. I was in the hospital to get an x-ray, and I was wearing a hospital gown. My sisters were making fun of me because the gown looked like a dress. I had been allowed to bring some toys with me to the hospital, a collection of handheld vehicles: cars, ships, and planes. In my mind, these toys were sentient, much like the vehicles in the Pixar film Cars. While my sisters made jokes about my gown, I imagined the vehicles were making fun of me as well. But, since I was the one voicing the vehicles in my brain, I got to be in on the joke, and that way, it hurt less. That private moment with my toys became a turning point. I started crying less and joking more.
Self-deprecation can be incredibly confusing for those who are not fond of it, and like with anything, it should be served in moderation. But what people often miss about self-deprecation is how it can be a way for powerless people to regain control in the face of difficult circumstances. I think that’s why Jewish humor strikes this tone (for those of you still playing Boz bingo, Jewishness is G5).
Humor became incredibly important to me in middle school. My middle school followed the middle school stereotype in that it was awful. There was a real jailhouse feeling to the place, an unspoken rule that if you weren’t picking on someone, you were going to be picked on. We were always on the defensive. You could be walking down the hall, minding your own business, and someone you might not even know would grab you without explanation. If it wasn’t a physical altercation, you were waiting instead for a random insult, one which also might lead to physical altercation if it wasn’t handled right. My school was big on comebacks. You always needed to have a comeback. At any minute someone might insult you or point out something embarrassing, and if you didn’t have something to say in return, you were the loser. And the more often you were a loser in those exchanges, the more likely it was that you would be a loser in general, and then the bullying might become permanent. Comebacks were like those missiles fired to take out other missiles. You had to neutralize the threat before it hit the ground.
This was before my high school growth spurts. In sixth grade, I was about as much of a bully magnet as you could ask for. I was short, skinny, nerdy, and still had a high voice. More than that, I came from a strict family, which made me err on the side of being a teacher’s pet. My prospects for popularity were not good.
At first, I was terrible at comebacks. It was a new art form. But over time I learned the rules and I could be quite mean. Surprisingly mean. This was something I would have to train myself out of after high school. Mean humor has a short shelf-life. In my opinion, insult humor is the least funny and should be used sparingly. Roasts always give me a bad aftertaste, even if they’re hilarious. I think you can only get so far on that kind of joking, and it works best as a weapon against the powerful when they’ve overstepped.
But, even in middle school, when things were at their most defensive, I started exploring alternatives. And for that, I owe an incredible debt to The Simpsons. The Simpsons was the first show to be my show. Since we didn’t have cable growing up (something I’m now grateful for because it forced me to read books), I always asked for the DVD box sets as birthday presents. The Simpsons had everything. It was dumb and smart. It was biting and compassionate. It was wacky and random, but also structured with finesse. I marveled at how the plot remained malleable, and at how far the writers stretched it through unexpected, interlocking situations.
The Simpsons operated in the way that I found things funny. The humor was weird, and the characters were ridiculous, especially Homer, who was supposed to be the man in charge. Anything could turn into something else. The rules of reality could be bent. An episode’s themes could be subverted by its own ending.
I experimented with weird humor in situations where a comeback was out of the question, namely when the person insulting me was much bigger and known for following through on physical threats. Self-deprecation surprised people. When people made Yo Momma jokes, I made My Momma jokes, and I loved seeing the bewilderment when they sputtered: “But, that’s your mom.” I tried to be a wild card in general. In classes, I was still the same try-hard nerd, but I mitigated that with inappropriate jokes, many of which got me in trouble with the teacher, but not so much in trouble that it affected my academic career. A public scolding got nods of approval from classmates. In fact, that was the sweet spot: smart kids who didn’t try, smart kids wasting their potential with a bad attitude. No one wanted to be dumb, and no one wanted to be a teacher’s pet, so by getting labeled as a smart-ass kid, you got to have your cake and graduate with it too.
Expressions became important. I had trained myself entirely out of crying by this point, at least at school. I cried at home in private because I was tough. And then I tried not to think about how much I was crying. Regardless, I found that a bored or blank expression really confused bullies. I remember vividly this one kid but not his name. He was that classic example of the kid who is bigger because he has been held back. That situation provides a particular kind of anger, especially towards nerdy students. In the locker room, he would go down the row like he was bullying on an assembly line. But when he got to my place in the queue and started pushing, I went not just bored but blank. Like a robot.
If I think back to it, I can see his exact expression. I can hear the gears of his little bully brain getting stuck. And instead of trying to provoke a reaction, he looked bewildered and moved on.
Being funny was an important piece to my survival. Being funny allowed me to renegotiate the roles that I felt forced into. In the process, I discovered that the people in charge were often just as ridiculous, as much as they tried to pretend otherwise.
A big tension at my school concerned complaining. The school was bad because it was underfunded. As an adult, I had the sickening epiphany that the school was underfunded because it was located in a historically black county. But I never heard that mentioned as a child, even at a school rife with racial tensions where a common way black kids got sensitive whites to lose their shit was to say, “Your ancestors probably owned my ancestors.” That one got me for the longest time, even though the black kid in question was laughing when they said it, and I would sputter out that my ancestors had come over during World War II. They didn’t own anybody. You gotta believe me. Later I would give the same kind of retorts but served in a joke. Please. My broke-ass ancestors who came a-running over here during the Holocaust? Please. They didn’t own shit.
I hated Jew jokes, at first. But I learned to embrace them after I started being physically bullied for my Jewishness in eighth grade. I had to pick my battles. And so, I started making Jew jokes against myself. It inspired the same confusion as the Yo Momma jokes: “But, your ancestors were in the Holocaust.”
A girlfriend of mine in college, one of the first, tried to get me on my Holocaust jokes. After one session, she pulled me aside.
“Hey,” she said, wearing the same sly smile that the other girl would later share when asking what my humor was a mask for. “Just so you know. My great-grandfather was hanged for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust.”
I hate to admit it, but I’m still proud of how I didn’t miss a beat.
“Oh,” I said. “Did you know my great-grandfather was Jewish? He and a couple other relatives came over during the Holocaust. Everyone else in the village was taken away and slaughtered.”
Her smile turned to horror.
“But…then why would you make those jokes?!”
“Because they’re funny,” I said.
I didn’t have time to explain my sad little backstory portraying self-mockery as a means of survival, and I wouldn’t have been comfortable enough to do it then either. Even in sophomore year, everything was still so fresh, and I still had so much more therapy to do before I could talk out about things in the open.
Back to complaining. Complaining about our school was en vogue for students. It was a semi-conscious and collective form of self-deprecation because other school systems looked down on us. But the school also had its defenders, namely people who had grown up there, the children of faculty members, and new teachers who were not yet burnt out. One of the most common rebuttals given was:
“Things are only bad because people keep complaining about them,” the daughter of a teacher said to me.
This is where The Simpsons style of sarcasm came in handy.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like Martin Luther King used to say. Stop complaining. Things will get better on their own.”
The girl scowled, but you know what? She didn’t have a comeback.
I got away with a lot of stuff at home too. I was still a good Christian boy, but I found myself laughing at jokes that pointed out biblical inconsistencies. Soon I was making similar jokes at the expense of the uber-Christian kids at school, and in this way, humor allowed me to wiggle out of the mental parameters I had been raised in as a Southern Baptist. It also paved the way for my transition out of conservative thought. We were a Republican household, but the further I went into adolescence, the more I started arguing against the kind of things I had once argued for. By the time of Obama’s first election, I was debating from the Democratic side, something unthinkable just a year or two earlier. Conservative thought just doesn’t hold up well to comedy. Liberal thought can get plenty ridiculous, but it’s different from people who insist on black and white thinking.
This mental wiggling is why I’ve needed humor in the workplace. Most jobs remind me of school. There are problems with the fundamental premise, but according to management, complaining is the problem. Also, like school, most of us are forced to be there for hours at a time performing tedious tasks and assignments that seem arbitrary. My jobs have felt even more so like my broke middle and high school because I’ve been underemployed. There hasn’t been enough money to go around at my workplaces. People can work full time and still struggle. So, like at my school, people alternate between complaining and trying not to, between acknowledging elephants in the room and explaining them away. Also, plenty of customers are bullies. They don’t even have to yell. At the restaurant, I found it most infuriating when people would outright ignore me. I would present the food with descriptions (an annoying requirement for runners at nicer restaurants) and the guests might not even look in my direction. Often, they talked over me. That hurt worse than the people yelling. At least the yelling customers acknowledged my existence, if only as some service industry archetype.
Most workplaces, especially the kinds that rely on underemployment to function, have contradictory policies, things that make sense to people who don’t work on the floor. At the ice cream shop, the district manager had an algorithm for how many employees were needed at one time. It fit the needs of a company trying to cut labor to compensate for an unsustainable business model, but it was impossible for the human beings who had to scoop, make waffle cones, offer samples, ring people up, replace old batches of ice cream, and somehow take a break amidst all of this during a rush.
This is where humor as a means of rebellion comes back into play. The most uncomfortable fact about modern labor is that most workplaces are toxic simply because most of the workers don’t want to be there. If they had a choice, they wouldn’t do it. This sounds obvious if you’ve grown up in our time, but for most of history, people didn’t sell their hours in the way that we do. Most people were farmers, and farmers had control of their day. Ditto for artisans such as blacksmiths. Of course, industrialization has also raised standards of living to levels unthinkable for people of previous generations. Therein lies the sticky part, and it’s why whenever I become too much of a millennial ranting about the evils of capitalism, I think about the benefits as well. But I also try to think of how we can neuter capitalism so that it’s no longer a game of survival.
Work has been its own essay, a couple now, but they’re all in first draft territory. Since this word count has already passed 3,000, I better get back to the topic at hand.
In each of my workplaces, I’ve needed weird humor to survive because at work I feel trapped. I can’t say my real thoughts, and I must do all sorts of things that I find to be monotonous and soul-crushing. My jokes can’t be cutting enough to get me in trouble, so I find ways to be weird instead that are technically not inappropriate according to the handbook.
It’s gone better than it could have. At all my jobs in Los Angeles, I was considered one of the better employees. I joke, but I’m still too much of an anxious teacher’s pet to really goof off. I get the work done; I just squeeze weirdness in between. And that’s the game I must play in order to get through my shifts without falling prey to despair.
Like at my school, it’s expected at customer service type of businesses that no one wants to be there, but some employees are still defensive. And I get it more in the workplace as opposed to school. It hurts harder to rag on our own underemployment, on the shitty nature of the jobs themselves, because we ended up there through our choices. It’s not like school. No one is forcing us to go except for bills, the need for a certain kind of flexibility, the paradox of needing experience to get experience, etc. Also, wages have stagnated since the seventies and wealth is hoarded by the one percent and many jobs are useless due to increasing automation and a sleight of hand bureaucratization that uses middle management and administrative jobs to keep people trapped in more comfortable but still soul-crushing kinds of tedious employment that suck wages away from the castes below them…
It's at this point I would like to invite two of my favorite kvetches to the stage. Please welcome Bernie Sanders and the ghost of David Graeber. On the bingo card, they’re I3 and O2 respectively.
I need humor to push back against customers as well. I get away with a lot of honesty by kidding around, and it seems to help more than hinder. When someone dodges my upsell, I break the fourth wall and point it out, teasing them for resisting. People seem to like that. I’ve gotten some sales that way. At the restaurant, lots of people would get upset about food not arriving on time, especially if their server had failed to check in. I would do this bit where I’d act fake-outraged and insist that I would go into the kitchen and raise hell. Then I would sidle up to the server or chef and ask if they could they hurry something up. Sometimes I would rag on the guest to show the coworker in question that I was on their side. And then I would go back to the table, hopefully with the food or drink in question, and continue my bit, saying that I had made a scene and obtained the food, but now I was fired. It was a big hit.
I was trying to explain to someone at my last restaurant why I had five or so jokes that were constantly being tweaked and recycled. To do so, I had to break the fourth wall and lay out the main ways that our job sucked. Customer service is not only repetitive, it’s an inherently artificial situation. Customer service is the uncanny valley of human interaction. The workers look happy because they must look happy, at least if they’re going to follow the scripts written by management and keep making money. I was miserable at each job, but I kept myself looking cheerful by acting zany. Much like a court jester, that also let me get away with roasting people who had power over me, and when I was feeling bold, roasting the company itself.
At my last restaurant, I had several managers. One of them thought I was obnoxious. She was a decent person, but we could not have been more different. This woman was a manager to the core, and that makes it hard to have a sense of humor. Her first shift, she was there when a customer who enjoyed my jokes came up and raved about me to the chef. That’s the kind of stuff you fantasize about when you’re doing your silly little bits at tables. And this woman did it right there next to my new manager. The timing could not have been better.
I turned to the new manager once the customer left.
“And you said I was fired…” I said in a teasing tone. It’s a joke format I’ve stolen from The Simpsons.
Her face pinched up.
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
I knew at that moment things were going to be awkward between us.
The thing is, even with my fear of authority, I came to relish bugging the shit out of her. It got to the point where she would cut me off mid-bit and that would make me gloat. Because, even with no power, I could make robo-cop lose her cool, and she couldn’t write me up for it.
Humor is all I’ve had to resist the casual way so many jobs insist we be less human and like it. My life was sad and confined at my workplaces, and I had to put up with so many things that were inherently dehumanizing. My job as a runner had me responding to a bell that the chef rang for me. It made me feel like a trained dog. The job required moving for hours on end with no break for dinner. Breaks had to be taken at the beginning of shift, so we all got hungry a few hours later, especially because we were smelling food nonstop. My job involved taking all kinds of shit from awful people, hoping that they still might tip. It involved being polite when a manager told us we needed to add more work onto our existing tasks even though we were barely keeping up with the original set because the restaurant was understaffed. It involved nodding at corporate policies that made no sense.
For example, when I threw out my back, it was after a period of setting up the outdoor dining by myself for days in a row. Only one employee was scheduled for set-up at a time, and that included not only carrying out heavy chairs, tables, heat lamps, and parasols, but also rushing to get through a whole other pre-dinner to-do list. All within an hour. Then that person on set-up shift took a thirty and moved for six plus hours straight, stopping only to get a drink or use the bathroom.
I have mixed feelings about mentioning the back thing in this context. The restaurant in question was the most humane restaurant I’ve worked at, and they were trying to treat us well. The chef texted me when I had Covid to make sure I was okay. The managers surprised employees on their last day with cake. The owners knew everyone by name and gave us handwritten cards for Christmas. These were good people. But it’s near impossible to have a profitable restaurant, much less one where the workers aren’t miserable and in literal pain. Restaurants operate on thin margins, and compromise is always portioned out first with labor, meaning that the remaining workers burn out even faster and management must find creative ways to gaslight the people they’re running into the ground. Also, restaurant work is the kind of physical labor that simply is not healthy. It wears bodies out. Most of the workers at my restaurant jobs were in their twenties and thirties. We all had joint pain. We all had terrible sleep schedules from working nights. We were often dehydrated because there wasn’t time to drink water. And almost everyone had atrocious mental health.
But here’s where humor comes back in. Because, after I threw out my back, they didn’t start scheduling two people for the set-up shift. Instead, they bought a tiny cart that didn’t fit most of the items that needed to be taken out. Using the cart made most tasks take twice as long, and when you’re setting up a whole restaurant in an hour, you don’t have that kind of leeway. The cart was for liability reasons, and this was what made me upset. Because, then if my back went out again, they could say something like, “Well, we provided a cart, he chose not to use it…” It was synonymous to the defense: “Well, this school is only bad because people complain about it.” The cart represented some ripe corporate cognitive dissonance, and it needed roasting. And roast it I did. But one of my coworkers was a snitch. I still don’t know who, but somehow my kvetching made it back to management.
I found this out during the announcement of a new back-protecting policy. For close, the cart was not suggested. Instead, tables would only be stacked in the front of the restaurant, not the back, saving the carrier a whole five to ten feet. Ingenious. Except, the issue with the carrying wasn’t the last five or ten feet. It was that the tables and other outdoor accoutrements were simply too heavy and ungainly to carry with good form. The hardest part was getting them off the ground. By the time you were back in the restaurant, the hardest part was then putting these ungainly tables and such back down on the ground. Then you had to stack them on top of each other. Saving carriers five feet was another policy designed with liability in mind, not backs.
The first shift where my manager told me this new policy, I resisted without even realizing it. I carried tables the extra five feet anyway.
“Now, Xander,” she started.
Xander was my work name. When I was feeling really edgy, especially when part of me wanted to get in trouble because I’d been working the job for too long and fantasized about being fired, I called it my slave name. That freaked coworkers out, because you could be written up for something like that, but it also got the laughs. And once a joke gives me laughs, it’s hard to let go.
“Don’t you remember what I told you?” the manager asked me in a schoolteacher tone.
I did remember. I really did. And I resented it, and I resented the fact that I could only be so honest without losing my job. And I resented the manager talking to me like a child when the job forced me to be childlike, to feel like I was trapped in school again. So, I did a bit.
“Oh, Molly!” I gushed. Molly isn’t her real name. “You do care about me! You do care!”
“Okay! Okay. But are you listening?” she chided.
I forget how I responded, but whatever iteration of the same bit I came back with, I remember her snapping in the same way teachers did when they also realized that they hated our school.
“You’re the one who said you threw out your back!”
And that’s when I knew I worked with a snitch. But like I said, I still don’t know who it was. And really, most of the people I worked with at that place were great. Even this manager, for all her stiffness, was an admirable person. When the shift ended, she started speaking like more of a human again, I relaxed a little, annoyed her less, and things were fine. And we do need managerial types. If LA has taught me anything, it’s that us spacey, creative folk need to be balanced by more organized and practical people. But when the organized and practical types have too much control, that’s when people are expected to act more like machines than people, because it’s efficient. And efficiency drives profit. And you can’t have a business without profit. And you can’t have jobs without business. And the algorithm says two people can work the whole floor and not go insane. So, swallow that panic attack, and get back out there.
I passed five thousand words just now, and I’m just getting fired up. I was supposed to bring in anthropological theory at some point to provide an intellectual precedent for my kvetching. And there’s plenty of that. Anthropology loves jokes. One of my professors spent a whole lecture explaining the deeper structure of them. Unfortunately, I don’t remember many details, I just know that he said something about how jokes ask questions that provokes unorthodox answers, answers that only a fool could indulge. At first. Hannibal Burress did a set that brought down Bill Cosby after years of serious accusations failed to. A stand-up set is a very impractical way to bring down powerful predators, but it worked. People talk a lot about how it took a man saying the same things women had in order to make people care, which is true, but I haven’t heard anyone point out that it took not just any man, but a goofy one spouting off. Call me biased, but I think that’s a crucial detail.
In many myths around the world, trickster characters serve as intermediary types. They’re shapeshifters who can reveal truths that others can’t. This is the kind of thing I consider when I’m fed up with my own foolishness, when I’m tired of being so obnoxious, when I’m tired of being expected to keep up an act that I started, when I’m tired of self-deprecating about things that still make me feel so ashamed. I tell myself that it’s not all for attention. It’s not just an indulgence. It’s not all frivolity. I am making jokes for the same reason that I now write essays, and many of these essays have jokes in them for the same reason. I am trying to take risks with honesty. That’s why I pursued the arts. I wanted to sneak truth into a system demanding artifice. I wanted to find a way out of the scripts we’re all expected to perform in daily life, and write my own instead. Also, I can’t stop hearing funny things. I tried to be one of the more practical types. I have given myself the same talking to many times, especially when starting a new job:
“Now, Boz, this time let’s just tone it down. Okay? You don’t need to be the court jester in every kingdom.”
But then I get bored, and then I do a bit, and then I get a laugh, and then I feel alive again, and then it’s all over. My failure to get serious frustrated me for the longest time, especially when I still planned to do political work. At some point, I told myself, I would have to put away childish things and grow up.
But the older I get, the more I see ridiculousness in so much of the so-called seriousness: That’s just the way things are. Things are only bad because people keep complaining. You’re the one who said you threw out your back.
And this is also why I can’t give up on the arts, as torturous as they can be, because if I succeed at one of these so-called practical careers, I’ll still be trapped. But if I can be funny enough, talented enough, hardworking enough, whatever enough to get away with being truthful, then I can be free. That’s what I really want, and it’s the reason I can’t stop writing essays. It’s why I wear jokes out that fascinate me even when they’ve started to annoy others. I’m looking for the right words. I’m looking for the right punch lines. I’m looking for the right rhythms. I’m looking to be that trickster character who reveals some truth. I’m looking to find something sacred within the profane. I’m looking for a way to take my stories and lead them someplace meaningful: The Promised Land.
But to get there, I first have to look for the laugh.