On humor amidst hardship

I just saw that tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live will also be the season finale. 

That revelation filled me with a tiny type of sadness I hadn’t fully felt yet. Please don’t go. I need you. I needed you. 

When SNL attempted its grand experiment 4 weeks ago, giving its performers the space to work without much space, writing and performing from their studio apartments and fancier digs (backdrops that vary depending on a player’s tenure on the show), I was apprehensive. 

For being a very awkward person, I don’t like awkwardness. It makes me cringe and shrink, desperate for the slick charm of a well-oiled machine. But Matt and I settled in anyway, because sitting down to watch Saturday Night Live — babies in bed and a drink in hand — contains echoes of another time. We usually stay home, but it used to be voluntary. 

Some of the sketches were indeed awkward. Many of them were genuinely funny. The resourcefulness was mind-blowing. It was an hour and 30 minutes of humor, heart and hope. And nothing is more encouraging during These Uncertain Times than people who keep trying. 

Trying to heal. Trying to invent. Trying to solve, feed, educate, reassure. Trying to elicit a smile from a stressed-out nation. 

Humor is an easy salve for grief and fear. When I lost my dad, returning to Chicago to finish the sketch writing program I’d started earlier in the year felt like a light at the end of a really trying tunnel. I craved the company of funny people. 

Months after my brother died, a dear friend lured me to Kansas City with tickets to a comedy festival, where we sat spitting distance from Amy Schumer, Nick Kroll and other greats. I laughed until I cried at a time when the reverse was more often true. 

And now, this. Grief of a different kind, at a time when television offers a place to go, whether that’s a dubiously managed tiger sanctuary or the cramped apartment of an up-and-coming actor. 

Last week, we sat down to watch NBC’s Parks and Rec reunion, filmed separately in each cast member’s home as a fundraiser for Feeding America. Again, I braced myself for discomfort, a failed attempt to recreate the lightning caught and bottled over 7 years of Thursday nights. Instead, we got a half hour of wonderfully earnest comedy. Pure televised sunshine. 

The need for levity when life is heavy is universal, but it can also seem petty or extravagant when our hierarchy of needs shifts towards survival. 

These days, I am mostly grateful to the doctors and nurses, the scientists and essential works. But I’m saving a small piece of that gratitude for the people who, undaunted by new limitations, keep trying to make us laugh. 

This is a picture of George that has nothing to do with my post.