By The Andrew Meyer
Where is all the laughter? The joyous, bubbling exuberance shining like a beacon from the smiles of the angelic beings who cast it forth?
Maybe this, above all else, is what’s wrong with the world. There are so many situations and scenarios where laughter is the wrong response, deemed ‘inappropriate’ for the circumstance. Imagine for a moment this scene: forty students perfectly aligned row by row, column by column, anxiously awaiting their LSAT exams, the test that will determine what law school they can get into, and thus what jobs they will be qualified for, and thus their whole worth upon this earth is determined by the score they receive on a test they have studied for joylessly for months. Now imagine a student in that room breaking out in uproarious, boisterous, thundering raucous laughter. What a nut! A baffling buffoon who should be thrown to the curb. He deserves no spot in this room full of serious scholars, men and women who have devoted their lives to this Herculean ta sk of scoring well on the LSAT. These are the men and women who are to be the pillars of society, shouldering the burden of being taken seriously, and acting civil and proper. The joker with the grinning guffaw is an outcast, a miscreant, a social deviant not to be given respect or taken seriously, even if his crazy wisdom is more true and divine than the unsmiling scholars.
I went to a fancy restaurant yesterday dressed in a blue wife-beater and a red top hat with a white fuzzy band around it that might denote it as a “pimp hat.” Well, imagine to my surprise the reaction of the luminaries around my dining table. Not the servers, who are forced to dress a certain way everyday they come to work in their hoity-toity establishment. They are used to customers in their restaurant dressing a certain way, and when presented with such a ridiculously attired fellow, it is natural that they would feel queer or unsettled. But what of my fellows, the people I came to dine with, who are both accustomed and expecting of my uncanny ways. Surely they can laugh, and appreciate the bold strangeness that I have exhibited?
“What are you doing, Meyer? You’re a complete joke. This is a nice restaurant. You can’t dress like that here.”
“Meyer, would you please take your hat off? Meyer? Take your hat off!”
And so on, and so on. And you know what? I’m willing to wager a few Galleons that these reactions are almost wholly unsurprising to the attentive modern observer. There is no wiggle room in the world these days for the dancing jester. There are specific social mores that must be upheld no matter how silly the place, the rules must be followed.
A college party in a backyard filled with 100 strangers and three kegs should be the most ridiculous and free environment imaginable. People should be pushing boundaries, exploring themselves and their surroundings, talking and laughing and enjoying life. The last college party I went to looked like this:
The backyard was covered with guys wearing the same collared shirt with similar colors in the same pattern. The girls were seated in little groups, waiting for the guys to approach and attempt to gain entry to the vagina. There are two tables of the ubiquitous college drinking game, beer pong, a game that neither involves anyone other than the 4 players nor stimulates conversation around it other than, “Yeah! Great shot!” or “Aw shit, I missed!” People weren’t meeting each other, they seemed like they couldn’t care less. They just wanted to be seen with their group of friends in a ‘cool’ environment.
The people in this world who are ‘cool’ are the people who don’t give a fuck. The guy going around the party in a deranged and spectacularly adorned cowboy hat, learning everyone’s name on the fly and forgetting them just as quick? That’s me. I’m expanding my world, learning new faces and names and opinions and ideas. Does that make me cool? I would say it makes me open-minded and willing to learn and seek others who realize that we are all the same. Everyone on this earth came from the same goddamn place, and those that seek to highlight our differences rather than our similarities, who would subvert the divine laughter for a serious game of beer pong, those people can and will go straight to hell. That’s a serious indictment, but don’t take me too seriously. I’m just playing around anyway – I didn’t even capitalize the h in hell.
