It Hurts to Laugh

So I spent way too long the other night reading a blog post with a comment thread that got totally out of hand on account of the fact that the blogger made a passing crack at a very popular author with legions of die hard fans. I found the thread especially amusing because any discussion of this author or the work causes me to break down in hysterics, and, as you might imagine, the work was discussed a great deal in the comment thread, until the blogger got frustrated with the whole thing and told everyone to cut it the hell out. Which was the end of my amusement. (Sad face.)

I read the author in high school and I don’t remember experiencing this level of hilarity, but now, it’s like an anaphylactic reaction, to the point that I can’t even use the jargon associated with this author without breaking into giggles. I can’t even type the words without laughing, which is good, because I’m attempting to fly under the radar of Google detection here.

So here’s what happened. It’s the first week of college. A friend and I hear that, in the evening, there is a recruitment meeting for the campus sketch comedy group, so we head over to the campus building where such meetings are usually held. We go into a room where, at a seminar table, sit a group of folks who are totally the type who populate sketch comedy groups (i.e., they bear more than a passing resemblance to the cast of Freaks and Geeks — no offense to comedy sketch writers. You know what I mean). And the meeting starts.

I don’t know how long we were there before we realized that this was not, in fact, the sketch comedy group, but rather, a meeting of the people who are followers of this particular author’s work. They were called the Shmashional Shoshmecktivist Society, (those words are ones which Google will flag and which will cause me to spit lukewarm tea all over the keyboard). But it was longer than we had an excuse for.

When we did figure it out, the fact that we’d been in the meeting for as long as we had without discerning that they weren’t actually rehearsing a gut-bursting yet deadpan comedy sketch was about a hundred times as amusing as any comedy sketch could have been, and to this day, I regret the fact that we didn’t immediately interrupt the ongoing sketch comedy troupe meeting next door and hand them that nugget of pure comedy gold.

I do, however, remember being in hysterics for the rest of the evening, through a whole pizza run and the tummy ache that followed. And, to this day, I cannot hear any words associated with that author or the author’s work without being similarly affected.

You’d think the dog-eared copies of the author’s most famous book, which is a two word title, one of which is a proper noun and one of which is a past tense verb, clutched in every member’s hands would have been clue enough for us. But, firstly, I’d grown up in a town with a large population of people who based their beliefs on the writings of another novelist, and people regularly told jokes about that, so the idea was something I was used to.

Secondly, I was 18 and a freshman in college, shmashional and shoshmecktivist were words that sounded pretty much like all the other words being thrown around in my introductory philosophy class, and I wasn’t really sure what they were attached to, and they seemed generic enough to fit in with all the other schools of philosophic thought. And when the people at the meeting started talking about it, it sounded so outlandish that the idea that the whole thing was some elaborate skit rehearsal about a fake philosophical society based on the philosophy of a novel did not seem out of the realm of possibility. After all, this was Yale. They had all kinds of crazy societies to make fun of, right?

Yes, they did, but none, not even the Tories, seemed as instantly amusing to me as this group.
And I can say “Tory” without laughing, though you will see a definite smile.

And no one ever makes cracks about the Tories on blogs, and if they do, you don’t see all kinds of Tories crawling out of the woodwork to amuse berate you. So it’s not as fun.

I was laughing so much, reading the blog, that Sailor Boy emerged from his finals studying, concerned that I had started playing his video game. You see, SB has recently purchased a video game that can be described as Resident Evil meets ProperNoun PastTenseVerb (i.e., this author’s famous book), and whenever he plays it, I try not to pay attention, as the characters in the video game regularly pontificate on the joys of Shmashional Shoshmecktivism, in between ordering you to kill genetically-enhanced-yet-demonic little girls so as to steal the parasites from their brains (it’s a deeply weird video game). Anyway, it seem inappropriate to laugh at all this little girl killing, particularly when it is couched in the terms of Shmashional Shoshmecktivism, and I’m pretty sure it distracts him from his infanticidal missions, to boot.

In passing, I think the idea of using Shmashional Shoshmecktivism as an inspiration for the setting of the game is a brilliant move, because the whole zombie apocalypse idea does get tired after all, and I’m sure I’d discuss it more if I could do so without cracking up. But one night, in college, I couldn’t tell the difference between a philosophical discussion and a parody of the same, and you just don’t get over stuff like that.

So though I know you found the whole thing annoying, blogger, I appreciate you taking one for the entertainment and amusement of us all. Or at least, those of us who thought we were into sketch comedy.

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* Please note. Anyone dropping the deleted keywords is going to get laughed (and moderated) right out of the comment thread. I can’t help it.