Dear Reader,

I know the place for the note to the reader is down below, but just here I do feel to write a small disclaimer. Yesterday I slept most of the day. I went to sleep after I sort of collapsed in a mini depression when I realized that I am not able to properly "entertain" you. I am just not a comic. I am not that talented. I am not like Shakespeare. After all, when Shakespeare produced his dramas, he always offered some type of "comic relief". In each serious play there were always one or two characters who provided the audience with a bit of levity to distract from the heavy subject matter. 

I find this interesting, because our modern day media companies don't seem to have taken this practice over from him. Dramas are dramas and comedies are comedies and never the twain shall meet? I'm probably just ignorant here. Please tell me where I am going wrong, dear reader. I just think that there is very little comedic relief in the heavy dramas. And I wonder if there is a reason for this. I mean, Shakespeare probably did it because, in his day, a person would never have been able to watch a very dark tragedy such as Romeo and Juliette without having had the nurse to lighten things up. It would have been too much of an emotional  challenge to sit through a MacBeth, for example, (or stand through, since the cheapest tickets, during that time, for the poorest show-goers, were not for seats but for standing room only). I confess, I haven't read MacBeth. I should speak of only what I truly know. In any case, I am thinking of how comedy helps us to get through really hard times and face the roughest truths we are faced with in life. 

That is why, is it not? that the royals always had their jesters. Wasn't it the clown who often helped the king see the folly of his selfish opinions? Have there perhaps been jesters who have entertained kings and despots in centuries past, who had the exclusive right of making a little fun, of pointing out in a light and slightly more tolerable way, that the king mayn't have formed the right opinion or have taken the right action on some issue that affected the general mass of the public at large? This is what I have heard and I wonder if it's somehow true. 

But right now I am thinking of something a little different. I am thinking how it is possible to get an idea into someone's brain... that is, through emotion, through influencing someone to feel something, and we all know or at least, the studies have been done (sic), that it is very effective to emotionally load a subject in a negative way. Negative feelings seem to carry much more weight for humans. Hence, if there is a topic where I want to have some influence, I can put something negative in there and it will have a greater chance of hitting the target, the human heart strings. People remember negative topics and ideas much more easily and much longer than positive ones. It's been researched in any case. 

So, in our modern day dramas there is hardly room for comedic relief scenes. It's interesting. Because when I was in Germany, I remember that I bought tickets to see a play. I had been there only a few weeks and I was just learning German. In a German class, and I cannot remember which class, or where, we had read a play. It was called, "Der Besuch der alten Dame". I won't bother to look it up. That translates as "The Visit of the Old Lady." It is a dark satire. There were some really nice jokes in it and I remember having enjoyed reading it so much. While learning a language there is a very particular thing that happens. When you experience a success during the process of being able to understand humor in the new language, it is a great thing. You feel such a sense of accomplishment. Well, this very, very dark play had several scenes in which there was a good deal of comedic relief sprinkled about. And a good thing, too, because it was, as I said, very dark territory. 

Then, I wanted to invite my friend to the play, when I saw that it was being put on. My friend had never seen the play in question and I told him that he would really like it. I was going on my own feelings, because I had experienced this great success at having first understood "German humor" while reading that play. (Remind me to tell you a "German" joke at the end of this.) That was during my very first few weeks in Berlin in early to mid 1989, just before The Berlin Wall came down. So, I "invited" my friend. That means, in German, I paid for his ticket. I paid for both the tickets. "Ich lade dich ein..." means, I invite you, means, I am paying for your ticket. That is something that you should know if you are with Germans. I invite you, if you say this in English, they are going to expect you to pay... so be ready or just say "would you like to join me". Don't say "I invite you...". Anyway, we went in and found our seats. I was excited to see the play, as I had greatly enjoyed reading it and was looking forward to that feeling of satisfaction at being able to understand the humorous parts that were coming up. Not only this, I was expecting that my friend would be similarly entertained by these same clever jokes. After all, humor is quite important to me... hmmm...

Well, it didn't turn out at all as I had expected. I was not prepared for a thing they call "artistic license". It seems that the director of this play, staged in 1989, which had been written perhaps a hundred or more years prior, well, this director had decided there was no need for humor in the play. He took out EVERY SINGLE joke. There was not one laugh left in the whole thing. Every time there was a joke coming up, I was getting ready to laugh, and thinking that, ok, here it comes, and I would get a chance to have a nice laugh with my friend. I was so disappointed each time as the laugh didn't come; there was nothing to laugh about. But my friend was undisturbed. Well, he didn't know the original play, and that it was pure satire. He was sitting there watching and indeed, quite ENJOYING, this "drama". Because, it had ceased to be a satire at the point where all the jokes had been lifted out. 

I got so perturbed that I suggested to my friend, "let's get out of here". But he wasn't having it. He was having a good time. Maybe a great time. Germans don't really possess a sense of humor, it has been rumored more than once. He was really enjoying this really depressing play about a woman who comes back to her family village in order to take revenge on a previous lover in her old age. It was depressing and it wasn't a satire any more and I was disgusted that I had wasted my money, but my friend actually was liking it. Go figure. 

And this is in contrast to a play that I was in, many years later. In this play, exactly the opposite thing happened. It was a contest. The contest was a play-writing one. So, there were a lot of plays and we all sat around a table and read different parts in plays that had been submitted. The subject matter of the play was supposed to be something that was a social issue of our time. The year was 2014. One of the plays was about unemployment and children dropping out of school to go and live with their parents again. The play was called, "The Homecoming" about a couple where the husband is out of work and the wife uses her sewing machine to help pay the bills. Suddenly the daughter drops out of college and returns home to live with her parents again after breaking up with her boyfriend. The husband is upset because the wife has to now empty out her sewing room and give it to the daughter. 

What happened was, the man who wrote the play became upset because the director, the man who directed me and the guy who played the girl's father (I was of course playing the mother of the girl); this director ADDED levity to the script. And it turned out really well. The jokes worked and the audience laughed. Several times. I even added a joke of my own at the end, with the permission of the director, and the play won the Audience Choice award as the best play among all those submitted. I think there were eight or so plays that had been chosen to be staged out of all the plays that had been submitted. Our play won. And I think the laughs were a big part of it. I don't want to say my acting wasn't what did it. (I think it was pretty good, but I'm going to say the comic relief helped the subject matter greatly.) Yeah, the play won, but the writer wasn't happy. 

I think what I am trying to get at is something else actually. Maybe it is easier to confuse people when the jokes are just left out. Maybe it is easier to get people to do certain things, to manipulate them actually, if it is just all negative. Maybe fear is a tactic... Maybe... 

I mean, it's odd for me now, when I think about it. Why do I not have ANY sense of humor. I really don't seem to be able to tell a joke, to really "entertain" you. I apologize. I really want to learn to be funny... Really I do. 

So, here, for your entertainment... a joke I heard while I was in Berlin. Now, I admit, you have to KNOW Germans in order to really get this joke.

It goes something like this and was purportedly told by a Canadian commedian living in Germany just before the Y2K thing. 

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The story goes that this Canadian was asked once by someone during an interview: 

Sir, what are the three best things that you like about Germany as a Canadian?

The comic answered as follows:

Well, first, I have to say I love the weather.

Hmmm, thought the reporter, weather, uh, that sounds a bit odd, sir, but ok, sure, maybe coming from Canada, one could say that we have good weather, I mean, it's cloudy here much of the time, but maybe it's not quite that cold, so sure... what's the second thing that you like about living in Germany?

The comic didn't miss a beat and answered right away, "The food, German food is the best." Again, the reporter was caught off-guard. She thought then, Oh, I guess he means all the foreign restaurants we have here in Germany, because you can eat Italian, Greek, French, Turkish, whatever you want. Chinese, etc. That must be what he means. I mean... he CAN'T have meant German food, surely!

By the time the comic came to the third thing he liked about Germany, I'm not sure the reporter even was able to follow him. But I had a good laugh when he declared: 

That's all great, the weather and the food, but really the BEST THING OF ALL about Germans...

is their HUMOR.

By that time I was rolling on the floor. As will you, if you've ever known Germans. If you haven't known Germans, you probably won't get the joke. If you have known Germans and didn't laugh, well, maybe I still can't tell a joke. 

Dear Reader,

so that was the joke, and I promise I will strive to do better next time.