What the world needs, in my humble opinion, is more humor, irony, and laughter.
Not the polite kind. Not the carefully filtered, politically correct kind. What we need is comedy and satire that catches you off guard and makes you laugh out loud before you have time to consider whether you should be laughing.
Which is how I ended up watching Meditations for the anxious mind on YouTube, laughing harder than I have in weeks.
The format is deceptively simple. No interviews. No confrontations. Just a calm, affectless voice delivering observational commentary while the camera shows real people existing in public.
The humor lives in the contrast.
The host speaks in broad, confident generalizations. The footage quietly complicates them. People posture. Perform. Soften. Contradict themselves. At the same time, they still perfectly illustrate whatever category the deadpan reporter is describing.
That’s the joke.
And it works because the delivery never tries to be funny. There is no wink. No punchline. Just flat, clinical observation. Which makes the absurdity feel unplanned and therefore even funnier. To me anyway.
What emerges, slowly, is the realization that identity itself is a kind of performance. Not just drag queens or mean gays, but everyone. The confidence. The indifference. The personas people construct and wear like armor.
Everyone is trying. Everyone is performing. Everyone is, on some level, a little anxious.
And everyone could benefit from relaxing long enough to laugh at themselves.
In a world that feels increasingly serious, humor like this feels less like entertainment and more like relief. Therapeutic even.
Its intention isn’t to escape reality. But to survive it.
Keep calm and laugh on!
Clint 🌈✌️
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Andrew Keenan Bolger: The Power of Queer Storytelling & Why It Matters Now (Aidan Wharton @ Getting Close)
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
BORN THIS WAY ON THIS DAY
02-24 = Doric Wilson (1939-2011) = American playwright, director, producer, critic, and activist 🌈
MAN CRUSH OF THE DAY
“Every day is a surprise. There are confirmations of an interconnectivity and synchronicity which inspire, titillate and confirm the inherent comedy of the universe.”
Billy Zane
Thank you for reminding me of my early theatre days in my hometown NYC when I briefly knew Doric Wilson through a mutual friend at the time, Terry Helbing. We both worked at NYU's School of the Arts, just before the name changed to Tisch. Terry was the first publisher of Wilson's plays. Such a heady time. They're both gone. Thanks again, Clint for that and for your stimulating curations.
Clint a great smorgasbord of archived rerun NSFW blokes, lads and everything in between. I'll catch up on the rest of your post laters. Cheers DougT 🏴🇬🇧