The Prime Directive - Are You Not Entertained?

More than Anything, Does the Cosmos Want Us to Laugh?

(Russell Crowe in “Gladiator”)

An Irish-Catholic background can, it sometimes seems, confer the right to be both reverent and sardonic, devout and dismissive, blessed and bitter when it comes to matters of faith. Some typically Irish jokes about Jesus come to mind:

Jesus Joke #1 - Jesus of Nazareth walks into a pub, slaps three nails on the table and says, “Can you put me up for the night?” (insert rim shot)

Jesus Joke #2 (best told in a Belfast accent) - On the hill of Calvary, Jesus calls to St. Peter. “Come to me, Peter!” Peter comes to the cross. “Yes, Lord, I’m here.” Jesus - “Peter!” Peter replies, “Yes, Lord!” Jesus - “Peter! I can see your house from here!” (somehow, that one makes me want to cry)

Jesus Joke #3 - How do we know that Jesus was Irish? Because, at age 33, He lived at home, He had no job…and His mother thought He was Jesus Christ.

So you may see at once that I, even though 3rd generation Irish-American (albeit 99.9 % Irish by DNA), feel compelled to use the upper-case “H” for He, Him, and His, even when retelling irreverent Jesus jokes.

Perhaps it’s similar to the way in which Black folks can use the n-word freely, or Jews can tell Jewish jokes, but God help the white guy or Goyim who presumes to do so. We’re baptized, catechized, and confirmed, thoroughly saddled with Catholic guilt, and may or may not have attended Mass in decades, but by God we’re Catholic - and Irish to boot, so we have the beautiful blend of oppression, purgatory, and alcohol to justify the free way in which we make fun of God, His Son, and even, on occasion, His Mother.

I actually once made the mistake of telling Jewish jokes to an entire restaurant full of Jews for a Bar Mitzvah celebration. The occasion was already absurd, as I was hiring myself out to entertain parties in the persona of Charles Dickens, wearing Victorian garb, using my own extravagant quasi-Victorian prose, with jokes created or stolen for the occasion. So we had a Catholic Irish-American guy, impersonating a Protestant British author, telling Bar Mitzvah jokes to a Jewish audience…in an Italian restaurant.

Bar Mitzvah Joke #1 - A Bar Mitzvah is that time in a young Jewish man’s life when he realizes he is more likely to own a professional baseball team than to play for one! (clank)

Bar Mitzvah Joke #2 - Q. What did the Jewish Mother bank teller say to her customer?A. You never write, you never call, you only come to see me when you need money. (mild amusement)

Bar Mitzvah Joke #3 (high risk - trust me, if you’re not Jewish, do not tell this joke to a Jewish audience) - A rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Buddhist monk go golfing together once a month. One Sunday, they’ve teed off and are out on the 4th fairway, waiting for the party ahead of them to finish putting, so they can play through. And the party on the green keeps putting, and putting, and putting. Finally after 45 minutes of waiting for these people to finish putting, they go to the course manager to complain. “We’ve been on the fairway for almost an hour, and these people are still putting!”

The manager explains, “I’m terribly sorry, but I have to ask your patience. You see, it’s a party of blind people, so it may take a while!”

The priest says, “Oh, dear! I will call the convent and ask all the nuns to say a Novena for a miracle, so these people’s sight may be restored!”

The Buddhist monk says, “Oh, my! I will call my ashram and ask all the monks to meditate, that these people may accept their karma and achieve Nirvana!”

And the Rabbi says to the manager - “What? They can’t play at night?”

(I’m a fairly decent entertainer, good sense of timing, etc. But this one elicited only a sour groan, followed by discontented murmuring. It’s a good joke - just not from a non-Jewish comic)

Which brings us to the deeper question: does the Cosmos, as Hindus aver, spring entirely from the desireless desire of the Infinite Consciousness to indulge in the lila (Sanskrit for ‘divine play’) of a gargantuan joke - one with an interminably long setup and an endless field of possible punch lines, each one the knee-slapping conclusion to an equally infinite number of time-line potentialities?

As Charlie Chaplin wisely noted - “Each life is a tragedy in close-up, and a comedy at long range.”

If only we could tear ourselves away from the agonizing close-up and pull back far enough (oh, say, a dozen light years or so) to be able to enjoy the exquisite rib-tickling hilarity of it all. Leave it best said by Griffin the Arcanan in Men in Black 3 - the 5th Dimensional Being who lives in multiple time-lines at once, and laughs and weeps at each one through eternity:

Speaking of holy hilarity, I once experienced a fairly miraculous rescue from injury, followed by what I can only explain as a sudden apparition of the Divine Feminine, in the person of a mysterious woman who stepped out from behind a tree in a wooded section of Temescal Canyon Blvd near Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles, quite late one spring night about 20 years ago. I had foolishly glanced down from my scooter on the deserted road, lost my balance, and crashed and rolled over, while calling on the Mother of God.

Incredibly, I spun a somersault and landed unhurt on my feet. Whereupon this mysterious, rather ordinary-looking woman stepped out from behind a tree ten feet away, and calmly asked me if I was all right.

I was stunned, but also embarrassed. I had lost control of my little motorbike on a deserted road with not a car in sight, while screaming the name of the Mother (by coincidence, it was in fact Mother’s Day, and I had just come from a 5-hour meditation).

“Yes, I guess I’m okay - thanks!” I said sheepishly. “I guess there’s one person we call on when we’re in trouble, yes?”

She just stood there, looking at me.

“I must say,” she said, “It was rather funny to watch you fall, all by yourself like that.”

“Yes, it must have been,” I admitted as I picked up my now inoperative scooter.

“Well, if you’re all right,” she said, “I’ll just get back to what I was doing.”

I had began to walk my scooter back down the road when it suddenly occurred to me to wonder just what it was she was doing there, lingering in the trees on a deserted canyon road at eleven o’clock at night, just feet from where I had fallen, calling on the Divine Mother.

I looked back. She was walking back toward the trees, stooping on occasion to pick up leaves with her bare hands.

Then the eerieness of the whole experience hit me. I’ve told the story to friends now and again, and they find it hard to believe.

You could say she was just a homeless woman in the right place at the right time. But I’ve never been able to buy that idea.

Maybe, apart from saving my life, She just wanted to enjoy the comedy of my hapless misadventure. And perhaps that’s all the justification the Universe requires for its existence. Mercy, compassion, and funny stories.

It’s good enough for me.

blessings,

Michael