The Lighter Side

Laughter is the best medicine.  I was reminded of this old Reader’s Digest homily at Saturday afternoon’s event at the PTC (Playwrights Theatre Centre) Studio.  Laugh until it hurts.  Laugh because it hurts.  Laugh and maybe you’ll feel better.  Laugh because one person’s misery can be another person’s mirth.   Laugh (because it’s probably a good idea) at the bittersweet nature of existence. 

Hosted by the irrepressible Billeh Nickerson the program followed the standard format by beginning with each of the four authors reading some of their work.  John Gould gave us ten minutes from his debut novel “Seven Good Reasons Not To Be Good”.  (Check out Jill Margo’s excellent review right here at Prefaces & Afterwords).  At least part of the story is an exploration of the lighter side of suicide and death.  The protagonist is trying to prevent a friend from killing himself.  Black humour may be black but it’s still funny.  As Gould said later in the program laughter is redemptive and connects you to other people.  Humour is flexibility.  It gives you a chance.  It acts as an antidote to the ego which is stiffness. Stiffness is for crazies and dictators and other unfunny people.

Rachel Wyatt followed with some pages from her latest novel, “Writing to Omar”.  Being unfamiliar with her work made today a very pleasant discovery for me.  There’s something about  Rachel’s delivery in that soft British accent that I think I could listen to for hours, maybe years.  She writes like the type of author who inspires the ambition to “curl up with a good book”.  She exudes warmth, wit and intelligence and is in possession of that quintessential novelistic talent of making so-called ordinary lives, in this case the lives of elderly female friends, fascinating and true if perhaps a little sad. But also humorous. 

Aaron Bushkowsky delivered an excerpt from his not quite published debut novel “Curtains For Ray”.  Aaron has the timing and delivery of a stand-up comic and in fact stood up to deliver his reading as doing it sitting down just doesn’t work for him.  I quite like the sound of “Curtains For Ray”.  Coming from a prolific poet, playwright, writer of screenplays and teacher I’d say it’s going to be good.  The author mentioned that the sources of his humour and his outlook can be traced back to when he was nine and his interactions with his father.  He said that if you just tell the truth, that’s funny enough.  If he ever needs a laugh he just phones a relative.  Referring to a play he wrote about the film business, a business he said he found very frustrating to work in, some of the comments he received were that his characters were really “over the top”.  His response:  “You’ve never worked in the film business.”  Tell the truth.

Lynda Barry, of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” fame, and the spitting image of her comic strip self-portrait including the glasses and the bandana tied up in a knot in her hair, chose to extemporize on her philosophy of writing rather than trying to read something from her work that, in the main, is highly visual.  She feels that “writing has an absolute biological function” in making you feel better.  “We are hard-wired for telling stories”.  Writing humour is like medicine.  Humour has a relation to one’s survival instinct.  It counteracts the erosion of one’s feeling that life is worth living.  Let’s face it.  Bad things happen.  Laughter is a relief.  “Sometimes my characters just crack me up”.

The PTC studio is a venue I haven’t attended before.  It’s the first event I’ve been to where you’re not on ground or street level.  It’s up two floors.  Sitting at the high end of the risers at the back of the space I was able to look out the windows and see Granville Islanders down there walking to and fro on a busy, car-clogged afternoon in the rain.  Two worlds, the one out there and its microcosm in here where we were looking into the serious business of analyzing the need for laughter.  The objective world as viewed from a distance and the subjective world in here, the world of the mind inventing strategies to cope with all that goes on out there.  Juxtaposition is the word I’m looking for.  It was an interesting juxtaposition.