Laughter

One morning when I was walking to work, I slipped on some ice and did one of those attempted corrections. My right foot went up in front of me, somewhere near my stomach, but, rather than pitching backward, my left foot compensated to hold me to the ground. But on the icy sidewalk my left foot slipped backward, propelling me forward, and I fell face-first into a snowbank on the front lawn of my neighbour Mr Wyznicki’s house.

Literally face-first. I was up to my neck in snow. I pictured myself, my head buried in the snow, my ass sticking up in the air, my legs dangling and waving like an overturned beetle. And that made me laugh. I had to spit out some snow.

I felt someone grab my shoulders and pull me out of the snowbank. The good samaritan turned out to be another neighbour, Fritz. He was chuckling a little, and said, “What happened to you?”

“I wiped out,” I said. “Winter casualty. I’ve lived in this country only forty years so I’m not used to ice yet.”

Fritz didn’t know me well enough to know if I was kidding or not. I wasn’t. Despite Canadians’ proficiency with all things ice—hockey, curling, figure skating, luge, mixed drinks—we still haven’t mastered walking on it. I think it’s due to our lack of proficiency in suitable footwear.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that,” he said, with a snort of laughter.

“I think I remember how I did it. I’ll show you.” I re-traced my steps, performed the double slippage, and landed head first in the snowbank again.

Fritz helped me up again, laughed, kept laughing, and, pulling his phone out of his pocket, said, “Do you think you can do it again?”

“No problem.”

He aimed his phone at me, and I did it again. If this had been an Olympic event, all the judges would have given me tens.

Fritz was beside himself, laughing hysterically. “Do you think you could do it again? I may have been laughing too much and shaking my camera, so it’s probably fuzzy.”

“No problem,” I said.

To steady his phone, Fritz set it on the hood of a nearby parked car and took a step away, giggling like a thirteen-year-old girl who had just had a boy she liked say “Hi” to her.

By this time, I felt pretty confident that I could do it again. You really don’t need ten thousand hours to perfect a skill. I went for it, and killed it this time, ending up buried to my armpits.

Fritz pulled me out, and we looked at the video. It was perfect.

“Send that to me,” I said, and gave him my co-ordinates as we watched the video at least five times before we went our separate ways.

As I continued my walk to the subway, I watched it repeatedly, and it got funnier and funnier. I showed it to the woman sitting beside me on the subway. She laughed hysterically and asked me to send it to her. Other passengers noticed our laughing, asked what was going on, and we shared it with everyone. When I got off the subway at my stop, everyone was laughing. Good spirits are a good way to start a working day.

By the time I’d reached my office, everyone there had seen it. Lots of people were still laughing hysterically. The people who didn’t think the video was funny were laughing at everyone else laughing. Not much work was done that morning.

By noon, it had been seen over thirty million times. By one, two hundred million times. By two, we’d lost track. Perhaps the internet had crashed.

At four o’clock, the Secretary-General of the United Nations was scheduled to make a speech about the laughter epidemic, but it was cancelled because the Secretary-General was found snickering helplessly in a UN bathroom.

Things never let up. Within a few days, almost everyone on the planet was laughing, and all work ground to a halt. I didn’t even bother going to work. I lay on my couch and tried to watch depressing documentaries but it didn’t help. The movie of my wipe-out kept replaying itself in my mind, and I struggled to even drink some water and eat a little bit. My body hurt from laughing. The endorphins mitigated that. Things work out. We adapt.

The upside was that war and murder and other terrible things stopped, but industry and food production stopped as well. After a couple of weeks, things weren’t good, although we all felt great. Finally, someone got all the robots working so food and goods started arriving in stores again, but no one particularly wanted them.

Several weeks later, after the thaw, I was out for a walk, chuckling to myself, feeling terrific because I’d just figured out how to drink a protein shake between giggles.

Waving at me from down the street was Fritz. He called out, “Hey, Video Superstar! Got another fall in you?” He put his phone up in front of his face and was evidently recording.

I raised my hand to wave back at him. My arm hit a tree branch hanging low over the sidewalk, I slipped on some dog poo I hadn’t noticed, and fell backward but, not wanting to land on my back, I did a half-twist in the air and managed to plant myself in someone’s flower garden. This activated a garden sprinkler which proceeded to soak me, while at the same time, two sparrows, whose nest had apparently been disturbed by my arm hitting the branch, landed on my head and began pecking. Meanwhile, a Labrador retriever, who may or may not have been responsible for the poo on which I slipped, bounded off the front porch and, thinking this was all great fun, jumped on top of me and proceeded to lick at the garden sprinkler and the sparrows at the same time. An elderly woman emerged from the house and started hitting me with a rake, yelling, “You’ve ruined my petunias, you juvenile delinquent!”

I felt I should have corrected her because I’m over forty, but I had other things on my mind.

By this time, Fritz had climbed the tree and was sitting out on a branch, continuing to shoot the video from a more artistic angle.

Then a dogwalker with six beasts in tow meandered past. The dogs, obviously understanding how much fun this all was, pulled away from the hapless walker and joined in, romping over the flowerbeds, the lawn, and me.

Fritz shifted his weight and the branch broke, depositing him on top of me. The broken branch dislodged a wasp nest, so the wasps joined in the chaos as well.

Fritz’s phone had buried itself in the mud of the flower garden, so shooting stopped for the day. Fritz and I managed to uncover the muddy phone the next day after the laughing doctors had put Fritz’s broken arm in a cast and covered his wasp stings with calamine lotion.

Fritz uploaded the video but, despite some positive reviews, it wasn’t considered as funny as my original slip on the ice. Someone even posted the comment, “Falling over isn’t funny.”

Sometimes things that were funny stop being funny. New sophistication, possibly. Possibly comedy is repetition of gags and jokes that people tire of. Possibly comedy, like any art form, is right for one time and hits the zeitgeist but means nothing later on. It’s hard to tell. I’m still baffled by the idea that Chekhov’s plays are supposed to be comedies. But I digress.

Frankly, I thought Fritz’s wasp stings were hysterical but I understand that’s not everyone’s idea of comedy. And maybe that was the problem. It was too funny for some of us, and not at all funny to everyone else. And maybe when someone says, “Falling over isn’t funny,” other people believe that. There are lots of examples of people just going along.

So the belly laughs receded into guffaws, then into chuckling, snickering, giggling, and then finally into nothingness.

Nothing seemed funny any more. The Marx Brothers retrospective at the Bijou was cancelled. The Comedy Network recorded its lowest ratings ever, even for classics like Barney Miller and WKRP in Cincinnati. Streaming and DVD sales of concerts by Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks amounted in the last couple of months to an approximate total of zero. Melissa McCarthy announced that from now on she would do only dramatic roles. This convinced me that things had now gone too far.

Laughter had to be restored as the overarching dominant concern for the human race.

Fritz and I came up with a plan. We constructed a mannequin out of rubber, put a bathing suit and blond wig on it, and planted it on a lawn chair beside Mr Wyznicki’s swimming pool. I climbed up onto the roof, and held on to the chimney. The plan was for me to pretend to lose my balance, and then bounce off the rubber mannequin into the pool. That was the plan.

Somehow the cops had gotten wind of this (probably due to the organised grumpiness of anti-fun people). They showed up in full force and began shooting beanbags at me. One of them caught me smack in the chest. I lost my grip on the chimney, toppled over, slid on my back down the roof, launched into space, bounced off Mr Wyznicki’s gazebo through some prickly shrubs, and landed on my back on Mr Wyznicki’s asphalt tennis court.

Fritz caught the whole thing on video.

I broke forty-two bones, and was in a full body cast for six months.

A lot of people thought that was funny and started laughing again, so at least there was a little upside.

It kind of hurts even when I slightly chortle, but when I think about it all, well, you have to laugh.

William Kitcher, a writer of stories, plays and comedy sketches, lives in Toronto.