Find the common laugh

War is not funny, or is it?

Humor is at the crux of gut-wrenching awfulness.

Humor is the wave we ride when we want to get out of a sea of sorrow.

If we can laugh for a moment while in the midst of a microcosm, we can ultimately transcend the macrocosm, right?

Laughter is a metaphor for transcendence.

When we are in the throes of crap – whether it be traffic on the 10 West, or a break-up with the moody soap star who now dates our bisexual brother, or when huddled on the front-lines of a conflict we signed up for when we were teens but first became engaged in when we were more seasoned – we look upon and embrace opportunities to double-over in uproarious spasms…of hope. Why? Because we need to believe in and act upon a certain and visceral thrust – and thirst – for life.

Laughter is life.

Why do we giggle at funerals? Why do we find the time to toss jokes into the air while bed-side in a hospice? Why do we choose to strive to laugh when the only other option is to wail?

Because laughter is love.

Call me nutty, but laughter is what keeps people sane. When I was a tot growing up in a not-so-pristine predicament, my entire family – con artists, drunks, co-dependents and the like – made jokes. The mob makes jokes. Tyrants make jokes. Ron and O.J and Bernie and Sarah and [insert villain here] all make jokes.

Why? To tell the truth. To surrender. To connect.

If only we all made the same jokes.

Flip Schultz is about to see if he can make the “same” jokes – jokes that will make an entire yet diverse bunch of forced-together people laugh. Flip just landed in Iraq and will be spending some quality time “entertaining” the troops. But what he will really be doing, I’m guessing, is trying to transcend not just time and territory, but his own sense of who he is and what he is there for. He will be hovering above his own life and theirs – adding levity to a situation so unfathomable and squalid and dirty and messy and yet inclusive of absolute honor – somewhere in the mire – that he will never forget the day, and either will they.

Thank God Flip is funny.

It will be a meeting of the minds and a melding of the hearts and a secret but communal plea to carry that same melding into the camps of the “enemy,” which is hard, of course, not just because there is an age-old clash of world view and overarching culture, but because there is an immediate and tangible inability, sometimes, to share in the simple pleasure of a well-told (and universally understood) joke.

If only we had more jokes in common, we would have little to fight about.

Find the common laugh.

For more info on Flip Schultz, visit flipschultz.com

For more info on how you can help levitate the troops, visit: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93088388