Previously, I wrote about feeling in a funk, but I think the fog of funk is lifting for me, even though between then and now I caught Covid. I wasn’t terribly sick, but I had to go to bed for long hours and sleep. And after a couple of days I noticed I was sleeping more peacefully. No longer was I curled up in a fetal position, hugging myself tightly.  Covid had made me relax?  Is this a joke?

I started having random thoughts about humor. The recent death of Meat Loaf triggered it!  That in itself is comic. I posted on Facebook:  “Meat Loaf is dead!”  After a couple of friends  laughed, thinking I was referring to my own cooking, I realized how it sounded.  The more I thought about Meat Loaf, I started smiling.  Meat Loaf (the singer) had always cracked me up when I saw pictures of him, or watched videos!  At three hundred pounds, and with a huge voice, he was large in every sense and he flaunted it proudly. Here was this “ugly” lover on stage, sweating, long dark slightly greasy hair, dressed in a frilly white shirt and black jacket that said “MEAT,” singing songs of desire and young love in overwrought emotional performances that could bring tears to your eyes. The comic aspect at odds with the heartbreaking sincerity of the words and emotion.  So, I was sad when I read he died (gone was the most amazing, never-to-be-heard again voice; and gone was a time from my younger days), and yet the announcement “Meat Loaf has died” just sounded funny.  The comic aspect deepened and darkened as we learned he died of Covid after being a vocal anti-vaxxer.  The perfect example of the dark humor of irony.

I continued thinking how humor is a necessary leavening for the heaviness of life, a bit of light in times of darkness.  

I started teaching again on Zoom for the first two weeks of this spring semester.  I am teaching serious stuff—nothing comic.  John Milton, the Enlightenment, with Spinoza and Newton, and Locke.  But when I looked briefly at my Zoom recordings of the classes, I was struck by how often I laughed, or said something funny (amusing myself, if not my students). and I realized not only that teaching/conversing with my students makes me happy, but also I sometimes can’t help but say something unserious because humor feels necessary, seriously necessary.

But these days it is easy to say something ironically or with a sense of fun that someone is likely to mistake, or call out as inappropriate or even worse, offensive.  Be careful what you joke about. We have to check ourselves, constantly, to make sure we don’t say the “wrong” thing.  It is true that words and the things we say can be used to inflict hurt, be hateful, racist, or to demean others of their humanity.  But just as we are continually monitoring and testing ourselves for Covid, so too I feel we are becoming hyper-vigilant about our language, words, and even sentences.  It is necessary and at times just, but isn’t it also exhausting?  I know some of my readers will even be afraid to “like” what I write, to be public about that (it happened once before with a blog), and I think that‘s a scary state of affairs.  

Humor is transgressive, a point I will return to, and thus dangerous in our increasingly polarized and violent America. We need change and reform to transform our society, to make it more just.  Zeal and passion fuel the urge to effect change, but it also fuels the conservative fear of change, desperate efforts to return to a supposedly better past. I wonder if zeal is inevitably at odds with humor.

Freud taught that humor often conceals anger and aggression, which is nevertheless still there, simmering below the surface. Jerry Seinfeld has said “all humor starts with anger,” which I think is an exaggeration, for there are varieties of humor. 

The comedian Bob Saget, who unexpectedly died in his sleep in a hotel room on January 9, 2022, was beloved by many, and brought lightness and humor to our lives. He was tender and kind, even though he had a filthy mouth. As with everything, there’s a spectrum, from light to dark humor, from empathetically kind and gentle to hostile, nasty and intentionally hurtful. There’s “gallows humor,” purposely grim during desperate situations, historically used by people condemned to die.  Humor can be something to protect you, a weapon to wound, or a healing balm. It can be something to raise the spirit. Laughter can indeed be good medicine, and something to bring people together, rather than divide, though I suppose we always risk alienating someone. And in our time of pandemic instability and grim seriousness, we need that medicine.

Humor is a way to cope with the sadnesses and tragedies of life. Think how many famous comic writers and comedians actually have struggled with depression: Sarah Silverman, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor.  Robin Williams took his own life after being diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia. Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Chris Farley all died young of drug overdoses.  Most depressed comedians, however, survive, and it’s their humor that is a life-giving drug, a self-generated medicine that helps them survive and thrive, while helping and giving pleasure to others. Wit and humor by the talented Mel Brooks, for example, is like a gift, which can be a service and a kindness to others. 

But humor is trasngressive, subversive, and thus feared and hated by ideologues. In Nazi Germany, Goebels called political jokes “the remnant of liberalism.” Anti-Nazi humor was considered a crime against Hitler, the state, and the Nazi government, punishable by death! As the linguist John McWhorter tweeted on January 28, 2022, “Humor is the first thing to go under the rule of ideologues.” So, I worry about our situation now.

We need humor, perhaps more than ever. Bessel Van der Kolk’s 2016 book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, continues to be in the top ten on the NY Times bestsellers list. Anxiety and depression are at record levels among our young people, resulting in an increase in suicide, especially young men. With this in mind, I do everything I can to keep my students happy, to give them a sense of purpose and hope. The New York Times ran an article on Feb. 18, with the headline “Yale Professor of Happiness [who teaches the popular course “Psychology and the Good Life] Says Anxiety is Destroying her Students.” In the interview, she announced she’s taking leave due to burnout. (Dark comedy here? The course on happiness isn’t working? And has exhausted her?)

My wise psychiatrist friend, who has specialized in childhood trauma, tells me of all the adaptive, coping mechanisms for trauma, humor, especially witty humor (not bathroom humor), is the highest form. I’ve been thinking about that. The brain must somehow transform, transmute the trauma—and yes, there may be anger and aggression, but somehow the material becomes changed and the person assumes a power over it, at least momentarily, through the transformative power of language. It is creative, maybe not unlike the opening of Genesis where God creates the world through language. “Let there be light.”

Dedicated to the memory of my husband, Tony, the wittiest person I have ever known.

I know I’m one of the fortunate ones. Never does a day pass that I don’t begin or end it with thoughts of gratitude.

I am healthy right now (as far as I know!). I have work that I love. I have family and friends, even if I don’t see them very much, or ever. I find moments of joy. I am not depressed. But for some time I’ve been in a funk and that feeling hasn’t disappeared.

The days are getting shorter, darkness is increasing (is it a metaphor for my life?), though after the winter solstice, the days will get longer and the sun will move higher into the sky.  We are heading to the longest night of the year, knowing the light will get stronger. Yet we are still stuck in the Covid plague that never seems to end.

Soon it will be two years that we’ve been living with Covid, or rather surviving, while we continue to receive counts of the dead; know people who have suffered or have died; or that are struggling with “long Covid.” Recently, I woke up one morning and the first headline I read in The New York Times was, “As the U.S Nears 800,000 Virus Deaths, 1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished,” even though seniors are statistically the most vaccinated. We think we’re on the upswing since our kids or grandkids from 5 to 11 years-old are able to get their shots. But then comes the Omicron variant to bring uncertainty as to whether our precious vaccines will indeed protect us and our lives are newly unsettled. Even if this variant proves manageable, we know there will be more. I heard a scientist recently say that future pandemics will be worse. How do we carry on when we are bombarded with daily reminders of impending, unstoppable disasters? I’d rather hide in my cave.

My undergraduates were so excited to return to the classroom this fall semester, rather than being forced to Zoom in isolation. They arrived optimistic, albiet a bit unsure with all the weekly Covid tests, about the experiment of being with other people again, even if fewer than before. I have seen them struggle and as a result they seem, somehow, flat and depleted. Many suffer from anxiety or just sadness, but also the inability to concentrate, either on what they read or on the papers they have to write.  We don’t really know what the long-term impact of this pandemic, that is now endemic, will be.  I do everything I can to raise their spirits, to give them hope. But I teach seventeenth-century literature, some of which can run dark—poems about the struggle for faith (really, hope), poems by Ben Jonson and Katherine Philips about their young children who died. We read the final chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658), about our vain, but nevertheless necessary attempts, to have our memory and connections continue for people to remember we lived. That our lives are not in vain.

Browne’s eloquent, moving meditation was on the syllabus the day in late November that one of my students returned to class, having emailed that she had been absent for weeks, mourning a young friend who had committed suicide. It caught me. Would I be deepening her depression, reading and discussing Browne’s beautiful meditation on mortality? Or is that how we deal with life, not shutting down our feelings (what is repressed always comes back) but accepting them, thinking about what it all means. And what better way than through literature? Maybe that’s why I’m teaching, especially seventeenth-century English literature, which allows us (if we are open to it) to confront some of the most difficult things, in the comforting space of a class, not alone, but with others, even if we are just sitting quietly.  

I never feel more alive than when I’m teaching or writing.  There is nothing as exciting than feeling I’ve had a new thought, discovering something I hadn’t realized before; or when I’m in the class and suddenly make a connection I hadn’t previously made; or a student’s comment creates a spark in my brain. That meeting of minds between my beloved students and me, their Professor, is the best.  At moments like that, I just feel great.

But then, there are the other times. Who can help feeling vulnerable, that “the end” may be just around the corner? There is climate change, which of course has its own high level for concern about the future. But in the immediate is another Covid variant that’s not understood. So, in order to go to work or to elsewhere, we have to test frequently (weekly for many) and do daily symptom reports. We monitor ourselves and have to be checked by others in order to do anything. We’ve been trained to be hypervigilant about the idea of being around others, even friends and family, and about our personal health (is my temperature normal? Is my little headache a sign of anything?).  I think of John Donne’s Devotions, his meditations on his near-fatal sickness in 1623, where he remarks that “one hand asks the other” (taking our own pulse) how we are. 

And then there is the reminder: it’s time for your annual physical.

My internist is a wonderful doctor. But her job is “preventive medicine”—something our parents knew nothing about. They only went to the doctor when something was “wrong.”  Now we go, and go. By the time I’d left, I’d been reminded that it was time for my mammogram, and my colonoscopy (two words my mother never knew). And oh, we need to check my vascular-pulmonary function. Go to the cardiologist, and here’s a referral to a pulmonologist.  All these tests and visits to specialists designed to protect us from impending decay and medical disasters make me feel even more vulnerable, even more focused on impending mortality. 

But yes, I’ve been in a funk.  Obsessed with mortality. My husband died two years ago. My older siblings are long gone and now i find myself the oldest person in my family. I have huge energy mentally and am physically strong. Yet, the recent loss of friends, even younger than me, over the past months, stuns me, makes me aware that our time is always limited, though I refuse to accept it—working at a furious pace, as if I can stop time. It brings to mind Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which now assumes a new meaning for me. In that poem, a man tries to convince a young woman to have sex with him, not to postpone lovemaking in the naïve hope that they have all the time in the world.  The poem ends with the famous lines:

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

 An intense conclusion to a poem of seduction, but is it not also a clarion call for how we might (should?) live our lives, with intensity, to the fullest, as if we might win that race (or postpone its end) if we keep living hard enough?