I am a big fan of both “Weird Al” Yankovic and Jane Austen, and these two are not as different as they might superficially seem. “Weird Al” has had a lasting and successful career of making comedy albums that ruthlessly skewer our vapid and corrupt society while also drawing attention to the worthiness of the music that is being parodied from a variety of genres. Jane Austen was a savagely witty authoress whose writings have remained enduringly popular for nearly two centuries and are often mistakenly thought to be pure romances even as they were witty commentaries on her own society (and, in many ways, our own), through endless references to money, food, clothing, music, and love. Despite the visual differences between a Regency spinster and a self-effacing Slavic parody musician (with a taste for Polka!), the art of the two and the underlying philosophy of the two is extremely similar.

Comedy is a choice. It is no surprise that many comedians and comedic actors are immensely depressed. It is the absurdity and tragedy of life that drives people to whistle by graveyards and laugh because the only choice is either bitter and sardonic laughter or weeping and gnashing of teeth. For our own survival, it is better for us, if possible, to find something to laugh at, even if it is ourselves (as is the case with a great many comedians). This is especially true if one has very serious and often unpleasant observations to make, because it is far easier for medicine to go down if it is sweetened with sugar than delivered sourly with bile. Those who are astute and pay attention recognize that in comedy there is a lot of serious social commentary that can be made. Those who dismiss the learning value of follies and amusements do so at their own peril, for a society in need of moral reformation and warning only has a few ways that they can hear and actually heed a message, and laughter is far better than paranoia at getting the point across.

It is perhaps surprising to many people, but satire is often a highly conservative means of entertainment. Jonathan Swift, no less than “Weird Al,” was gifted at skewering the stupidity of his people. His “A Modest Proposal” was perhaps the most worthwhile satire he ever produced, a surface appeal to cannibalism, appearing to promote the fattening of Irishmen for slaughter like cattle, that instead was an appeal for the humane treatment of the Irish and the knowledge that if the Irish were treated as cattle they would at least be fed, rather than being left to starve. And this was over a century before the Potato Famine and Swift could already see the writing on the wall. His appeal went largely ignored by those who could do something about it, but it was a warning to the English rulers over Ireland that their behavior was already causing the starvation and misery of the Irish people, something that has neither been forgiven nor forgotten by many.

When we are faced with the tragedy and misery of our world that is all around us, and that is present in the lives and experiences of all too many of us, we have a choice to make. How do we choose to deal with it? Do we ignore it, try to sweep it under the rug and live lives of pretense? Do we try to self-medicate it with promiscuous sex or addictions to work, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, or any other number of things to try to fill the vacuum within us? Do we become embittered and cynical about the world around us, retreating into lonely isolation or treating the world with hostility? Or do we try to find the grim humor in our situation and that of the world, so that we may draw wise lessons and show ourselves to be the master of our stories and not merely the victims, even poking at our oppressors while encouraging them to underestimate us.

Comedy is deeply subversive. This can be a good thing, or it can be a terrible thing. Much depends, of course, on what is being subverted. There was once a terribly profane comedy movie (that I must own to watching) called The Aristocrats. I will not attempt to recount the joke here, which relies on horrifying details recounted with chilling relish with a punchline that says that the name of the act is the Aristocrats. In watching this film I came to a certain strong sympathy for comedian Sarah Silverman, who portrayed herself, in her version of this horrible vaudeville joke, as the childhood victim of an immensely abusive family. It struck me that the whole horrible joke itself, though, was a parody of sexual abuse at the hand of family members, and that the joke itself probably served a purpose in providing a way for comedians to laugh about the pain and intense shame that probably drove many of them into comedy in the first place. We laugh sometimes because we must laugh in order to survive.

It was this sentiment, no doubt, that led Abraham Lincoln to be such a connoisseur of off-color jokes, one of the lesser known aspects of this worthy man’s ways of driving away the darkness of melancholy through a deliberately forced and extreme sense of humor that showed a mature (in many senses of the word) response to an extremely severe and lifelong struggle against the dark demons of depression. Despite a life filled with disappointments and tragedies, including just over four years as President of the United States in its darkest hours so far, he was able to endure such horrors in large part because of his combination of deep (though unconventional) faith, immense humility based on self-awareness, a ferocious ambition to do the best he could no matter the circumstances, and a conscious cultivation of an absurd and uproarious sense of humor. This sense of humor, his love for anecdotes and stories and jokes, led many of his political enemies to underestimate him, thinking him merely frivolous when he was quite serious.

Therefore, it might come as little surprise to those who know me well (though perhaps of some surprise to those who do not know me), that despite my own intense seriousness I have the gift of making other people laugh, whether it is through being moderately absent-minded, through my love of witty conversation, or through my droll observation of other people and their behavior (or of my own). After all, even if life is deadly serious, none of us are so wise as to be able to afford to take ourselves too seriously. And if we, like Elizabeth Bennet of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride & Prejudice, are forced to endure our dysfunctional families with some hope of improvement of our own situations through skill and fortune, we need to laugh at least sometimes at the follies we are forced to endure. For if we make the choice to survive rather than to surrender to despair, we need our wits about us, and we need a sense of humor to help lighten the burden that we bear. After all, if one can listen to a song like “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “You Don’t Love Me Anymore,” one can feel a lot less bad that one’s own life is only slightly less tragic, though perhaps equally amusing. For it is far harder for a comedian to lighten the burden they bear than that of others, but we have to start somewhere. If we choose to develop our comic sense and provoke even strangers to laughter at the only slightly exaggerated events (if exaggerated at all), we should at least be able to provoke within ourselves a wry pursed smile. And that is often enough.