Introductions are always the hardest part. Better to lead in with a joke. I was sitting at the firehouse with a couple of coworkers, one recalling a run from the previous night. A Catholic priest was struck by a car on the roadway at a high rate of speed. The driver didn’t stop and left the man there to die. At this point, someone in the room interjected and said “Who the hell would run over a Catholic priest and keep going?” “Who else?” I said. “A Protestant.”
What if I told you that I made the whole thing up? What if this joke was based - not on the individual death of someone you might know - but on the Catholic-Protestant back and forth that fueled the land conquests and “ethnic cleansings” of the Medieval Period; which was actually at the heart of the joke - where the levity found its seat. Because if you think about someone being so angry at another person over their religion that they would hit them with a car - in the abstract - it’s funny because it’s so goddamned silly. The humor isn’t in the personal accounts. Those are tragic and rip at the thread of humanity. And that’s why great comedy hits differently than slapstick or contrived humor. It exposes the senselessness and repetitiveness of tragic life events: War, poverty, substance abuse, racism, corruption, death… all parts of life, our life, that we would otherwise want to turn away from brought to our attention by softening the seriousness without losing the gravitas. Because life is messy.
And this is one of our great ways of coping. It’s a way of releasing the tension from life’s personal maylays. And when we laugh together - like that deep belly laugh - we connect with the people around us through an unspoken declaration of “I understand you.” My co-worker when on to say that she had so much trouble relating to people outside of work. She said that to make jokes such as that would stop a conversation and separate you from the rest of the group. She gave a personal example, as did I, as did our other colleague. And it makes it hard for us to talk about difficult topics in that way… in any way. If you can’t find the humor in it then everything just becomes stuffy and serious. And that is how we often present, isn’t it? Rigid, stoic, don’t let them see you sweat. But that’s not tenable, is it?
And this doesn’t extend to tragic events, but also to the mundane. I worked for Amazon delivering packages part-time. It was a way for me to get away from the uncontrollable variables of the fire department and still make some money to cover expenses while working through college. I loved that job. It was so different from the fire department, yet there were parallels. I could get an inside view into people’s lives by looking at their landscaping and the outsides of their homes. People would come outside to greet me, sometimes offer me food, beer, or marijuana even. I got to do a lot of that on the ambulance too, but instead of people sick, hurt, impatient, and otherwise, in a bad way, folks were happy to see me and best of all I didn’t have to carry a gurney out the door with my customer on it.
I came home from a delivery one day and told my wife about the shift’s events. I can’t remember what I was talking about, but it seemed pretty important to me at the time. And about halfway through the point, I interrupted myself and said “This is unbelievably boring isn’t it?” She stayed engaged while I went on and on but I know she was doing it because she loved me, not because what I said was particularly interesting. So then I can understand how someone with a job that doesn’t come with body parts and explosions and child abuse can feel a similar sense of alienation when people at home and in their life just don’t want to hear about their day.
As I was saying about my co-worker, she felt this sense of alienation set in with people who didn’t see and didn’t care to hear the grizzly details of the fire service. People will ask you what you do for a living and when you say you’re a firefighter they usually thank you for what you do and then if they don’t take it as an invitation to read off their resume, they’ll ask something like “What’s the worst call you’ve ever been on?” expecting some polished story of explosions on TV. They don’t want to hear about dead children and priests killed by a senseless driver. By and large, folks just simply don’t care to know how the sausage is made.
My co-worker went on to describe her personal alienation within work devoid of meaningful conversation. As I said earlier, those jokes are ways of decompressing from acutely stressful events, however, like comedy they are meant to illicit deeper curiosity and dialogue about the topics covered in the comedy bit. She found that many people didn’t want to talk about these things. And they didn’t want to talk about family life either. She said it was always the same story on repeat. Always the same firehouse drama and gossip.
And I thought about it and asked her, “Do you think that perhaps that is a result of the alienation many of the people we work with feel at home? If they are told all day to shut up about their fucking job stuff and are compelled to focus on things that - in their eyes may seem superfluous - are you surprised when they don’t want to talk about those things for the 24 hours they are here?