While I was in intensive care, I spent a couple of minutes being what Miracle Max in The Princess Bride would call “mostly dead.” My heart rate dropped precipitously and I could feel myself pulling away. It felt good actually. Dying is not all that bad.
Beepers went crazy. Doctors and nurses burst into my room. “Keep the shot ready; don’t use it yet,” a doctor told a nurse who held a heart stimulant. They stood in a row at the foot of my bed watching, not me, but the monitor above me. All had the exact same expression, eyes tight, mouth slightly slack jawed, shoulders tense. In short, they looked exactly like people studying airport monitors. I’ve seen that look hundreds of times: has my connection left already, is the plane on time, which gate?
I thought they looked hilarious and decided if this was my last moment, I was grateful it was funny. With that thought I came back. My heart rallied and steadied without the stimulant. Laughter, apparently, is an irresistible call to life.
So much of art is comic, full of visual puns and jokes. Picasso’s Blue Guitarist seems on the surface to be about a broken, dying man strumming a battered guitar, but a second look at the brush stroking reveals he’s actually fondling a young woman. Is it Hans Holbein who painted a somber, newly married couple but worked a skull into the rug at their feet? A dim view of marriage, perhaps, but funny. There’s an all black painting in the Chicago Art Institute; it always makes me laugh to see a nonpainting hung importantly on an important wall. For a time at the Institute there was even a nonpainting hung on a nonwall. The painting, Gray, I think it was called, was actually a hole in the wall.
I love stuff like that. They remind us that no matter how serious the moment or how seriously we take ourselves, that in the end, most of what we are is silly, a reality that makes life bearable, despite the pain, or the temptation to run from it. Art and life are both meant to be funny.
Above: The Sneeze, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20. Copyright 2006 ptw.
