by Whom do you prefer? Are they the same thing? I’ve often told friends and acquaintances that I much prefer associating with, hanging around and talking to comedians rather than actual people. As if comedians are not actual people. Well, they’re not. At least when you spend half of your life in journalism, a field in which your editors talk about "actual people" and "real people" as sources to be hunted down and recorded for historical purposes.
Talking with a new friend who studies philosophy, though, I began openly exploring what my statement truly meant and what it might say about me. Why do I group myself with comedians as something separate from actual people? Perhaps it has much to do with the way we look at the world and how we choose to interpret it. We mock reality and the absurdities of life, entertaining the actual people who go about their daily routines as if they were drones, or as the appropriate phrase springs to mind, cogs in the infinite machine. That’s why actual people laugh at us. We wake them up with our words, our punchlines. We remind them how silly life is. How so many of the things people occupy their lives with is so trivial and banal, how so little of it truly matters in the end. How the material goods are merely larger examples of the money we use, how just like a dollar bill is only worth a dollar because we agree that that paper is worth something, the jobs we hold, the things we own also have some sort of merit in mutual trust. When we’re together as comedians, we’re often not talking about these things unless in jest, but tend to discuss about how stupid actual people are. So yes, I prefer comedians to actual people. How about you?
