Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else

by Maeve Higgins

Art is not exclusively created by and for the lucky ones. Each life is a deep mine of events and emotions that is ours to dig up and use if we wish to. What we find in that mine might feel too heavy to be excavated, or be broken into such tiny pieces they seem worthless, but that doesn’t matter. The trick is to polish those pieces up, to make them shine with the laughter of recognition, of realizing that we are not alone, that we have this common language.

hatred unchecked has a way of collapsing time, trapping us all until we deal with it.

Funny people are my favorite, maybe because they feel like home. Let me be clear: by funny people I absolutely do not mean comedians. Some comedians are funny, of course. Some of my favorite people are comedians! But, sadly, most comedians are not really funny as much as confident/persistent/sociopathic in their mimicry of actual funniness. The most deeply unfunny people I know are comedians, and earn a good living from it too. I don’t begrudge them their success, but I do dislike them.

The people I hold dearest are the ones who are funny for funny’s sake. They do bits without a microphone, they deliver punch lines silently to themselves, they joke around without any obvious reward. They are the bus driver who consistently responds to the question, “How much is the bus?” with a deadpan, “About two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” They are the science teacher Photoshopping baby goats onto his wife’s birthday card, and the seven-year-old pulling a goofy face in the mirror that only she will see.

A joke can be many things: a simple play on words to delight another person, a break from the mundanity of a day, or a code to let someone know that you know what they’re up to, that you approve, that you disapprove. Being funny is a way of being indirect too, skirting around the ugly feelings, not saying what you mean because what you mean is too big, too painful. In our case, the rounds of messages were really saying, Nothing bad will ever happen to you, it simply cannot, because we all love you so much.

The best parts of a person are buried too deep to be uncovered by as blunt an instrument as a direct question.