(This is Part 7 of a series. Go back to Part 6.)
Questions can also be used in very long-term ways as well. Hanging with a really good question can be a very deep sadhana (spiritual practice).
As an example, a question arose for me when I was 6 years old. I was going to Sunday School at church every Sunday morning and learning that God was all-loving. And yet I was looking around me and beginning to notice that there was a lot of suffering of various kinds.
This presented a conundrum to me: If God was all-loving, then why was there suffering in the world? Who was allowing this? And that became my question:
Why is there suffering in this world?
There were the obvious answers presented by religious teaching: Because of the devil. Because of man's disobedience to God's injunctions. Because of God's indifference. Because of God's malevolence. Because of God's non-existence.
None of those answers satisfied me. They just didn't feel right somehow. I hung out with this question literally for decades, year after year. Eventually the question became like a Zen koan, an unanswerable question meant to bring the mind to a halt.
But gradually, over the years, a beautiful answer began to form. I got a glimpse of the answer again the other night when I was watching the movie "48 HRS" on DVD. The movie stars Nick Nolte as a detective who gets Eddie Murphy out of jail for 48 hours to help him on a case.
Now here's the thing: "48 HRS" is a comedy, and yet Nolte spends the entire film pissed off, disgruntled and caustic. And then it hit me—the secret of comedy. Not the kind of comedy that comes from toilet jokes, slapstick or one-liners, but the kind of comedy that arises from character and situation:
The secret of comedy is that in every scene at least one character has to be unhappy. Or to put it another way:
The secret of comedy is unhappiness.
Isn't that remarkable? Just the opposite of what might seem so at first.
While Nolte is disgruntled, Murphy is devil-may-care through most of the film. The contrast is incredibly funny. Sometimes Murphy is disgruntled too, but that's okay. All that's necessary is that at least one character be unhappy.
When I thought about other comedies the same principle came to mind. For instance, in the wonderful comedy "Midnight Run" Robert De Niro plays a bail bounty hunter who nabs Charles Grodin and now must bring him back to Los Angeles from New York.
The thing is, De Niro is pissed off, disgruntled and unhappy all through the film while Grodin is devil-may-care and smiling. The contrast is very funny.
But I realized that it's the unhappiness that actually makes these comedies and others funny. Everybody can be disgruntled or just one person can be, but if everybody's happy there is no comedy.
To be continued...
(This is the end of Part 7. Go to Part 8.)
—jim sloman, 8.11.03 for 3.25.04
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