Laugh while the irony is hot

The popularization of computers is providing fertile ground for an entire new world of ironic events. When the computer is down you cannot get paid and when you get paid you cannot deposit it because the computer is down. I recently overheard one irate customer complain because the clerk could not sell her an item she desperately wanted. It seems that there were five of them left on the shelf, but the computer repeatedly refused the sale because it said that they were out of stock. Conversely, a publisher told me that according to the computer, they had 1,100 copies of a book remaining but could not find one to sell me.

The news media is constantly reporting ironic incidents that are either tragic or funny, depending on your point of view. Here are some that were chronicled within a twelve-month period:

• A Florida school board distributed fliers to fight illiteracy, urging everyone to "overcome literacy."

• A man in California won $9 million in the lottery because he forgot his wedding anniversary and played the wrong number.

• Some of the biggest sellers in bookstores were cookbooks and diet books; one tells you how to prepare food and the other how not to eat it.

• A plane designed to provide a safe, airborne command post for the president in case of a nuclear war was disabled after it flew into a flock of geese.

• An airline lost a man's luggage; nothing new or funny about that, except that he was the only passenger on the plane.

• The National Planning Association was not sure where their next year's convention will be.

Bo Lozoff, the director of the Human Kindness Foundation, which teaches prisoners meditation, says that "whether life's ironies strike you as funny or not depends on your sense of humor. I didn't laugh much when I was an angry radical in the sixties. And when I was a naive New Age seeker in the early seventies, I was never sure what was okay or not okay to laugh at.... Now that I'm not so angry or frightened, not only do I laugh a lot, but it turns out I have much more political and spiritual influence than I ever did in those joyless years when I was trying so hard. Ain't that a hoot?"

Lozoff points out that:

God's best jokes are all around us.... Look at the great sums of money curly-haired people spend to straighten their hair, while straight-haired people are spending their bucks on perms.... Or the millions of dollars being spent so the Pope can visit the poor ... And how come scientists never discover that soybeans or alfalfa sprouts are bad for us; it's always got to be something like ice cream or chocolate or booze or pot. . . . We're crazy as loons, struggling for illusions we can never get, on a planet that just doesn't support the style of life we try so hard to create. As the great cartoonist Gahan Wilson once said, "Life essentially doesn't work. And that's the basis of endless humor."

Seeing humor in things that do not work is another way of finding the comic irony of life. One down-and-out man realized this when he received a money order for fifty dollars, and the only person who could verify his identity so that he could cash it was someone to whom he owed forty-nine.

Playwright Gore Vidal reports that when his play The Best Man was being cast back in 1959, an actor named Ronald Reagan was suggested to play the leading role of a distinguished front-running presidential candidate. Reagan, however, was not given the part. Those casting the show felt that he lacked the "presidential look."

Several other celebrities have also had their day with comic irony. Fred Astaire's Hollywood screen test, for example, stated, "Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." And Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in Monte Carlo. The judges awarded him third place.

What we can learn from these stories, if we do not already know it, is that the world is absurd. There is not much we can do about that fact. What might help and what we can do, however, is to step back and find the comic in the absurd.

The Washington Post, for example, once ran a story about actress Mary Martin. She was walking down the Champs-Elysées in Paris one day wearing a stunning designer outfit. Suddenly a bird flew overhead, and before she knew it she was covered with droppings. Without batting an eye, Martin turned to her companion and said, "For some people they sing."