DON'T GO

I lay no claim to any form of psychoanalytical expertise but I think it's fair to say (to paraphrase someone, whose name escapes me right now) that once upon a time we listened to politicians and laughed at comedians whereas nowadays  it certainly seems to be the reverse case. 

The polemical wit and observational comedy of people such as George Carlin and Robin Williams for example, was without equal and really cut to the point. Sadly, both of those fine gentlemen are no longer with us in the flesh but in another sense, their bodies remain - their bodies of work - as cuttingly apposite now as ever before, if not more so. 

It strikes me starkly however that with this insight and the revelatory absurdity that comes from observing life from a comedic perspective, the material that's delivered for our amusement is profoundly tragic. The pathos just oozes from every pore.  

The lore and spectre of the sad clown syndrome was never more startlingly apparent than with comedic giants such as Robin Williams and in a bygone era, Tony Hancock, a pioneer of British comedy. Or was it? It only became startlingly apparent posthumously and there wasn't a shred of humour in that revelation. 

I experienced the same sense of intense pathos while watching and listening to Steve Hughes last night down at the Adelaide Fringe. There was this astonishingly funny and quite brilliant observational comedian performing before us yet unlike Robin Williams, whose depressive plight slipped quietly past us - to our eternal shame and chagrin, Hughes was stating quite bluntly (and I believe, genuinely) that if there was some place where he could go to transition from this world, he'd do it in a heartbeat. He'd had enough. His show was dubbed appropriately Nervous Breakthrough and it parodies, in part, his recent nervous breakdown and the stark horror of that experience. It is so much more than that though and the layers, if we were to peel them back, reveal, I think, a much darker and desperate world. 

He talks openly about not having had the balls to commit suicide but he certainly explored that possibility. Hughes, to me, is wise and wonderful and paradoxically connected with higher aspects of life where he posits our only hope of any form of long term survival as a species comes in the guise of a consciousness evolution yet we are so distracted by banal inanity that we are, many of us, sinking inexorably into a state of irreversible unconscious existence. 

One of his quips - stop obsessing with the evil of the past and watching Hitler doccos when there's full colour evil happening before our eyes that we skirt over or simply feel helpless to resolve. 

There's no overpopulation and there's plenty of "stuff" to go round, he quips. To believe in a state of global overpopulation and a shortage of stuff is, in essence to deny that whatever transpired to place us here in the universe was a very badly worked out plan indeed. And whether one is religious or atheistic, there's something fatally flawed in that mode of thinking. And if we accede to this ideology, it inevitably leads to fascism and someone or some group of people deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. 

"When you ask someone if they think the world is overpopulated and they say yes, ask them why they think this?"

"They stare blankly at you and mutter - someone told me..." 

"So if people need to be removed - if there are too many of us - kill yourself. Do your bit."

"No, not me, they protest - them - them over there. Yeah, it's never you, is it. It's always someone else causing the problem. And that's the real problem." 

Much of the show was in similar vein. It was biting and excruciatingly funny yet I was deeply saddened that this insightful, talented man admitted he no longer wished to be part of this tribe - us. He'd had enough. He saw no hope for us in our present state - a conclusion obviously augmented by his own personal burnout and resultant breakdown. 

What the fuck does one do in a situation like this? 

Laugh it off?  

Why? 

Because he was joking, right. He is after all a comedian - a successful one. 

So were Tony Hancock and Robin Williams....

They too had had enough. The chronicling of life's bitter ironic absurdities for the amusement of others was no longer enough for them. And we were too busy laughing at their antics to sense the tragedy lurking beneath. 

If Steve Hughes elects to bow out too and my wife intimated that as horrible as that prospect was, she got the distinct impression he just might, then try as I may, no matter how he might have "joked" about it, I just don't find that funny. 

The mixture of amusement and tragedy roiling within me as we filed out of that theatre last night, was profound to say the least. 

Where to from here?