funny / not funny

depends on who you ask

Dec 04, 2024

Transcript

today’s audio is my version of the classic “The 12 Days of Christmas”, appropriately enough titled for our time, “The 12 Crises of Xmas”. you can find it on my new EP of anti-holiday songs, “F*CK U TOO!”.

i am writing and recording today in the hangover shadow of thanksgiving. perhaps you had a great one! i hope so. perhaps you had a difficult one! i hope not. however cranky i can be about the holidays, i really do wish for people to have the most easeful time possible.

i am sure you noticed in the days leading up to thanksgiving, the proliferation of memes and videos about the inevitable family tensions on the holiday, especially after this last election. this stuff is so popular and comforting because it’s true and familiar. and because it’s based in actual stress and pain, it’s also funny. like deeply, achingly funny. laughs that turn into tears. guffaws that suddenly catch in your throat.

the daily show had a brilliant clip about leslie jones coming to your thanksgiving to interrupt micro and macro-aggressions so you didn’t have to.

and a popular meme i saw over and over this weekend was from instagram user @lakota_man.

pictured are a stereotypical, wealthy white family at a beautifully set thanksgiving table, thanking jesus for their bounteous meal, only to be answered by a migrant worker in a field. denada.

to underline the obvious, this is funny because it is so deeply not funny. we have to laugh to keep from drowning. or i guess i should speak for myself. i have to laugh to keep from giving up. and i’ll take it one step further, i have to write funny things or else i will lose my mind.

i have always laughed at the worst things, and at the worst times. and it’s not an uncommon coping mechanism. i have an extremely vivid memory of being in second grade, watching the launch of the challenger shuttle. for the weeks leading up to it, our little class had learned all we could about the astronauts, especially christa mcauliffe, the school teacher who had been chosen to join the mission. somehow, we had also procured tomato seeds that had been in space and were now growing them in our classroom, learning to observe and compare any differences to the earth-bound tomato seeds growing next to them.

the day of the launch, our teacher rolled in the AV cart, always a thrilling site. it had a huge TV strapped to the top of it and always looked like it was about to topple over. as she centered it in front of the blackboard, we pulled our tiny chairs around to watch. to make it extra special, she turned out the overhead lights, as if we were in a movie theater.

everyone knows what happened next. i was 8 years old and watched a spacecraft carrying 7 astronauts explode in real time. a spacecraft that i had a model of at home (my dad was an aerospace engineer so we had lots of models at home). as everyone around me gasped or cried out or just went silent, i did the unthinkable: i laughed. i knew i wasn’t supposed to, so i tried to stifle it, but i couldn’t stop it in time. it was so powerful, so reflexive, so sudden. i hated myself in that moment, and it took me years to understand the surprise, horror, and shock behind my hilarious convulsion.

hey yall! here we are at the penultimate episode of season 3 of Fax of Life. we’ll wrap up in a couple weeks then go on a short hiatus until spring.

meantime, the anti-holiday shows have begun and i’m out on the road!! i hope you’ll join me for the remaining ones: DEC 7 in northampton, DEC 19 in boston, and DEC 21 in brooklyn. tickets as always are at erinmckeown.com/shows.

now is also your last moments to purchase anti-holiday gifts from my online store. shop now for all kinds of goodies like signed vinyl, hats, snow scrapers, and yes, the anti-holiday hymnal.

and with that, i thank you for listening and all your support, and send you back to the episode.

like most people, some bad stuff has happened to me that i only share with friends and therapists. it’s painful and the work of living with it is ongoing. although sometimes humor is part of that work, sometimes it’s the last thing i want. in my songs and musicals, i might write around the edges of it. maybe humor allows me to get a little closer publicly to being open, but not disclose everything. i think this tension makes for excellent art. other times, i’ve seen art that was someone else’s use of humor to work through their pain, that i did not find funny at all. for example the lesbian therapists in jeremy o harris’s “slave play”. this is niche, but their portrayal still stings even years later.

i bring all this up because i recently got a couple of pieces of pushback around some of the humor in my recent anti-holiday EP. its predecessor “F*CK THAT” got plenty of pushback and walkouts and polite “thanks, but no thanks” from listeners. i thought i had grown immune to it over the years. perhaps it was because it was from people who didn’t feel like allies or my natural community. they were usually folks that were holding on to a sacred version of christmas for their own reasons, which ultimately i respect.

but recently, someone online objected to my song “KAMALA YE FAITHFUL”, writing in an instagram comment that they were so disappointed to see an artist they had long respected and admired support someone who was perpetrating genocide.

and someone else objected to the pronoun joke in “THE 12 CRISES OF XMAS”, writing that they wish i hadn’t made hay of the fact that pronouns are a crisis for some people. they felt it underscored and reinforced that non-binary and trans-people were ultimately different and a problem. they wanted more positive representations.

i’m not highlighting these two folks because i want to shame them, or because i want you to shame them. they were very polite and thoughtful in their comments, though i must admit my first reactions were snarky and dismissive. come on, people, lighten up! i wanted to explain that i didn’t have the luxury of being a single issue voter around kamala, or that i have had deeply painful personal experiences around people struggling with or even actively resisting pronouns. but for all my snark and mischievousness, i am ultimately a good girl and a people pleaser. i didn’t like being called out, and i wanted to lash back. or over explain myself. or take the songs down. or write long apologies.

thankfully i worked my way past these knee jerk reactions. long ago, i got in the habit of not responding to negative comments. unless the post is egregiously offensive, i actually leave it up. i even hit “like” to let the poster know i saw it.

with these two posts in particular, i have really been trying to take a deep breath and let them be. the call out came from the inside the building, ostensibly from people who are more like me than not: lefty, political, queer, caring about justice and change. these are the very folks i am hoping to find community - and dark humor - with. if what i am doing is not landing for them, am i doing something wrong? am i actively causing harm? i think these are fair questions any artist must consider and come to their own conclusions on. ultimately i am grateful that folks cared enough to say something.

anytime you make art, you are taking a risk - the risk that people won’t like or understand it, or the risk that they will. either way you are taking the risk to be seen. but you have to weigh that risk with your own need as an artist to express yourself and process how you process. and i have to remember that this risk is central to my ability to survive. for me laughing at the worst moments seems to be how i cope best. i am hoping you’ll laugh with me, but if you can’t, i understand that too.

x erin

ps: your carl content. he likes to get as close to the music as possible.

¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!

speaking of holiday meals, what *is* a vegetable??
a beautiful short film about bringing buffalo back to Native land
a complex and heart-tugging follow-up on 7 basketball players 10 years after high school. as someone navigating middle age, this one was particularly resonant.
my friend lucas’s husband greg wrote a fantastic memoir about growing up gay and with cerebral palsy.
dig in for a giant tome about ancient history told through the lens of the horse.
last weekend at NERFA, i had the opportunity to connect and spend some time with two fantastic new artists that i think you’ll enjoy: abigayle kompst and youth in a roman field.