Why Laugh? Why Here? Why Now? Michael Fields at Tedxeureka

A mentor of mine said that life is 51% comedy and 49% tragedy and the two push against each other and create that space for laughter. And that's what I do. I explore the tension of that space to provoke laughter. I do it through the theater and I do it through the particular lens of this place. I was 21 when I first came to Humboldt County and I came up here to be an actor in a theater festival and the first five minutes I was in the tiny town of Blue Lake, California I was in a bar fight. (Laughter) The place was aptly named Walt's Friendly Tavern and here's what happened. I went in the bar and some guy said, "Dance with my wife." And I said, "No" and he threw me through the doors. And testosterone-ridden as I was, I went right back in after him and we had what you may call an good ol' boy fight. That's where you grab each other and you beat each other on the back until you're exhausted. (Laughter) You can't get too hurt doing this. Tables will break, glasses will fall, but you can't really get too hurt. But I was infuriated and at some point during that fight he started to laugh. And [that] infuriated me even more, right? And then the crowd starts to laugh and the fiercer I became the more everybody laughed. (Laughter) That was epiphany number 1. That comedy is serious business. (Laughter) You can get hurt. And epiphany number 2 is, up here, when somebody says, "Dance with my wife," do it! (Laughter) I was in the last group drafted to go to Vietnam the lottery number I pulled was 5. There was no way out. And in the panic of that moment I joined a Gorilla Theater Company. Not knowing what that meant and kind of being afraid that I would have to wear a gorilla suit. And what they asked me to do was dress in Vietnamese black pijamas and sit in front of a Methodist church on a Sunday morning with a sign that said: "Stop the war." So I waited, everybody went into church, I've got my costume and my prop, and I sat in front of that church. And those people came out of church an hour later and kicked the living crap out of me. And the only reason I probably didn't get hurt seriously was that I started to laugh and couldn't stop. The ridiculousness of the situation overcame me. And that was epiphany number 3. I'll use the words of William Butler Yeats, my favourite Irish poet, "You'll always play for mortal stakes life and death." And the operative word in that sentence is "play", because if you really engage at play at that level, at that depth, you have the opportunity to turn the lens through which people see. I believe that laughter is essential to a healthy community. And that involuntary physical action that is laughter brings the unvoiced voiced, it brings things out into the open. And if we get to the point where we get so serious that we can't laugh at ourselves and what's around us then, you have what my grandfather would call the fart-higher-than-your-*** syndrome. And this is something we've all experienced, right? I am so important. How dare you deign to disagree with me! That just reveals you to be the drooling imbecile that you are. My grandfather would've just hated that. And seriously, especially after listening to Michael's speech, I would rather die peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather, than yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car, so -- (Laughter) And that's a terrible joke. (Laughter) It's agist, it has all the wrong things in it. And they say that most comedy is infantile, right? But it's interesting to know that babies laugh, on average, 300 times a day, and adults 20. And there's an old adage that says, "We never really grow up. We just learn how to behave in public." And comedy is usually very indicative of the place from which it comes. I travel a lot to Denmark. I work there. My children are half Danish. And I think it was Garrison Keillor who said -- he best described the country -- He said: "In Denmark, there are 42 political parties and one way to use a fork." Pretty much describes it. So, Dell'Arte did a play called "Slapstick" which was, as you might expect, about Slapstick: a lot of the great old routines were in it, and in this country, people roared with laughter when they watched it. So, we were invited to an International Theater Festival in Denmark. We were very excited. We go, we perform -- Dead silence. Not a sound. We thought, "We have failed", right? And this one guy wanders backstage at the end of the play and he says, "You were so funny, I almost laughed." (Laughter) Right? That's indicative of a prospective from place. And we have it here in Humboldt County, too. We have our "Sixties-Meets-the-Sea" kind of descriptions. On the 4th of July, my neighbour told me this joke -- Notice how he sets it and phrases it -- It's a twist on the old rural farmer's daughter joke. The farmer had three daughters and they were each going on a date that night. The farmer was from McKinleyville. That's set something right there. So, the first guy comes and knocks on the door and says, "Hi. My name is Joe. I'm here for Flo we're going to the show. Is she ready to go?" And the farmer goes, "Yeah, ok, alright, yeah." Takes her away. Second guy knocks at the door and he says, "Hi, my name is Eddie. I'm here for Betty. We're gonna go have spaghetti Is she ready?" The farmer goes, "Yeah, alright, go ahead, c'mon, get out of here." Finally, there's a third knock at the door and the guy comes and he's all rusted out and he goes, "Hey... hey, hey, my name is Chuck." The farmer shot him. (Laughter) Not all humor provokes violence, obviously -- Although I've seen it rile some people up really well. A few years ago -- I didn't think that one would work -- A few years ago, Dell'Arte wrote a play called "Corbell." It was actually four plays. And it was about a changing of a way of life that we were seeing in this community. And it was a soap opera and it was about that jump from the Logging Industrial Era of this place to something else. To what it's become -- what it's becoming. And it was about a family. A matriarch - Dorothy Doughan, and her two sons one who'd cut off pieces of his body in a series of ridiculous logging accidents. And the other one who was a lesbian transvestite. So, it followed their journeys through things. And Dorothy had just committed suicide by sticking her head in a microwave. Something that is really impossible. Don't try it. And, at the end of the play, the second play -- I'll make a long story short on this -- Her son Tommy Doughan was being investigated for a terrorist activity. He had plugged up all the toilets in the Humboldt County courthouse. I told you humor was infantile. And at the end of the play the FBI and the ATF rappelled off the roof of Dell'Arte down into the amfitheater with guns drawn, bull-horns out and said, "Give us Tommy Doughan from Corbell." And we had an 8-year-old boy, a shill, a plant, in the audience who stood up at that point and he said, "My name is Tommy Doughan and I'm from Corbell." And then we had an actor, stand up and say, "My name is Tommy Doughan, I'm form Corbell." And every single night, audience members, all on their own accord, some for the fun of it, some deadly serious would stand up and say, "I'm Tommy Doughan and I'm from Corbell." That, to me, is the moment to work for. That moment when a community, in laughter, in concert, laughs at itself and also stands up for itself. This is what we call theater of place. Theater by, for, with a particular community. And it engages that deeper laughter that sometimes happen in the darker moments. When you think of the comedia character of Arlequino, most people think, "Oh, it's a little cute clown and a little leotard in diamond shapes." He was a street urchin that was starving to death. He made a virtuosic moment out of eating a fly. The Dutch have a name for it. I work at the National Theater in Holland and they have a name for this dynamic I'm talking about, it's called "walking the edge of the knife." And it's what real, popular theater aspires to do, to engage the human comedy. The comedy that reveals us and all of our foibles for who we are -- human beings with dreams, ambitions, appetites, desperately trying to keep the mask of sanity on our face. And when we lift it from the banal to the profound, we entered into this delicious realm of laughter. I think we all wanna make something of this life, all of us. And when we as individuals or a community really engage that noble effort, we have to be able to imagine life other than it is lived. And my suggestion after this glorious afternoon, of speakers and topics and thoughts, is that laughter is an essential ingredient in it all, it is human beings making a sound that says, I am you, and you are me. As Charlie Chaplin said, "A day without laughter is a day wasted". Thank you and thank you all. (Applause)