CREDITILLUSTRATION BY EDWARD KOREN
Over the past few days, it has become apparent that many people have lost their ability to laugh. Some of us could laugh at one point but, owing to recent events, have become unable to do so. Others of us seem never to have been able to laugh in the first place. This is a guide both for those who only now find themselves incapable of laughter and for those who have had difficulty laughing their entire lives.
Part I. A joke is a thing that is meant to make life tolerable.
Suffering is all around us, just like furniture when you are at an IKEA store. Sometimes it comes from the natural world, like the wood used to make the furniture that is currently surrounding you at the IKEA store. Sometimes it comes from other people, like the people who pick things up and then leave them in totally random places around the IKEA store. Sometimes it’s just there, and we don’t know where it came from, like that ownerless dog that follows you around the IKEA parking lot, and then wants to come home with you, but the second you let it into your car, it poops everywhere.
When people make a joke, what they are doing is combining words and/or images in ways that are intended to surprise you a little. They may even surprise you a lot. These surprises make us laugh because we weren’t expecting them, and we involuntarily react by laughing when we are released from a state of not knowing what is about to come. Laughing lets us forget about the suffering that is an unavoidable part of life, at least temporarily. It frees us to lie down in a bed that we don’t own at IKEA, and to try to forget about the small dog that changed the way our car smells forever.
Part II. Sometimes jokes make people upset.
Necessarily, in the course of trying to surprise people, jokes can surprise some people a little too much. Once I told a joke to James Bond when he was suspended above a tank of sharks, trapped in a device that would drop him into the tank if he laughed. He didn’t laugh, though, because he’s a professional spy. Also, it was a current-events joke, and he’s a fictional character from the nineteen-fifties, so he didn’t get it, even though it was really funny, I swear. People often get angry about a joke that they think went too far, and they lash out at the person who told it to them. After he escaped from the shark-tank-laughing device, James Bond was pretty upset with me.
But those who write jokes come to expect negative reactions from a certain number of people. James Bond doesn’t come to any of my standup shows anymore, and certainly not when he’s stuck in the shark-tank-laughing device, which is surprisingly often.
Part III. Jokes can tell truths about things.
Some jokes are more than just surprising per se, because they articulate a truth about something in real life. My friends used to joke that I didn’t know what the term "per se” meant, because I always used it when I was talking about pears that could talk. We laugh at these types of jokes and then, when we’re done laughing, we realize that some of the things we heard in the jokes relate to real life. In this case, I realized that I was, in fact, using "per se” incorrectly.
Part IV. Sometimes getting upset at jokes helps you learn new things.
There are some people who have distorted beliefs about reality. I once fiercely believed that priests and rabbis rarely frequented bars together. When people hear jokes that challenge what they think they know, they can get angry. Did you hear the one about the priest and the rabbi in the bar? It took me a long time to wrap my mind around that one. But now I am surprised by almost no one entering a bar.
Part V. Jokes can be bad.
Some jokes are just completely horrible. Did you hear the one about the blind ship captain? He couldn’t sea anything. That’s a horrendous joke. But I still should have the right to tell it. Just like you have the right to say that it’s not funny, and then temporarily blind me and make me the captain of a ship to show me how unfunny it is. Actually, you don’t have the right to do that—that would be false imprisonment and the infliction of grievous bodily harm. What you should really do is say that it’s not funny, perhaps call it insensitive to blind ship captains, and then move on.
Ahmed Merabet's eulogy is the most important thing you'll read on Charlie Hebdo
On Wednesday, as two gunmen fled the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where they had murdered much of the staff, they encountered a police office named Ahmed Merabet in the street. The gunmen shot Merabet before he could respond, hitting him in the groin. As he fell to the ground and held his arm out in self-defense, one of the attackers asked, "Do you want to kill us?" Merabet, whose final words were caught on camera, answered, "No, it's okay friend." One of gunmen jogged over and, standing above the policeman, shot him in the head.
Merabet's death soon took on special significance. He was of Algerian heritage and, like eight to ten percent of France's population, Muslim. So were his killers, who ostensibly killed on behalf of Islamist extremism and in retaliation for Charlie Hebdo cartoons lampooning Islam. The attacks provoked debate within France and the Western world, as they were perhaps intended to, over the compatibility of Islam with Western values, aggravated preexisting hostility to Muslim immigrants and to Islam, and provoked a series of "reprisal" attacks on French mosques and Muslims.
These were the things weighing on Malek Merabet when, on Sunday morning, he eulogized his brother Ahmed before a small crowd of mourners and, by way of television cameras, much of the world.
His speech was only two minutes, and it did not draw as much attention as the 44 global leaders marching through Paris, yet along with his comments later that day at a press conference, it placed his brother's life and death within that larger context in a way that powerfully rebuked both the terrorists and the Islamophobes. And it reaffirmed something that has been widely forgotten this week: that the values that France stands for, and that Charlie Hebdo sought to champion, are not incompatible with Islam at all, and in fact are upheld by French Muslims like Ahmed Merabet.
Here is a translation of his speech, drawn from multiple sources, along with video, which I would urge you to watch even if you don't speak French:
Good morning all,
My brother was French, Algerian, and of the Muslim religion. He was very proud of the name Ahmed Merabet, proud to represent the French police, and to defend the values of the [French] Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity.
Through his determination, he had just received his judicial police diploma and was shortly due to leave for work in the field. His colleagues describe him as a man of action who was passionate about his job.
"MADNESS HAS NEITHER COLOR NOR RELIGION"
Ahmed, a man of commitment, had the will to take care of his mother and his relatives following the death of his father 20 years ago. A pillar of the family, his responsibilities did not prevent him from being a caring son, a teasing brother, a generous uncle, and a loving companion.
Devastated by this barbaric act, we associate ourselves with the pain of the families of the victims.
I address myself now to all the racists, Islamophobes, and anti-Semites:
One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease our families.
Thank you.
Speaking separately at a press conference given by the Merabet family, Malek succinctly addressed what Islam had to do with the Charlie Hebdo attacks: "My brother was Muslim and he was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims. They are terrorists, that's it," he said. "As for my brother's death, it was a waste."
The terrorists want you to imagine that a French-Muslim identity is an a contradiction — an agenda they share with Islamophobes who have since attacked French mosques or who have blamed Islam itself for the attacks. But Ahmed Merabet demonstrated that French-Muslim is an identity that can be worn with special pride, that can and should uphold the ideals of both rather than choosing one or the other. That's the message that Malek has divined from his brother's life and death, and it's one that France and the world need to hear.